Thai Girl

"A Woman of Bangkok" is Back!

2011-12-21T17:28:00.002+07:00

The great news is that, "A Woman of Bangkok", Jack Reynolds' classic novel published in 1956 in New York and London is at last back in print.If you scan down this blog you'll find many articles about my quest to learn more about it's author. I've now gone far down that road and so am thrilled for him that Monsoon Books in Singapore have issued both a paper version and an ebook.The blurb that you'll find at www.monsoonbooks.com.sg reads as follows. (If you go to the sample chapter, you'll also find a short bio of Jack.)**********"Set against a beautifully observed Thailand of the 1950s, this is the story of a young Englishman’s infatuation with a dance-hall hostess named Vilai, who all Bangkok knows as The White Leopard. No ordinary prostitute, Vilai is one of the most memorable in literature’s long line of brazen working girls. An unmitigated liar and brutally transparent about her desire for money, she unscrupulously milks young Reggie Joyce, the son of an Anglican vicar, with complete frankness. Reggie knows her for what she is yet there seems no folly he will not commit for her, no road to ruin he dares not take. Vilai becomes an obsession for him—an obsession that brings Reggie moments of ecstasy, months of anguish and the threat of utter disaster.Acknowledged today as one of the most memorable novels about Thailand, “A Woman of Bangkok” was first published to critical acclaim in London and New York in the 1950s and is a classic of Bangkok fiction. While the Fifties was a very different world, what is remarkable about this book is that the more the bar scene in Bangkok changes, the more it stays the same. Just as Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill stand eternal, Vilai takes a very special, dare one say seminal, place as the first and best of the many anti-heroines of the now burgeoning Bangkok novel."********It is a fine piece of writing and well worth reading. Tell us what you think!********** Please forgive this bizarre editing. Blogspot is refusing to accept my paragraphing.

Preah Vihear Ablaze Again

2011-02-09T16:48:00.011+07:00

The Cambodian flag flies peaceably above the first temple at Preah Vihear, known to the Thais as Khao Phra Viharn and I cannot now believe that blood is again being spilled in this futile border dispute. The conflict has no real substance but is merely the result of extreme nationalism being fanned by politicians on both sides of the border seeking to distract attention from internal problems and to impress the electorate. It is so ironic that two Asian nations are scrapping over a border that was imposed on them by French colonial Indo-China in an unequal treaty that the World Court then had to interpret.

Bullet holes from the Khmer Rouge era are clearly visible.

The biggest losers are the traders for whom the temple was a livelihood.

A sacred place, it should be enjoyed as a shared heritage.

I wrote the following article in October 2008, never thinking that the dispute would gather momentum for so long. Nothing has changed. Things have only got worse and more blood has been spilled. When will everyone come to their senses?

Thailand’s Temple of Doom?

I am so sorry that Preah Vihear, the Cambodian temple on the Thai border has once again become a political football, souring relations between the two countries.

Called Khao Phra Viharn in Thai, it is just two hours from where we live and I keep on going back as for me it is one of the most magical places in the world. I’ve been there ten times in the last few years and I want to go another ten.

Though the Khmer temples at Angkor are grander in scale, the natural setting of Khao Phra Viharn is beyond compare. It sits at the top of a cliff and as you stand there looking down at hundreds of miles of Cambodian plain and mountain spread before you, just behind you a thousand year symphony in stone, this must be one of the most remarkable places in the world.

The temple often acts as a lightning rod for tensions between Thailand and Cambodia as it is the Cambodian and not the Thai flag that flies over it. In 1962 the International Court of Justice decided a border dispute referred to it by Cambodia, ruling that the temple was within Cambodia and that the Thais must withdraw their troops. The Thais were outraged and have never forgotten this slight from the minnow to the east.

Now managed by the Cambodians in a pleasant state of sleepy under-development, little girls and old ladies wander through the ruins beseechingly selling postcards and cold drinks and whenever there are tensions between the two countries, the Cambodians assert their authority and close the temple to visitors. Whether the pretext is pollution flowing into Thailand from the stream below the temple or a Thai helicopter allegedly overflying Cambodian airspace, it always spells doom for the poor vendors who abruptly lose their livelihood.

The decision of the Court was that maps drawn up during the French colonial era and at least implicitly accepted by the Thais placed the temple in French Cambodia notwithstanding that geographically it is within Thailand. Standing on top of a gently rising escarpment and cut off from Cambodia by the cliff, it must always have been approached from the Thai plateau.

The usual presumption is that international borders follow the watershed. In this case the watershed is the cliff edge, which would put the temple within Thailand, but the Court concluded in this case that the treaty ruled otherwise. Unequal treaties by which colonial powers sought to extend their territory are nonetheless taken to be valid.

The latest saga is that Cambodia has now made an application to UNESCO for the listing of the temple as a World Heritage Site and again the Thais are outraged. The new Thai government seems prepared to co-operate but the opposition Democrats have made it a major issue in domestic politics, attempting to bring down the government. Charging that a deal had been done to allow the Cambodian application proceed in return for a casino concession for Thaksin Shinawatra, the shadowy power behind the PM, the opposition has obtained a court injunction to stop the government supporting the application for listing and has stirred up extreme nationalist fervour against Cambodia.

The whole conflict is damaging for all sides. If the Thais could only accept the reality of Cambodian sovereignty over the temple and support an application for listing, there would be benefit for all, especially for the poor vendors in the temple.

The approach to the temple from the Thai side is scheduled as a National Park so the Thai authorities already collect entry fees equivalent to those charged by the Cambodians for the temple itself. As the access and the only population centres are on the Thai side, the benefit of virtually all associated tourism primarily benefits the Thais. The Thai province of Si Saket is one of the poorest in the country and desperately needs its one significant tourist attraction to be promoted by harmonious progress to a World Heritage listing.

The current dispute could now close the temple and sour relations between the two countries for years, thus doing considerable self-inflicted damage to Thailand.

The more intransigent the Thais prove to be, the more the Cambodians will try to develop the approaches to the temple from their own side. There is talk of foreign funding for a major road through the jungle, of building a cable car up the cliff and, perish the thought, of casinos in the vicinity.

When I first visited the temple seven years ago, the view from the top was totally untouched by humanity. Though the jungle had perhaps been stripped of the best timber, there was not a road or a man-made structure in view for a hundred miles in any direction. Now already there is a dirt road with trucks crawling along it like ants and small shanty towns at the intersections. I fear what the future will bring. The great charm of the temple is that it remains under-developed and innocent, but all that soon may change.

In recent times it has been the focus of violent conflict as it was one of the last strongholds held by the Khmer Rouge long after the fall of Pol Pot, the genocidal leader of Cambodia. Indeed one of their cannons still stands high on the hill facing back towards Thailand.

Now once again the atmosphere is laden with doom and it all seems so sad. As I walk up the steep stone avenue towards the temple steadfastly refusing all offers of postcards, the little girls gaze hopefully at me. ‘Okay, mister. Not buy postcard now, but maybe later come back.’

Maybe but maybe not.

My heart usually melts for them or for the boy who in competent English tells me his life ambition is one day to go to school. My hand slips into my pocket for a few baht, always to be rewarded with a million dollar smile.

The temple and the simplicity of these people thus enriches me and all who go there, while the barrenness of racist nationalism and partisan politics that is now rearing its ugly head diminishes all of us. In this most beautiful of places the petty behaviour of politicians could not be more grotesque.

My Thai Girl's a Hunter-Gatherer

2010-12-08T16:29:00.010+07:00

This crab wandered in and paid the price.

During the rains there's frogs and fish in the rice fields.

These tiny fish are delicious deep fried.

And this was the trap that caught them.

A spicy dish of bamboo shoot is highly prized.

But it takes much time and effort to prepare it.

Rural Thailand is changing fast, often for the better, but as always there are winners and losers. For this child, change will not come fast enough and he may have little choice but to join the cohorts of cheap labour that migrate to the cities to fuel the modern economy, thus maintaining the comfortable life-style of the middle classes. The land can no longer provide a living, except for those who own substantial farms and work hard and capably.

But it was not always that way. Once there were forests and food for free.

I’ve written before about how the Surin countryside where my wife, Cat and I now live used to be bountiful and how it abundantly yielded birds and animals to eat, roots, leaves, nuts and fruits. Her childhood was spent gathering food in the countryside and her memories of that time seem to be happy ones.

The trouble is now that every available scrap of land has been made productive and almost all the forest has gone. With increasing population, farming cannot support the population and this unlimited resource of free food for the landless is no longer there. Thus the young and fit have to move away to the cities to find low paid work, often leaving their small children with Mama Papa in the village.

I’d never before thought of Thais as hunter gatherers but rather as prosperous growers of rice, so this is a new insight for me. Farmers and pastoralists wandering the world with their cows are the wealthy ones and the hunter gatherers are all but gone. One thinks only of the pygmies in the Congo, of the Punan in Borneo and the Orang Asli or Sakai in the mountainous jungles down the spine of Malaysia.

I’ve seen people in West Africa who wore nothing but leaves but even they grew crops. I’ve stayed with Dyaks several days up the Skrang river in Sarawak, sleeping under the huge bundles of human skulls tied up with rattan. They lived off the jungle and just before we went out hunting orang utan, they showed me the paws of a bear they’d killed a few days before. They also grew a few vegetables and kept pigs that ran wild in the forest around the long houses. This was fine by me but in the absence of a WC, when I headed off into the jungle to hide behind a bush, the pigs would come running. They were so keen to get up close and personal as I squatted down that they almost knocked me flying.

The only pure hunter gatherers I’ve ever met though were the Sakai in the Taman Negara national park in Malaysia. In the vastness of the jungle we were lucky to come across them sitting in low temporary shelters of palm and leaves. They were very hospitable as they showed us how they whittled the darts for the blow pipes with which they killed monkeys and showed us the roots and the honey they’d recently collected from the jungle. They were delightful people to meet, their most precious possession being the fire that they kept glowing in one of their shelters.

I now realize to my surprise that my Thai wife too is a hunter gatherer. There’s nothing she loves doing more in the village than collecting food and despite the loss of the forests, it’s still out there if you know how to find it.

And it also comes into the house too without being asked! The garage is a cool, quiet place where we’ve caught intruding crabs and frogs, rats and even a scorpion, and all of them have gone into the pot.

Then when it rains heavily at night, the frogs cry out noisily and Cat gets up and goes out in the dark and the wet hunting them. She takes a powerful head torch and a vicious looking spear and returns with several kilos of frogs and fish in a bucket.

We’ve had heavy rain recently and the fish pond overflowed and she made a fish trap of fine netting where the water runs out. This produced quantities of beautiful small fish of the kind that are used to make plaa raa, the foul smelling fermented fish that Isaan people so love.

Then Cat takes the bamboo shoots from around the fish pond and spends ages cutting it into tiny slices and boiling it up to soften it. One dish she made recently was to mix it with rice, chopped pork, various spices and a liberal quantity of plaa raa and fiery chili to render it totally uneatable by any farang. Then it was wrapped in parcels of banana leaf to make a local delicacy that was truly a labour of love.

She also collects pak ah chet, a leaf that grows on the surface of the pond. And she gathers kee lek from behind the house which is pounded to make a bitter green paste or soup, and at a certain time of the year we go out to the rice fields and climb the sadao trees to collect the young shoots that again are cooked up to make a decent curry as bitter as bile.

Then there was the trap with a blue light that accumulates a huge quantity of insects overnight that are fried up and eaten as a snack. The rice fields are full of fish and crabs, shell fish and prawns, all there for the taking, just like at the seaside, so in some ways the countryside is still nothing less than bountiful.

Nonetheless, you have to have land as there is no longer enough to sustain the whole population of rural Isaan. And that’s why the middle generation has gone off to the towns to find menial and badly paid work.

A few days ago one of Cat’s aunties came in to show off a new grandchild that had just been left with her by her daughter who works in Bangkok. This woman had eight children of her own but with only one of them now still with her in the village, all the others having gone away to the south. She already has two small grandsons living with her, their unmarried mothers gone far away so a third is a real burden, not to mention the cost of milk formula. From time to time her family send back small sums of money her and Papa and the children but for them it’s a poor life, living in what an only be described as a shack. They have absolutely no other income.

The new child is of course a joy, but the burden for an old woman of raising yet another baby is hard. But that’s just the way it is in rural Thailand.

The comfortable middle classes in Bangkok benefit from a vast pool of cheap labour while Isaan is a totally different world.

The village is a real community, though under threat, but it’s sad if more of the benefits of the modern economy cannot be brought to the countryside. That tension is of course what the current political turmoil in Thailand has been all about.

Meanwhile Cat has her farang and a comfortable life, but I respect her passion for living off the land and for not running a mile from the toughness of her upbringing. That’s what makes living in the village more rewarding for me as Cat’s enthusiasm for country life brings me a little closer to what remains of ‘the real Thailand’.

It still leaves the question though that the countryside has been stripped bare and is no longer capable of sustaining those with little or no land. In times of trouble there is little now for them to fall back on.

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog December 2010

"Resilient Thailand" Again

2010-10-29T16:14:00.002+07:00

Central World Plaza, the massive retail mall in Bangkok that was devastated during the political protests only a few months ago has opened once again. Comparing this picture to the scene of destruction that you will see if you scan down this blog is remarkable.

This is a tribute to the resilience of the established political and commercial powers in Thailand and to the ability of this society to bounce back following seismic tremors.

I admire these qualities very much but there is perhaps a negative side as well. If the elite that controls Thailand restores the shiny facade but fails to deal with the grey reality that lies behind, then greater problems are only stored up for the future.

The privilege of the moneyed Bangkokian to shop in cool, marble malls has been restored but it is still the rural migrants who do the construction and factory work and run the city for dismally low wages. There is little then to send home to Mama Papa who squat in the dust back home in the village.

Amazing Thailand, Resilient Thailand, a country that is admirable in so many ways. Nonetheless, for her sake I desperately hope that she can learn to adapt and change in the very near future as her essential problems will not just go away of their own accord.

Andrew Hicks The Thai Girl Blog October 2010

Some Sad News to Tell

2010-10-20T15:50:00.005+07:00

'Are rural people living in Isaan truly poor' was the theme of a blog article I wrote some months ago. Rather than add more questionable generalisations to the debate, I made it a 'case study' of Cat's old auntie and uncle and I described their hard lives in detail... how that had raised seven children farming rice on a very small holding of land and eking a living digging crabs in the fields and selling noodles. (If you scan down, there are pictures of them and their home and farm.)

Now in their seventies the worst has happened. They are both fragile and as thin as sticks, but to keep body and soul together working life has to go on. They have to fend for themselves as little money seems to come in from their adult children who are far away and have many mouths to feed. The old man has continued to take his three buffaloes out to the fields every day and she to walk miles around the villages carrying heavy baskets over her shoulders with a clay barbecue to cook and sell noodles. That is how they survive from day to day.

Now he has suffered a collapse and is in hospital forty miles away in Surin. He seems to have blackouts and now is partially paralysed down one side. He has been hospitalised for several weeks and it is impossible to guess the outcome. The story that comes back to me is that as he never eats meat he doesn't have enough blood and so is very weak and they seem to be despairing of him.

She too has had a collapse, perhaps exhausted by the responsibility of managing the animals and getting into Surin to look after her husband. Now she is home but she is very much at risk.

While some of the basics of medical care are covered by the state, being ill is very expensive and I just don't know how they'll manage. In the struggle to get by, I'm sure money will be their one consuming worry.

He always has a gentle smile and is the perfect gentleman, the very best of Isaan farmers. She has enormous spirit and is the life and soul of the party but it is now terrible to see her so down.

I don't know what good luck could come their way but I only hope it does as they are among the nicest people I know.

Andrew

The Thai Girl Blog October 2010

Bangkok's World Trade Center Disaster

2010-07-15T15:12:00.005+07:00

It is truly shocking to see a picture of Bangkok's Central World Plaza in ruins shortly after the recent disturbances in the city. Peaceful protests can so easily get hijacked and run out of control when a widespread sense of grievance is so very strong and raw.

The Plaza was a truly spectacular celebration of consumerism but for the huge majority of Thais their only place in it was as low paid constuction workers, cleaners and skivvies. A pretty girl from the countryside whose skin colour was light enough might aspire to sell burgers there but not much more.

Bangkok's world, it seems, is thus heating up in more ways than one.

How ironic it now is that before a substantial upgrading and rebranding a few years ago, this huge retail complex was called the World Trade Centre. While the Marriott Hotel did not change the name of its Tsunami restaurant, any possible association with a terrorist atrocity in Manhattan was clearly best avoided for Bangkok's biggest retail mall.

What befell though in Bangkok was entirely a domestic affair, the problems of a young country that has imperfectly integrated its distant provinces such as in the South and North East and since the revolution of 1932 has not fully modernised its essential polity.

Now the talk is of getting back to normal through reconciliation between the different factions. This sounds thoroughly appropriate, though it is meaningless if it simply amounts to demanding that the poor go back to their sweatshops and to ploughing the dirt without more. Unless the inequities in society are adequately addressed and a substantial shift occurs in the balance of political power between different interests, then the grievances will only become more bitter and the next conflict only be delayed.

History deems that Thailand's achievement in avoiding being colonised was a good thing. However, while it begs the question to say this, in essence its whole structure of power politics is in need of modernisation.

This cannot be attempted soon enough, though it is not in the interests of the power brokers to see it happen.

Meanwhile, though tourism is down, Thai manufacturing and exports are booming and the government's finances remain healthy. The means to promote change therefore exists and there is little real excuse for not so doing except self-interest.

As the pressures continue to build, what then can break the log jam?

Andrew Hicks The "Thai Girl" Blog July 2010

Cute Terrorists-Which Way Thailand Now?

2010-06-16T15:34:00.013+07:00

A scrawled poster pasted up during the recent demonstrations in Bangkok suggests the wide popular nature of the protest. But was it, as the much criticised media coverage suggested, a genuine peoples's movement for democracy or was it in fact a power struggle by new monied interests seeking to seize power from the traditional elites? Where does the truth lie and what's next for Thailand?

The protester organisers passionately wanted to be non-violent.

Bangkok is a vibrant city that relies on armies of cheap labour.

Petty traders survive there just as they would back in the village.

Or they work on construction sites in appalling conditions.

Their salvation is finding support and community in adversity.

They are building a sleek airport rail link that they'll never use.

Getting to work means a hot bus toiling in traffic.

Or riding a smelly boat on Klong San Saeb.

Once a year at Songkhran, the Thai New Year, they have a few days off to go home to the village, fighting for a seat at Moh Chit bus station.

It strikes me that Thai politics never seems to address the key issues of the day but creates dominant personality cults and focuses solely on the politicians themselves. Which war lord is going to grab power next and what vested interests do they serve? Thus politics is not so much a contention between opposing principles and ideas but a crude struggle for power between rival patronage groupings.

Living in a village in Isaan I see this even at the local level. Elections here are always welcomed as you’ll hope to collect a few hundred baht for the promise of your vote. A candidate for a minor position in local government, orbortor or whatever, invests a considerable sum to buy his way into power but winning the post will reap a useful dividend. Nothing can ever be had without being bought.

Even a farang living in Thailand openly gets asked for bribes by officials and many times I’ve been stopped by police asking for cash before going on my way. Right up the ladder to the top, office holders use their position for their own benefit. Nobody did this better than Thaksin Shinawatra who used the government coffers to buy the favour of the ordinary voters and became unusually rich during his terms of office. As he was the first leader to make it his policy to benefit the poor farmers, his followers now do not begrudge him his questionable billions.

Every political movement or party, even a street protest, whether Yellow or Red shirted, thus needs a powerful backer dispensing patronage. Even if you are an ordinary worker sincere in your protest you cannot survive at the barricades without being paid 200 baht a day. A genuine mass movement of the rural poor can thus be hijacked and distorted by those who use it in pursuit of power.

So what of the recent disturbances in Bangkok? Were they a genuine struggle for democracy by the disenfranchised poor or something else entirely? Was it instead a power struggle in which the traditional political, bureaucratic and military elites were resisting an alliance of the newly rich and the rural poor?

Perhaps it was both, a broad populist movement which came to be bankrolled and controlled by another patronage grouping seeking power. If the Red Shirt movement was a grass roots movement of ordinary people seeking to better their lives, they soon lost control of it and it became something else entirely. Sadly, the underlying imbalances within Thai society and the sharing of political power and wealth remain unresolved.

So was it a genuine populist movement or a crude struggle between opposing interest groups? Whatever view you take, as one strips away more skins of the tear stained onion of Thai politics, there is always another layer beneath.

A Comment on my previous blog article, “Thai Rural Poverty - A Powder Keg?”, recommended an article in Newsweek as a good analysis of the current situation. (See www.newsweek.com/2010/06/04/the-end-of-brand-thailand.html) This boldly stated that of South East Asia’s modern economies, ‘only Thailand is disintegrating’ and is ‘becoming ungovernable and a failed state’.

That’s not how it feels living in Thailand though.

At the time of the troubles, if you were not in the immediate vicinity of the disturbances, life went on as normal. This does not feel anything like a failed state but is a well-managed and broadly stable society.

In the last fifty years the country has in fact made enormous strides, creating an impressive infrastructure of roads, power supply, schools and hospitals even in the remotest areas, everything managed by a clunkingly complex bureaucracy.

Through the Thaksin years and beyond, outward signs of increasing prosperity have been increasingly evident in the countryside, even if this has been partly based on inward remittances. The comprehensive powers of the police and bureaucracies and the influence of the Chinese dominated commercial sector means that the country is effectively run. Nonetheless, a deferential society such as this may allow pressures and resentment to build up if power is imposed from above and wealth is not equitably shared.

Newsweek ascribes Thailand’s relative decline to a poor education system based on rote learning and to concentrating on lower value manufacturing for foreign companies. At an early stage of its development, this approach has served Thailand well, though as Singapore realized in the eighties, lower wage economies can soon become uncompetitive and it is then necessary to gear up and go ‘hi-tech’.

Basic education that avoids critical thinking and maintaining low wages is an essential of the old approach and a cause of dissention today. Thailand’s mass labour that fuels the factories is made up of economic migrants from the countryside who passively work for poor wages, but as they become more urbanized and aware, it is they who are now protesting.

Newsweek sees a dangerous polarization between the Yellow and Red factions, though that observation states the growing problem rather than identifying solutions. In conclusion, statesmanlike leadership has been lacking, it says, and is needed to pull Thailand out of it present troubles.

Of recent prime ministers, the spatula wielding Samak, who was removed from office by the courts for hosting a TV cooking programme, was the antithesis of statesmanship. However, Thaksin himself had many leadership qualities and even occasionally talked about the rule of law. The current prime minister, Abhisit Vejajiva is a man of considerable political skill who would impress any audience for his grasp of democratic principle and who looks good on the international stage.

Yet he is in a bind that no one man could disentangle, nor would his backers want a different allocation of power and wealth. A general election is, however, due some time in 2012, so Abhisit’s task is to grimly hang onto power for as long as he can, aware that the will of the people is likely to upset the applecart and hand power back to the other side.

A further layer to the onion of Thai politics is its history. Thailand is still a young country and the democratic revolution begun in 1932 when the absolute monarchy was abolished is not yet complete. Furthermore, its far provinces are only recently integrated and then imperfectly. The northern kingdom of Lanna with its centre in Chiang Mai was substantially cut off by the mountains until recently, and the jungly scarps of the Korat plateau made Isaan, the great north east, very difficult of access from Bangkok.

Only by herculean feats of civil engineering were railways pushed through at the beginning of the twentieth century to make the nation a manageable political entity. (See “How the Trains Made Thailand”, my blog article of 31September 2010.)

On many occasions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the peoples of Isaan have resisted rule from distant Bangkok and these rebellions have been firmly put down. A major communist movement in the north east during the Cold War era was perhaps the last of these insurrections, but the tensions have not yet gone away.

Sanitsuda Ekachai, a columnist for the Bangkok Post uses the term ‘racist nationalism’ to describe the expectation of the central Thai power elite that the minorities should conform to their brand of ‘Thainess’ and be culturally assimilated. The failure of the clod-hopping Laos of Isaan to conform to that stereotype condemns them to exclusion and ridicule and to be the eternal funny men of every comedy and farce on Thai television.

