Before the feature presentation begins at any movie theater in Thailand, there comes a solemn moment when the previews and advertisements go dark, and a silent message appears on the screen inviting all present to “Please pay respect to His Majesty the King.” Audience members rise from their seats as the soothing harmonies of the Thai royal anthem fill the room, accompanied by a brief pictorial tribute to the nation’s beloved 72-year-old monarch.
This time-honored ritual, a sweetly reverential act repeated hundreds of times a day at theaters throughout the kingdom, is part of what makes going to the movies one of Bangkok’s great little unsung pleasures — particularly at the newer cinemas, which offer efficient computerized booking systems (no need to queue up for good seats), up-to-date sound and projection equipment and the singular option of choosing dried squid treats instead of popcorn at the lobby snack bar.
With tickets selling for only about $3 at the city’s impressive inventory of modern multiplexes, Bangkok would be a true paradise for cinephiles were it not for an unfortunate dearth of good pictures rolling through all those high-fidelity projectors. At almost any given time, a handful of mediocre Hollywood blockbusters monopolizes the local listings, consistently favoring the kind of shallow comedies and action-packed thrillers that lose nothing in translation. But so appealing are the movie houses themselves, my wife and I routinely scan the new releases for a convincing excuse to spend an evening at the cinema, frequently settling for titles we hope will be at least mildly entertaining if not especially memorable.
It was in this spirit that we attended a screening last March of “The Beach,” starring Earth Day 2000 poster boy Leonardo DiCaprio. The film adaptation of Alex Garland’s dark novel was just out in Thailand, but reviewers in the States had been badmouthing it for weeks, so we arrived at the theater with decidedly low expectations and were not the least bit disappointed.
Squirming through the ponderous tale of an island Utopia gone seriously awry, I wondered how the Thais in the audience must feel seeing their culture reduced to such incidental, two-dimensional characters: The weird old witch of a chambermaid, the sneering snake blood salesman, the heartless police detective, the sadistic posse of backwoods dope farmers with fingers ever twitching on the triggers of their automatic weapons.
Then it dawned on me that my own culture wasn’t faring so well either, represented in the film by an impetuous and self-indulgent American backpacker who goes hog wild in the tropics after running away from home in pursuit of an escapist adolescent fantasy.
Despite director Danny Boyle’s best efforts to make us like DiCaprio, the most heroic figure in “The Beach” strangely turns out to be the chief marijuana grower, played with convincing edginess and pragmatism by Abhijati “Meuk” Jusakul. When the final confrontation between farmers and foreigners brings the story to a long overdue climax, Jusakul delivers the film’s most gripping moment — and only example of subtle character development — as he works out a harsh but eminently sensible resolution to the conflict that doesn’t involve blowing the whole lot of pathetic farang kids to kingdom come.
More intriguing than the movie itself is the ongoing debate about the real beach at Maya Bay on the island of Phi Phi Leh, where much of the filming took place. Protesters picketing outside the Bangkok premiere called for a general boycott of “The Beach” on the grounds that location work for the film — which involved bulldozing sand dunes and planting a temporary grove of coconut palms — had caused irreparable damage to a sensitive littoral ecosystem within Thailand’s Koh Phi Phi Had Nopparat Thara Marine National Park. Twentieth Century Fox, which obtained a permit to use the site, contends that its crew left the beach in better condition than when it arrived, removing the imported palm trees, restoring the dunes and hauling away tons of previously accumulated flotsam and jetsam.
Later the plot thickened when significant sand erosion became apparent at Maya Bay after last year’s rainy season. Environmental activists blamed inadequate restoration of the native vegetation that would have stabilized the dunes. Royal Forestry Department officials countered that unusually strong monsoon storms were responsible, insisting that the dunes would re-form naturally over time.
