City Notes: Subjective Bangkok
I'm writing thirty posts in thirty days, again. This is number fourteeen.
This week, after my post on Los Angeles did well, I sat down about five times and tried to write a similar post about Bangkok, my other favorite city, where I lived for 3.5 months. Each time it’s gone poorly, even though I have a lot to say about the subject. Today, I realized why I’d been having a hard time.
Bangkok was the first place I felt truly lost, which is to say, the first place I felt free. My memories of it are inseparable from this sense of understanding just how puny I was in the face of all that vastness. Trying to describe it with any kind of objectivity was insulting both to my objectivity and my experience. It was a silly and incredibly difficult task, like trying to write a resume for your first crush.
So, I’m giving myself an easier assignment.
What You Do Here
Basically you walk, eat, and go to the mall. The tourist destinations are terrible, but the mere existence is fantastic. The heat forces you to submit to it. Electricity is delivered by improbable chunky tangles of wire, snaking past the storefronts, altars, and vegetation.
Without local gossip and happenstance, it turns out that you’re not a complicated guy. Without relationships of substance, you feel oddly hypothetical, like an intellectual exercise. The pollution sunsets are absolutely lovely, and because the humidity and temperature remain high, the night seems like an artificial change in scenery, like a new screensaver switching on.
In the foreign daze, in which you know nothing, everything is equally significant, equally worthy of regard—you sort of see things like God would, if God were more quizzical than vengeful.
Death
You’ve read that all the food vendors keep their wares looking fresh with formalin, a toxic preservative usually used to firm up tissues to be examined under microscope. Every time you hop on the back of a motorcycle taxi, you can feel your mortality right there in front of your face—the drivers move like those crazy bike couriers in NYC, over sidewalks, against traffic, inches away from big trucks. You go with the older drivers, because they’ve lived longer. Also, at about two packs of cigarettes a day, combined with the air pollution, you start to feel your nasal passages change texture.
Your body’s vulnerability is just one of the frequencies you’re awash in here, and you don’t really mind that very much. When you were younger, and you thought about suicide often, you would think about everyone saying nice things at your funeral. Now, on the back of a bike, you occasionally think of your life ending, and it’s a simpler idea, like when you turn an old TV off and there’s a little white dot that’s only there for a second before disappearing.
Reputation
All you ever heard about Bangkok was that people have sex for money there. But you discover that, outside of a few red light districts, which are appropriately sex-related, Bangkok is largely a chill, conservative place. It’s not as chaotic as you expected; you feel like a boat on a river, rather than like a pinball in a machine. The traffic is occasionally notable, but it’s all so big and warm that everything seems slow in ultimate terms. Basically nobody ever bothers you.
You were expecting there to be an edge of the earth that you would, perhaps, fall from. Surmounting the day requires four to five Thai iced coffees, which are incomparably sugary. You float on a blanket of sugar until dinner.
Extremes
Your local noodle stand, is, in some ways, your home. You’re here most evenings. It feels realer than your apartment, where you typically play internet chess all night. The hot food is hot in your stomach, which is inside your hot skin, residing in the hot air. Sweet smell of sugary sauce, sweet smell of gasoline, sweet smell of garbage, metallic taste on your lip as you drink from the tin cup. In a moment, this will all be wiped away by your favorite 7-11, which is one of four you can see if you turn all the way around. (There are 4500 7-11s in Bangkok.) You will freeze in the air conditioning, it will smell like commercial nothing. You decide against drinking this evening. Instead, you will consume strawberry milk, which will make you think back to days of soft serve, an occasional treat in the schoolyard, the last time you were quite this alone.
Endlessness
By nature, you’re a low-grade flaneur. You enjoy swimming among the people, and bouncing your thoughts off facades concealing luxury goods. But here, such an approach is doomed. Bangkok stays large longer than you can stay sane. You stab out in random directions until you start to get heat stroke. Sometimes you’re rewarded: the best spicy chicken you’ve ever had, deep in Sam Sen, in a parking lot you never find your way back to. Sometimes, it’s just alley after alley, open-fronted apartments with a half-dozen kids watching a smallish TV, chop shops with piles of motorcycle-derived scrap. On these long, doomed walks, it’s not that you’re discovering who you really are, or anything like that. It’s more like you’re seeing the canvas upon which your quotidian identity is usually splattered.
Indoors
Occasionally, you make it out to the cocktail bars, which, unexpectedly rival the best in New York or LA. You come home covered in mosquito bites, and you stand, drunk, at the stove, burning them one by one with a spoon you heat with a BIC lighter. You do this twice a day, and you are so, so good at it—you get the right temperature every time, and it feels wonderful, like a series of tiny hot baths. Your old AC unit screams like some plains animal. Your room is now a fridge. You get used to the hard mattress. You are softening, in general.
Returning
Before you return to New York, you get a couple of shirts made at a tailor down in bougie Thonglor, so you can come back from abroad and give the impression that you looked great while you were over the ocean. You do arrive tanned and slim, in perfectly-crafted oxfords, but the truth is that you looked terrible most of the time in Bangkok, although, finally, you figured out that you shouldn’t grow a beard. That was probably the biggest revelation you came to, over your three months. That’s about four revelations per year, which isn’t really such a poor average. When you return, four years later, the place you remember is half there and half gone. Much of it was an impression that started fading upon being composed. After you left, you lost all the tools you made it with.
> Sweet smell of sugary sauce, sweet smell of gasoline, sweet smell of garbage, metallic taste on your lip as you drink from the tin cup
exactly. exactly
Sasha, Bangkok is my favorite city in the world. I've been three times, and you described it so perfectly. That is exactly my experience. Thank you for this.