Newly developing societies often progress at two speeds but the divisions in Thai society are glaring with few opportunities for the poor and minimal social mobility. The privileged seem satisfied with the status-quo. I recently read an articulate but angry rant by a highly educated Thai against the Red Shirts. She argued that the protests were risking the economy and her long running gravy train. Why couldn’t they just go back to their buffaloes was the underlying theme. After all, if Thai farmers are poor that can only be because they’re stupid.

It strikes me that educated urban Thais often seem to know or understand little of the conditions in which rural people live; or they don’t want to know. There is also a tendency to say that some of the protesters behaved badly and so the grievances of the poor should be dismissed. However, the Red Shirts do not formally represent the interests they claim to speak for and violence on the fringes of the protest in no way devalues the complaints of the poor.

Now the Thai farmers are losing patience. Thaksin gave them a taste of what was possible for them and understandably they want more. The trouble is that conducting a peoples’ protest pure and simple is well nigh impossible in Thailand and even if they can eventually exert their power at the ballot box they will almost certainly choose the wrong leaders.

It is highly ironic who they seem to have chosen as their champion so far!

In conclusion, there are many new nations where a comprehensive corruption of power allows office holders at all levels to use their position primarily to benefit themselves, where the police can be bought and the rule of law does not operate. It is always hard to see away out.

So which way Thailand now?

There are no glib answers but the Thais do have a knack for soldiering on in adversity and slow progress towards a modern state is always possible. However, the present tensions will grumble on until the centre of gravity in Thai politics shifts quite radically against the traditional holders of power and the economy is rebalanced to allow a fairer sharing of wealth and opportunity with mass labour.

My own key idea is that a major policy of regional development should be developed to devolve factories to provincial centres, thus taking the modern economy to the rural areas. To bring jobs to the people could thus help save the essence of Thai rural society which currently is disintegrating as workers migrate to the bloated urban centres.

It won’t be easy though and it will take time.

Andrew Hicks The ‘Thai Girl’ Blog June 2010.

Thai Rural Poverty-A Powder Keg?

2010-05-27T15:31:00.012+07:00

An old couple in a Surin village smile as they prepare a meal but are they truly poor? This article examines the details of their daily lives to suggest whether Thai society runs at two speeds, for the urban elites who cream off the wealth and the country people who have been left far behind.

This picture shows a typical newly built house in our soi.

The old couple live and sleep under these grass roofs.

A small electric pump supplies them with water.

An 'iron buffalo' is expensive but is needed to till the fields.

The harvest is kept in sacks in a handsome rice barn.

Every night the buffaloes are brought back to this barn.

Every day is spent taking the animals out to find grazing.

Hot hours are spent digging crabs to glean a few mouthfuls.

This, the poorest house in our soi, looks pretty desperate.

Was it Thai rural poverty that ignited the recent upheavals and violence on the streets of Bangkok?

A yawning wealth gap can certainly cause instability and, while I’m not an economist, it seems that the gap between the rich and poor in Thailand is very wide indeed. The wealth represented by Bangkok shopping malls such as Central World Plaza and the very basic conditions in which people live in the villages are worlds apart. When a society is hierarchical and corrupt, social mobility is limited and resentment among the disenfranchised poor could light the powder keg.

So are Thai farmers poor? This question is endlessly debated and there are some obvious points to be made.

In Isaan for example there are now many more mobiles, motor bikes and pickups than a few years ago, though easy credit for buying luxuries can be a terrible trap. Furthermore, the infrastructure of roads and power is excellent and markets are well stocked.

I’ve heard corn-fed farang confidently asserting that in the countryside nobody needs to go hungry but others argue strongly that rural poverty is as grinding as it is hidden. My wife’s village in Surin where we have lived for some years is relatively well off, but even so 45% of the children in the school are under the body weight recommended by the Thai Ministry of Health. Yet they look happy enough.

During the Thaksin years money flowed into the rural regions but in changing times there are both winners and losers. You see the winners everywhere enjoying their Nokia and new Honda Dream but hunger is invisible.

Let me therefore present to you a ‘case study’ of an elderly couple in our village and then pose the question, ‘are they poor?’. Have the rural poor been left so far behind the urban middle classes that Thai society could become unstable?

The couple that I shall describe are immediate neighbours in our village. I have known them for a long time and they are delightful people. The old man is gentle and smiling and Mama is always full of fun, the life and soul of the party when she dances everyone to exhaustion. Now in their early seventies they continue to work hard as they have done all their lives. As small farmers they work 365 days a year and they have hardly ever left the village, nor ever had a holiday. The concept of a holiday just does not exist for them.

Like everyone they are rice farmers with a tiny holding of land. They live in one of the better cement block and wood houses on our lane, though they tend to live and sometimes sleep outside in a grass thatched shelter under which they burn a fire to keep warm in the cooler months.

They raised a big family of seven children all of whom have moved away to find work in the cities and factories. After minimal education, there is no way up for them. The two youngest sons are unmarried and come and go from the village as and when they can find low paid casual work elsewhere, such as cutting sugar cane. The others visit rarely such as at Songkhran, the Thai new year festival when their factories, eight hours away, close down for a few days.

They too have their families to feed and, I suspect, can only occasionally send back a few baht to help support their Mama Papa. The old couple are thus largely dependent on their own resources for food.

Their assets include their house, the land and the rot tai or ‘iron buffalo’ which is necessary to till the soil. Water is drawn from a bore hole by an old electric pump. Regular expenses include monthly payments for electricity, fuel and repairs for the rot tai, occasionally pumping out the toilet sump and paying the money contributed at parties, funerals and weddings. Medicines are a significant cost and not so long ago Mama fell ill and Papa had to sell a buffalo to pay the hospital fees. While former prime minister Thaksin introduced an element of free medicine, the locals still have to pay big money if tests, procedures and a hospital stay go beyond the minimal.

Rice cultivation keeps them busy for half the year and provides them with their staple food that they keep in their rice barn. Cultivation is not without costs though. Seed, fertilizer, pesticides, fuel for ploughing and bringing the rice home, labour for planting and harvesting, hiring a thresher and then milling the brown rice means that this is not food for free.

Papa keeps several buffaloes which at night are kept in a rough barn by the house. There are no enclosures for grazing cattle so every day of the year Papa takes them out on a rope to wherever he can find a few blades of grass in the dust. He sits and watches them eat and moves them on from time to time. If his three animals bring one offspring to maturity annually, he can sell perhaps one a year when they need the cash. For this almost full time daily work his annual income is thus about 15,000 baht on selling a fat buffalo.

Around the house they have a few scrawny chickens and grow mulberry leaves for the silk worms which an old lady strips from the stalks, paying them about 40 baht every few months. Coconut and banana trees occasionally yield a few more baht.

Mama has long been the entrepreneurial dynamo, selling bowls of noodles around the villages. Every day she loads up two baskets with noodles, vegetable, spices and a substantial ceramic barbecue and heads off down the lane. The baskets are extremely heavy for anyone to lift and she walks with a swinging gait, the baskets slung on a pole across her shoulders.

Walking to neighbouring villages, she keeps going until the noodles are all sold, each day taking a different route so that customers do not become bored with her food. When cycling out from our house, I’ve met her many miles from home, as cheerful as anyone could be despite the burden of earning perhaps 100 baht a day.

When not selling noodles, Mama also forages for food in the surrounding fields wherever she can find it. There are red ants eggs high in the trees, insects and grubs in the earth and tiny fish, rats, crabs and frogs if you work hard enough to find them. In the long dry season when there is no rain she looks for the holes in the parched rice fields and digs hard in the pitiless heat to find a tiny crab a foot or so down. There is no meat on them but when crushed they add calcium and a little flavour to a hot soup or som tam.

She also collects bamboo shoots and leaves from the countryside such as kilek and sadao which add a bitter flavour when pounded into a paste. Eating a few vegetables for a meal, a volcanic chili sauce of this kind is important to help the rice go down. Everyone fears eating rice with salt only, a bitter memory they don’t want to relive.

At the end of the last rainy season, several times I saw Mama up to her neck in the muddy water of our pond collecting the shoots of pak ahchet, a weed which grows on the surface in abundance. This looks to be a tough life that is enough to kill off any frail old seventy year old but she is full of spirit and has kept going thus far.

The two of them cook on the floor in the kitchen with pots and pans strewn everywhere and while, pathetically thin, they somehow manage to feed themselves.

What I have just described is typical for the people living in our soi, in the rest of the village and, so far as I can see, throughout the wider region. Yet this hard working couple have land, buffaloes and a big family to support them and so are by far from being the poorest of the poor in Isaan.

Many other old people are also burdened by having grandchildren to bring up. I think of one half blind old soul nearby whose husband is an invalid and totally dependent and who has two tiny grandchildren to raise single-handed. Sometimes babies are dumped with the old folk in this way but then the money their parents should be earning for them never arrives.

In our soi there are nine family homes. Almost all of them consist of grandparents with babies and small children while the middle generation of wage earners is almost totally absent, returning perhaps once a year for Songkhran. This separation is necessary to fill the family rice bowls, but it cannot advance the family’s fortunes who inevitably remain near the bottom of the heap. At least they are fed but it is hardly a satisfactory way to raise the children.

Other families sink even lower through taking on credit they cannot afford. Within three hundred yards of our house no fewer than three ordinary families recently bought brand new Nissan pickups on credit for a minimal down payment, hoping to earn money with them to cover the monthly payments. A superficial observer would have thought this was a wealthy soi, but within a year all three pickups had been repossessed and sold off by the finance company, perhaps at an under-value to an insider. Each family was then left with a huge outstanding debt.

One family was taken to court in Surin town and had their home sold from under their feet, while another stripped and sold every piece of wood and corrugated iron from their house and, in the face of threats from debt collectors, went into hiding. I haven’t seen them since.

Farmers often have to borrow to cover the up-front costs of cultivation and when the harvest fails are then left with impossible debts. There is often no way out unless they have a pretty young daughter who will make the inevitable sacrifice in the bars of Bangkok and Pattaya.

Much of the apparent wealth in the villages, such as vehicles and house improvements, is that of salaried government servants such as police and teachers, while most of the rest comes in from outside. Construction or factory work in Bangkok is not well paid and the best wages are earned in Taiwan and Korea, while good money can be made in the girlie bars and, what’s more, by marrying a farang.

So that concludes the brief story of my neighbours and how they live, exemplified by the old couple who are the ones I know best.

But what is my take on all this?

Since the seventies, I have lived in and travelled through much of Africa, India, China and South East Asia and visited some of the poorest of countries such as Burkina Faso and Nepal. I have seen peoples who are poorer, but I still would describe my neighbours as poor, indeed starkly poorer than the urban elites.

The old couple I’ve told you about will not be the ones to go to the barricades, but the next generation of poor farmers may not be able to restrain their anger.

So, in conclusion, do you think my neighbours are unduly poor?

If this represents widespread rural poverty, could it ignite the powder keg?

Andrew Hicks The “ThaiGirl” Blog May 2010

Bangkok Burning-Why?

2010-05-20T18:44:00.010+07:00

Central World Plaza, to the left, has been on a civil war footing.

It was cleverly linked to a sky walk and the Skytrain.

The King gazes benevolently down and is widely revered.

And Bangkok has been booming with upmarket construction.

Ordinary people, often rural migrants, have to shop in markets like this that are just like the ones in the villages.

But the rich won't be shopping here any more.

It’s hard to believe that Central World Plaza, the biggest shopping mall in Asia is now a smouldering ruin. It must have taken some skill to torch it as it is a series of vast open spaces. Shops like Asia Books that I have visited so many times would have plenty of combustible material, but to destroy the whole place is truly remarkable and shocking.

Ironically it used to be called the World Trade Centre but presumably to remove the association with a complex that collapsed in flames, the name was changed. It was then given an elaborate face lift and was upgraded to become one of the glitziest malls in Bangkok and indeed the world.

So where do the rights and wrongs of all these violent protests lie?

We have been rightly warned against regarding the Red Shirt movement as a romantic crusade of the poor and oppressed to achieve democracy. See www.somtow.org/2010/05/dont-blame-dan-rivers.html. A complex situation requires deeper analysis and peeling off each layer of the onion skin of Thai politics always induces tears and often leads to misunderstandings and confusion.

Yet there is clear justification in the Red Shirt demands for an election to be called immediately and not at some later date. A charismatic but young and inexperienced old-Etonian prime minister came to power as leader of a party without a full electorate mandate and is struggling to hold together a coalition of disparate interests. This could describe either Britain or Thailand, but the difference is that in Britain the majority of the electorate has not been repeatedly deprived of its franchise by military and judicial coups, as in Thailand.

Yet one cannot simply characterize the confrontation in terms of goodies and baddies. Prime minister Abhisit is as liberal and decent a leader as Thailand is ever likely to get, even if now swimming in a tank of sharks. He does not have presidential powers to make decisions as he would wish and has little scope for real action. On the other side, Thaksin, the man who has hijacked the cause of the poor, is the biggest self-serving kleptocrat of them all. Once again the rural poor are being exploited in a way that is totally cynical by him setting himself up as their champion.

A few months back I went to a press conference at the FCCT (Foreign Correspondants Club of Thailand) given by the leaders of the Red Shirts who were explaining the aims of their proposed protests. They were, frankly, unimpressive, though to be fair they are not a formal political party with a manifesto and party membership but a loose collecting point for a range of interests and views. It was clear that theirs was not a united or cohesive movement and it was inevitable that they would have little if any control over the way the protest developed, even though their desire for non-violence seemed sincere.

After so many years of frustration, ‘protest and be damned’ would be understandable as a philosophy. Nothing else would achieve the changes they seek as reason and dialogue with those monopolizing power had already reached the end of a long road.

So what are those changes?

Essentially what is sought is a complete shift in how political power is shared in Thailand and perhaps Central World Plaza epitomizes the fundamental divide in Thai society.

Who were the men who laboured in terrible temperatures to build the place and the rest of Bangkok’s consumer palaces, living in appalling conditions for low wages? Who are the cleaners and other skivvies that then run it from day to day? Who drive the taxis, clean the streets and do all the menial tasks that keep Bangkok running?

It is the children of the rural poor who have to leave their villages to find work as agriculture no longer provides a living. And their sweated wages are hardly enough to feed their children and ageing parents back in the villages.

And who enjoys the benefit of Thailand’s evident prosperity, achieved by the low wage slaves of factory and field? It is the urban elites, government employees and middle classes of the cities… the ones who could shop at Central World Plaza and enjoy the dream and comfort of a rich consumer society.

Like looking for good guys and bad guys, this thesis may seem simplistic but it is essentially true. Too much of Thailand’s wealth and political control has been held in too few hands for too long. My neighbours in the rural North East are truly poor and there is no way upwards. In a hierarchical society of deference where the poor do not complain, there comes a time when their patience and tolerance comes to an end. That is when they run amok.

Had the government called an immediate election a few months ago, all of this might have been avoided. It is hard now to see how further chaos can be avoided. How sad that Abhisit took the poisoned chalice of prime minster when he did, rather than wait for a more secure mandate. How sad that Thaksin so badly betrayed the trust of the Thai people in the two clear electoral mandates that they entrusted to him.

His was the best ever opportunity for Thailand to make political and economic progress but his self-serving greed created the mayhem on the streets that we have seen in the last few days. I hope he does not emerge the winner from all this and that the poor can ultimately find a new champion who can more fairly shift the sharing of power and resources in Thailand.

Copyright Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog May 2010

A Day in the New Kunming

2010-05-10T21:57:00.022+07:00

One of the stories in Jack Reynolds' wonderful book, "Daughters of an Ancient Race", which is about his experiences in China in the late forties with the Friends Ambulance Unit, is called "A Day in the New Chungking". What was new at the time was that the communists had just arrived.

I first visited China from Hong Kong in 1978, in the eighties, in 1994 and again two months ago, this time from Thailand. Each time the change has been remarkable, but in particular I can hardly believe the material progess in the new Kunming. It is material progress on the scale of a new Singapore and they have built a truly beautiful city.

The old rural China is still there but so too are the sweeping freeways, the consumer society that a surprisingly large proportion of the people can enjoy and of course displays of the most prestigious branded goods.

The size of China's population and its problems are truly awesome but in a park in Kunming the essential humanity and individualty of its people is always so very evident. A little girl, angelic with pink wings riding a stone lion, a mother and child on a park bench, an elderly couple taking the air, all enjoying a break from the eternal treadmill of work during the Chinese Spring Festival remind one that the teeming millions have a human face.

The park is busy and vibrant, a daily festival of people expressing themselves with drama and music by the water. While she knits, he plays his violin and the old men enjoy their small orchestra of traditional instruments.

The communist revolution is now but a distant memory and the old traditions and internal struggles will mean something very different to the new generation. If a regime can deliver stability and prosperity even without political reform that is what will satisfy their pragmatic view.

And prosperity there certainly is. In the towns there are top of the range cars everywhere and the fat cats are very apparent. While the traditional subsists with the new and the older generation readily embraces progress, somehow I doubt though that China will allow itself to be truly coca-colonised. It may take some trinkets from the West but it is too big, too much of a 'middle kingdom' to allow its own culture to be submerged.

The old Kunming has almost been swept away in the face of a tide of modern development. The old university campus is an oasis of calm but elsewhere there is no stopping the twenty first century. Run down streets are closed and quickly demolished. While in smaller towns the new may be rebuilt as a pastiche of the old style there is no sentimentality about slums and they have to go.

This is a new dawn and the new year celebration in the park is the place to see it writ large. Kunming is 'the city of eternal spring' and in mid-February the temperature was perfect, the tulips in full bloom and with cameras and mobiles in abundance to record them. Big lenses record the chubby single child of recent policy who can move confidently into a future that offers so much more than her parents could ever have hoped for.

Meanwhile the expressways flow fast and the tower blocks soar skywards. This extraordinary place where more than six decades ago Jack Reynolds landed after a rough flight over 'The Hump' would be totally unrecognisable to him. He and his colleagues in the Friends Ambulance Unit who faced the daunting task of moving medical supplies across impossible roads and who confronted oceans of suffering would be truly amazed. The part each one of them played at that difficult time was truly heroic.

(Jack was born Emrys Reynolds Jones and was known at the time as Jack Jones. He wrote under the pseudonym, Jack Reynolds.)

Susan Boyle Meets Jack Reynolds!

2010-04-30T19:54:00.003+07:00

A plea for help with my quest to find Jack.

If you’ve been reading this blog recently, you can’t have missed the fact that I’m obsessively researching the life of the Bangkok based author, Jack Reynolds, who published a solo novel, “A Woman of Bangkok” in 1956. This seminal book was the first of a long line of ‘bar girl swallowed my wallet” stories and in the view of the critics is far superior to its many imitators.

It’s snappily written and Jack had a particular interest in language varieties and dialects, especially Lincolnshire and Thinglish, so he has a keen ear for authentic dialogue which is one of the main charms of his writing.

When, a few months ago I read ‘A Woman of Bangkok’ for the first time, one expression used surprised me as it seemed more Estuary eighties than middle class nineteen fifties. I could even say I was ‘gobsmacked’.

Later trawling the internet I came across what could be called a meeting of Jack and Susan Boyle. The website in question was www.vocbulary.com and the article is titled, “Susan Boyle is Gobsmacked (and Poleaxed Too)”. It reads as follows.

“Unless you've been living under an Internet-free rock, you've probably seen the enthralling video of Scotland's Susan Boyle singing on the television show Britain's Got Talent. According to the latest numbers, the video of Boyle's performance has already attracted more than 100 million online views. But it's not only her singing prowess that is attracting worldwide attention: it has also been reported that "Web searches for the term gobsmacked spiked after Boyle used the British slang meaning utterly astonished when describing her reaction to newfound widespread acclaim."

The graph for gobsmacked on Google Trends bears out the huge spike in online searches, buoyed by Boyle's use of the term in numerous interviews. She told CNN, for instance, "I'm gobsmacked, absolutely gobsmacked." Previously, this colloquialism hadn't circulated much outside of the British Isles, but now it's fair to say that Boyle has brought it to much wider notice in the United States and elsewhere…

British usage of gobsmacked has only become prominent since the 1980s, but the earliest known appearance of the term actually goes back to 1956. As Jerry Friedman noted recently on the Usenet newsgroup alt.usage.english, Google Book Search now reveals this passage from the novel Woman of Bangkok: "I'm so amazed that only the Malderbury dialect can express my condition: I'm 'properly gob-smacked.'" The author of Woman of Bangkok is one Jack Reynolds, but this is likely a pseudonym: also in 1956, the book was published in Britain as A Sort of Beauty under the name Jack Jones. And just to add to the mystery, the "Malderbury dialect" to which the narrator refers is a fabrication: there's no such place as Malderbury.

We can guess that Jack Reynolds/Jones had some ties to northern England or Scotland, where the term gob has long been a slang term for "mouth." According to Michael Quinion of World Wide Words, the word likely spread from Scottish Gaelic (where gob can mean "beak" and also suggests gab "talk"), primarily via insulting phrases like "Shut your gob!" ("Be quiet!"). So it's fitting that a Scot like Susan Boyle, who hails from the town of Blackburn about twenty miles from Edinburgh, should be the one to bring gobsmacked to international recognition.”

It’s a good guess but “Jack Reynolds” (real name, Emrys Reynolds Jones) was born in Buntingford, Hertfordshire to a father of Welsh origin who was the Congregational minister there in the village.

In “A Woman of Bangkok”, the hapless protagonist, Reginald Ernest Joyce is the son of the minister of the village of Malderbury. The novel thus opens with Reggie taking the train down to Malderbury to say goodbye to his parents before flying out to a commercial job in Bangkok where he falls for a Bangkok woman who swallows, inter alia, his wallet.

So there is no such place as Malderbury, the article tells us.

What intrigues me though is that I’ve had access to one of Jack’s old notebooks and in it there is a reference to Malderbury. In the passage in question Jack summarises the key stages of his life in a couple of pages and he says that in the late thirties he was for a year undergardener at Malderbury Grange.

But is this true? Did Malderbury Grange really exist? I’m sure my blog readers can find me the answer. Hertfordshire or Lincolnshire would be most probable as he worked as a gardener in both these counties.

One of the intriguing things about Jack is that his fiction was partly autobiographical and his writings about himself even in his unpublished notebooks also seem to mix fact and fantasy. In the middle of an accurate description of his life there comes a lurid detail such as that his father was killed in a bombing raid on London which in fact isn’t true.

Are these passages simply sketches for another autobiographical novel, spiced up with a little imagination, or are they intended as accurate accounts of his life?
To check an aspect of their accuracy I therefore need to know if Malderbury Grange really was real.

Now another extraordinary thing has happened. I have just met Michael Llewellyn, son of the late author and Oxfam stalwart, Bernard Llewellyn. Michael handed me a nicely printed book of poems published by Jack in the nineteen thirties, twenty pages of unpublished manuscript poems and a letter from Jack of September 1952 giving them to Bernard. All these are unknown to the world and to his family.

The poems are beautifully written but my point is that those dated 1938 to 1940 are written as from Welwyn and Wrotham.

When I worked as a solicitor in London half an age ago, one of our clients was the Wrotham Park estate. At around that time, it is known that Jack was working as a gardener. Perhaps therefore he was at Wrotham Park in Hertfordshire, not so far from his village of birth, Buntingford, and it served as his model for Malderbury Grange. This is all a bit speculative but I shall write to the estate and ask if they have employment records from that time and if there is any record of Jack.

All this detective work now leads me greatly to respect the many biographers who reconstruct the lives of their subjects years after their deaths. I have so many leads to follow up that I myself am overwhelmed.

I have tried but failed to find a local historian in Buntingford who would help me discover details and pictures of Jack at his village school and of the Congregational Church and manse where Jack’s father, Joseph was Congregational Minister from 1911 to 1922. (Jack was born in 1913.)

The family then moved to London and lived at 21 Castleton Road, Walthamstow, E.17 where Jack went to Trinity County School. This I have discovered merged with another school to become Wood Green County Grammar School in 1962. Do school records and photos from Jack’s time there in the twenties still exist?