Of course, many of Thailand’s ostensibly protected wilderness areas (including Phi Phi Leh) have been seriously harmed without the intervention of Hollywood film crews, and I see no reason to doubt the sincerity of Fox’s efforts to clean up after itself. But during a recent conversation with American environmental crusader Thom Henley, author of two nature guides to southern Thailand, I began to see an implicit double standard in the trumpeting of trash removal and habitat restoration as justification for reshaping the beach at Maya Bay.
Henley placed the debate in a broader context for me by posing the rhetorical question, “Would Fox have been able to get away with this on parkland in the United States?” Of course not. Imagine a Hollywood film company petitioning the National Park Service for permission to cut trees in Yosemite Valley, or plug up Old Faithful, or give George Washington’s face a nose job on Mount Rushmore. The American public simply wouldn’t support it, no matter how much restoration work was stipulated in the deal.
The same week “The Beach” opened in Bangkok, another new film set in Thailand arrived in local cinemas, a strictly homegrown production called “Satreelex,” or in English, “Iron Ladies.” Like “The Beach,” “Satreelex” follows the exploits of an idealistic band of young adults whose dogged pursuit of an alternative lifestyle leads to passionate and sometimes violent conflicts with one another and with various elements of Thai society.
In this case, however, the protagonists belong to an endearing squad of gay and transgender volleyball players loosely modeled after a real team from Lampang (near Chiang Mai) that won the Thai men’s national volleyball championship in 1996.
Part “Karate Kid” and part “La Cage aux Folles,” this playful puppy dog of a film begins when the new coach of the Lampang provincial team — a bighearted middle-aged tomboy whose own sexuality is frequently called into question — invites two homosexual men to try out for the team. After all but one of their straight teammates quit the court in disgust, the gay boys enlist some old friends to fill out the squad, and the remainder of the movie follows their predictably rocky but often hilarious road to victory.
While “Satreelex” indulges in the most coarse comedic stereotyping — limp wrists, swishy walks, hysterical sobbing over a broken fingernail — it also makes a somewhat serious attempt to shed light on day-to-day social dilemmas faced by the range of gay, transvestite, bisexual and transexual men collectively (and rather impolitely) referred to in Thailand as katoey.
One closeted teammate, Wit, shocks his conservative parents and unsuspecting fiancie when they learn he has joined the notorious team. Nong, the gentle giant, struggles to reconcile his dainty and feminine personality with a big, masculine body. The effusive, flaming Jung tries in vain to win the affections of the straight men he desires. And Pia, the most physically feminine of the bunch, mourns the loss of a former boyfriend now in the arms of a lover whose breasts are not fake. And through it all, the team’s heterosexual captain, Chai, learns firsthand what it’s like to be the odd man out. Surprisingly, only one of the gay characters is played by a real-life katoey (Kokkorn Benjatikul as Pia), but the straight actors cast in the other principal rolls pull no punches, and their exuberant, uninhibited performances carry the film through its more heavy-handed moments.
When I asked one Thai friend his opinion of “Satreelex,” he told me that although he enjoyed some aspects of the film, he was concerned that it might give foreigners the wrong impression if it gets distributed overseas. “They might think Thailand is an open country with freedom in this way of life — that all people do accept gay life in our society,” he explained. “Just take Jung and his parents as an example,” he said, referring to a character whose mother and father lovingly embrace their son’s sexual orientation. “When farangs look at this family, they probably think Thai parents do accept their gay kids, but it’s not always true — believe me.”
In a subsequent discussion, my friend was even more critical of the film, describing it as “freak comedy.” “People pay money because they want to see katoey in the film for a laugh — but when they get out to the real world, some of them still don’t accept it.”
On the other hand, if all you knew about Thailand was what you’d seen in mainstream Western movies — Yul Brynner singing jolly tunes as King Mongkut, James Bond racing among the craggy isles of Phang Nga Bay, Emanuelle humping her way through Bangkok or DiCaprio losing his marbles in the jungle — your view of the kingdom would bear far less resemblance to Thai reality. And in any case, “Satreelex” is plainly meant to be more didactic than realistic.
