I was sitting at the bar of the Pension Grilparzer yesterday, trying to remove a piece of glass from the bottom of my foot with the bartender’s ice pick, when an American woman approached me with a suggestion for my newspaper column. I am always open to suggestions, and since she didn’t seem to mind that I continued to pick at my foot while she spoke I let her have her say. I swear on all things holy that the following conversation is recorded here exactly as it took place, word for word. I wrote it all down on a beer mat so I wouldn’t forget it, and typed it up as soon as I got home.
"When are you going to write about these stupid farang women who take off their bathing suit tops on the beach?" she asked.
"I have," I said. "Actually, I write about it fairly regularly. My readers seem to enjoy it when I write about women’s breasts, in any context at all. Every time I mention a woman’s breasts in the newspaper I get tons of fan mail."
"I hate it," she said, ignoring my response. "It’s so rude. I’m here because I love the Thais, and I feel so angry that the hotels make Thais wait on these rude women."
"Well, I don’t think the beach boys mind it much," I said to my foot, hoping she would go away.
"It’s against their religion, you know."
"Um, no, it’s not." By now I was trying to puncture a vein with the ice pick. Anything to get away from her.
"Most Thai men will become a monk once in their life," she huffed.
"Well, the ones whose mothers make them will," I said. "And when they ordain they’ll find the temple walls covered with murals featuring bare-breasted women."
"What if they’re Muslim?" she countered.
"Then they won’t become monks."
She gave me a an angry look and left me to my surgery. As I dug into my flesh I thought about rules. When I began my newspaper column my wife told me there were three things I couldn’t write about: the monarchy, the monkhood, and her mother. With the exception of the comments above I have observed this rule fastidiously, and haven’t found that it has seriously limited by ability to comment on life in this country.
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There are rules of law and rules of polite social intercourse, and even rules of impolite social intercourse, and if he observes them a foreigner can make a nice life for himself in Thailand. Most of these rules can be found in any guidebook: don’t touch people on the head, don’t point with your feet, and don’t bare your breasts in public. But after a few years here every expat has personal rules that are the result of careful observation and a healthy survival instinct.
For instance, I always turn on the light and check the floor for centipedes before I step into any bathroom, even those in five-star hotels. I have never seen a centipede in a five-star hotel, but it costs nothing to be careful. I never eat in restaurants that have strings of Christmas tree lights outside, because nobody in them, staff or customer, really cares about the food. I’ll only order coffee in good hotels or tiny Muslim roadside stalls. I never drink in bars that keep gibbons on chains. I once spent a week in jail, and the only thing that could have made it worse would have been a bunch of tourists feeding me beer nuts and taking my picture.
If somebody says to me, "She’s not like these other girls. I’m going to marry her and send her to hair dressing school," I nod my head and tell him what a lucky fellow he is. But I don’t lend him any money.
I am never rude to strangers. Before I can feel safe insulting anybody, I make certain they have no relatives working in the Immigration Department, Labor Department, Police Department, or the Patong Beach Leather Belts and Silver Jewelry Vendor’s Mafia. In fact, I am only really abusive to my close friends.
And one day out of every month I lock my family and myself into the house with a stack of rented videos and a bucket of barbecued chicken. This day is the last day of the month, known in Thai as wan sin duen and in English as “pay day”. On this secular monthly holiday every man or woman with an employee’s ID badge will finish their shift and embark on a lemming-like drive of consumerism. In the gloom of the evening the women will drive their little motorcycles home with one hand, the other holding a hundred bulky parcels full of plastic and denim and collagen-based cosmetics that obscure their rear-view mirrors and make them drive tipped to one side at a 45-degree angle. The men will spend the evening in some place with Christmas tree lights outside, making adolescent jokes at the expense of a bored sing-a-song girl in a cheap chiffon evening dress and boasting about how much alcohol they can drink. Then they’ll take their buddies home in their brand-new Nissan pick-up truck achieving speeds perhaps in excess of the legal limit but designed to get them home before they fall asleep at the wheel. I never, ever, drive on Phuket’s roads on wan sin duen.
By observing these few, simple rules, I have managed to survive when virtually everybody I knew when I arrived in this country has either died or gone home in economy class, to bad-mouth Thailand for the rest of their lives. I publish my personal opinions in the Kingdom’s best newspaper every Sunday, and with the exception of a dead dog thrown on my lawn, a Kafka-esque interview at the Crime Suppression Division and a threatened lawsuit that came on stationary claiming to be from the Bunnag International Law Office, I have never been in trouble for what I’ve said.
I spend my days performing minor surgery on myself with bar implements and watching the silly European women cultivate melanoma on their breasts, and it’s a very pleasant life. But a person who will complain to a stranger about something as silly as those women on the beach is not destined to enjoy her time in Thailand.
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