territory. Only 8 percent of Thailand’s 68 million people are Muslims, but they constitute the majority in the four provinces closest to Malaysia. These are Yala, Narathiwat, Songkhla, and Pattani, where, for six or seven years before the trip I’m describing, ethnic Malays had been fighting to make an independent Islamic state of the strictest sort. Several thousand people had been killed, some by the insurgents, some by the Thai army. Rebel tactics have included bombing nightclubs, burning schools, and knocking out power grids. Beheadings, however, are what seem to frighten Thais most of all. Each time there is a new rash of decapitations in the south, the authorities in Bangkok respond with fresh resolve and then declare victory. And so it goes.
There were no berths available when I purchased my ticket. My seat faced the rear of the train, so that I saw the landscape unravelling counter-clockwise, so to speak. The click-click of the rails was matched by the rhythm of the countryside popping up and then quickly vanishing down the right-of-way. There were big stretches of open country alternating with fields and paddies under cultivation. Safely in the distance, brown mountains. But at what seemed almost to be regular intervals little hamlets would whiz past, with a home or two, some vehicles, some buffalo, a stand selling local produce, and either a wat or a mosque. In each case, a sign announced the name of the community, but I could find no such places on the fairly detailed road atlas I had brought with me.
The carriage was full of Muslim women with diamond-shaped Malay faces, travelling in twos and threes, with baskets and tote bags full of food for the journey. I was surprised at how easily they laughed; they were having a good time, or at least making the best of a tiring trip. From across the aisle, an especially cute infant gurgled at me and I smiled in return, which obviously pleased the mother, who said something in Thai that sounded quite friendly. But this interaction brought a fierce scowl to the face of the young man sitting opposite me. He was in his late twenties and was better dressed than the other passengers, including your correspondent: well-shined shoes, tailored slacks, an expensive-looking belt, a crisp white dress shirt, a costly watch, an MP3 player jabbed in his ear. For the next few hours he stared at me: the real snake-eye treatment. Later, a food vendor passed through the carriage, doing brisk business. This was a signal for me to take my own bag of goodies from the overhead rack. I smiled and offered the other fellow some, thinking I might get at least a faint nod. He did not react. I began to wonder whether there was trouble in the offing. He was still staring when the sun woke me (and the entire complement of babies). With the exception of this one suspicious young Muslim in secular Westernized attire, everyone else was rumpled and bleary-eyed as we began rattling through the outer slums of the capital. Moments before we reached Hualamphong Station, we both stood up at the same instant, I to reach for my bag, but he to reach inside his pocket. He pulled out a tiny digital camera. Using gestures, he asked me whether he could snap my picture. I was surprised. He put his thumb and forefinger round the corner of his mouth, indicating that I should smile. I smiled. Then (finally) he smiled, and we disembarked and were individually subsumed in the morning’s rush-hour crowd.
— BANGKOK NOIR —
This was the first time I’d ever gone to Bangkok by land and I felt odd not to be disoriented, as I am when arriving by plane. When you fly in across the Pacific, one of the first oddities you notice is that it’s the same day as when you left, but a different date. Ah, the International Date Line: the stories I could tell you. I once arrived in Taipei to interview some government official on the wrong day, only to find that the Taiwanese didn’t sigh too loudly, for they are used to such things. Another peculiarity of Bangkok is that, in my own experience at least, all flights arriving there do so at 0100 hours, regardless of their origin or the direction travelled.
I used to stay in big hotels when I could afford them, but some years ago my friend Christopher G. Moore, the expat Canadian novelist, recommended that M and I stay at a clean, cheap Indian-run hotel in Soi 8 near Nana Station, and it has been our local headquarters ever since. In its little restaurant, deserted except for me, I refreshed my taste for the Bangkok Post and my impatience with the other English-language daily, the Nation. Reading these online is simply not the same. The Post was founded in 1946 by an American, Alexander MacDonald, using presses acquired at an auction of Japanese property seized after the war. MacDonald first arrived in the country by air — by parachute, actually. He was working for the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, helping to organize the Free Thai resistance movement in the north. I still regret that once, years ago, at an auction in aid of a Bangkok charity, I passed up one of the small maps of Thailand printed on silk that American and British operatives and pilots kept tucked inside their flight suits. I believe that the Post, when I became aware of its existence, was owned by the first Lord Thomson. Some people said he found it a convenient place to store his son-in-law.
In Bangkok, as in major centres all over Asia, there is life everywhere, on every street, in every shop and at all hours. For many people such as myself it is not only a key destination in its own right, but the staging area and provisioning place for incursions into Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and so on. It’s a sprawling, polluted, congested, and deafening city of 10 million people — and twenty universities, thirty hospitals, and a recent architecture of astonishing ugliness, as the element of gigantism found in Asian religious cultures (all those giant Buddhas and the like) now finds expression in skyscrapers, as well. Many are decorated with replicas of foreign landmarks. It’s not unusual to come upon a scaled-down Tour Eiffel or Statue of Liberty topping off some enormous black shaft of an office development. Down at eye level, though, BKK (it is commonly known by its airport code) is a city of neighbourhoods, each of them almost a tribe unto itself.
Some of these nabes are particularly associated with white foreigners. Transients have Khao San Road, which is synonymous with backpacks, hostels, and cheap phone cards. Expats, who are almost without exception far older than the trekkers, have Sukhumvit Road. It is the most important of five districts that shelter many thousands of Western foreigners known as farang (pronounced falang), most of them English speakers, who have fallen in love with the place or perhaps only with one of its citizens, or are enjoying a comfortable budget-retirement, or have decided for various reasons, legal, moral, or philosophical, not to return home. The Dickens of this demimonde (or maybe its Mayhew) is the aforementioned Christopher G. Moore, who has lived there several decades and, being a speaker of Thai, has learned a great deal about the workings of the host culture, as well as many secrets of the expats, most of whom are British or American. His middle initial prevents confusion with two other Christopher Moores — the American writer of trash-books read at airports and the Toronto historian and Governor General Award winner.
So far, Christopher G. has published well over twenty novels and thrillers, all of them set in Southeast Asia and most of them in Bangkok, the city that, after all, is said to have inspired Blade Runner and is indeed a place of fascinating sleaze and colourful crime. The concept of full disclosure compels me to confess that a small literary press I started published two of his books in the Canadian market several years ago. One of them had some favourable reviews and sold modestly well, perhaps because it opens on a grisly murder in Vancouver (where Moore once taught condo law at the University of British Columbia). The other one was not at all commercially successful in Canada, where he has never been popular the way he is in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan. Still, many Canadian readers of police-procedurals admire the books of his that feature Vincent Calvino, a disbarred New York lawyer who works as a PI in Bangkok, often in uneasy co-operation with the local cops.
Reading his books, you might expect its author to be a tough guy, but he isn’t. He looks somewhat like the singer Tom Jones, is blessed with private school manners and bearing, and knows that the type of writing he does is dependent on expert listening. The last point was reinforced when, during a week’s worth of bar- and restaurant-hopping, he introduced me to some of his material, on the hoof, as it were.
Sukhumvit (pronounce the v as a w), having been discovered by expats during the boom-time of