In the fictional Thailand of first-time director Yongyoot Thongkongtoon (trained in the punchy, sentimental art of television advertising), you can’t swing a cat without hitting a katoey, and every time an unsympathetic character makes a homophobic remark, some innocent bystander (who happens to be gay) takes offense and takes the bigot to task. The message in this oft-repeated gag is clear: Gays are everywhere, and any unkind comments you make about them in public can and will be used against you.
In a domestic movie market dominated by foreign imports, “Satreelex” has done surprisingly well at the box office here, earning 100 million bahts (about $2.65 million) in its first four weeks — already enough to rank it among the top-grossing films in the history of Thai cinema. Despite some uneven acting and obvious technical faults, this fun, feel-good comedy has all the makings of an enduring camp classic along the lines of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” or John Waters’ “Pink Flamingos,” in which case it stands to make even more money overseas.
I predict that when long-neglected copies of “The Beach” are collecting dust on the shelves of your local video store, “Satreelex” will live on in midnight screenings at repertory cinemas and college campuses throughout the land, attended by bands of costumed revelers merrily (if not gaily) decked out as their favorite Iron Lady. You heard it here first.
Dec. 18, 1999
“For all your arrows tipped with poison,
The curved daggers you bear as arms,
Amorous Malays and valiant Javanese
All will be subject to the Portuguese.”
– Lums Vaz de Camues, “The Lusmads”
(translated by Landeg White, Oxford University Press, 1997)
Compared with the high-profile Hong Kong handover back in 1997, the formal
withdrawal of Portuguese officials from Macau late Sunday night is shaping
up to be a relatively minor event in the Millennium-fogged eyes of the
international news media. With big business and civil liberties hanging so
publicly in the balance, foreign correspondents simply couldn’t resist the
allure of Britain’s controversial exit from Asia, and they dutifully endured
torrential rains, oppressive summer heat and extravagant late-night handover
parties to bring the story to the world. But across the Pearl River Estuary
in Macau, the resumption of Chinese rule has long seemed like a fait
accompli, yielding meager fodder for sexy headlines beyond the occasional
eruption of gang violence in the waning months of Portuguese administration.
In a broader historical sense, the impending change of government in Macau
has far greater symbolic importance than the territory’s size or current
economic status would suggest. When the big countdown clock in Tiananmen
Square strikes zero and the Chinese flag is raised over this diminutive
slice of coastal real estate on the South China Sea, nearly 500 years of
colonial occupation will come to an end as Portugal, the first Western
European nation to expand into Asia, becomes the last to leave. And at that
very moment, the final dissolution of Lisbon’s erstwhile Asian empire will
deliver a conclusive coup de grbce to the supremacist fantasies of a
swashbuckling 16th-century poet whose magnum opus, “The Lusmads,” is
considered the crowning work of Portuguese Renaissance literature.
I first encountered this extraordinary figure on a bright summer morning in
the inner courtyard of the Leal Senado, just off Macau’s exquisitely
preserved central plaza. In an intimate formal garden below the dear old
municipal library, I happened upon the stone bust of a bearded man with
European features and an unruly crop of windblown hair, one eye curiously
closed in an eternal, joyless wink. An inscription in both Western and
Chinese characters identified the statue as:
LUIS VAZ DE CAMOES
POETA PORTUGUES
1524-1580At the Macau Museum later that day, I learned that Camues settled briefly in
Macau in the mid-1500s, and that parts of his most famous work are thought
to have been composed here in a public garden that now bears the poet’s
name. Later still, after tracking down an English translation of “The
Lusmads,” I began to grasp the full irony of Camues’ official canonization on
the soon-to-be-Chinese soil of Macau.