Then Jack says in one of his articles that he was the only speedway rider to be son of a minister and to have a poem published in ‘The Listener’, the influential BBC magazine that published early poems of most of the great names of modern poetry. I know the speedway teams Jack rode for but have failed to find and trace anything about him on the internet. Trying to find his poem in ‘The Listener’ I have likewise drawn a blank. Where can indexes or copies of ‘The Listener’ be found?

I have unearthed Jack’ father’s obituary which of course defines his childhood and I have the passenger list for the ship on which he sailed for China in 1945. Extraordinarily I am in touch with a China friend of Jack’s now in Canada who is sending me pictures and anecdotes about Jack from the time. And I will go to a Friends Ambulance Unit reunion in London in May in the hope of meeting old China friends of Jack.

But can anyone open doors for me in Buntingford or about his Wood Green school, his speedway career or his poem in ‘The Listener’?

I feel sure the information is out there somewhere if only I can find it.

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog March 2010

Tossing the Condom - From Tin to Tofu

2010-03-14T07:14:00.025+07:00

The Chinese town of Shiping seen from the gate is like any other.

Modern cars and mobiles contrast with the old back streets.

The daily grind goes on as a woman washes dishes in the street.

And others wait in the early morning selling peanuts and oranges.

A lady barbecuing breakfast tofu looks more animated though.

While a food seller stoicly waits eternally for sales.

The streets are busy, though what are they laughing at?

Street life is open and public and privacy is not much valued.

The railway station where Jack Reynolds arrived in 1947.

A rainy street scene in an old village near Shiping.

Roofs of an ancestral temple epitomise old China.

And a fret work window makes another classic image.

Old men play old mens' games in the warm of one of the rooms.

These two take the money to see inside the courtyard house.

Meanwhile, Denise photographs a fine interior.

A detail on a carved door suggests the opulent life of the few.

An ancestral hall, built to commemorate the rich forebears.

Family and friends await a lavish wedding breakfast.

The wedding food looks distinctly appetising.

This fine house is remarkable for being built of mud bricks.

The interior is spacious and elegant but today is just a farm house.

Word is going around Shiping in Yunnan province in western China that when the foreigners have difficulty negotiating an important matter of personal relations, they reach a decision by the strange practice of tossing the condom.

Over the Chinese New Year, we were on holiday there (See the two blog articles below.) and had just arrived at Shiping. This is a typical small town that promised us some traditional architecture, and we’d found our way to a clean modern hotel in the town centre. The problem was that they only had two rooms that were very different, a slightly gloomy one on the ground floor and a more pleasant one that demanded a climb up four flights of stairs. So who was to have which room?

The receptionist looked on as we debated and dithered. Then Bill suggested we toss a coin. Trouble is, they don’t seem to have coins in China. We could toss something else then, but what? The girl looked mildly aghast when we used the one thing that’s beside the bed in every hotel in China, which duly made the decision for us. I’m not surprised if she later told all her friends about our bizarre behaviour.

Shiping is famous for making tofu and its present wealth is based on tofu factories, big and small, which are everywhere. Even half a century or so ago it was an unusually rich town but that was when the local tin industry was flourishing.

Jack Reynolds, the Bangkok based novelist, whose fascinating life story I’m hoping to write, was in this region of China in the late forties doing transportation and relief work. He was working with the Friends Ambulance Unit and was sent by them to Shiping to investigate an outbreak of malaria. He arrived by train, alighting presumably at the impressive French built railway station that we saw, which still stands at the end of the line exactly as it must have been in his day.

On coming into the town Jack was struck by how very prosperous it was.

“Plodding around I quickly realised that Shihping was the most prosperous town I’d ever visited in China. In the main streets the temples were tumble-down but the markets were stuffed with food and goods. But it was the side streets which were the revelation. They were incredibly quiet and empty for Chinese streets. They were lined on both sides by high stone walls. At intervals in the walls there were roofed gateways adorned with some of the best stone carving I ever saw in China. Behind these gates the tin mine owners lived in vast compounds built on the traditional plan – a succession of four courts joined by moongates. You were always asked inside the main gate, asked to sit in straight-backed chairs in a reception room just inside, and provided with tea and sunflower seeds.”

The shocking truth though was that this wealth was built on slave labour and child labour at that. In a fine article in the Bangkok Post in 1977, which I hope to include in my forthcoming book, Jack exposed the awful story that the miners were all little boys because they were small enough to move through the low galleries of the mine. To stop them getting too big they had an inadequate diet and were given opium to keep them going. Working in these appalling conditions, their life expectancy was about two years.

For his persistence in investigating and visiting the mine, Jack very nearly paid with his life. A serious attempt was made to kill him.

The arrival of the communists a few years later put an end to all this, but now, more than half a century later, on seeing some of the fine buildings in the town it constantly struck me that while they truly are beautiful, the ostentation and display of their owners was built on the bones of small children who never had a proper life.

Today most of the old buildings in the town have been swept away though and Jack would recognize little in the town other than the railway station. For tourists like us wanting to find old ancestral shrines and courtyard houses, you thus have to go out to surrounding villages. Nonetheless, despite China having moved confidently into the twenty first century, I’m sure that the feel of the place would be familiar to Jack. The people, though now better off, are still much the same as ever. The experience of eating breakfast out on the street in the chill of the morning, sitting on stools six inches high, cannot have changed one bit. And the food would be familiar too, even if tofu has edged its way onto the menu. The light, the mist, the smells, the mud… all these things in China are eternal and unchanging.

After exploring the town centre, we took a day trip out to a village called Zhengying Cun which is about ten kilometers to the west and is known for its fine domestic architecture and temples.

As always, once out of the town, it was apparent that China has a huge appetite for steel and for vegetables; there were factories of some sort scattered everywhere and tight between them sprawling acres of vegetables.

As you drive along motorways and side roads, in valleys and villages, between houses and commercial premises everywhere you see row upon row of vegetables. The Chinese ability to grow vegetables in abundance is remarkable. Every inch of ground must be fully exploited and to this end their vegetable gardens are incredibly neat and orderly. I have the feeling though that this strict imperative exhausts the national capacity for tidiness and, apart from their modern townscapes, rural China is often a chaotic mess. On the way to the village for example everywhere on the side of the road were sprawling heaps of coal just dumped untidily by its owner. If tidiness doesn’t make money, then it’s not worth bothering about.

When our taxi reached the village it began to pour with rain. That’s the end of any decent photos, I thought. Even so, as we walked on through the drizzle, I was optimistic that misty grey skies and wet pavements would evoke China as it so often is. Certainly the traditional buildings did not disappoint. What was so pleasant was the relative absence of vehicles as the whole place had a human scale with small paths and passages between the buildings with their pan-tiles swept up roofs. It had not been planned around the motor vehicle.

We were able to visit a number of fine ancestral halls and courtyard houses and they were superb. In one of the halls there was a wedding feast in full swing and it was fun being a fly on the wall as food was carried from the kitchens to the tables where the friends and family were sitting at tables. Certainly we attracted a few curious glances but generally we passed largely unnoticed as foreign tourists are no longer a rarity.

The house I liked the most was at the end of our walk, a large and elegant building whose fine quality was not diminished by the fact that it was made of mud brick. We had a nose around inside the courtyard and it was apparent that this was no longer the home of a rich, capitalist road landlord type but of modest ordinary people. Yet despite relative neglect it looked strong and was surviving the years well despite its form of construction, which is a tribute to its builders.

Our visit over, I hardly believed that the promised bus would actually arrive as it was getting late and we were well off the beaten track. Should we walk therefore or should we wait? Could we phone for a taxi? We seemed to be at odds over what to do. How therefore would we resolve this awkward impasse between us.

The light was fading and I was trying to think it all through. If we could narrow the options to two and if there were a pharmacy nearby we could buy what we needed to give us a final decision. But by this time everything was now closed.

Then thankfully there was a hoot and a bus came round the corner to take us back to Shiping.

Perhaps in future I should carry a packet with me to deal with situations like this, though explaining the reason to my wife, Cat, might be a little bit difficult. I’m not sure she’d believe me.

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog March 2010

Yunnan's Yuanyang Rice Terraces

2010-03-08T12:16:00.014+07:00

In Yunnan, a Hani grandmother smiles at us from her doorway.

High on the mountain, our bus stops to top up its radiator.

Misty light at dawn on the flooded terraces.

The mist filled the valley for much of the morning.

And it was difficult to stop taking photos.

It only needed figures in the landscape to take another one.

This old lady was going to bring in her ducks for the night.

Breakfast was with all the other visitors in the kitchen.

A buffalo's bottom, an old crone and pigs in the mist.

An old man sharpens his scissors on a stone.

I’ve seen a few rice terraces in my time in Nepal, Bali and the Philippines but for sheer scale they are all dwarfed by the Yuanyang rice terraces in Yunnan province in S.W. China that Cat and I have just visited with our friends, ‘American Bill’ and ‘Chinese Denise’.

Our trip had started with a night in the atmospheric center of Jianshui. (Scroll down for the pictures). In the morning it was noodles in the street and then many hours in a small bus over the mountains to the rice terraces. The roads were a miracle of engineering, with long snaking hairpin bends taking us to terrifying heights with thousand foot drops and no guard rails. Meanwhile the overloaded bus, its roof piled high with luggage, bumped and swerved and brought us close to the brink. Soon we came to a grinding halt and the reason became clear. The tortured springs had collapsed under the strain and we were left miles from anywhere waiting to be rescued by another bus.

Soon we saw the Red River thousands of feet below us, passed the spectacular barrage which dams the gorge and arrived in the bleak modern town of Nansha. Here we booked a comfortable taxi all the way to the terraces, but at Xinjie, the old town on the hill, we were told to get out and join a mini-bus. This was driven by a middle aged woman who was surely on speed.

After a terrifying journey through the mountains she stopped abruptly and told us to get out and walk. The village and guesthouse we had booked was, she said, a few hundred feet down the hill and there was no road. This seemed unlikely and a raging argument erupted during which we were threatened with death and worse besides.

Shouldering our heavy packs, walk we did, not knowing where we were going, until a nice lady said she’d only show us the way if we gave her 20 Yuan, a good day’s wage. When we got to the square concrete guest house which was still half building site, we were shown our bare room with six beds for a price that would buy four star luxury in Thailand. Then we went off into the village to look for food but there wasn’t any. It was to be eating in the guest house or nothing.

It’s strange though how even after two days travelling and a bad start, things can quickly warm up and we really enjoyed our two days there in the mountains above the spectacular rice terraces. The family who ran the place were pleasant enough, and even if they were milking the New Year festival for all they could get, they produced mountains of edible food for all their visitors who were an interesting crowd.

The village itself was very strange. Apparently designated as a tourist village, all the houses had been painted in a pleasant shade of pale shit brown and fake thatched roofs had been stuck on top of the tiles. From a distance it looked quite quaint, though totally unauthentic, while inside it the daily life of the farming families went on as usual.

The first day dawned with the valleys full of cloud and we took a long walk down into the terraces in the grey mist of the morning. There was nothing artificial about all this though and we saw rural life in the raw, much as it has been going on for centuries.

The terraces were flooded but not planted and were quite remarkable, an extraordinary feat of civil engineering created over many generations. And the villages, in part of well-made mud brick, were exactly what the tourist hopes to see, a vision of a traditional life with black pigs and buffaloes, children brightly dressed for the festival, men tilling the soil by hand and the duck lady going out to bring her ducks back at night. It was National Geographic in 3D, with smiling locals, buffalo dung, sounds, smells and all.

These were not Han Chinese but the Hani people, one of many minorities who make up a large proportion of the population of Yunnan. What their history was and how they got there I have no idea. Perhaps more powerful peoples had driven them from the lowlands into the mountains many centuries before where they had since had to survive in these unforgiving mountains. How they had created such stupendous terraces and generated so large a population and substantial villages is a tribute to their ingenuity and it should command great respect.

Nor do I know how their relationship with the men from far away on the plains now stands. All I can say is that the Hani seem to be worlds apart from the China of the industrial lowlands and big cities. Up on the road behind our village there was a viewing platform and at dawn perhaps thousands of Chinese holidaymakers came, like us, to see the terraces and the human zoo of the minority peoples.

They had come in their big, plush cars and SUVs, sporting smart clothes and shoes and cameras with long lenses to capture the light on the terraces at dawn. And for this privilege of looking down the mountain they had paid 70 Yuan each, a fee that would not be cheap even in the West. Then with the short official break over, they’d pile into their cars and go back home for another year’s work.

I marvelled at this transformation of China from the poor country I’d first seen in the seventies, now with its confident and expanding middle class even in far Yunnan, out for a good holiday in the mountains. I wish them well and I admire them for becoming prosperous in so short a time. Somehow though, this place where one group of rich and mobile Chinese was so busy taking pictures of country people stuck in a nostalgic past seemed to encapsulate all the potential problems for the future.

How can China’s new found wealth be reasonably fairly spread and how can fringe minorities be included in the wider polity? How to respect and preserve their traditions and individuality but not in the process make them a mere spectacle for the majority to stare at? Such are the problems of modernizing a fast developing economy.

China claims to now have a middle class of 300 million people and from my brief glimpse of this far region I can well believe this to be true. In the next few years China will become the world’s biggest economy which is no surprise because until relatively recently it always was the world’s biggest. For China has always been the most populous country on earth.

While we were in Yunnan there certainly were a lot of people on the move. Even on the country roads to the terraces there were traffic jams. But of course the week we were there was the Spring Festival, the New Year when China stops work and everything closes down for a week of celebration. Like lemmings we were thus taking part in the biggest ever migration of mankind in the entire history of the world.

It was an interesting time to go, but boy, was it tough for Denise when she was trying to buy us bus tickets! I wouldn’t have liked to have done it without her.

Copyright Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog March 2010

China Fifteen Years On

2010-02-25T16:58:00.010+07:00

The door gods in Jianshui have been renewed for Chinese New Year.

The Yue family gardens are already open early in the morning.

This little boy waits for his papa and for breakfast.

There are clear signs of prosperity as this family enjoys their noodles.

They're all waiting for something but I'm not sure what.

For the elderly though it looks as if life's still a struggle.

A few days ago Cat and I were eating pao-tze in the soft sunlight of Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan, in the South West of China.

I was last in China fifteen years ago and before that in the mid-eighties. The very first time I visited was in 1978 when travel was first allowed after the doors had slammed shut and China became embroiled in its own self-destructive turmoil. Sadly for much of the seven years I lived in Hong Kong (1976 to 1983), China was thus not accessible to foreign travellers.

Each time I’ve been back the changes have been remarkable and the Kunming we have just visited is more reminiscent of a sparkling Singapore than the drab Guangzhou of the communist era that I visited more than thirty years ago.

While there I received an email message from an American called Howell Jones who told me he had flown into Kunming in 1954 just after the end of the War, arriving to work for the Friends Ambulance Service. As far as I know, he’d been given my name by the Friends Library in London as being interested in the remarkable history of the FAU in China.

With his email he enclosed an article he’d written many years before for a journal produced by the Medical Faculty of Hong Kong University which described his arrival in China and his first convoy carrying medical and relief supplies many perilous miles over the mountains to Chungking.

“Walking through the old town of Kunming at night had all the magical sounds and smells of old China,” he told me in his email. His article also describes the joys of eating pao-tze, the ubiquitous white dumplings with savoury pork inside.

Howell Jones is thus an important new contact for me as I am currently researching the life and experiences of ‘Jack Reynolds’ (Emrys Reynolds Jones) who likewise arrived in China to work with the FAU, landing at Kunming on 10 October 1945 and later became a noted author in Bangkok. It seems that Howell is not aware of my very specific interest in Jack and in his email he did not mention him to me.

Howell and Jack would now find Kunming very changed, but if they went further into the countryside, they’d find scenes that would be thoroughly familiar to them.

At the airport we were met by our friends, Bill, a quiet American from Sichuan University, Chengdu and Denise, a Chinese translator/interpreter also from Chengdu. They immediately took us to the bus station where we boarded a bus for Jianshui, a town about four hours south. The outskirts consist of modern brutal tower blocks but after checking in at our hotel, we discovered that the town centre was still like something out of old China. We sat on low stools in an open fronted eating place and watched the busy world of the spring festival flowing noisily around us in the street.

Next day we were up early and had a quick look round the town. While many old buildings have been demolished, an attempt has been made to recreate the past by putting up new buildings in traditional style. This architectural pastiche is relatively successful and it’s not easy in some cases to distinguish the new from the old.

The streets are all beautifully paved in natural stone, are kept reasonably clean and while we had our breakfast, again in the open on low stools, we could see the signs of new prosperity as people ate their noodles and enjoyed the New Year holiday. Changing times as always create a curious mix of old and the new, of winners and losers and the elderly people still seem to live a frugal life of heavy toil, the lines etched deep into their faces.

I then spent a very interesting week in China, often thinking of Jack and Howell as our bus toiled up the hairpin bends and over high mountain passes above precipitous drops that were utterly hair raising. Now back in Bangkok, I’ve been going through the old photo albums that Jack’s family have very generously lent to me. One picture I’d until now overlooked was of a fresh-faced young man in a mortar board who was obviously just graduating from university. It did not seem at all relevant to Jack’s family story, but then I noticed some writing on the reverse.

This showed that the portrait had been taken in a photo studio in Queens Road, Hong Kong and it was inscribed in a neat hand as follows.

“To my dear Jack, without whose help this would have been quite impossible.”

It was dated 6.9.53 and was signed, “Howell”.

I am thus, it seems, holding in my hand a picture of the now elderly man who a few days ago sent me the article about his China experiences in the first half of the last century, not apparently knowing of my interest in his mentor, Jack Reynolds.

I’m hoping to hear more from him about all this, but in my search for the life of Jack Reynolds nothing much now surprises me any more.

Copyright Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog February 2010

An Adman, Buddhism and Birthdays

2010-02-13T16:52:00.010+07:00

Revered monks are made immortal at the cave temple.

The mouth of the cave is festooned with the roots of a fig tree.

Monks sit outside the shrine in the shade of the trees.

Cat and Yut chat to the head monk inside the cave.

The Buddha images gaze eternally out of the cave.

The monk poses for a photo he will never see.

Like so many older monks, his face is strong and serene.

Once at the Foreign Correspondents Club in Bangkok I heard someone say that international reporters in Bangkok soon find they have to give up writing seriously about Thailand. It’s simply impossible to achieve more than a superficial understanding of Thailand unless you’re a Thai. When you think at last that you’ve begun to grasp the tear stained onion of Thai politics, in truth there’s always more slippery layers hidden beneath.

So it takes an American adman called Peter Arnell to stay just a few weeks in Thailand and to announce to the world that he knows all the answers. According to the Bangkok press, he’s promised to deal with Thailand’s image problem and he’s going to do an instant re-branding of this, the very amazing Land of Smiles.

“I think I can make this place famous for what it’s famous for, instead of what we think it’s famous for,” he vacuously said. So was that a real mirage or did I just imagine it?

Having lived a long time in Thailand, a small scrap of wisdom that accrues to me is that really I know almost nothing of the place. I like the Buddhist philosophy though, that all is illusory, changeable and unsatisfactory, and I find it a welcome contrast to the material self-confidence and assertiveness of the West. In that respect, the American adman has said it all, yet all has become confusion here too as the Thais are now so readily embracing his militant materialism.

Staying for several years in the rural wilds of Surin in the poor North East of Thailand, I thought there were no more unchanging corners here for me to learn about, but I was wrong about that too.

We’ve just visited a fascinating temple in Bua Chet an hour away from home that I’d never heard of before and it was fascinating. Bearing our yellow bucket full of supplies for the monks we drove up a long track through the rubber trees to this pretty forest temple set in a cave under huge, craggy rocks.

The cave is a wide fissure running deep underground, not even high enough to stand up in, whose mouth is covered with a cascade of roots from a strangling fig tree that clings to the rock face. Inside it’s dry and cool, with an elaborate display of Buddha figures and revered monks and behind them a substantial reclining Buddha. It’s tidy and clean but everywhere is suffused with the pungent odour of bats.

Cat and her sister, Yut, sit before the head monk and chat and make merit with him. He then chants at length and with a switch flicks sanctified water over us as he intones loudly. It’s easy and relaxed with none of the stiff religiosity sometimes present in Christian ritual.

Then we climb a ladder to the top of the rock above the temple and wander through the dry jungle, wondering at the strange shapes that countless ages of water flow has carved into the stone.

And then we leave this timeless and ascetic world, free of electricity, televisions and the baubles of modern living. The head monk looked to be at peace with himself and I doubt that he cares much whether or not a passing American succeeds in rebranding Thailand.

What the American does not of course understand is that Thailand is not a brand, is not Coca Cola or McDonalds, but is a rich culture that can never be defined by one as shallow as his.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, today it’s my birthday and I am for a third time passing the milestone of twenty one years.

Yesterday I also became a grandfather for the first time. I welcome Bethany Dawn to a world that will be very different to the one I grew up in, and I congratulate Anna and Will. Her Uncle Tony is only four years her senior and he’s looking forward to meeting her. (See two blog articles down.)

Tomorrow is both Valentine’s Day and Chinese NewYear and Cat and I fly to Kunming in Southern China where Jack Reynolds, the famous Bangkok author, much discussed on this blog, landed in a DC3 on 10 October 1945.

On my desk as I write, I have his diary and journal from 1957 that his son, David, has just lent me. Most of it is written in spidery pencil and takes some deciphering but when I get back I’m going to go through it all in detail.

I can hardly believe this is happening. I should of course stop striving and go with the flow but Jack’s life is such a remarkable story that I feel another book coming on.

It’s a story that just has to be told.

Andrew Hicks The ‘Thai Girl’ Blog February 2010

Savaged on Samet!

2010-02-06T15:22:00.011+07:00

The fishing boats at Koh Samet are still very colourful,

though how they manage the tangle of gear in a storm I have no idea.

The tourists are pouring in again and Samet is full once more.

Thankfully you can still find an unspoiled corner along the coast,

and the seas are still alive and shiny as the sun begins to fall.

Invaded at weekends, it's a major task to keep the place clean.

“Nice doggie,’ I said and it leaped at my face and tried to bite a chunk out of my nose. That was in Si Saket eighteen months ago. I won’t forget all those rabies jabs in a hurry!

Then a year ago a pavement on Sukhumvit soi 4 rose up and hit me on the chin, breaking my jaw in three places. A new graduate of a really bum run, I then spent three nights in the Bumrungrad hospital where they wired my teeth together for the next six weeks so I couldn’t eat anything.

But it made a great blog article. (In a Pool of My Own Blood! 8th March 2009.)

Then at New Year on Koh Chang the snake in my shorts, only a small one I might add, bit me on the toe and I nearly died. Could have been my last blog article. (I Stare Into the Jaws of Death! 2nd January 2010.)

To cap that one, I’ll have to get into the tiger enclosure at the zoo.

And now I’ve just been to Koh Samet for a short trip and, sitting on the verandah of my hut, once again I got savaged. It was like a horror replay of Koh Chang.

Again, unseasonably, it was raining. I was sitting in the easy chair on the verandah feeding the mosquitoes when, suddenly, to my intense shock something small and soft fell onto my foot, an exact reprise of the instant just before the Koh Chang snake sank its fangs excruciatingly into my little toe.

Adrenalin surged but no agony came. It was only a lizard!

But then I felt an itchyness down the side of my neck. I scratched and I scratched and finally took off my shirt to see what it was. Yes, I’d been savaged again.

This time by a caterpillar!

Cat’s always been warning me about caterpillars and once again, annoyingly, she was right. My neck swelled up in a livid, red rash and the spots spread down my chest. In the damp and sweaty heat it was extremely uncomfortable and I couldn’t go in the sun and didn’t risk going in the water either. I must have done something pretty bad in a previous life to get so traumatised by a caterpillar and while on holiday.

Koh Samet, a tiny low island only a few hours from Bangkok was still as beautiful as ever though. It’s a very special island, being immortalized in literature as the setting for part of Sunthorn Phu’s, nineteenth century epic poem, “Phra Apai Manee” and of course for Andrew Hicks’ noughties tropical beach romance, “Thai Girl”.

