I had visited Asia for several years before settling in Bangkok in 1993.
I now divide my time between a flat there and a family and home on a working farm in Surin, six or seven hours away by train or bus. I have been married to a Khmer-Thai for 10 years. I have visited Phuket many times but have never lived there.
I really don’t know how often Thailand is mentioned in Romancing The East, but it’s important in the chapters about Joseph Conrad (who did not stay at the Oriental), Somerset Maugham (who nearly died at the same hotel), Pierre Boulle (who had the wrong bridge and the wrong river), William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick (the movie made from their book co-starred a man who became one of Thailand’s most beloved prime ministers), Alex Garland (The Beach), and that disgruntled army of people most of whom can’t write whose novels make Thailand sound like the world’s whorehouse.
Why did I write the book? I was a big reader when I was growing up, I read Conrad and Kipling and Maugham. At the same time, the US was at war with Japan, I had two uncles overseas and my father was a welder in a shipyard in New Jersey. But it was the novelists who made the lasting impression for me. Asia was where romance and adventure fit.
Okay, fast forward to 1993 and now I’m living in the real Asia. I didn’t feel lied to. Not entirely. But I knew some of those writers missed the boat and, as I discovered, many never even got on the boat and the stuff they wrote was misinformed or just plain imagined.
This is part of what formed how the West came to think about Asia. I wanted to know where these writers were right and where they were wrong and what, if anything, was still there to see and smell and touch; in other words, was there any of what Henry James called “the visitable past.”
So I visited the places and people I once read about and I read a couple of hundred books, too – some great, others dreadful. Altogether, it took four years.
The Asia I know best is Southeast Asia and of course it’s changed a lot in 20 years, but the basic stuff is still in place. My wife still tips her glass to spill a little of the beer on the ground before she drinks herself, something for the spirit that lives there.
The poor and unskilled and badly educated are still poor and only slightly more skilled and educated, and in many cases still showing misdirected respect for those who oppress them. (They, after all, control the jobs.) But that’s changing, too, now that the red shirts have challenged their longtime “masters”.
The internet has taken Asia into homes worldwide, making it easier for many to think they know Asia because there’s so much information there, from every kind of source. (Much of it as wrong as that served up in the novels I write about.) I’d say vast majority of the foreigners here really don’t have a clue. Even a lot who live here, especially the ones in the businessman’s bubble.
A couple of years ago, the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) introduced a slogan, “Unseen Thailand.” No matter how much you read, in books or on the net, you still haven’t seen Thailand. I think that sums it up for the continent.
Why are so many of these people coming here, moving here? Newsweek said it was for the sex and golf. It’s also much cheaper than where they came from, although that’s changing rapidly as well.
And, let’s be honest here, so long as you don’t talk stink about the royals and Buddhism and you keep your head down, there is the illusion that you can do just about anything you want. I came here from Hawaii, where dreams come true. In Thailand, it’s the fantasies.
Where a lot of foreigners go wrong is in failing to treat Thailand and its people and culture with real respect. They walk about half naked, get totally naked on the beaches, get drunk and fall down in public; god knows, Phuket has seen plenty of what I’m talking about.
Even the ones who behave themselves, the ones with the cars and drivers and servants and kids in international schools, are only visiting. There is no commitment to actually being here.
One of my favourite lines is, “One of the reasons I like Bangkok is because it’s so close to Thailand.” I’ve been walking Bangkok’s slums with Father Joe regularly for 15 years and I’ve been going to Surin to my wife’s poor rice village for part of every month for more than a dozen years and it’s humbling how little I know or understand.
Romancing The East is about how Western novelists flirted or fell in love with Asia and in some cases ended up hating it, but always influenced, rightly or wrongly, how the rest of the world thought and felt about the place. If you love or hate Asia, or just don’t know what to think, my book might help you at least to understand why.
I close my book, thanking all the authors profiled in it for improving my reading list after the book was begun. I have now returned to my less challenging long addiction to mysteries. A statement that may, in fact, explain why I’m so enamoured of Asia. It’s the mystery.
Published by Tuttle Publishing, Romancing the East is priced at B525 and is available at Asia Books in Jungceylon.