The son of a sea captain, born in Lisbon and educated at the University of
Coimbra, Camues began his career as a tutor in the court of King Joco III,
only to be banished in 1546 for pursuing a forbidden love affair with one of
the queen’s ladies-in-waiting. Still in his early 20s, he joined a
Portuguese military garrison in Morocco, where he lost an eye battling the
Moors, and a few years later he was jailed back in Lisbon for injuring
another man in a street brawl. He subsequently traveled by sea to the
Portuguese settlement at Goa on the west coast of India, then continued east
to the Spice Islands and southern China, where he spent two years as a
functionary in the recently established colony of Macau. Recalled to Goa in
1558 on charges of extortion, he survived a shipwreck at the mouth of the
Mekong River, abandoning most of his possessions to the waves but clutching his
precious unpublished manuscripts as he swam to shore.
Over the next 10 years, Camues grappled with criminal charges and financial
woes in Goa and Mozambique before finally borrowing enough money to return
to Lisbon in 1570. “The Lusmads” was published two years later, giving Camues
the distinction of being the first notable European literary figure to pen
eyewitness accounts of life in Asia, and posthumously earning the poet a
prominent place in Portugal’s national pantheon.
A sprawling, spirited epic deliberately cast in the mold of “The Aeneid” and
“The Odyssey” — complete with pagan gods and goddesses watching over a
distinctly Christian protagonist — “The Lusmads” concerns Vasco da Gama’s
historic voyage around the southern tip of Africa to India at the end of the
15th century. A few years after Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue
and claimed the West Indies for Spain, da Gama set out in the opposite
direction to chart a viable maritime trade route between Europe and the
lucrative spice markets of the Far East. His journey paved the way for
Portugal to become a dominant world power in the early years of European
empire-building, making him a true hero in the eyes of Camues, whose
occasional run-ins with Portuguese law seem not to have soured his deeply
held sense of national pride.
Upon da Gama’s triumphant return to Lisbon in 1499, the Portuguese wasted no
time in leveraging their superior seafaring skills to forge a network of
colonial outposts along the east coast of Africa and across the Arabian sea
at Goa. With a firm base on the subcontinent, the Portuguese continued their
conquest of Asia by capturing the thriving mainland port of Malacca and
founding colonies in the Malay archipelago at Timor Island and the Moluccas.
By 1520, Lisbon’s reach extended as far as the southern China with several
outposts near the mouth of the Pearl River, later
consolidated at Macau.
“The Lusmads” paints a heroic portrait of these early colonial conquests, and
in a fanciful discourse on European history, the poet traces Portugal’s
manifest destiny back to the ancient Roman province of Lusitania, and casts
his own people as the divinely sanctioned rulers of the Eastern lands they
conquer. In Camues’ telling, the gods are so pleased with da Gama’s
exploits that they arrange for his men to make landfall in the course of their
return journey at an enchanted isle stocked with a bevy of amorous nymphs.
This sets the stage for a hilarious account of crusty, unwashed sailors
pursuing nubile seductresses through a verdant tropical paradise as carnal
compensation for a job well done (“Some pretending to be troubled less/By
shame than by action, scampered/Naked into the bush, letting them see/Just
where their itching hands would like to be”).
The epic ends on a more somber note, however, for by the time Camues arrived
in Asia half a century later, Portugal’s fortunes had already begun to fade.
With other European nations muscling in on the spice trade and Lisbon’s
limited resources thinly divided among far-flung campaigns in Africa, Asia
and South America, Portugal’s initial success as a colonial superpower was
showing serious signs of decay. In the final stanzas of “The Lusmads,” Camues
bemoans a nation “given over/To avarice and philistinism,/Heartlessness and
degrading pessimism,” and he calls for a return to the courageous spirit of
da Gama’s generation, “that no wondering/German, French, Italian, or
Englishman/Can boast Portugal is more commanded/Than given to exercise
command.” In 1580, the year of Camues’ death, Phillip II of Spain annexed
Portugal, and by the time Lisbon regained independence in 1640, the old
Portuguese empire was in shambles, with Britain and the Netherlands
controlling most of the Far Eastern trade routes first pioneered by
Portuguese explorers.