I do love Samet, but whenever I go back there I’m always shocked by the new and expanded holiday developments that despoil what’s supposed to be a national park on which all development is prohibited. When first I went there about ten years ago, the small bamboo huts used by backpackers were tolerable but now it’s on a totally different scale. It’s no longer a bamboo backpackers’ place but a concrete resort destination for city dwellers that’s going gradually upmarket.

On returning to Bangkok from my sporadic trips to Samet, I usually fire off a letter to The Bangkok Post’s Postbag bemoaning the flagrant breaches of park regulations and the fact that none of the millions collected in park entry fees at 200 baht per farang face is being spent on keeping the place clean. An utter shambles of ragged buildings and strewn rubbish greets you in the main village of Na Dan which could win a gong for worst Thai eyesore any day.

This time though when I got back, still nursing my sore neck, I wrote no letter to The Post. Somehow I felt a little more reconciled to the fact that Samet is now a sophisticated resort island. It looked a little cleaner to me and the shops and eating places on the road to from Na Dan to Hat Sai Kaew were looking distinctly smarter. There was definitely encouraging evidence of an effort to clean things up.

Just as Bangkok is a monument to organised chaos, so also it is remarkable that thousands of tourists are regularly shuttled out to Samet along with the many tons of food and drink that they’ll consume, that they’re all accommodated and relieved of a little money before they and some of the rubbish they’ve generated is shipped back to the mainland. Even water has to be brought to the island in rusty old tankers and as shit happens daily, the sumps under the new WCs in the rooms have to be pumped out by a same same but, one hopes, different old tanker and taken back to shore or dumped somewhere on the island.

By Thai standards I have to admit that Samet is at least a partial conservation success. There are no tower blocks, the interior is still low, dry scrub and jungle and there are no real roads. For western tourists it adds a sense of a far frontier as the battered pick-ups bump and rattle them down the island’s rough dirt track to their resorts and it’ll be the beginning of the end when the road down the east side is paved in concrete.

And I love the fact that you still leave the mainland from the same tatty old jetties on the same traditional wooden boats, many of them converted fishing boats, all brightly painted in blues and oranges and smelling of diesel and the sea.

The guide books talk of sightings of hornbills and I’ve seen the skin of a python that was killed and eaten on the island and it was the biggest I’ve ever seen. Yes, it’s still a beautiful place to visit, though I have to admit it’s wild… wild and sometimes dangerous.

There’s man-eating caterpillars out there!

Copyright: Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” blog February 2010

Introducing My Son, Tony

2010-01-30T17:36:00.014+07:00

Tony, aged about three, on his grandmother's knee.

Now aged four and serious, with a tank as birthday present.

Cat's sister, Yut, plucks a chicken for the party.

Grating one of our big crop of coconuts.

Amnuay, still looking elegant as she scrapes the spuds.

A wall of speakers fit to drown all hope of conversation.

The disco king who's come to make it a special Thai evening.

They all remember Tony's party as the event of the year.

Our local teachers are always like this, even at school.

The farang always sit and eat at tables,

But the Thais prefer mats on the floor.

In our family pictures on this blog you may have noticed a little boy reappearing from time and wondered who he might be.

My personal life in our Isaan village with my Thai wife, Cat, became very public something over a year ago when I published our story as a book called, “MY THAI GIRL AND I”. This tells of our first five years together and what it’s like for an old stager like me to settle down in a remote rice farming community with an energetic wife half my age.

One of the limitations in writing the book and these subsequent blogs has been trying to respect my Thai family’s privacy. While I’m free to blow my own cover, I’ve had to think more carefully about theirs.

For similar reasons I haven’t yet told you about the little boy in the pictures but now I feel that I should. We’ve just celebrated his fourth birthday, his name is Anthony, or ‘Tony’, and Cat and I have recently completed the complex process of adopting him in Bangkok.

My adult children, Anna and Mike, are in their thirties and so now they have a little brother, even if too far away, while I find myself the wrong side of sixty with a four year old who calls me Daddy, and very happy I am about it too.

Needless to say, Tony is a delightful child and I cannot now imagine life without him. He’s a tireless ball of energy and full of the joys of spring. He’s constantly observing and analysing everything and, like an ever expanding sponge, absorbing all he sees around him. It’s remarkable to watch him as he develops, equipping himself with all the complex skills necessary for survival.

He came to us when he was only a few weeks old and so he knows nothing else but us. Cat’s family has received him warmly and they cherish him as one of their own, and in that he’s very lucky indeed. Childhood in a village such as this is idyllic as there’s warmth and space and he can run freely without facing too many risks. In a farming community there are always people around and he always has friends to play with. It’s open house all day long, doors are never closed and he has constant stimulus from a wide extended family.

In the West we barricade ourselves inside our claustrophobic nuclear families, presumably so-called because at any time they’ll destructively explode. In Asia all is open and welcoming which makes the Thais the way they are and ensures that this truly is the Land of Smiles.

We’ve just held Tony’s fourth birthday party and it was a big village event with everyone invited. Because they’re busy in the fields with the cows and buffaloes until evening, it has to be a late party and the adults come too. All day there’s food to be prepared, chickens to pluck, coconuts to be taken from the trees and grated, roots to peel. All is hectic activity and fun.

And of course there’s music, which has to be mega-loud. Music-man arrives in a pickup and spends all day setting up a wall of speakers and a stack of electronic boxes with complex knobs and wires streaming out of them. Apart from the fact they’re outside in the open, this is music to raise the roof. It’s so loud it reverberates as it hits my chest but, despite the mountains of woofers and gizmos, the sound quality is excruciating, as is the karaoke that follows.

The garden soon fills up with visitors. A few farang and friends sit at tables, the Thais on mats on the grass. There are of course balloons and presents and a technicolour birthday cake, with food and alcohol in abundance and that’s all just how it ought to be. Thai parties are an extravaganza and ours for Tony was no exception.

I can hardly believe that we’ve now steered him safely through his first four years and that he’s got a Thai passport with a grinning picture and the name, Anthony Hicks. Like raising my own kids, this has to be one of the most important things I’ve ever done.

For me at my age, facing up to baby feeds and nappies and to sleepless nights was a bit of a shock, though it came quite naturally, a bit like riding a bicycle again. And of course this time around it’s been so much easier. Three decades ago, having two babies and two demanding full-time job was always hard, so now with neither of us in formal work and with so many supporters, all desperate to hold the baby, it’s been relatively easy. Mummy and Daddy are usually at home for Tony and the family have been giving him a perfect childhood.

There’s even a little infant school at a local temple and he goes when he wants to and when he doesn’t, he just stays at home.

Cat and I speak English with him and he sometimes speaks a cocktail of Thai, Lao and Suay to the rest of the world. Somehow he manages to switch to English to talk to me, though it’s very comic when Thai words get mixed in too. He knows the colors and numbers in both English and Thai and we’ll try hard to raise him as bilingual in both languages.

Having thus introduced my small son, Tony, to you, he can now begin to feature openly in the continuing story of what should from now on better be called, ‘My Thai Wife and Son and I’.

Copyright Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog January 2010

Jack Reynolds Again - Naming Names

2010-01-25T17:06:00.005+07:00

Hardly a day goes by when I don't discover something more about Jack Reynolds, Bangkok's 'grand old man of letters' and author of the novel, "A Woman of Bangkok", whose life I've been researching.

Yesterday I posted in my story below some more pictures about Jack with the introduction to my draft story of Jack's life. And I appealed for somebody to make contact with Jack's children for me.

Today I recieved an interesting article on The Friends Ambulance Unit from a friend in Austalia (Jack was with them during the war years), and I have also discovered the names of his children and some family photos. A good day all round.

These pictures show Jack at home in Sukhumvit soi 8 with his wife, Wanpenh Muthikul, their sons, David, Philip, Steven, Ben and Frank and their daughter, Chandra Meagan with her baby, Mark, Jack's first grandchild.

Jack is looking frail, is using a walking frame and his left ear is bandaged, presumably because of the cancer that was to end his life six months later in September 1984. It looks a happy family gathering, though sadly was probably one of his last.

I have now spent a lot of time tracing Jack's life and have discovered much about him. I would thus love to be able to share all this with his children. As one friend said to me, "They should be very proud of their father".

The married daughter (who worked in an art gallery in Petchaburi road) will have changed her name but the sons, I believe have the name Muthikul Jones.

So where are they now and how can I find them?

Please help!

Andrew Hicks The "Thai Girl" Blog January 2010

Jack Reynolds - The Search Goes On

2010-01-24T10:59:00.009+07:00

Jack Reynolds gazes down from his grave stone.

The first edition of his seminal novel in its original title.

A Pan edition of the book with a snappy cover design.

And a good write up on the back.

Jack enjoyed inscribing his book, this one for John Stirling.

From 1944 Jack spent seven years in China with the Friends Ambulance Unit.

Dominic Faulder's fine portrait of Jack taken not long before his death, appearing on an interview with 'Living in Thailand' in 1983. (Copyright Dominic Faulder.)

I’ve written before about my fascination with Jack Reynolds, the author of “A Woman of Bangkok”, the 1956 novel, just preceding “The World of Suzy Wong”, that established a genre, the Bangkok novel. Since then many such have been written by western authors, including me. They tell stories of torrid affairs with Thai women whose interest was more about money than romance, but more than half a century later Jack’s still sets the standard.

Jack died in 1984, well before the internet era, and I have been trying to learn more about his life and to record something for posterity. I have now written 22,000 words about him and my problem now is to decide what to do with it.

There’s still more to learn about him though and my main gap is that I have not managed to make contact with his children who were born and raised in Bangkok. He had seven children, the first born in the mid-fifties when he was aged forty, and the chances are that they are still in or around Bangkok.

Jack’s real name was Jones and his children are likely to be called Muthikul Jones. The first three were, David, Steven and Philip, one an artist, one a musician, but I do not know the names of the others. I believe that they went to school at the Ruam Rude international school and there must be many who remember them there. They could be in a Thai language phone directory or somewhere on the web. As I cannot read Thai, it is difficult for me to search for them.

Someone, somewhere knows where they are and could help me find them. There can’t be many Thais called Jones so do please help me find them!

I would also like to find more of Jack’s articles published in The Bangkok Post and elsewhere, especially anything about China which generally are his best work. Perhaps you have a copy of one of them in the bottom drawer of your desk or could point me in the right direction.

And one final question. Jack produced a book called, “THE UTTER SHAMBLES”, which was available in the book shops but it seems to have disappeared without trace. Can anyone produce a copy of it?

What now follows is the introduction to my story about Jack Reynolds. I hope it’s tantalizing and makes you want to learn more about him.

Finding Jack Reynolds – Bangkok’s ‘Grand Old Man of Letters’

‘Jack Reynolds’, Humanitarian worker and writer
1st June 1913 to 2nd September 1984

A Rationale for My Search for Jack?

I ask myself, why am I so intrigued to learn more about Jack Reynolds. His one novel, long out of print, is not enough to stir such curiosity, though an element of mystery about its author does intrigue me.

I first saw a glowing recommendation of “A Woman of Bangkok” in Joe Cummings’ ‘Lonely Planet Guide to Thailand’ perhaps as long ago as 1977 when I was first visiting Thailand. Joe now tells me that he’d found a weathered copy of Jack’s novel left there by a previous tenant when he moved into an old wooden house on a khlong in Thonburi, and he’s been praising the book ever since.

Another such story is how Steve Rosse found an abandoned copy in the attic of a burnt out casino in Atlantic City. It had totally fallen to pieces, yet he found the yellowed pages to be ‘a novel of extraordinary sensitivity and insight’. So compelling was it that a year later he was on a plane bound for Thailand to see for himself. ‘Like tripping on a landmine’, it changed his life forever. (www.thailandstories.com.)

It further added to my curiosity that I too am author of a single novel about the obsession of a young Englishman for a ‘Thai girl’, but that still couldn’t explain my fascination for Jack whose book I hadn’t even had the chance to read. At last a few months ago I found a copy of the book in a Chiang Mai second hand bookshop and wrote a long critique of it on my blog (www.thaigirl2004.blogspot.com , 7th November 2009), and then things began to happen. I was contacted by Michael, a son of Bernard Llewellyn, an Oxfam stalwart I’d known long ago in Hong Kong as it transpired that Bernard and Jack had become close friends when doing humanitarian work in China in 1946.

Both men wrote books about their experiences in China during the war years and, since reading these, along with an unpublished book by Bernard that Michael sent me, I have become increasingly intrigued by them and by their friendship. Bernard, who died aged 88 in June 2008 (see www.guardian.co.uk), was an inspirational character and if he and Jack were close friends, then that was enough for me. I thus now wanted to find out exactly who was this Jack Reynolds whose novel about a woman of Bangkok so many readers still talk and enthuse about.

Jack died in 1984 well before the arrival of the internet era so all I could find about him on the net was enquiries like mine asking where to find the book and asking for details of his life. I have therefore tried to find and contact his remaining friends, to listen to their anecdotes and to collect together the few articles written by him that can still be identified. (The small proportion of his articles that I now have is listed in a Bibliography below.)

What follows is therefore a summary of what I have learned about Jack. If I quote extensively from these sources, perhaps with some repetition, please forgive me. My aim has been to preserve any interesting scrap of information as a more permanent record than the yellowing newspaper clippings that inevitably will stay in somebody’s bottom drawer until they are lost forever.

In Bangkok I recently met up with three of Jack’s friends who went to his funeral in 1984 and I have been in touch by email with many more. That they all came forward so readily to tell me about Jack shows in what great affection he was held and that he is far from being forgotten. They know who they are and I want to thank all of them for their help.

If you’d asked Jack about someone writing his biography, I think he’d have laughed aloud and ridiculed the idea. He’s probably right though as he was a private man and he left two fine books by which people can remember him. What now follows is therefore intended briefly to fill some of the gaps in his life story and to answer the queries of the curious that appear on the web from time to time.

In so far as anything can ever be a permanent record, here is my incomplete and imperfect version of the extraordinary life of Jack Reynolds.

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So where am I now going to publish the rest of Jack’s story?

That’s my big question!

Copyright Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog January 2010

The Discreet Charm of the Cambodian Child Dancers

2010-01-17T11:58:00.016+07:00

The Princess smiles down on the sweet faced rice dancer.

The rice harvesters dance symbolises hope for the future.

There are carrots too but the stick strikes out the timing.

The little ones work on their suppleness.

A still photo makes it look so easy,

But each move has to be as smooth as flowing water.

Rapt concentration. Now spot their feet!

Dancing gives these children a life and multiple skills.

An adolescent becomes apsara incarnate at Banteay Srei.

Health education in the village, unglamorous but so essential.

Anticipation adds to the pleasure but there is always something particularly special in the unexpected.

At the end of a very rewarding week in Cambodia, there could be nothing more to top what we’d already seen. The promised visit to a small dance school near the Angkor temples could surely not be the highlight of all we’d so far experienced but it was to be exactly that.

As we drove out towards the ancient Khmer temple of Banteay Srei we passed through fertile rice fields and neat villages, slumbering in the prosperous glow of harvest time. The road passed under spreading trees and the many farm houses were well built and brightly painted, but then things began to change.

After we’d passed the turn to the temple, I was aware that there were fewer farms and trees, but instead areas of barren scrub and long views to the distant hills. This was a much poorer place and it was here that we found the dance school.

We had come to see the work of the Nginn Karet Foundation for Cambodia (www.nkfc.org), a privately financed foundation that has been working in the area for more than ten years. It supports fourteen poor villages, aiming to promote sustainable development and the provision of basic needs for a self-reliant rural community through a range of projects. First we saw one of the schools they had built, an attractive small primary school with three classrooms, and then went on to watch a health education project in full swing.

Mention government spending on public health and we think of doctors and hospitals, but in a poorer country there are prior imperatives to deal with. Among these are the provision of clean water, proper sanitation and, most important, simple education in hygiene and child care.

This is exactly what local staff of the Foundation were doing when we arrived at a typical modest farm house, bustling with women and children. The Foundation had provide them with a well and a pit latrine and a lesson in personal health care was now in progress. A smiling lady employed by the Foundation was using a set of hand painted pictures to demonstrate various lessons in hygiene to the group of adults and children sitting on the mats around her. It all looked to be good fun and she certainly had the rapt attention of her audience

I much admire an unglamorous project such as this one. It is easy for aid agencies to fund physical things you can photograph such as wells and latrines and then to walk away. But these are only the hardware and the real value is added by teaching people how to use them properly. Rural life is not a rustic idyll in which people necessarily enjoy good health. As populations grow, as crowding increases and as there are more and more throw-aways that are not bio-degraeable, there is much to be learned. Life expectancy can best be extended by teaching people the essentials of how to look after their health and, crucially, that of their children. .

We then went on to the dance school that is run by the Foundation. This is set in spacious gardens with shrubs and vegetables and with several buildings and open-sided pavilions in which the children practice their dance.

The children from nearby villages opt to study either traditional dance, classical dance or music, all of course in the Cambodian tradition. In total there are more than 150 children and some of them were lined up in files to greet us as we arrived. They ranged from tiny children to young teenagers.

It was explained to us that a condition of joining the dance school is that they also keep up their regular education. This is possible as government schools run two daily sessions so that children have half their day free. Thus these children are not only assured of making progress in their conventional education but also are schooled in the fine art of Cambodian dance.

The aim is not to produce teams of dancers to wow the tourists but to preserve Cambodian dance and to make these children its custodians for the future. With decades of turmoil so recent in the country’s past, the survival of the traditional arts can not be assumed and initiatives such as this one are very much needed. It is also intended to re-sanctify Cambodian dance as a royal and sacred art by returning it to its proper setting in the ancient Khmer temples.

We were then given a display of dance that I shall always remember. I have seen traditional dance in many places such as Bali and Thailand but always these are put on for the foreigners and while wonderful, are sometimes a little showy and impersonal, with gaudy costumes, spotlights, big amplifiers. This time there was none of that.

It is hard now to describe or explain just how spine tingling was the children’s performance and why it affected me so. Partly perhaps it was because it was so unexpected and because the dancing was so perfect, so simple, so unadorned.

We could see the childrens’ hard work and dedication as the little ones limbered up, working on their flexibility, holding poses that would defy anyone not trained from an early age. And I hugely admired the dedication and skill of the teachers we met. Theirs is the credit for creating what we saw, working tirelessly from day to day to give the children an iron self-discipline, a togetherness and an art form for life that is truly magical. Especially when you remember the awfulness of Cambodia’s recent past and how very poor the present still is, this school is truly a remarkable place.

The children of course were enchantingly beautiful, all of them, and the simplicity of their dress, just a sarong and a white tee shirt, gave them such discreet elegance and charm, and with such innocence and grace. Having so many times seen the dancers carved in stone on the great Khmer monuments, for me they truly evoked the spirit of that time. They were apsaras incarnate.

The dance was thus truly magical, a performance that had me transfixed. There are those rare occasions in the performing arts, in theatre, music or dance that send a shiver down your spine and for me this was one of them.

I asked how the school is funded, always a crucial issue for any such project. The Foundation’s fund raising has always been done on a personal basis and a new focus is on obtaining individual sponsorship for the children. A scheme just started this year called, “Giving a Future to a Child Of Angkor”, ensures that each child is given the equivalent of US$ 20 per month for attendance at the school. This compensates the family for the loss of the child’s services in the home or on the farm and helps ensure that money is available for clothes and good nutrition. Children from further away are provided with bicycles for the journey and thus it is a tough day to cope with both regular school and to go to the dance school as well. While the local children clamour to join, the cash is desperately needed by their families and will help them all to stay the course.

The website, www.nkfc.org shows photos of all the children that need sponsorship and has details of how a child can be chosen for tax deductible sponsorship at US$250 per year. This way you can give to a child of Angkor, ‘a gift of education, art, happiness and a promising future’. (Enquiries to nkfc@nkfc.org.)

A last unexpected performance for us was when we were all taken to the temple of Banteay Srei nearby. With the sun falling and the tide of tourists almost ebbed away, we were treated to one last dance in the precincts of the temple. Dressed in a red sarong, a single girl put on a perfect performance, a fragile figure against the harsh laterite stone of the temple wall. Like a sprite from another place, she was no longer a mere child, a messenger from the gods perhaps.

Then it was all over and she became a little girl again, chatting to her friends, laughing and joking as adolescents do. And it was time for us to go back reluctantly to our own world.

We were so very fortunate that day to have visited the dance school and I wonder how they all are.

It was a day I shall not easily forget.

Copyright: Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog January 2010

The Beauties of Angkor

2010-01-10T12:10:00.018+07:00

Angkor, the ancient capital of Cambodia is a haunting place in which you'll surely find great beauty. In each of the temples there are many beautiful girls, full figured and voluptuous and wearing only a sarong. It was Kent's quest to find and to photograph as many of these as he could.

As the sun falls, the many visitors leave the great Angkor Wat.

A face on the side of one of the Angkor Thom city gates.

Ta Prohm, left to the trees and jungle by the French.

Stopping more damage by the trees is now not easy.

Approaching the towers of the great Bayon temple.

Offerings at a living shrine in the heart of the Bayon.

Two of the huge faces that gaze down on awed visitors.

Said to be Jayavarman VII's first wife,Jayarajadevi.

The King's second wife, Indradevi, bids us farewell.

Angkor, the ancient capital of Cambodia, is a haunting place in which you’ll surely find great beauty.

Over a wide area, there’s an almost endless number of stone temples, each one with different qualities and in them you’ll find many beautiful women. The ‘girls’ we were looking for when I was there recently, that Kent so obsessively photographed, have fine head dresses and body decoration, are full figured and voluptuous and wear only a sarong around their waists. These women of course lived almost a millennium ago and are now figures in stone, the apsaras or devatas that appear on all Khmer temples.

Who were these women and where are the men? It is Kent’s unswerving mission to try to answer that question. (See www.devata.org and www.DatASIA.us)

At the temples you’ll also find beauty of a more transient kind, the girls and women who see out their young lives, waiting for tourists to buy the scarves and trinkets that they sell. The stalls and these vendors are at all of the temples and either they’re intrusive or an essential part of your Angkor experience, according to your attitude. For me at least they add both colour, charm and a warm Cambodian welcome.

They certainly do their job well and they know how to work a customer. As soon as you arrive at the temple, they’re crowding at the door of your minibus offering you handfuls of postcards and Khmer scarves.

‘Mister… buy postcard! Ten for five dollar. Okay you not buy now… later maybe come back.’

They don’t take no for an answer and in remarkably good English they’ll draw you into conversation.

‘Mister, where you come from? What’s your name, mister?’

And when you say England their eyes light up and they say, ‘Capital London, population sixty five million,’ and rattle off a list of statistics, right down to the names of the football teams. Often it’s a captivating performance and they can do it for any number of countries whose tourists come to the temples.

I asked one little girl aged twelve the capitals of all the obscure countries I could think of. ‘Bolivia?… La Paz. Mongolia?,,,Ulan Batur’, and only after eight or ten capitals had rolled off her tongue did she finally get stuck on Venezuela.

When you then wander off to go round the temple you are a marked man. You are her exclusive sales territory and when you get back, she’ll greet you by name. She’s written it in biro on her palm. On one occasion, a little bored with the hassle, telling the kid I was Adolf Hitler, I felt a bit of a heel when she called me Adolph as I returned.

When you don’t buy from them they then alternate between giving you beseeching and angry looks. Mine doesn’t lose hope of a sale until I’m right inside the minibus, when she stands and balefully gazes in at me through the window. I haven’t bought her postcards so I’ve now condemned to her to a lifetime’s hunger and suffering, I suppose.

At one remote temple I chatted too long to a particularly articulate child as I waited for my friend to survey the devata. I really didn’t want to carry any more cards so as I said goodbye to her, I offered her all of my small change in Riels. It was certainly more than the mark-up she’d make on a set of postcards.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Sorry… cannot take money from tourists.’

I often ask these children how they’ve learned such good English and they always tell me they learned it from the tourists.’