Prized in Portugal both for his considerable literary artistry and his
lyrical veneration of Portuguese identity, the outlaw poet once exiled from
Lisbon has since become a national hero. The anniversary of his death, June
10, now marks Portugal’s National Day, and Macau’s territorial government
has annually honored Camues on that date with formal ceremonies in the
Camues Garden, a hillside park where the poet is said to have sought his
muse during his brief sojourn in the territory.
Strolling through the garden on a hot July afternoon, I found Camues’
legendary haunt peopled by elderly Chinese men in sleeveless white
T-shirts and dark trousers rolled up past their knees, some gently
exercising, others splayed on benches listening to crackly portable radios.
At the commemorative bust fixed in its shady stone grotto, I paused to
reflect on Camues’ elusive dream of Portuguese crusaders “Venturing as far
as remote China/And the most distant isles of the Orient,/Until every
sea-way is subservient,” and I wondered if the citizens of the Macau Special
Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China will continue to lay
flowers here on the anniversary of his death. Then, gazing out over a jumbled
gray cityscape toward the Chinese border, I imagined the poet’s poor
disillusioned ghost regarding the handover through his one good eye,
lamenting the last dying ember of the Oriental empire he once championed so
passionately in verse.
The rains came early to Bangkok this year, with April showers taking the
edge off what is normally Thailand’s hottest month. Big black
thunderheads crashed over the city in May and June, churning the Chao
Phraya into an unruly cappuccino-colored torrent as intrepid pedestrians
hiked up skirts and trouser legs to wade barefoot through flooded roadways.
Then in mid-July, a different kind of tempest raged through the capital,
after the international edition of Newsweek published a controversial cover
story under the headline “Beyond Sex and Golf: Money is pouring in. But can
Bangkok escape the low-cost rap and join the high-tech world?”
The 2,000-word commentary on Thailand’s prospects for economic recovery
raised eminently level-headed concerns about corruption, greed and cronyism
in the upper echelons of Thai society. The minor furor, however, erupted in reaction
to one essentially irrelevant quip, attributed to an unnamed Western
diplomat, which Newsweek’s editors mined for the headline. “Thailand has two
comparative advantages,” the source said: “sex and golf courses.”
That statement alone was enough to spark heated debate in the halls of power
and in the op-ed pages of local newspapers, and the magazine’s layout added
fuel to the fire: Although the article was ostensibly devoted to serious economic
matters, the opening spread featured a three-column image of a scantily clad
Thai woman cruising Pattaya’s sleazy nightlife district on a motorbike with
a Caucasian man in tow. The cover photo showed a magnificent golden stupa
with the ridiculous teaser “Thailand: If only its economy looked as good as
its temples.” Huh?
An important point Newsweek’s reporters raised briefly, then brushed aside
with another reference to “the raunchy strip bars of Pattaya,” is that
mainstream tourism — not just the naughty kind — has been the one bright
spot in Thailand’s ailing economy. While the manufacturing and financial
sectors have stumbled, exchange rates have remained favorable, the
government has remained stable, visitor arrivals are up and business is
booming along the beaches of Phuket and Koh Samui.
- – - – - – - – - – - -
The Asian economic crisis began here in July 1997, when the baht plummeted on
international currency markets and the Thais could no longer afford to pay
interest on the foreign loans that had financed the nation’s rapid growth in
the 1980s and ’90s. The baht has recovered somewhat since then, but the
collapse has left its mark on Bangkok’s cluttered skyline in the form of
delinquent construction sites where massive erections of concrete and Rebar
have been abandoned by bankrupt developers and left to fester in the
tropical heat.
These crumbling monuments to excessive speculation serve as a constant reminder of
how far Thailand’s economy has fallen, forcing laid-off construction workers
to return to farms and villages in the northeast, forcing commercial and
residential property owners to cope with tenants who can’t pay the rent and
forcing formerly high-flying executives to liquidate golf clubs, Rolexes and
other icons of affluence from the boots of their beloved Mercedes.