‘Don’t you go to school?’ I press them?

‘I’m saving money to go to school… my dream. Can you help me, please?’ comes the reply.

Sometimes they admit that they go to school for half a day and sell postcards for the rest of it. The Cambodian schools run two shifts a day so half the day is free. How each one comes to be selling at the temples I have no idea though, perhaps because their family has one of the trinket stalls. All I can say is that they are children of great charm and ability. I wish them well and that they don’t one day get turned away from selling outside the temples.

So I ask myself, do all Cambodian children have these special qualities or does a competitive market select the prettiest and pushiest to sell to the tourists?

Their language ability is certainly remarkable though. In many parts of rural Thailand the English teachers at least in the junior schools cannot speak a word of English, yet here these tiny tots are fluent and their pronunciation and diction is excellent.

At one temple, I found myself chatting to a Japanese tourist about this, indicating the little girl who’d just been talking to me.

‘Watch this,’ he said, and walked over to her, looking to me for my reaction. She was chatting to him in Japanese.

Some of the older vendors I met were equally impressive. One attractive young woman with lustrous, sad eyes told me how much she regretted the current political in-fighting between her country and Thailand. How wrong that Cambodia was being pushed around in this way, she complained.

Another twenty year old selling pirated copies of English language novels about Cambodia actually knew what it was she was selling. She had read and could discuss in a sensible way the novels she had enjoyed, something that would take a confident literature graduate in Thailand, and she little more than a street kid.

The really nice thing about Thailand though, as compared for example with being a tourist in India, Morocco or Bali is the absence of hassle. Rarely are you approached by vendors and if you say you’re not interested, they’ll back off with great dignity. Thailand’s greatest asset, despite a minority of rip-off merchants, is surely the gentle dignity and grace of its people. That said though, their inability to use the English language, when compared to the Cambodians puzzles me.

Malaysians of course speak excellent English, but neither the Cambodians nor the Indonesians were colonized by the British and yet their English is so much better than the Thais’. Perhaps their peoples are simply different in how they wish to apply themselves in life. For the Thais even a foreign language that can give them career perhaps is not so important, I surmise.

I thus find differences in national characteristics fascinating, especially as the human experience is basically the same everywhere. Why for example, are the little girls of Angkor so much more assertive than their counterparts in Thailand, a place with similar and overlapping cultures? An obvious answer is that Cambodia is poorer and so they are more desperate for a sale. The struggle for survival in Cambodia has long been very raw and this could a partial reason… though unfortunately that doesn’t explain Laos. This tiny buffer country has been trampled over and laid waste for centuries and is now perhaps the poorest and most backward of the lot, but the Lao people seem to be even more relaxed than the Thais.

Eight years ago in Cambodia, after I’d crossed a very choppy Great Lake in a tiny boat and arrived on the fringes of Battambang, there waiting on the river bank were rows of boys holding up placards advertising their guesthouses, behind them several minibuses into which we were firmly but gratefully ushered. It was active salesmanship of the very best kind.

In contrast, in Laos, when going down river on a slow boat to Luang Prabang, we stopped at a village where there was a row of stalls on the bank selling bananas and snacks. At each one sat a vendor who stolidly remained seated. We sat in our boat and looked at them and they sat and looked at us. They only received a handful of boats a day, yet they didn’t even bother to walk the few yards to the boat to offer us their wares, as would always happen on any train or bus in India or Thailand. Despite their poverty they almost willfully failed to make a single sale.

The Protestant work ethic of northern Europe and the Confucian values of China that have spread southwards into Viet Nam must contribute to national characteristics, but throughout Indo-China and Thailand the people enjoy shared values as Buddhists and thus should be more similar.

The ancient Khmers of course were aggressive enough to create a vast empire receiving tribute from much of what is now Thailand and Laos. Their king, Suryavarman II, build the vast, arrogant monument that is Angkor Wat while, the most hyperactive of them all, Jayavarman VII built the Bayon and so many of the other great monuments. What then drove them to these extraordinary logistical feats of ostentation and display?

On our visit to the Bayon we were taken round by Robert McCarthy, an American archeologist with a Japanese agency, working on the continuing conservation of the temple. He explained to us the restoration of the southern library, their research on the bas reliefs and the structural stabilization of the central tower. As Kent kept clicking away recording the many fine ‘girls’ on the towers of the temple, Bob too shared with us his similar fascination with these devatas, pointing out their many intriguing details.

Particularly fascinating are two very distinctive womanly figures that look to be real individuals. One is thought to be Javavarman’s first wife, Jayarajadevi who died young, while the formidable looking one on the right is said to be Indradevi, his second wife who was sister of the first wife. Intimate details such as these humanise the temples which make it strange that the complex and sophisticated world of the ancient Khmers so totally disappeared into oblivion and that we know so very little about them.

Presiding over the whole scene at the Bayon are the many huge, serene faces carved on the towers that eternally gaze down on the human comedy in shorts and tee shirts that parades beneath them. Who they are and what they represent is constantly disputed by the scholars, but they probably represent the faces of three different gods, that it the devata, the female guardian goddesses, deva, the male gods, and sura, the demons.

Whatever they represented to the ancient world, for me they powerfully symbolize the continuing identity of modern Cambodia as you constantly see the same strong bone structure, the same broad noses and full, square faces in every town and village you visit.

The Khmers indeed are striking people, often with the serenity that their forbears captured in stone, though on my many visits, people have sometimes been surprisingly open in telling me the sorrows of their past. Somehow I always sense that the ocean of suffering so recent in Cambodia’s past still lies not very deep beneath the surface.

The big historical mystery of the ancient Khmers, of course, is why did their empire crumble so rapidly? Though that inevitably is what empires always do.

The greater mystery perhaps is why did the kingdom rise to such prominence in the first place. How could a king such as Jayavarman VII have assembled the resources and skills to construct these vast monuments. Such profligacy just couldn’t last. The lessons of lessons of history should therefore teach us that the seeds of decline are often sown when political leaders pursue unjust wars and build self-aggrandising follies, both religious and secular.

What most fascinates me though about the fall of empires is that there often is no bounce… that they fall headlong and so far. So often the richest civilizations slip into the greatest disarray and poverty. Think of Egypt, China, India, Central America. Even Greece and Rome, Spain and Portugal became the poorest of the European nations.

Cambodia too is among the poorest of modern nations and Isaan where I live in North Eastern Thailand, an outlier of the Angkorian empire in which many of my neighbours are ethnic Khmer, has long been poverty stricken. In contrast to the earlier technological and artistic achievement of Angkor, the region slipped so very far.

Here, unlike in an African village, there is no tradition of carving, no decorative arts, no artistic life, other than music, and the few handicrafts I see such as basket ware are utilitarian and unadorned. Even with growing prosperity, there is little concern for the aesthetic, except as a public statement of wealth.

So what broader lessons does the fall of ancient empires now hold for the world’s great super power and for the West in general?

Answers please on a postcard or as a Comment below!

All I know is that Angkor is a beauteous place and I identify with its people as they struggle to sell a scarf or two, hoping for a better life for themselves and for their children.

Copyright: Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog January 2010
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I Stare Into The Jaws of Death!

2010-01-02T15:50:00.005+07:00

Thais have a varied reaction when you show them a vicious looking snake that's just bitten you. Either it's to say that this type is a particularly dangerous snake or more seriously that it's best fried in ginger and garlic. I was in agony after a Laotian wolf snake had bitten me on Koh Chang. How was I going to get through the experience, if at all.

The Jaws of Death!

Never, never, ever make jokes about being bitten by snakes!

I’ve just been staring into the jaws of death and it wasn’t funny. The jaws were small, the jaws probably of a Laotian wolf snake, but they might have killed me and by God, did it hurt.

We’ve just been staying for the New Year on Koh Chang one of Thailand’s loveliest islands and we took a chalet on White Sands Beach, under the jungle canopy hard up against the foot of the mountain. The monkeys come down in the evenings and there are wild boar up there so it’s still nature red in tooth and claw, including the rash of bars and discos on the sands.

On our first night, despite it being the dry season, it began to rain. I lay awake in bed listening to the rain beating on the corrugated iron roof for a bit but, not having seen rain for a few months, went outside onto the verandah to have a look. In the lights of the surrounding huts I could see that my shorts hanging on the verandah rail were getting wet so I picked them up to move them under cover.

Then I felt something soft fall onto my right foot and immediately came a stabbing pain. As I turned I saw something slither away into the pot plants moving very fast. I wasn’t sure what it was and at first I thought must be a centipede.

I blundered back inside the hut rudely waking Cat and Nan and lay in agony on the bed massaging my foot. I broke into a sweat. I felt dizzy and sick. This looks too bad to be a centipede so it must be a snake, Cat tells me.

Tropical snake bites can be fatal so, I guess, I’m now staring into the jaws of death.

Cat goes and calls help from Thai friends nearby who get up and gather round looking extremely worried. “What’s the remedy for centipede bites?” I ask them.

“Kill centipede, squeeze shit out and rub it on the bite.”

I think I’ll assume it was a snake. We haven’t caught the thing yet anyway.

I’m still lying on the bed, the worst pain of my life now tracking up my calf and into my groin, while outside the hunt for the snake begins. Suddenly there’s a hubbub. They’ve found it curled up under one of the pots. Figures are dashing to and fro and there’s a banging sound. They’ve killed the snake.

I have a great respect for local knowledge on country lore such as snakes and I watch their faces. They look grave.

“We know this one. Very bad snake. Very dangeruss!”

It doesn’t look too good for me. I need a doctor pronto.

There’s nobody who can drive my pickup so I have to drive it myself, my right braking foot a blazing ball of fire. We get to the local international clinic which says it cannot treat me but arranges an ambulance to the government hospital on the far side of the island.

It’s a good long run over the hills and almost vertical hairpins so it’s just getting light as we arrive. Now early morning, it’s very quiet and an English speaking nurse checks me in and takes my pulse. We show her the snake and she checks a poster showing the local snakes that are dangerous. When she can’t find it, she does a Google search and says she thinks it’s a Laotian wolf snake, a small snake that hunts frogs and lizards at night. This one isn’t poisonous, but they can't take any chances with the identification.

The doctor comes and I learn more about snakes. One type of snake bite is neurotoxic. The venom causes extreme drowsiness which is the neurological system closing down and the beginning of a quick death. The other poisonous bite affects the capacity of the blood to clot and the victim slowly bleeds to death from all orifices and internal bleeding.

If I’m lucky, it could be another type where the snake disables the prey with shock and extreme pain caused by toxins injected into the blood. It’s certainly hurting me enough to disable an elephant.

What they have to do, it appears, is to admit me for observation for 24 hours and take regular blood tests to check that coagulation is normal. But what if it’s not, I wonder. How can a small public clinic on a Thai island cope if there’s a severe crisis? What can they do to stop me bleeding to death?

I’m not usually squeamish about having blood taken but the first nurse manages to squirt my blood all over my arm. I sink into a whirling pit of dizziness and put my head between my knees. Perhaps this is it then, a new species of snake that can do a double strike. The blood’s gone everywhere because it’s not coagulating properly and the snake’s toxins are now fatally attacking my neurological system.

Yes, it was an anxious few hours with little Cat could do to distract me. I was admitted to a ward to lie and stare at the ceiling. At first the pain had been so bad I didn’t much care how it stopped, but now it was easing a bit and I was getting more reluctant to die.

The hospital was excellent and soon reported that the first blood test was normal. I slept the night with the usual interruptions for checks of temperature and blood pressure and for more blood letting. By morning I was still alive and it was still raining.

It was a dismal day and I dressed and sat out the front of the hospital watching as the night’s harvest of farang males who’ve fallen off motorbikes are brought in to be patched up. Of these there were three in all that morning.

One had bounced down the road on his beer belly, removing most of the skin. Two others riding a motorbike through the jungle had gone straight on where there was in fact a bend in the road. Lying unconscious and hidden in the undergrowth at three in the morning with about five fractures between them can’t have been the best way to spend their holiday, but I’m told the hospital has about twenty of these road accidents to deal with every day.

My own problem was beginning to look relatively minor in comparison. These lads were in real trouble.

As for myself, I was now going to be okay.

The Laotian wolf snake it was that died.

Copyright Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog January 2010

Could They All Be Cambodian Girls?

2009-12-26T12:36:00.014+07:00

From the Google map the great temple of Banteay Chmar in north west Cambodia shows as a square block and to the east is the huge baray or lake, now mainly cultivated as rice paddies, with an island temple in the middle.

The only boat is too small so the only way is to walk it.

I boldly waded across the swamp, at first with my shorts on.

On the island there's a dry moat so there should be a temple here somewhere.

Now we've found part of the stone lining to the moat.

The first glimpse of stonework is really exciting.

And I foolishly try to climb the wall to get inside.

We find some really fine stonework and carvings.

And the Hulk takes some pics of us just for the record.

I met him on the internet as one does and we went off to Cambodia together looking for what he calls ‘his girls’.

He is totally focused in his quest, he cannot get enough of them and totally adores them, obsessively photographing each and every one. Given that at Angkor Wat alone, there are precisely 1,780 of these girls, that’s no small undertaking.

To him they are supremely beautiful, mysterious, bewitching, even though they are of course much older women and are carved in stone.

It had all happened like this.

Some time ago I’d posted a blog article called, “Thai School Girls Turned Apsara”, (16 March 2009), about the traditional dancing in our local Khmer temple at Sikoraphum in Surin province. This post included pictures of the temple’s very fine carvings of these ‘devata’ as they are called and in no time at all he’d got in touch. Soon we’d struck up a firm cyber friendship, as one sometimes can, and the emails were flying to and fro.

It’s strange how quickly you get to know someone just by exchanging emails but somehow I was finding it hard to remember his name. Was he Clark Kent or Kent Clark? Indiana somebody perhaps, but was it Thomas, Davis or Jones?

He was both scholar and publisher, an explorer across the ages, but could American parents really have named their son after a small county south of London that grows vegetables?

Kent Davis then foolishly allowed me to go with him on a great adventure to Cambodia, and he proved to be amazing company, tolerating me for what was a very memorable week indeed. He was unfailingly energetic and enthusiastic and, in the best possible way, irrepressibly American!

I’ve heard it said though, perish the thought, that Americans can on occasion suffer an irony deficit, especially about themselves. Kent however scoops the pool. He was always ready with a rapier sharp quip. He does irony in buckets and spades, often garnished with a world weary cynicism that can be hilariously funny. Together we boldly waded across a treacherous swamp to find and photograph the hidden temple on the island and he always kept me smiling.

We were way off the beaten track at Banteay Chmar, the deserted ancient Khmer complex in the north west of Cambodia. (See the blog article below.) We’d spent many hours that day out in the heat exploring this huge site and now I’m ready to drop.

‘There’s a mebon temple on an island in the baray a few miles away,’ says Kent, his eyes lighting up, ‘and I just have to see it in case there’s more devata there’.

‘How do we cross the baray though?’ I ask with no small hint of scepticism.

‘I’ve booked a boat and a guide. It’s easy,’ said Kent, brimming with optimism.

Mine was not to reason why and our driver eventually found the place where the boat was supposed to be waiting. We got out, scrambled up a dusty slope and there spread in front of us was a vast lake, spotted with rice paddies and in the blue distance an island covered in trees.

Then we found our boat. It was just a small dugout canoe, a bit wider than my thumbs and next to it in the water stood our guide. A cool looking Cambodian youth in jeans, his tee shirt bore the one word, “HULK”.

‘You don’t think we’re all going in that thing?’ I say, aghast. ‘It’s hardly big enough to take a tailor’s dummy, let alone you!’ Kent looks a little put out.

‘But it’s an amazing design… I love traditional boats,’ I add to lighten the mood. ‘Who made it and why the strange rounded bow?’

It turns out that Hulk himself had carved the dugout from a big tree and the bow was his own idea. It was, he says, inspired by the shape of the bombs the Americans had dropped on Cambodia in such dreadful numbers.

Kent no longer seems dismayed and grasps the nettle. ‘If we can’t go by boat, then we’ll have to walk,’ he says. ‘How deep’s the water?’ he asks the Hulk.

The Hulk stops smiling and indicates his armpits.

‘But it’s probably infested with leeches and scorpions, with water snakes, crocodiles, mines and mosquitoes,’ I mutter to no avail. Kent is now smiling encouragement.

Five minutes later I’m wading up to my armpits in deep mud, my shorts on my head, my camera, mobile, money, passport and dignity all at serious risk of a fall into the mire.

It’s heavy going but eventually we’re stepping ashore on the island where no tourist can have gone before and I have a soggy sense of anti-climax. It’s covered in trees and scrub and our guide has no idea where to find the temple, even if there is one. Have we got ourselves so wet and muddy for nothing?

Then we find what appears to be a dry moat of the kind that surrounds most ancient Khmer monuments and spot what is clearly the laterite lining of the moat. We persist for a few more minutes and soon discover some substantial stone work. There is a temple here after all so there must be some girls too. Kent’s getting excited.

We force our way through the undergrowth and we’re standing below a wall of vast stone blocks. The Hulk scrambles nimbly up it and I follow somewhat less nimbly, aware that he’s a third my age. More sensible to have a major accident near a world class hospital in Sukhumvit than stuck out here in the back of beyond.

Then I realize I can get into the temple by going round the wall rather than over the top of it. Kent is close behind me, his camera recording the stonework. And yes, there are some fine carvings and devata and we tear away the vegetation for a closer look and a photo or two.

Clearly this is an important site, the lake temple a holy of holies set on the island in the baray, a man made lake that had both spiritual significance for the Khmers and practical significance as a water source. When Kent later gave me a Google map, I could see how the ancient site of Banteay Chmar and the baray lie alongside each other and somehow it’s spellbinding. Everything is so overgrown that it’s difficult to see it on the ground but with the map all is crystal clear and its sheer scale is breathtaking.

That day was another great experience on a memorable trip and what’s more we’d found some girls. I’d flicked a deadly scorpion off Kent’s shoulder, there’d been plenty of male bonding and at the end of it all we came back for another beer. I was learning stuff too.

I was beginning to get an idea why Kent is so interested in the devata on the temples and in the current renaissance of classical dance since Cambodia’s darkest days. He told me of his publishing ventures (see www.datasia.us), and he posed the question to me, why is it that so many images of women dominate the monuments at Angkor? What is their significance and why are they all so very different?

Their poses differ, he pointed out, as does their clothing and head dress. Their body shapes vary from young, slim girls to older women with pucker marks around the navel who have clearly borne children. Their features again suggest that these are real individuals and not just mass images of mythical women.

Kent even plans to try to analyse their facial structures as their racial characteristics seem to differ widely. They could all be Cambodia girls but just as likely some are Chinese, some from Java or Thailand and from regions that paid tribute to the great kings at Angkor. (See www.devata.org.)

How fortunate I was that day, following Kent through deep, deep mud out to the mebon temple as he loudly hummed a repetitive Beach Boys theme. My bare legs were lacerated by the undergrowth, the mosquitoes had made a meal of me and my muscles ached for days afterwards.

But it was all worthwhile.

If it wasn’t for him, I’d have missed all of this, have stayed comfortably at home and to this day I’d still not know what a devata was.

Copyright Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog December 2009

The Lost Khmer City of Banteay Chmar

2009-12-19T13:31:00.017+07:00

A figure guards the entrance to the temple at Banteay Chmar.

Modern politics intrudes on the timeless scene at the temples

The site was first mapped by the French and is extensive.

The Cambodian flag flies over the front entrance to the temple.

A collapsed section of the wall is being pieced together.

The stones are massive and it's all done by hand.

The work of reassembling the low reliefs on the wall is under way.

Khmer soldiers present severed heads to their masters.

As always the stonework is lavishly decorated with carvings.

In the extensive workshops, a smith uses a forge.

Peter and Kent explore the ruins.

Indiana Tucker almost bashes his head on the temple of doom.

Every turn finds a new chaos of ruins.

Angkor Wat in Cambodia, one of the greatest ancient temple sites in the world receives hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors a year. There are traffic jams around the sites and it’s hard not to feel oppressed by the sheer volume of tourists that now overwhelm the temples. After decades of political instability it is good for Cambodia that tourism has taken off so fast but there are risks. I was first there at Angkor nine years ago and it was very different indeed.

The whole experience of visiting the Khmer ruins has to some extent been spoiled as, visiting now in 2009, you’ve come at least ten years too late. However, there’s more to the Khmer kingdom than Angkor and Cambodia still offers some hidden surprises.

I’ve just come back from seeing the ancient temple at Banteay Chmar and it was a remarkable experience.

We crossed the border at Chong Jom in Thailand’s Surin province and drove in a hired 4x4 on dusty roads for an hour or two before coming to a poor little town. It was only different from the others we’d passed through because it had a tree lined moat on the other side of which you could see some extensive stone ruins. This was our objective, the ‘lost city’ of Banteay Chmar built by Jayavarman VII, Cambodia’s hyperactive builder of vast stone temples.

While this huge complex was first recorded by the French, its physical isolation, the civil wars in Cambodia and the cultural heritage existing at the centre of the Angkorian empire means that work on clearing the site was only started about eighteen months ago. For us arriving here at this early stage must thus be how it was when visitors came to Angkor many decades ago. Things may now move quite fast though and a well-attended conference in August 2009 discussing the management of the temple and the possibility of application for listing as a World Heritage Site has stimulated considerable interest.

Our first task was now to find somewhere to stay. There are no hotels as such in the town so our driver found us a ‘homestay’ down a dusty side street. There seemed to be a choice of two and ours offered three clean rooms in a well built local house.

As for lunch, there were no restaurants apparent either, though we found an eating place just opposite the entrance to the ruins, run by a pleasant couple who even spoke a little English.

Food sorted, it was time to enter the temple.

Passing a pair of stone figures and a sign recording the recent de-mining programme, we crossed the causeway over the moat and reached the walls of the city where the Cambodian flag was flying. To our left was a closed off site where workers were sorting out the scatter of fallen stones and rebuilding a section of the wall and gallery. On the walls all around the temple precinct are carved low reliefs similar to those on the Bayon temple at Angkor, showing an exotic array of characters and battles, both human and mythological. Warfare is ever present and one particularly grizzly relief shows the victors displaying the severed heads of the enemy.

Inside the walls was a world that time has forgotten, a chaotic tumble of massive blocks of stone, of standing ruins and shattered towers, all encroached upon by huge white trees and bathed in dappled light. The glory days of the temple were almost a millennium ago but there was now only a few hours before another day drew to its close. It’s size was astounding and we had it all to ourselves, a magical other world for us to discover and explore.

On arriving I’d seen on one of the site notices the name of John Sanday who I’d met on two earlier occasions when visiting Preah Khan at Angkor where he was directing restoration work on behalf of the World Monuments Fund. On producing his card from my wallet, we were immediately taken to his office on the edge of the town where he very graciously dropped the more important things he was doing and took us on a tour of the site.

It was fascinating to be taken round by someone of his knowledge and experience and to hear the story of how he had initiated this project, now working with the Global Heritage Fund. Within a very sort time he has cleared the site of all vegetation, has stabilized some of the more precarious structures and started building wooden walk ways over the fallen rocks as access is difficult and dangerous.

Having set up site buildings and workshops, including a forge, he has also focussed on the important task of training local staff. Two stone naga heads have been found in good condition at the front of the temple and he hopes to restore the platform to allow for dancing and other events. Most importantly the fallen stones from the low reliefs to the left of the entrance have been moved, numbered and laid out on the ground and progress is being made on rebuilding the wall.

Most exciting of all, he told us of the project to develop a computer software that could assist in solving the most difficult jig saw puzzle in the world. It’s supposed to work like this. Each stone would be suspended and a digital image taken of all its surfaces. When the stones for a section of wall have all been scanned, all you have to do is press control/alt/delete or whatever and hey presto the computer tells you exactly how the stones fit together. At least that’s how it’ll happen in an ideal world and it would be a significant breakthrough if so.

Even with the help of a thousand computers though, many a life time is needed to achieve much progress with this site. The scale of the ruins makes the prospect of restoration totally daunting, a truly herculean task, and all the king’s men could never possibly put it all back together again. Perhaps therefore they should not even try to do so.

There may be considerable political pressures to recreate the structures as they were for the benefit of tourists but this is always a questionable aim. Reconstructed Khmer monuments often look a bit of a mess. Far better in my view, to prevent further dilapidation but otherwise to leave a rare virgin site such as this in the historical condition in which it is now found. A few sections of low relief should perhaps be reconstructed to show visitors how they once were, but otherwise the ruins should be left much as they now are.

What matters more than reconstruction is archeology, that the site be studied in order to learn more about the Khmers and how they used their buildings. Far more important than cobbling ruins back together again is to discover historical information. It is of course important to ascertain what was on the collapsed reliefs, but generally rebuilding the site would be intrusive and mistaken.

A far better alternative is to produce computer simulations and on-site panels with pictures and text interpreting the ruins for the visitor. At the many Angkor sites themselves, huge effort has gone into piling stones back on top of each other but there is precious little museum-style interpretation for the visitor. I get the impression too that the huge burden of managing monuments of this magnitude has also drawn resources away from the important task of pure archeology in and surrounding the temples.

How to conserve sites such as these is of course fiercely debated and my two penny worth adds nothing. I can only say though that it was a privilege to have seen Banteay Chmar as it begins to awaken from its long slumber.

John Sanday told us that one of the things that will inhibit the development of hotels and other facilities for tourists is a severe shortage of water. Perhaps, I wonder, seeing the frenetic pace of construction at Siem Reap, that might in the long run be no bad thing.

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl’ Blog December 2009

Isaan to Angkor Wat - Where, Why, How?

2009-12-11T12:26:00.012+07:00

It's beauteous at the temples and you can end up with too many scarves.

It can be a long and dusty road to get there though,

And many of the outlying villages are pretty poor.

Siem Reap town itself is a pleasant base for temple hopping though.

It's full of old markets and patient faces waiting for a sale.

The people are delightful and family life revolves around the children.

To get to the temples you take a motorbike tuk tuk for the day.

This temple in the town is a gem but is untouched by the foreign hordes.

Life in the countryside goes on as a new rice crop is sown.

Isaan to Angkor Wat – Where, Why, How?

I’ve just boldly been to Angkor Wat and I’m amazed because it now takes only two hours by the new road from Thailand’s Si Saket border crossing.

So why did I want to go to Angkor in Cambodia?

Because it’s so close to home here in Surin province, because it’s one of the greatest ancient temple complexes in the world and because it haunts my mind and I just can’t keep away.

The trouble is that it’s been hard to get there as the roads have been so bad. My map shows the main access road from Aranyaprathet/Poipet to Siem Reap as ‘impassable in the wet season’ and I well remember in the dry season of January 2002 bumping along it at walking pace, the old pickup dropping down into the water courses where the bridges were broken and slowly negotiating the deep pot holes and craters. We’d paid extra to be in the cab and not outside in the dust and sun. Trouble was another six people had paid to be in the cab and with the windows jammed closed and with no aircon, it was more than hot!

In my novel, THAI GIRL, the girl in a travel agents shop in Khao San Road, (Bangkok’s backpacker centre), tells Ben and Emma about taking an open truck from Aranyaprathet to Angkor. “Road no good but very cheap. Twenty people in the back, hot and dirty… nine hours, maybe twelve. Better you fly aeroplane if you care your ass.”

That time I took her advice and flew from Bangkok into Siem Reap but suddenly everything has changed. The major routes are now in good condition and the 150 kilometres from Aranyprathet/Poipet to Siem Reap for Angkor can be done in under three hours. Another time I went from Trat to Koh Kong in Cambodia, took a boat to Sihanoukville, a bus to Phnom Penh, a boat six hours up the river and to the end of the Great Lake and then a motorbike into Siem Reap. It took five days and I’ve just got back to the Surin border in exactly two hours.

For me now living in Surin province in Isaan, there’s no more any need to travel two sides of a triangle five hours westwards to Aranyaprathet and then three hours east again to Siem Reap. These great temples lie directly to the south of us, perhaps only 100 kilometres from the Thai border and now it’s possible to get to them that way. Or is it?

I’ve found it extraordinarily difficult to find out about the roads, but having just gone in a circle, crossing the border from Surin, going anti-clockwise to Angkor and returning to Si Saket, I’ll tell you what I’ve learned.

The major border crossing across the massive natural barrier of the Dongrak Mountains in southern Isaan has always been from Surin’s Chong Jom to O’Smach in Cambodia. Here on the Thai side there’s a huge market and a four lane highway that sweeps you smoothly up to the border. As you cross, there’s a glitzy casino and a big resort and it’s all horribly slick and impressive.

After that though as you enter Cambodia, it’s all downhill in more ways than one. The unsealed road plunges down the Dongraks in a series of bumpy hairpins, the dust billowing and the car plunging wildly. It’s hard to think this moonscape of a road can be passable in the wet season, except with four wheel drive. The next 100 kilometres or so is then a reasonable dirt road, before it reaches the Poipet road and you turn left in a dog leg eastwards to Siem Reap.

To promote international friendship and cross border trade, a new route has now been developed from Chong Sanggam in Si Saket province with substantial Thai money being spent on good sealed roads. On Thailand’s Route 24 at Ban Lalom just west of Phusing the big blue signs now show the turn off to Angkok Wat. The road across the border on both sides is so new, it probably doesn’t appear on your map but it does exist and is well signed from Route 24.

Once in Cambodia the road is direct and fast and coming back and completing our circle we covered the fast road from Siem Reap to the border in exactly two hours. The only problem is that, unlike Chong Jom, the border crossing itself is totally undeveloped, a dusty road through the dry jungle with a few barriers, push carts and portakabins.

Using either entry point, you’ll have to be dropped at the border as leaving your vehicle there would be more than risky. You also ideally need to have booked a Cambodian car to meet you and to take you to Siem Reap, though I’m not sure about mobile phone coverage across the border. (My well-connected friend had booked a car and our 4WD arrived twenty four hours early just in case!)

We were charged 2,500 baht by Keo Sotheara for a comfortable return trip from Siem Reap to Chong Sanggam. He is near Chong Sanggam at Anlong Veng and speaks good English. His card shows (855) 1267-7544 (Cambodia phone) and 086-343-7091 (Thailand phone).

Alternatively Chan Sovan of Siem Reap is on 012-843992 or (855) 92-89-0005 (though another card says 374-374 prefixed either by 011 or 012 or 013 or 090. Confused? So am I!).

We used a nine seater mini-bus to take us round the temples and between the three of us paid US$25 per day for the vehicle. (Dee, our delightful driver was great value too.) See www.angkorguide.asia/phansy and rosphansy@gmail.com. (Email him perhaps and ask him to send a car to Chong Sanggam?) See also www.siemreaptaxidriver.webs.com. Sorry if I’m a bit vague on all this as I didn’t do the phoning for cars.

Alternatively, on crossing the border at Chong Jom, there could be some cars waiting for business or not far away. At Chong Sanggam it would also be possible to get someone to call a car from Anlong Veng (twenty minutes away), or even from Siem Reap. People are always friendly and helpful especially when it opens wallets.

One small thought… returning to Chong Sanggam by car, arrange to stop off at the exquisite small temple of Banteay Srei and also at Kabal Spean to see the ‘River of a Thousand Linggas’ as they are en route and well out of town. (For Banteay Srei, you’ll need to have bought an extra day on your temple access card, available at the main entry to the temple park. It’s US$20 per day, US$40 for three days and US$60 for seven days. It seems you can opt for the days not to be consecutive… six days running could cause total exhaustion.)

To get round the temples most visitors use a tuk tuk which is a motorbike towing a covered trailer that seats two in comfort and costs US$10 to 15 per day according to how far you want to go.

Pick up a “Siem Reap Visitors Guide” (‘Canby guide’) in a hotel or restaurant when you arrive. See www.www.canbypublications.com. It’s a remarkably good free guide book with coverage of the history of the Khmer empire and of each temple, as well as the usual comprehensive tourist information on everything you can possibly think of.

As to accommodation, there’s a huge range of choice from US$5 a night. We paid US$15 a night (yes, 500 baht!) for the Reaksmey Chanreas Hotel which is on the right at the bottom end of Sivatha Boulevard, the main drag in town. It had beautifully appointed rooms with fridge and TV, all to a very high standard. There were excellent baguettes and breakfasts and pleasant staff whose aim in life is proving that cleaning rooms and serving the ‘barang’ is the most fun thing you could ever do. Highly recommended! Most of the expensive hotels are stuck out on their own but this one is right between the old market and the tourist night market and all that the town has to offer.

And Siem Reap certainly has a lot to offer. Ten years ago when I was first there, it was a dusty little provincial town trundling with ox carts and amputees, but now it’s a dusty big town with many attractive bars and restaurants and more cotton scarves for sale per acre than anywhere in the world. Something of its innocence has been lost though but that’s ‘progress’’ and at least it has been well done. If only the Thai tourist traps could manage a fraction of the style and good design that seems to be second-nature to the Cambodians.

As for money, my Kasikorn card produced US dollars from an ATM machine in town and I didn’t have to use it too often. Thai baht are widely accepted but when spending either currency you end up with handfulls of Riel as change which at 4,000 to the Dollar is a pain. With three currencies and a pocketful of zeros, it’s exceptionally hard for the numerically challenged such as me.

After some great experiences, on getting back by car to Chong Sanggam, I called Cat and we arranged to meet at our favourite Thai restaurant by the lake. The pickup we hired to take us there from the dust and mess of the border then ran over Peter’s toes as we were loading our stuff into the back, but that was the only disaster in the whole week.

If I now review the best weeks of my life, this one would have to be high on the list. Angkor and all that the ancient Khmers have left behind is truly magnificent.

My next posts on this blog will tell you all about what we did, including seeing the ‘lost temple city’ of Banteay Chmar, wading through the swamp to the temple on the island in the middle of the Lake, photographing a thousand devatas at Angkor and meeting ‘Miss Saigon’ in the Zanzy Bar in Siem Reap. Well some of it anyway!

It was non-stop action and now I really think I need a holiday.

Finally, do please post a Comment with any questions on all this and with additional info (or corrections) that could be helpful, especially for other Isaan resident travellers.

There’s nothing much to do around here in my Surin village, but I’ve just discovered that one of the world’s greatest religious monuments is now only a few hours from home. It wasn’t that easy to find out though.

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog December 2009

Manifolds and the Missionary Position!

2009-11-29T10:31:00.010+07:00

"A stretched Willys delivers your load!" Manufacturer's motto.

'Love me, love my jeep,' I desperately told my wife, Cat.

But now after five years I'm quite resigned to selling it.

And I have a very good four doored reason for sale!

This is to tell the world that I’m putting an important literary artifact up for sale.

When it’s a Cadillac once owned by Elvis Presley, the auction prices go sky high. And that’s despite the fact Elvis never sang about his cars and he had hundreds of them and gave them away as presents.

I’m now selling my beloved jeep and it’s sure to go quickly as it too has had a brush with fame. As an important member of our Thai family, it has three chapters all to itself in, “MY THAI GIRL AND I’, the book about ‘how I found a new life in Thailand’.

In the chapters, ‘Love Me, Love My Jeep’ and ‘The Black Jeep of the Family’ I tell the entranced reader how my own obsessive jeep syndrome and the mai pen rai attitude of local mechanics placed a severe strain on our marriage. ‘Not Crossing Borders’ is how my love affair was rekindled when I had a new four speed gear box fitted… my love for the jeep that is.

And in ‘The Jeep Strikes Back’ I tell the story of how when carrying a ton or two of illicit timber at dead of night, the prop shaft fell into the road with a crash leaving me with a serious conundrum… either to flee the scene, abandoning the jeep and my marriage, or to keep pushing and risk twenty years in a Thai jail.

This chapter ends with the comment that despite all the problems it’s given me, I’ll never sell my jeep, but that, “after this book’s published, I’ll never be able to sell it anyway”. Not true though for many reasons!

Coupled with its special place in literature, the practical side for buyers is that the extensive restoration work done on a vehicle has never before been so thoroughly and publicly documented. The lucky buyer will receive a bundle of bills for work done amounting to sixty or seventy thousand baht… and of course a valuable signed copy of the book.

The problem though selling an old jeep round here in Surin is that no Thai farmer will buy it except for peanuts as it’s really a toy for an eccentric farang, and there are very few of these nearby. In Pattaya or Chiang Mai, it would sell very fast. Here it’s more difficult.

Annoyingly, I have sold the jeep once already, just that the buyer never actually gave me the money. He was very, very keen to buy it, as would be any discerning petrol-head, and he couldn’t wait to come up here to Isaan and collect it. But he kept making veiled references to needing it for work and getting the agreement of his partner abroad, which had me a little perplexed. I suggested it mightn’t be the most practical vehicle for daily business use but this only strengthened our mutual trust and regard.

We thus continued our extensive email exchanges in which he asked for more photos, and I told him the engine and gearbox were from a Nissan Turbo Diesel, that all the clutch and brake systems were modern Japanese, that rarely had we gone beyond our local market town for spares and that in the course of four years’ daily use I’d replaced and overhauled almost all the moving parts of the damned thing except the air con and the door hinges because it doesn’t have any.

I told him it’s got some new tires, a new battery, radiator core, shocks, rear diff, universal joint and that there’s a nice little compass and temperature gauge that tells you which way you’re pointing and why you’re feeling so damned hot. My distant buyer was pleasant and positive and we became good email friends.

Clearly he was smitten by the jeep, a price was agreed sight unseen and we kept in close contact literally for months. Until one day I received an email in which he admitted the purchase was not entirely in his control because it wasn’t his own money he was spending.

He was, he said, a missionary!

All my doubts about the jeep’s suitability as a serious workhorse were now dispelled. Clearly this was an ideal car for a missionary. It would make him highly visible to his flock. It would be like a donkey doing God’s work, the self-mortifying, ‘sack cloth and ashes’ equivalent of comfortable modern transport. There could be no manifold sins and wickedness here… no mia noi would ever be seen dead in this car!

Furthermore, I’ll admit that on my journeys in the jeep I’ve sometimes prayed. For him the power of prayer would surely get him there and if not, he’d have the chance to meet and perhaps convert the many souls he’d asked to push him home.

He’d also told me that he was very happy to work on the mechanics of the car himself, so I could imagine him up to his elbows in its innards, sorely tested and trying not to blaspheme in the name of the Lord. And he would often find himself lying on his back underneath it… in what I might call ‘the missionary position’.

Needless to say he never came up with the money, so now the jeep’s back on the market and I’m hoping someone, missionary or otherwise, will want to buy it.

‘It’s a good little bus. I’d stake my life on it.’ (A quote from a First Year contract case whose name I’ve forgotten as it was forty years ago.) And I’m sure the first to see will buy. Despite the jeep’s limitations, the right buyer will have lots of fun with it… as the actress almost certainly said to the sado-masochistic bishop!

I’m not sure if I’m cut out to be a salesman, but I do still love my jeep and it’s been a great car for posing in. Apart from taking unscheduled holidays, it’s done good service for us over several years. Having a much longer load base than the original Willys jeep, it has carried many tons of cement, sand and stone, pigs, a heavy spirit house and 100 kilo sacks of rice. Once returning from a funeral we had seventeen passengers on board, so it can be a really useful car on local runs. The key to enjoying it is having a good mechanic nearby or being one yourself. And if you have a wife and you want to keep her, she’ll have to be the tolerant kind.

When I first bought the jeep, the previous garage owner/enthusiast had just done a full body off restoration, fitting the new engine and other systems and the problem was that it hadn’t had a proper post-rebuild shake-down before he sold it to me. This coupled with a plague of mai pen rai mechanics meant quite a few tribulations, but I hope it’s now sorted just in time to sell, probably for about half what it’s cost me so far.

It’s never been raced or rallied, has had no elderly lady owners, and was never owned by Elvis Presley, though Lamyai, his biographer’s wife keeps asking about buying it. And there’s a genuine reason for sale. I’ve got a nice new Toyota Pickup which has made the jeep totally redundant.

In the first week of December I’ll be in Cambodia, going cross country from the Surin border to Angkor Wat, but I’ll be keen to field your enquiries at arhicks56@hotmail.com. The jeep is in our village in Surin province so you’ll have to come here to look at it there when I get back.

This isn’t a joke and I do want to sell it.

But I’ll be sad to see it go. Honest!

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog December 2009

Surin Trumpets Thailand's Tuskers

2009-11-22T10:02:00.017+07:00

The first arrivals for the Surin elephant buffet.

To offset the elephants you need some pretty girls too.

And some elegant Thai dancers in the morning sunshine.

And then more dancers in front of the founder's monument.

Balloons make it all magical for the children.

And respect for His Majesty The King is ever present.

Waiting for the buffet there's a nice family atmosphere.

And the first to get stuck in have nice table manners.

This boy isn't afraid to come in close.

The first of the lorry-based floats then arrives.

As do more and more elephants.

This one has magnificent tusks.

And these four mahouts certainly look the part.

We’ve just been to the Elephant Roundup in Surin, Thailand’s big annual elephant festival and as always it was spectacular and fun.

Last year we went to the main elephant show in the stadium where two hundred elephants play football and fight wars, so this time we went to Friday’s elephant buffet in the town and it was well worth the effort.

For this event the elephants parade into the town centre followed by elaborately decorated floats and there by the monument to Phukdi Sri Narong Chang Wang, the elephant warrior who founded Surin, the elephants gather by the park and lake and have their ‘breakfast’.

I’ve never before seen such a vast quantity of fruit, laid out on tables all down the street. There was sugar cane, bananas and water melon in huge abundance and I’m surprised if the elephants didn’t all end up with stomach aches.

Waiting for the elephants to arrive we watched the various shows of dancing and mingled with the crowds and then at last they appeared, lumbering slowly up the road, each with a mahout on its back who directed them towards the fruit.

It was a great festival atmosphere with throngs of happy Thais, children, balloons, dancing girls in fabulous costumes and every element of a really good street party. What’s always such fun too is that in Thailand ‘health and safety’ can go hang and the revellers are free to mingle and to snap pictures among the legs of the browsing tuskers. Last year there was a serious incident but it was kept under wraps as nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news. The show must go on.

In my book, “MY THAI GIRL AND I”, I comment that expats everywhere can be seen in bars gazing into their beers and expatiating at length about what drives them mad living there… and expats in Thailand are no exception. I remember one such grumbler who’d just suffered a minor setback in the Land of Smiles and he was vocal in letting off steam over his beer Singh. “These Thais,” he said. “They couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery!”

But no, I told him, he was utterly and totally wrong.

A festival, a funeral or fair. A big party or a piss-up in a brewery. That’s exactly what the Thais are brilliant at organizing, and the elephant show is only one example. It was as always a triumph of the Thai talent for promoting collective public fun. Surin was awash with a colourful tide of happy people and elephants, was simply heaving with local and foreign visitors and the cash registers were ringing loudly.

What strikes me as sad though is that while they so successful at selling this amazing cultural asset once a year, for the rest of the time the town is a sleepy provincial backwater and its tourist trade is negligible.

I’ve read that only three percent of foreign visitors ever visit Isaan, the huge rural bulge to the North East that is home to almost half of Thailand’s population. A rice growing area with a limited modern economy, it is depressingly poor and so desperately needs to develop a viable tourist industry.

If there’s a single explanation for the present political upheaval in Thailand it could be that the level of economic development in the rural areas, and especially in Isaan, has fallen too far behind that of the cities. While national politics and the purse strings are controlled by the urban elite, the slumbering popular franchise of the countryside is now beginning to assert itself and to promote its political champions.

Every possible means should therefore be found to help Isaan catch up economically and as agriculture is not the sole answer, promoting tourism is an obvious opportunity. Thailand has very fully exploited most of its touristic potential and the one major asset still neglected is Isaan and its traditional rural culture.

So here comes my very own ‘Isaan tourism action plan’, a dream scenario that would need capital expenditure to develop flagship visitor attractions in the region. The area is large and a visible circuit of specific attractions is needed, together with active central marketing by the tourist authorities to give them life. The cost need not be excessive though.

Road and railway links are good and most towns are already well served with good but inexpensive hotels which are sadly underused. Inter-city bus services from Bangkok go everywhere, though are difficult for non-Thai speakers to use. It would however be would be so easy to designate certain VIP routes from Moh Chit as special tourist services and a departure point could also be developed on a vacant site in the city centre. The other option is to offer package tours using mini-buses or larger coaches when the demand picks up. These would be very acceptable to older (higher spending) tourists who will often use such tours in their own countries.

Most of the attractions are already there, though Surin needs to build a permanent elephant centre, not far out in a village, but as close as possible to hotels and transport in the town centre. This would provide elephant displays to visitors all the year round, together with a living eco-museum of rural culture, including basket and silk-weaving and the culture of Thai fragrant rice.

Taking a train from Bangkok’s historic Hualampong station out onto the rice plains, then climbing slowly up through jungle and mountain onto the Korat plateau and to Surin (or even as far as Ubon) would be a great adventure. Perhaps it could be a steam train even. There are several serviceable steam engines in service and these are only used a few days a year. Then at Surin station, the passengers are met by samlors (cycle rickshaws), or even by elephant to take them to their hotels. The faux exotic possibilities can be generated ad infinitum.

Other opportunities in Isaan are many and obvious. There is the ancient settlement at Ban Chiang, one of the world’s earliest examples of copper smelting, whose pleasant museum was desperately in need of improvement when I went there a few years ago. The prehistoric rock paintings on the dramatic cliff at Pha Taem in Ubon province overlooking the Mekong river, with the craggy hills of Laos on the other side are well worth a long journey. And there’s a superb five star resort overlooking the river nearby.

The heritage of Khmer temples throughout Isaan is superb. Visitors to Surin could be taken the hour or so onwards to the temples of Muang Tam and Khao Phnom Rong. Then when either Thaksin or sanity is restored, a few hours east lies the utterly magical cliff top temple of Khao Phra Viharn, surely one of the world’s great sites. (See on this blog, ‘Thailand’s Temple of Doom’, 3rd July 2008, and ‘A Shared Heritage’, 5th August 2008.)

Not to mention Phimai in Korat and an abundance of smaller temples such as Sikoraphum, less than an hour from Surin town. This is used as the setting for Thai dancing and for an annual sound and light show that are of world class but are totally off the tourist map.

Then there are huge opportunities for inexpensive access via these sites to visit Laos and Cambodia. A train to Nong Kai will allow visitors to cross the river to Vientiane in Laos, followed by a bus or boat tour down the Mekong to visit the sleepy river towns. A train to Ubon and a visit to Pha Taem can be followed by a trip into Laos to see the Khmer temple of Wat Phu, to visit the Mekong rapids at Si Pan Don (Four Thousand Islands) and the quite spectacular waterfalls on the Bolavens Plateau. (See on this blog, ‘Wat Phu, Champasak’, 27th August 2007, and ‘Four Thousand Islands’, 29th August 2007.)

From Surin it’s only an hour to the border at Chong Jom and one of the great and unvisited Cambodian sites, the ancient Khmer city at Banteay Chmar is about thirty kilometers away. And of course Angkor itself is not much more than a hundred kilometers to the south. Isaan thus has much to offer but it is also the ideal overland gateway to so much more besides.

Isaan families are in crisis as the young and fit go away to work on construction sites and in the tourist industry in other parts of Thailand. Their region has historically been neglected by the centre but with excellent communications, there is now no longer any reason for that. Developing Isaan tourism would instead bring those jobs to the people and valuable social integrity to countryside communities that currently are struggling to exist.

For a start, a proper elephant and cultural centre in Surin town would help bring increasing prosperity to this part of Thailand. The Surin elephant show is so good that it should not just be an annual event, but it needs support and marketing from the central authorities if it is to develop further.