Even so, the juice has not all been sucked from the Big Mango.
Two years into the crisis, Bangkok does not feel like a city depressed and
downtrodden, largely because the Thais have a remarkable ability to put a
good face on even the stickiest of situations. Times are tough, to be sure,
but there’s nothing like a healthy dose of “sanuk” — fun — to ease the pain.
For example: At Cabbages & Condoms, a Bangkok restaurant that promotes safe
sex while raising funds for the nonprofit Population and Community
Development Association, the free prophylactics that have long been handed
out in place of after-dinner mints are now available in a choice of “IMF
Size” or “World Bank Size” (no indication of which is bigger, or if either
variety is full of holes). Another restaurant, founded last spring by
laid-off employees of the Bangkok Bank of Commerce, serves such topical
delicacies as “Poached Chuan” (a fish dish named after Prime Minister Chuan
Leekpai), “Tom Yam Tarrin” (after Finance Minister Tarrin Nimmanhaeminda)
and “IMF Soup” (an austere broth of chicken bones and bitter melon).
Consumer spending may be down, but the shopping malls are still packed on
weekends, with gaggles of schoolgirls crowding excitedly around photo
sticker machines, one of the latest youth culture crazes to be imported from
Japan. And at an office building off Ploenchit Road, a circus-colored banner
cheerfully hawks cheap commercial real estate with the slogan, “Downsizing
is welcome!!”
(Downsizing has not been such a breeze for transvestite kickboxer Prinya
Kiatbusaba, aka Nong Tum, whose request for a sex change operation was
reportedly turned down in March when surgeons at a Bangkok hospital
determined that the 18-year-old slugger, who is famous for wearing makeup
and a sports bra into the ring, would require more counseling before making
the final cut. If Prinya eventually does earn approval for the operation,
he’ll be in good hands: Thailand has lately gained notoriety as a
destination for sex changes, cosmetic surgery and other elective procedures, as local hospitals have actively marketed their expertise abroad. The Tourism Authority of Thailand has even gotten into the act, promoting health tourism as a way of boosting foreign earnings.)
Despite the crisis, many new business ventures have forged ahead, betting on
longer-term profits when the economy picks up. The Peninsula
Group of Hong Kong made a big splash last spring with the grand opening of a gorgeous
five-star hotel directly across the river from the venerable old Oriental. A
new technology mall opened in May, claiming to offer only legitimately
licensed products and throwing down the gauntlet to its notorious competitor,
Panthip Plaza, where shoppers can pick up pirated software and pornography
for little more than the cost of a blank CD.
At Siam Discovery Centre, an
upscale mall on Rama I Road, a Hollywood-style movie and entertainment complex just
opened, including two “Gold Class” theaters equipped with massive reclining
seats (picture a carpeted room full of plush red La-Z-Boys) and in-house
wine and cocktail bars so moviegoers can savor a buttery Chardonnay along
with the latest Hollywood action-adventure flick.
While Bangkok restaurateurs and bar owners have suffered over the past two
years, there’s no shortage of post-crisis success stories. Biscotti, the
fine new Italian restaurant at the Regent hotel, has introduced the right mix of
cool atmosphere and reasonable prices to attract local diners, and the room
is full almost every night. Nearby, impeccably made-up society ladies sip
expensive espresso drinks in the first of several Starbucks outlets that
have been popping up around town — including one in the lobby of a posh
private hospital — and local entrepreneurs have begun to develop their own
uniquely Thai take on the growth of international cafe culture. My favorite,
a tranquil haven called Kuppa on Sukhumvit Soi 16, offers excellent coffee
(roasted in-house) and a tasty mix of Thai and Western foods in a big,
bright room with high ceilings and a soothing neo-colonial interior.
Old hands will tell you that the city’s club scene has lost much of its luster
since the baht collapsed, but young Thais still squeeze into pre-crisis
favorites like Spasso at the Grand Hyatt, Round Midnight on Soi Langsuan
and Saxophone near the Victory Monument. Some newcomers have hit it big as
well, including the chic Red Bar on Royal City Avenue and the enormous
Species Arena on Sukhumvit Soi 24.
One welcome side effect of the crisis has been a noticeable decline in
Bangkok’s notorious traffic jams, as personal automobiles have been sold or
repossessed — and the situation is about to get even better with the
opening of a new elevated light rail system.
After years of delays, metropolitan transit officials vowed to get the
long-awaited system up and running in time for the king’s 72nd birthday
celebrations in December, and they’re almost certain to meet the deadline.
(Most Thais genuinely adore their king, and this will be a particularly
important anniversary, marking the monarch’s sixth cycle in the 12-year
Chinese zodiac.) Some people say that few locals will ride the trains, which
will be more expensive than public buses and less convenient than private
automobiles, but visitors will be able to make good use of the system, which
will link the riverside hotel district and Silom Road with the Chatuchak
market, the shopping centers along Rama I and Ploenchit roads, and the
often-congested reaches of Sukhumvit.
- – - – - – - – - – - -
The Thais love a good scandal as much as anyone — the other day I came
across a pair of “Clinton” and “Lewinsky” pillow cases for sale at a local
boutique — but the mid-summer Newsweek kerfuffle quickly lost momentum and
fizzled within a few days. After the offending story hit the stands, the
Foreign Ministry summoned its authors to a meeting with angry government
officials. The Nation, a local English-language daily, reported that one of
Newsweek’s writers “apologised for any hard feeling his story may have
caused,” and blamed the magazine’s New York editors for the provocative
headline. The reporter was also said to have denied any role in planning the
layout of the story, including the suggestive photo from Pattaya.
Face-saving statements were issued, tempers cooled, the prime minister
called on his colleagues to do a better job of educating the media and that
was that.
It’s a good bet that Newsweek’s cheesy packaging succeeded in boosting
newsstand sales, but sadly it also diverted attention away from the real
meat of the story, and from a refreshingly frank sidebar by Amaret Sila-on,
chairman of Thailand’s financial sector restructuring. In 500 no-nonsense
words, Sila-on took Thailand to task for the “perverse social values” that
contributed to the crisis, and called for “a fundamental rethinking of how
we do things.”
That sort of change will take time, of course, and meanwhile there are
plenty of more pressing matters at hand. The rains have continued, bringing the
worst flooding in years to Thailand’s eastern provinces. Further reforms of
the nation’s financial and legal systems are in the works. The army is
struggling to update its weapons-control systems before the Y2K bug kicks
in. The powerful and popular abbot of a scandal-plagued temple is under fire
for amassing wealth and distorting Buddhist teachings. And now the British
edition of Esquire has come out with an article describing Pattaya as a
place where “Young British men go … in their thousands to get what they
can’t get at home — endless sex with as many beautiful women as they can
manage.”
Esquire’s exposi prompted another round of angry public statements, of
course, and the new tourism minister, Paveena Hongsakul, was quoted in the
Bangkok Post as saying that “anyone who tries to sabotage our country by
writing such an article will be blacklisted.” The same article said that
Hongsakul claimed to have seen “no evidence of a flourishing sex industry”
on a recent visit to Pattaya, but the Post’s editors knew better: On the
same page of the Aug. 12 edition they published a captioned photo of the
U.S. aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk, which had just dropped anchor off Pattaya
so the boys might enjoy a little wholesome R&R in the exotic East.
Through it all, the people of Bangkok still find reasons to smile — like the
taxi driver I rode with recently whose meter registered 43 baht when we
arrived at my destination. I handed him two 20-baht notes and was fishing
around in my pocket for coins when he waved me off with a friendly “Mai pen
rai” and added (in English), “Have a good-looking day!” I paused for a
moment to reflect on the poetry of his sentiment, then unfurled my umbrella,
squeezed through the crush of pedestrians on Phayathai Road and slipped
optimistically into the dank back alleys of Siam Square.