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog November 2009

Jack Reynolds - The Plot Thickens

2009-11-15T12:44:00.008+07:00

The totally nude image of a sexy and delicious Thai girl on the front cover of the DK Books 1985 edition of Jack Reynolds' extremely seminal novel, "A Woman of Bangkok" would have deeply shocked Vilai, The White Leopard, the aforesaid Bangkok woman and dance hall hostess, the posturing anti-heroine of Reynolds' story. She would never have let herself be seen either in daylight or darkness unless elegantly but alluringly attired, especially at the dance hall. And to be seen in the nude, let alone be photographed, and then to be manhandled for free by an infinite number of smutty book readers would never have been allowed by The Number One Bad Girl of Bangkok. Unless of course she were quite exceptionally well compensated.
(And now a tip... a copy of this rare edition of the book is available at leading second-hand book dealers, DASA on Sukumvit road near the Emporium, but it won't be for long.)

But did The White Leopard really exist and has she ever shown her face since the book came out? What does Trink think? Read on!

The Plot Thickens

My solitary quest to discover the life of ‘Jack Reynolds’, the shadowy author of the 1956 novel, “A Woman of Bangkok” is continuing apace and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. It has become totally absorbing as each new bit of information comes to light, but there are so many leads to follow up that I’m overwhelmed.

If you scan down this article, you’ll find a list of key questions and with these I really do need your help, especially as I am not in Bangkok to do any of the hands on research.

Can you answer any of the questions for me? Could you yourself go and dig out some of the answers even, in a common effort to produce a brief account of Jack’s life? (Eg Employment records at UNICEF or The Bangkok Post.)

Most dramatically, I now have a photo of the Christian headstone to Jack’s grave, though I don’t know yet where it is exactly. It shows him as Jack Reynolds Jones, his wife Wanpen Muthikul Jones. He was born 1st June 1913 and he died on 8th September 1984, just over twenty five years ago, aged seventy one. A photograph shows a man with glasses, dark hair and a square lantern jaw. An empty space awaits the picture of his widow.

My previous article below describes the extraordinary phenomenon of this talented writer producing a first novel about the very accommodating woman of Bangkok which bursts upon the world just a year after Frank Mason’s, “The World of Suzy Wong”. The book reputedly sold more than a million copies, but apart from one serious non-fiction work about China, its author then disappears almost without trace. The people around him would of course deny this but in truth there is no public record of his life. I’m now trying to find those who did know him and to fill the void with a short history of Jack Reynolds. The few thousand words I plan seem to be growing though as the information flows in.

One new and unique source is the unpublished book written by pioneering Oxfam stalwart, Bernard Llewellyn in the late eighties. His remarkable manuscript book called, “A Traveller in the Third World – The Memoirs of An Itinerant Do-Gooder, 1940-1982” should definitely see the light of day, though that’s another story. The point is that outside of his family and a few friends from Oxfam, I am privileged to be the first person to read it… and there are four fascinating passages about Jack. Bernard and Jack worked together in the Friends Ambulance Unit in China during the war years and with much in common as the England born sons of Christian Ministers with Welsh origins and as conscientious objectors, they quickly became firm friends.

One rather poignant passage in the book goes some way towards explaining Jack’s failure to produce another novel.

Llewellyn writes that when he visited Jack in Bangkok in 1957, the year after “A Woman of Bangkok” was published, Jack, “was making heavy weather of his more serious work. His novel had taken months to write and rewrite; but in 1957 “A Woman of Bangkok” had finally appeared. He wrote it using his mother’s maiden name: the nom de plume, Jack Reynolds. Though we did not know it in 1957, this was to be Jack’s sole full-length novel. Some shorter pieces were later to be collected and produced in paper-back [this was presumably “Daughters of an Ancient Race”, Heinemann 1974] but nothing was to cap his early achievement.

The picaresque adventures along Chinese and Thai roads which made his letters such fun to receive for the most part never found their way into print ; though he was to send me in the sixties a summary of the plots and the characters around which nine separate books were to be written. But Jack could never quite settle to complete them one at a time and, in his mind, one story merged into another and he wrote and rewrote until the accumulation of material confronted him with an impossible task. Nor was the literary problem the only thing on his mind. Family life and the problem of earning a living in a country of infinite distractions held back the flowering of what seemed to me a prodigious talent.”

Jack’s protagonist in the novel, Reginald Joyce was a tormented character torn between the biblical strictures instilled into him by his Christian Minister father and his own more tearaway tendencies. In the book Reggie escapes his upbringing in Bangkok by taking to booze and easy women with a huge appetite, but all the time racked with guilt and recriminations.

Given the autobiographical implications of the novel, perhaps Jack too was a complex character and I hope his old friends can tell me more. I have received two personal reminiscences suggesting that in his later years his joy in writing had turned to dust and that he suffered a terminal case of writer’s block. There was also mention of an article called something like, “The Ghost of Soi ??” that appeared somewhere in the Bangkok media in which his picture showed him as looking thin and with a whispy grey beard.

Can anyone locate this article?

The great strength of Jack’s book is that it is so precisely observed from life. His picture of Bangkok and of Reggie’s arduous drives up to Korat are passionate and vivid. Thus one inevitably asks, who was the inspiration for Vilai, ‘the woman of Bangkok’, known otherwise as The White Leopard of the Bolero dance hall and the bitter rival of The Black Leopard. Were they too and the Bolero itself drawn from life and who exactly were they?

It seems I may now have an answer. My informant, now in his nineties, tells me as follows (after some editing).

“The Bolero was the Cathay, an open air Bangkok dance hall with a concrete floor and Mekhong and Singha on offer. It had a roof, a bit of a bandstand and sometimes serviceable toilets. There was also Thai food available. The girls sold drinks and tickets to dance with them. It was mostly Thai men as there were very few farang then. At both the Cathay and the Hoi Ten Lao, a famous six storey restaurant with a nightclub on the top floor, the White Tiger and the Black Tiger were the mainstays. (They were of course Jack’s inspiration for his characters in the ‘Bolero’.) The Black, as I think it was, moved on and set up shop elsewhere until the nineties. One of the Tigers, I think the White, got sick and spent all her savings on doctors but died anyway in the sixties.”

A number of sources, based probably on published interviews that Jack later gave, say that he and the White Tiger were firm friends and saw each other every New Year for many years and that it was a probem for him keeping her identity private. However, later on when Jack was in declining health, she had eventually failed to show up to see him.

About six years ago (?), Bernard Trink, presumably in his Nite Owl column in the Bangkok Post, said he saw the White one in a Sukhumvit bar playing pool. This is what he said.

“If you didn’t read Jack Reynolds’ “A Woman of Bangkok”, long considered the literary classic about the night life of the metropolis, skip this item. Believe it or not, its White Leopard heroine was seen shooting pool a week ago at Rajah Hotel’s Hillary Bar (Soi 4 off Sukhumvit). Her name, incidentally, is Muck. And her personality is much the same as when Jack wrote about her.”

It would be fascinating to resolve this mystery though the ‘facts’ must by their nature always remain shadowy. Of greatest interest would be to see Jack’s version of things, if any of the contemporary published interviews can be found.

So when exactly was Jack doing his literary ‘research’ in Bangkok and when would he have discovered the ‘Bangkok woman’ of his story?

He had arrived in Bangkok to work with UNICEF in 1951 but he surely must have enjoyed R&R visits from China before then.(????) By the time of Llewellyn’s visit in 1957, he was married to Pen with two kids and another on the way. If, as in the book, the White Tiger was about thirty at the beginning of the fifties, by say the year 2000, at eighty years old she would have been one of the older chicks playing pool in the Hillary Bar. Or perhaps she was only seventy. Or perhaps it wasn’t her at all.

NOW FOR A FEW QUESTIONS

1. I am failing to pinpoint the time scale precisely for Jack’s working life in Bangkok. It seems to go something like this.

- 1951 UNICEF aged 38, and then a posting to the Middle East in 1960 (Llewellyn.)

- 1960s(?) Working at The Bangkok World and The Bangkok Post, aged 47-57 (???)

- early seventies with The Investor, then to a UN job in Africa (Jim Shaw believes)

- then what. Some dates for all of this would be good.

- and when did he work in Indonesia, the Philippines and Nigeria, as the 1974 book bio says?

2. Can anyone send me an image of the cover of their copy of the book to arhicks56@hotmail.com, please.

3. Can anyone come up with his Bangkok Post obituary (died 8 September 1984) or with any other articles, eg ‘Living in Thailand ‘in 1983. (My two money cards failed to pay for access to the Post’s archives which may only go back to 1992 anyway.)

4. Can anyone identify Megapoint of Kwun Tong, Hong Kong who has posted on a forum about Jack.

5. And how about Jack’s widow, Wanpen Muthikul Jones? And their seven children, including David, Philip, Steven Muthikul Jones, a successful sculptor, and reputedly another son who is a scholar and has published in the Journal of the Siam Society. Most importantly can someone do web searches for them in the Thai language (remembering that they are probably Joneses but could be Reynolds), which is beyond my expertise.

6. A biographer would of course get a copy of Jack’s English birth certificate (Emrys Reynolds Jones, born Hertfordshire, 1 June 1913.) And Thai records of marriage, death and probate of a will.

7. UNICEF should have full employment records and so should The Bangkok Post.

8. DK Books were presumably in touch with the family when, after Jack’s death, the book was printed by them in 1985 and 1992.

9. There are key people who have memories, including the aforesaid Trink. Also William Warren, John Everingham, Roger Crutchley, S. Tsow, Jason Schoonover, Sterling Seagrave,, Colin Piprell and many more who, though of course younger, may have crossed paths with the great author. Who were his immediate colleagues at The Bangkok Post. Has the experience killed them all?

10. Finally Vilai herself. She tells Reggie that this is only her nick name, so what does it mean? The European colonizers justified their intrusions as a civilizing mission but the Thais successfully resisted them, claiming that they were already ‘si vilai’. Is this the same word as her name and what does it mean exactly?

So who can help me with any of the above?! Who will leave a Comment or email me?

My family here in the village in Surin is wondering what I’m doing spending even more time steaming at my computer than usual and it could start causing problems.

Andrew Hicks The ‘Thai Girl’ Blog November 2009

"A Woman of Bangkok"

2009-11-07T09:14:00.009+07:00

The 1985 edition by Duang Kamol

The book cover shows Aberdeen harbour, Hong Kong in 1957.

I took these pictures in Aberdeen in the late seventies.

What Ever Became of Jack Reynolds?

At the end of this blog there’s a serious request for information from you. I’d like to learn more about Jack Reynolds and to share what I discover in a later article… so please read on.

*****************************************************

Coincidentally I’ve just found copies of two out of print books about Thailand that I’ve long been looking for.

“A Woman of Bangkok”, the seminal novel by Jack Reynolds (first published in 1956 as,“A Sort of Beauty”), is a classic ‘Suzie Wong’ story set in fifties Bangkok, while “With My Back to the East” by Bernard Llewellyn published a year later is an elegant account by an established travel writer of his journey through seven South East Asian countries, including Thailand.

The first one I found in Gecko Books in Chiang Mai, surely Thailand’s biggest second-hand bookshop, while the Llewellyn was found for me by a sharp eyed friend in a second hand book shop in Bangkok.

A curious link between the two books is that much of Llewellyn’s chapter on Thailand is about how when in Bangkok he stayed with his old friend Jack Reynolds and how they travelled up to Korat by jeep together.

For me there’s a more personal link as well.

When I was lecturing in law at Hong Kong University in the late seventies, Bernard Llewellyn, then working for Oxfam, used to come and stay with me in my spacious university flat overlooking the western approaches in Pokfulam and became a good friend. Perhaps it was in character that he never talked about his books and this is the first time I‘ve managed to find one of them.

I mentioned Bernard’s name in a recent article on this blog about my volunteer work with Oxfam (‘Can Oxfam Really Help Thailand’s Poor?’, 22 August 2009) and such is the power of the internet that his now middle-aged son, Michael, then emailed me to get in touch. Bernard had published four travel books and Michael told me that he was working on a fifth not so long before he died aged 88 in 2008.

This unpublished book covers much of his active life from the time he joined the Friends Ambulance Unit in China during the Second World War, through his first travels in the East until his retirement from Oxfam in the 1980s and so it should be a fascinating read. Michael has now sent me a pdf file of the book and I am much looking forward to printing it out and reading it. Bernard’s obituary can be found in The Guardian of 24 June 2008. (And sadly that of another Oxfam friend who was with the Friends Ambulance Unit, Michael Harris was published in The Independent on 8June 2009.)

I’ve also long been curious to read Jack Reynolds’, “A Woman of Bangkok” as it is celebrated as the first of the many ‘expat’ Bangkok novels written by and about western men falling for and foul of rapacious bar ladies in this, the Land of Seductive Smiles.

My own solo novel, “Thai Girl”, the story of young British traveler, Ben who gets entangled with a pretty beach masseuse called Fon, has been described by one reviewer as ‘the definitive novel about relations between Thais and foreigners’.

Others say that this accolade should instead go to Jack Reynolds’ story, even though it’s now already half a century old. I’ve seen comparisons made between the two novels in discussions on an internet forum, so I was very curious to see what I’d think of his book.

“A Woman of Bangkok” is the story of Reginald Ernest Joyce, a virginal and mildly irritating twenty five year old Englishman who sells vegetables in a grocers’shop. The guilt ridden son of a rural vicar, he only comes to life, it seems, when he races motorbikes on the speedway track. Could it be coincidental then that Jack Reynolds likewise rode speedway and was the son of a vicar? I’ve read too that Reynolds’ real name was Emrys Reynolds Jones which bears more than a passing resemblance to Reginald Ernest Joyce.

The story starts when lettuce seller Reginald is jilted by his girlfriend, Sheila. She, the hussy, then gets off with his older brother who is clearly more of a man than he. Reggie then takes up a three year contract as a commercial salesman based in Bangkok where he falls defenseless into the clutches of the self-styled ‘White Leopard’, the eponymous ‘woman of Bangkok’. A bar girl of the most mercenary kind who mercilessly parts him from his money, she is soon to be the cause of his disgrace and sudden return to England at the end of the book.

Though much in the book could be autobiographical, Reynolds paints Reggie as a misfit who fails at everything he tries to do, including suicide and seducing Sheila. The critical turning point in his life when he fails to screw his courage to the sticking point is lyrically told by him in the first person as follows.

“Oh, Sheila, Sheila, Sheila. Lying there moaning in the heather. My hand on your heart. My hand under your head. The odour of your hair and skin, as sweet as the heather. Your tense repeated cry: “No Reggie, no. Don’t do anything we’ll regret – please…” I got up and walked stiffly (?!?) twenty feet away. I shouldn’t have been so soft. In fact I was a fool. I let her appeal to the Ivanhoe in me, the medieval Sahib.”

Big brother then apparently seizes both the initiative and Sheila and drags her off to the altar, leaving Reggie twisted and bitter towards women and life in general. Later Sheila tells Reggie that after he’d left her moaning in the heather, “you came back looking all noble like Sir Galahad and no doubt with a new poem in your head”. Reggie replies, “What did you expect me to do – rape you?” “Why not?” says the feisty Sheila.

Reggie rages thus. “Half the human beings in the world are female. The breed is produced by the busload. Billions of the bitches. And every one of them stamped in the same press.”

Thus in the world according to Reggie, when a euro-sheila says no she really means yes, but he soon discovers that certain Thai women in bars know the precise meaning of ‘yes’ if adequately compensated.

Reggie is thus bedeviled by his Christian guilt about sex, torn between perceiving women as bitches in need of a mate and as unsullied beings to be wooed according to the conventions of courtly love. As an outlet for his frustration Reggie has angrily penned a novel called “Perfidy” about how a perfect gentle knight such as he is done over by perfidious women. It expresses ‘the rage of a jilted lover’, says Reggie. It is ‘an outpouring of rage’, full of ‘plummy writing. Over-ripe Victorias. Every semi-colon is like a plum stone in a plum pie’.

The only difference is that while Reggie tore up his fledgling novel in fury, Jack Reynolds got his successfully published.

Thousands of readers have thus since learned that Reggie had a middle-aged landlady in London who took a big shine to him and he, it appears, to her fifties-style legs. In Reynolds words, her calves ‘twinkle fawn-stockinged between this evening’s particular flowery voluminousness and her run-over-at-heels but meticulously-polished shoes.’

The style of the book is sometimes elegant but even for its time is sometimes seriously over-written and slow. My writers’ group back in Exeter would have hammered it for its plummy writing and adjectival retentiveness.

As the story unfolds in Thailand, there’s a premature climax (if I may call it that) when Reggie goes on his first business trip to Korat by jeep with his Thai colleagues and they go to a local pick-up joint. While the Thais freely indulge, Reggie fights shy and goes home, only to slip out and later return to the scene. There at last he loses a few baht and his innocence.

“My pistol-butt is no longer un-notched; my belt is hung with scalps,” he boasts. In this, his first short trip to Isaan Reggie then manages to collect another seventeen ‘scalps’.

Bernard Llewellyn in “With My Back To The East” writes as follows of his own trip to Korat by jeep with Jack.

“We ate that night in one of the restaurants across the water. It was the place – so Jack said, and he should have known – where Ronnie (sic) Joyce, the long-suffering hero of his novel, and his friends had their hilarious meal preparatory to the loss of Ronnie’s virtue in the Korat back streets.”

Once back in Bangkok, Reggie falls into the clutches of Vilai, ‘the White Leopard’ at a dance hall called the Bolero, but sadly for Reggie Vilai is unutterably vile.

Reggie is soon besotted though and meekly reaches for his wallet at her every demand. She bleeds him dry, trying every trick in the book, a money-Dracula of the worst kind, without any redeeming features or even any apparent charm.

Reynolds takes pains to make her as detestable as possible and lacking in any positive human qualities. She spends three to five hours every day putting on her makeup and tarting herself up for the night. Her great pleasure in life is plucking her arm pits with tweezers. She pisses on the shower floor instead of in the squatter. She is despicably unpleasant to her servants and anyone beneath her and, what’s worse, she kicks the little puppy.

Just after a fortune teller has predicted his death, her small son is hit by ‘a long green beautiful car’ which ‘moved with the silent deadly stealth of an arrow’. Reggie then scoops him up, badly injured, and puts him on the back seat of his car. Reluctant to sit in the back with him as he’s dirty from rolling in the road, Vilai strongly resists taking him to a hospital as she wants to get ready for work at the Bolero. It’s Saturday night and there’ll be lots of American there.

When Reggie insists on taking the child to the hospital, she extracts a pile of money to pay the doctors’ fees. She then goes off to the Bolero and when the boy dies she blames Reggie for killing him as he took him to a hospital that would never care for him properly. She then makes him pay all the funeral costs.

Later when Reggie has just driven up to Korat on business, she sends him a telegram to say she’s in serious trouble and needs him to come back urgently. Despite being exhausted after the long drive, he then immediately abandons his colleagues and his work and in torrential rain and in the dark heads back to Bangkok in the firm’s jeep to find her. In consequence he has a bad crash and nearly kills himself.

When he finds Vilai, she slags him off for coming to her house covered in mud and gore, demands a huge sum of money from him to deal with some unspecified crisis and when he says he hasn’t got that much, tells him he’s lying. He’s not good to her like he was before, she says, and she’ll never speak to him again if he doesn’t come up with the money.

Knowing that he’ll now lose his job for going absent and wrecking the jeep and having no money to give to Vilai, he decides to go that night to his boss’s house and to steal his wife’s jewels for her. There’s then a melodramatic scene in the last few pages when he takes a samlor from the Giant Swing to the National Stadium, then a tram (not the Skytrain) past the British Embassy to the house in Bangkapi. There he creeps up to the darkened house and goes inside, contemplating murder if it’s necessary to get the jewels for Vilai. Surprising the poor lady sitting in her bedroom in front of her mirror in a pink nightdress, his boss walks in and the game is then well and truly up for dear Reggie.

By this stage I wasn’t too bothered about what was going to happen to Reynolds’ protagonist anyway as both Reynolds and Reggie had lost the plot as far as I was concerned. I fully accept that bar ladies may sometimes be single minded in their calling and that western men can be extraordinarily naïve, especially when fixated on rescuing a whore with a heart of gold. In my view, however, the extent of Reggie’s fixation for Vilai pushes the bounds of credibility too far, given that she is just so very vain, vile and obnoxious. As described, she gives off no great erotic charge and does nothing to explain the extraordinary hold she has over Reggie in the face of her grotesque treatment of him.

Much of Vilai’s dialogue is cleverly written, authentic and funny, but top scoring bar girls have charisma and charm while Vilai has very little. It’s evident that she’s already over the hill and getting past her screw by date too, so she’s not even very attractive any more. Occasionally she turns on some crocodile tears and plastic affection to manipulate poor Reggie but she is otherwise without any redeeming qualities. Nor, apart from three feckless husbands in her past, does Reynolds explain what has made her such a demon.

There is brief mention of her past as a village girl fondly remembering better times, but that is perhaps universal for those who seek a better life in the city. As a character with a single dimension, she is for me, a cardboard cut out whose exaggerated persona is over the top. ‘Money [is] the most important thing in the world’ for all bar girls but they have to be nicer than this to get it.

Despite its many qualities, the story therefore did not work too well for me. I could not suspend disbelief. While Reggie is a well developed character, even if not a sympathetic one, Vilai is merely a clever caricature. While many of the details about Bangkok and Thailand in the fifties are well observed, again they are hardly affectionate or positive, which is strange as Reynolds must have loved the place.

I’m sure that for a western man who’s been devoured whole, wallet and all, by a bar girl, this book says it all, but frankly it wasn’t for me. It struck me it was not so much about the ‘woman of Bangkok’ as about the post-Christian complexes of poor Reggie, crucified both by Sheila who said no and by Vilai who’d say yes for money but could never return his love.

The book is therefore quite unlike my own novel, “Thai Girl”, which is about Ben’s struggle to understand the Thai girl, Fon. Thus he talks to her at length about her childhood of poverty in Isaan and insists on going to her home in Buriram to meet her Mama. Unlike Vilai, Fon is not a bar girl and persistently says no to Ben, so there are major differences in the two stories. They are comparable perhaps because both explore relationships between foreigners and Thais, but in very different ways.

They end differently too. While Reggie’s DC6 takes off from the airport in Bangkok on the last page of the book, on the last page of “Thai Girl” Ben’s jumbo jet lands in a wet and dismal London.

Nonetheless, “A Woman of Bangkok” is a remarkable period piece that makes me more than curious about its author. Banned, it’s said, in Australia, it must have taken great courage to write and to publish it. In an era when Lady Chatterley and Fanny Hill were being prosecuted for obscenity, a story about prost****ion and men having s*x with the n*tives just really wasn’t the done thing. But is it a great book?

In my own view there are few really fine novels, such as Greene’s, ‘The Quiet American’, but many bad ones like ‘Moby Dick’, ‘The Davinci Code’ and those endless Barry Potter books. Of the rest you may either enjoy them or be disappointed and Reynolds’ book is one of these. I enjoyed it as a period piece and because it was about Thailand but nothing more.

Nonetheless, I’m intrigued to learn more about the life of Jack Reynolds. I know that he was a conscientious objector and during the Second World War was with Bernard Llewellyn in The Friends Ambulance Unit in China. This expertise in transport presumably brought him his job with Unicef in Bangkok.

Little bits of information about him keep surfacing. Enjoying a beer at Kinnaree with Jerry Hopkins in Sukhumvit soi 8 the other evening, Jerry told me that Reynolds had lived in that very soi. He’d written for The World, then the only English language paper and the internet tells me that he had a book of stories about his experiences in China called, “Daughters Of An Ancient Race” published by Heinemann in 1974.

Llewellyn’s book says that Jack was married to a Thai village girl who spoke no English and didn’t enjoy her visit to England. At that time he had two sons called Philip and David, and another on the way. Other accounts credit him with between seven and nine children, though perhaps even he didn’t know the score. The children must be in their fifties today but where are they now? Has the book finally gone out of print because it’s an embarrassment to them? Reynolds is said to have died twenty years ago but again I can find no details as to where or when.

On one of the internet forums, an American called Jim Shaw who’d worked with him on ‘The Investor’ in the period from 1970 to 1975 said recently that after losing touch with him he’d visited soi 8 sometime in the eighties to try to discover what had happened to him but he’d learned nothing. (See www.tfs2m.com). And so the plot thickens.

Though Reynolds pre-dates the internet era, Google searches turn up quite a few results on him but many of these ask the same question as this article. Who was Jack Reynolds and what ever happened to him and his many children?

So can you tell me anything more about Jack Reynolds? If so do please post a Comment on this blog or contact me at arhicks56@hotmail.com.

What was his real name and the surname of his children? How and when did he die? Can you give details of your copy of his book with names, publishers etc? And did the novels Bernard says he was working on when he visited ever see the light of day? It would be good to compile a simple bibliography of his writings.

In the fullness of time I will then try to put together a summary of what I’ve learned and to post it on this blog. If enough is reliably discovered, perhaps it should go on Wikipedia.

It should be perfectly possible to discover what happened to Jack Reynolds but only with your help!

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Incidentally, I’ve just learned that a fine early copy of Reynolds’ book in its original dust jacket is available at the Librarie du Siam et des Colonies which is near Pantip Plaza. It isn’t cheap but you could email cgsiam@cgsiam.com to secure it. .

Andrew Hicks The ‘Thai Girl’ Blog November 2009

How The Trains Made Thailand

2009-10-31T12:07:00.015+07:00

Bangkok's Hualampong station - waiting to go northwards.

But for Thais even eternal waiting can and should be fun.

An advert for Tiffy recalls the dramatic era of steam.

The station's busy with men in uniforms and local trains too.

The gateway to Chiang Mai and our train on the left platform.

The plains were flooded and it was still pouring by Lamphun.

At Lampang there was a fine old steam engine on display.

Wheels and couplings speak loudly as we clatter over a culvert.

There's light at the end of many a tunnel up in the mountains.

One of many mountain stations, much loved and immaculately maintained.

Nations are defined by wars and geography but it was its railways that finally integrated Thailand within its permanent borders.

Cat and I have just been on the overnight train from Bangkok to Chiang Mai and the journey back by day has reminded me what an extraordinary feat it was to construct a railway across the plains, through almost impenetrable jungle and mountains and up to the ancient kingdom of Lanna.

We’ve also recently been through the humiliating and barbaric process of applying for visas for Cat, both to go to the UK and also to get a Schengen visa for Europe. There is a link there somewhere!

After millennia of tribal warfare, the Schengen agreement between twenty one European nations now allows visitors to obtain a single visa valid for all these countries. How civilized it is to freely cross borders and how very sad that the UK stood apart and did not sign up to this accord. If only we now had just one visa to apply for on going to Europe.

Ease of travel in a modern world means that strict national borders are needed to separate and divide people, but we’re now so used to this intrusion that it’s easy to forget that the nation state itself is a brand new concept. Likewise, passports are something of a new thing. Italy and Germany are new countries and the United States was quite recently defined by its civil war.

And Thailand as we now know it is new too.

Relating things to my own lifespan, a warring Europe was pacified, the invaders were turned back and an extraordinary reconciliation was begun only two years before my birth. And not long ago Africa was abruptly carved into more than thirty artificial nations by the European powers at the end of the nineteenth century, driven on by the insatiable demands of their missionaries and traders. This all happened a mere twenty years before my father’s birth.

Despite the artificiality of some of the borders thus created, even in Africa the nation state has been extraordinarily successful with remarkably few annexations or secessions. Just like Vietnam’s eviction of Pol Pot from Cambodia, nobody liked it when Tanzania kicked Idi Amin out of Uganda as borders are sacrosanct and must not be violated even for good reason.

Eritrea successfully broke away from Ethiopia and Morocco has been too acquisitive, but the fledgling ‘state’ of Biafra, the biggest ever secession failed and Nigeria, Africa’s giant, remained intact, as does almost all of the late nineteenth century political map of the continent.

Now taught an assertive brand of nationalism, modern Thais may look at a map of South East Asia and believe that theirs is an ancient Kingdom but, as defined by its present borders, like so many other nations, relatively speaking it’s brand spanking new.

So what’s the story and why is this so?

Throughout history, where land is divided by insurmountable mountains, rivers and seas, political entities must of necessity be small and this region was no different in that respect. The old civilization of the Chao Phaya basin, of Sukotai and Ayutaya which lie at the core of Thailand, was closed off by mountains to the west, north and east. Those to the North isolated it from the kingdom of Lanna/ Chiang Mai, while the mountains to the east ensured that the Korat plateau and Isaan looked eastwards and could not be fully integrated by ‘the Thais’ from the west.

Thus the loose ‘empires’ of Burma, Thailand and Cambodia, not yet nations with settled borders, were in perpetual conflict as they sought to control the small vassal states around them and to extend their spheres of influence.

The mountains were of course the defining factor. But if you move mountains, everything changes, and that’s exactly what the railways achieved. During the reign of King Chulalongkorn, truly the architect and father of Thailand, construction of the great railways to the south, to the north and east of Thailand was courageously begun.

I’ve previously written of how the feat of cutting a railway over the mountains to Ubon in the east enabled Isaan to be better absorbed into a unified nation… which ironically the current political tensions suggest has not yet been perfectly achieved. (See ‘Last Train From Sikoraphum’ posted on this blog on 14 November 2008)

So now I want to tell you of our long daytime journey back from Chiang Mai by train, a slow and spectacular ride down through the mountains that again reminded me that before 1921 when the railway was finished, Chiang Mai and the Lanna kingdom was another world, a veritable Shangri La, hidden from the Thailand of the southern plains.

In the last few decades air travel has given us seven league boots and made the world smaller but the railways had a far greater impact than that. As a major breakthough in transportation, they redefined much of the political world, allowing access to outlying areas that could now be integrated politically and commercially exploited.

Not least of all this is how it happened in Thailand. It was the railways that were the essential means to make the nation what it is now.

The financing and construction of the Thai railways was a modern marvel of political will, organization and engineering. Crossing the plains was easy but surveying a route through the mountains, building cuttings, embankments, bridges and tunnels, especially a long one through the Khun Tan mountain, must have seemed an impossible project. At last the dream was achieved and served its purpose, though now the line is desperately in need of modernisation and has been left to gently molder in the shadow of its past glory.

Thus as the Chiang Mai train slowly approaches a tiny station high in the northern mountains, the station master is in his old clothes, busy manicuring its immaculate garden. He snaps to attention and rushes off to buff up his boots and to put on his best uniform and peaked cap. Just in time he grabs his green and red flags and makes it onto the platform as the train rumbles in.

Yes, they still wave their flags and they ding a big, polished brass bell to send the trains on their way. It’s just wonderful and nothing, but nothing seems to have changed. Steam has been exchanged for diesel, but the Thai railways still offer a perfect time warp for any nostalgic lover of the world’s quaintest old railways.

Not only travelling hopefully to Chiang Mai is fun but arriving’s even better. As always I greatly enjoyed the city and although it’s changed and grown, the atmosphere is much the same inside the moat as it was when I first visited and stayed in the seventies. The rice fields and mountains are still there too and rural life goes on much as it always has done. And so also do the trains.

The railway is thus the perfect link to help you to slow down and to take you from the madness of Bangkok to that other more gentle world of Chiang Mai. Even Bangkok’s Hualampong Station where your journey begins has been nicely restored and it retains its fine architecture and a polite otherworldliness.

It is always vibrant with people and activity but for Bangkok it’s strangely calm and orderly. The central hall is packed with people, but they just sit on the floor with their luggage surrounding them and they serenely wait as if forever, something the Thais are always so good at doing.

Perhaps they’re pleasantly anticipating the slow ride out through the slums and the shanties built literally feet from the passing trains, out through the sprawling city and onto the endless rice plains. After the long run across the plains, when Chang Mai is not so far away in distance but still a long way in time, their train will abruptly leave the rice fields and climb slowly up into the mountains.

It makes slow progress and you can see the train ahead of you as it rounds the sharp curves. You can feel the extraordinary steepness of the gradients as the train clatters over bridges and culverts. Its single track is but a precarious thread, dwarfed by the mountains and threatened by the encroaching jungle, more like a narrow gauge mountain railway than the important artery that first united Thailand.

In less than a hundred years though the railway has become insignificant and almost an irrelevance. Governments have repeatedly failed to modernize and to invest, caught in a power play with the railway unions who strike to preserve the privileges and inefficiences of an outdated system. It will take strong and determined leadership to give upgrading the railways the priority it deserves, which suggests that nothing much will change in a hurry.

In the meantime I’m not personally complaining about that.

Nothing for me could be better value or fun than a round trip on the train from Bangkok up to Chiang Mai and back. I’ve done it several times before and I hope this time won’t be my last.

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POSTSCRIPT… I’m no historian and have done no research whatsoever to write this piece so if you find it’s riddled with inaccuracies or can tell us more about the story of the railways, do please leave a Comment on this blog.

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog November 2009

Andrew Hicks Is A Bastard! - Official.

2009-10-22T08:40:00.004+07:00

My two modest books about Thailand have fared quite well at the hands of reviewers in the media but I do have some ‘issues’ about book reviews in general. Often, I think, they’re pretentious, ridiculous and corrupt.

Some time ago, I wrote a blog about the overblown extracts from media reviews printed inside the dust jackets of novels by the top selling 'Johns', Grisham and Irving. It wasn’t professional jealousy that got me onto this topic, just my observation that the obsequious quotes that get splattered all over ‘international bestsellers’ are often the utterest of utter crap!

[See ‘Dear John, I’m Confused’ on this blog at 17 October 2008.]

Before my very own book, “My Thai Girl and I” went to press, I thought of soliciting ringing endorsements from top authors such as J.K. Rowling (who was at my very own University of Exeter) or Dan Brown (who wasn’t, though he taught at Philips Exeter) and then I could stick them on the back cover. But frankly I couldn’t be bothered. Nobody would believe anything they said anyway so I decided to write my own glowing endorsements instead.

Thus “My Thai Girl and I’, according to the back cover, is, “One of the funniest books I’ve read all week”, “A feast for feminists”, and “Hicks at his best”.

No buyer will be swung either way by any of this, so why not make a spoof out of it! And as few book reviews are ever truly independent or free of an agenda of some sort, the majority of them come across as total rubbish.

Except that book reviews can occasionally be genuine!! And it’s a big exception!

The very best are independent reviews posted on the web and my favouite is one written by an Aussie fireman called Eric.

I don’t know him from Adam but he’s got a great blog at http://firemaneric.blogspot.com and I’d recommend it to you as a rattlingly good read.

You see fireman Eric came to Thailand and as Thai ladies like firemen and as Eric fell for a Thai lady, the rest is hysteria. In the strange way we Western males sometimes have, just like me, he felt compelled to write a blog about his utterly unique romantic experiences in the Land of Increasingly Foolish Smiles.

And, despite being kind of busy, he managed to read “My Thai Girl and I”, not once but several times. The story in my book rang bells for him and, it seems, he liked it quite a lot.

Then in an independent and uncorrupt way, he couldn’t restrain the urge to write a review about the book and to post it on his blog.

I am not dismayed by this, despite being a modest person who shuns the limelight, but I shall now paste in his review below in order to showcase the snappy and readable quality of Eric’s writing.

For me, this review is lit crit of a very special kind. The web can be cruel and anonymous but when I get an accolade like this, I value it very highly. That someone has enjoyed my book means a lot to me.

Thanks Eric, you Aussie bastard!

So here’s a fireman’s review of “My Thai Girl and I”.

Complete and unexpurgated!

03 September 2009

Andrew Hicks Is A Bastard! - a book review.

I’ve never done a book review before, so this is something very new for me, but this is one book that I cannot help but share with everyone.

The book in question is, of course, “My Thai Girl and I”, Andrew Hicks’ tale of woe, happiness, frustration and bewilderment as he goes from being a divorced sixty-something retiree to the husband of a ball of energy and “Thai logic” half his age – the enigmatic Cat.

I first heard about Andrew’s book on the ‘net’ – as one seems to hear about many things these days – and, after having a look at the website and reading Andrew’s blog, I decided that it was worth a read. I finally managed to pick up a copy from Asia Books’ at the airport in Bangkok at the end of my recent trip to Thailand. I only wish I’d found it earlier.

Despite my best intentions, and having promised myself I would only read one short chapter every evening, I read the book in three late-night sittings – I simply couldn’t put it down – before handing it to one of my mates to read. Now I’ve got it back (only a week later) I’m reading it again and finding it even more enjoyable the second time around.

This is Andrew's second book written about Thailand. His first book, "Thai Girl", a best-seller in its own right, is something altogether different, telling a fictional tale of a young traveller who meets, falls in love with and, ultimately, loses a Thai girl. You can find out all about "Thai Girl" on the same website, here, a little down the page.

We start our journey with Andrew as he takes a breather in Phuket, one of the more well-known tourist locations in Thailand, as he undertakes a journey of self-discovery following the end of his former life as a corporate Lawyer and Lecturer in Law, brought about by the twin barbs of early retirement and divorce.

As happens many times in life, a chance encounter becomes, in relatively short order, a life-changing experience of a kind that defies explanation – unless you’ve had the same happen to you. Andrew purchases what must go down in history as the most expensive piece of papaya in history – the first step towards the slippery slope leading to the insanity that is known as life in Thailand.

“My Thai Girl and I” chronicles not only that first encounter, but Andrew’s gradual introduction to life in a small village on the rice-growing plains of Isaan – Thailand’s poorest and most remote region. Throughout the book he details the storm that exists around him, as he tries to sit calmly in its eye and learn to “go with the flow”, meeting some of the most colourful characters on the face of this earth and, somehow managing not to go completely insane, slowly adapts his rigid western values and thinking to something closer to the Thai way.

The reader is drawn in to the exciting, illogical and heart-warming string of disasters, joys, projects, travels and events and, before long, is eagerly turning the page to see what happens next.

Some of the stories are amusing, others side-splittingly funny, whilst the occasional sadness of small-village life creeps in elsewhere. Throughout it all, the reader is left wondering what kind of world this is, does such a place truly exist, and where can I find it?

This is the story of the REAL Thailand, far away from the tourist traps and plasticised smiles and tacky façade that westerners think of as Thailand. This is the Thai’s Thailand, the one you won’t find in the glossy tourist brochures or on the TV adverts, the one that few people ever get to see, and we are fortunate to have this rare insight offered to us in the eloquent format which makes “My Thai Girl and I” mandatory reading for anyone who has an interest in Thailand as it really is.

If you’re thinking of travelling to Thailand for something more than bars, beaches and Bangkok, you simply can’t do so until you’ve read “My Thai Girl and I”, lest your brain explode as you try to process the world around you. Even if you’re not going there, “My Thai Girl and I” is a ripping yarn, bloody funny and written for the likes of you and me.

This is one of the few books I have read – one amongst thousands – which left me feeling that it had been written specifically for me. On each page I felt as though I was sitting across a table, cold drink in hand, as Andrew imparted his wisdom and experiences to me, sharing with me the emotional lows and manic highs of his new life. It became personal, poignant and answered many of the questions I had about life in the real Thailand. Written by a mate, for a mate.

Thanks, Andrew, for writing this book for me.

So how does this make Andrew Hicks a bastard?!!

There’s several reasons.

Firstly, Andrew is English – that makes him a bastard from birth. (Remember, I’m an Aussie)

Secondly, he’s living the life that I want. Andrew is laying out, in plain English, the blueprint for the life and lifestyle that I have been dreaming about, so I’m jealous. No matter how you dress it, he and I both know that he’s lucky, a “lucky bastard” as we say here, so there’s the second strike on the bastard count.

Thirdly, many of my friends have suggested that I eventually turn this blog into a book. I don't need to now - it has already been done and "My Thai Girl and I" is far to close to what anything I'd write would look like. Change the names and the town and I think it'd look identical.

Fourthly, did I mention that he’s English?

Finally, you can join the ongoing story of Andrew, Cat and their insane life by visiting Andrew's blog, "Thai Girl", 'The Exotic Adventures of a Literary Sexagenarian' (that means someone in their 60's). Add it to your favourites and you won't be sorry.”

The “Thai Girl” Blog September 2009

Still Stalactite Thirty Years On!

2009-10-14T15:40:00.015+07:00

Staying in Ralph and Mee's house in the mountains was magic.

Waking up to a sea of clouds made the long journey worthwhile.

Papa cooks breakfast in his bamboo house nearby,

and Mama and her sister enjoy the meal in their bamboo house.

A walk to their tea garden washes away the stresses of the city,

while Papa picks tea leaves under the jungle canopy.

This village tree is a single banyan which puts down tap roots.

Slaughtering a pig seems to be quite a big event,

and everyone is there, anxious for a slice of the action.

We visit the Chiang Dao caves and feed the fish in the temple pond.

And I recognise a stalactite I last photographd thirty years ago.

Tourists to Thailand rush to the sea and islands but for me the forests and mountains are an even greater draw.

Cat and I have just come back to Bangkok after a short holiday in Chiang Mai and it’s been amazing. Walking through the tea plantations high in the mountains, the light falling soft and dappled on the manicured bushes is an uplifting experience. This magical place could hardly be more different to the endless flat rice fields that surround us at home in our north eastern village in Surin province.

We stayed with Ralph and Mee in their modern home in Mee’s Lahu village high in the mountains above Chiang Rai. We arrived in pouring rain but awoke the next day to the vista of a sea of cloud seen from the upstairs balcony.

From then on our stay was a succession of great experiences.

Mee’s parents live there with them, cooking and eating in a traditional split bamboo room right next to the house. Their life retains many of the traditional routines of their mountain upbringing and every day in season they take the long walk to their tea garden to pick twenty kilos of leaves each.

The village is vibrant with life, at night the children playing in the open area by a vast banyan tree and in the day workers go off on their motorcycles to pick tea. Life is much as it is everywhere in a rural community with small shops, a pork butcher and noodle stalls but unusually for Thailand there are three Christian churches.

On our last day Ralph took us down to the valley to visit the Chiang Dao caves, one of the largest limestone cave complexes in Thailand. After we’d fed the massive fish in the temple pond at the approach to the caves we went inside and were hugely impressed by the echoing caverns.

While I was photographing one of the stalactites I suddenly recognized it as an old friend. It was not the caves themselves that I remembered but the photo I’d taken of this river of limestone three decades ago. On thinking back I soon realized I’d been here just a month or two short of thirty years ago.

That time in the seventies the rice harvest was already coming in and the workers were out in the heat of the fields, swathed in clothes to keep out the dust, threshing and winnowing the rice by hand, tossing it on bamboo trays and blowing away the chaff with big fans. The rice was then hauled away on ox carts for storage in their wooden barns, all so very different to how it’s now done in the twenty first century.

Back in Chiang Mai we drove through crowded streets out of town past the university and the temple of Wat Suan Dork, which is now totally hidden behind rows of shops. On that first visit to Chiang Mai the Suan Dork temple was then a sleepy place. It was outside the urban area and into the the countryside.

We also ate at Aroon Rai, a well know eatery on Mool Muang Road. I told the middle aged waitress I’d been there thirty years before and that, as I remembered it, there'd been no bleak concrete building as now and we’d eaten outside in a quiet garden. Yes, I was right, she said, as she’d started working there just three years before that time.

Worryingly I’d forgotten about the Chiang Dao caves but had remembered the restaurant! This time I’ll have to get back there to both of them sooner than thirty years on.

Yes, Chiang Mai has changed. It’s bigger and brasher, though in many ways it feels very much the same… hot, busy and chaotic but so welcoming and I think I’ll always want to come back.

Now I have to survive being in Bangkok again before we go back to the village, still thinking of the peace of the family tea garden in the mountains.

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog October 2009

No Bamboo In Bamboo Land

2009-10-01T15:05:00.006+07:00

Living in the back of beyond in rural Isaan, apart from English newspapers and farang food, there’s not many things you need that you can’t get hold of quite easily. Although there’s bamboo everywhere, including in our back yard, there’s a strange shortage though of stuff made from bamboo.

Yes, you can get pre-Ikea knock-down chip board furniture everywhere and fold-down steel kitchen tables that are totally hideous. But if you want attractive bamboo or rattan furniture for an exotic Eastern look you might as well forget it!

For the locals of course, wicker or rattan smacks of the past and they much prefer fifties chip board chic, but the strange thing is that functional bamboo furniture can be seen everywhere. It’s quite nice and all the little grass roofed eating places in town use it… but can you buy it here?

Not a chance?

After we’d built the house, I’d always wanted a decent bamboo table and chairs so we could eat out on our downstairs verandah, but they’re simply not available anywhere. This puzzled me so I worked on the problem as intensively as a CIA spook for three years until I discovered the truth. Bamboo furniture comes from a bambooish sort of place in Ubon province about three hours away and you can only get it there. Apart perhaps for a few roving pickups loaded to the sky that come round the villages, you can’t buy it here.

Ultimately therefore, three years on, despairing of my old jeep, I had to buy a new pickup and drive to Ubon and find the bamboo shops myself in order to fulfill my farang dream of eating off bamboo furniture.

This minor frustration was recently mirrored in a severe marital tension that has occurred between me and my sweet though straight talking wife, Cat. Just before leaving for a trip to see my family in England the rains began early and it seemed that the gutters round the house were blocked with leaves, probably from the eucalyptus from next door. The result was that they were overflowing in the worst of the downpours and water was cascading down the front of the house and onto my valuable bamboo furniture and precious antique ox cart.

“Cat,” I say to her desperately, “We must get gutter man in to unblock the gutters”.
“Cannot,” says Cat. “In Sangkha not have gutter man.’
“But we only need someone with a ladder who can get up there and do it in a few minutes.”
“But in Sangkha nobody have ladder. I ask already at all the shops.”

I quietly seethe in frustrated disbelief, silently accusing Cat of not being bothered about this disaster and telling me what she wants me to hear.

So it seems that Surin folk don’t do ladders then. When they built our house all those five years ago they did it without a ladder, instead standing on upturned paint tins and climbing painfully up the wooden scaffolding. And nobody in all the builders merchants in town knew of a gutter man, insisted Cat, even though they all sell guttering. And certainly nobody, but nobody in Sangkha has a ladder.

Seriously, Cat tells me, nobody has a ladder because they’re always made of bamboo and bamboo stuff’s made in Ubon and not in Surin.

So we flew off together to England leaving unblocked gutters and torrents of water falling down the front of the house. When we got back, like the mowing, nothing of course had been done about it.

I tackle Cat head on asking her to get it sorted and get one of those ‘kill-at a thousand-paces’ laser looks.

I’ll go and cut some bamboo from around the pond and make a ladder myself if I have to, I tell her. I’ll charter a helicopter to drop me onto the roof. I’ll clear the gutters if it’s the last thing I do… and given the height and the steep pitch of the roof, indeed it might be.

Then Cat’s brother Saniam, taking a break from helping us to cut the ‘lawn’ goes somewhere and walks back about five kilometers to the house carrying on his shoulder a short bamboo ladder. He tells me through alcoholic fumes that he’s going to stand the ladder on the low kitchen roof, climb up and over the top of the house and dig out the gutters for us.

I contemplate scraping his remains off the path at the back of the house and decide to put a damper on the whole thing. Drunk in charge of a ladder is not a good idea Perhaps tomorrow he’ll be sober, I fantasize, but no, it never happens and I soon notice that the ladder has gone.

Then one day I hear Cat’s frantic voice loudly calling me from the back of the house. It must be an invasion from Cambodia, World War Three or the pig’s escaped again. Then I hear what she’s saying to me.

“Andrew, gutter man come. Run, run quickly!”

I’m out of the house in a flash and at the gate and sure enough there’s a modern pickup with a ladder on the roof coming down the soi. Like many Isaan tradesmen, the man who does gutters drives far and wide looking for work, announcing his arrival with an intrusive loudspeaker that can be heard for hundreds of yards. Cat had heard him coming. This was the answer to my prayers.

But shock, horror… all he had on top of his truck was a short bamboo ladder!

Just like Saniam’s plan, this he perched precariously on the kitchen roof and in bare feet scaled up and over the house to clear out the gutters and repair a few leaks. I watched him climbing down again, the foot of the ladder stood on the steep slope of the kitchen roof. It was shocking to see the risks he was daily exposed to through his own casual attitude to life and death. And who would have to pay hospital bills or compensation if he fell? It would be me! Like when a motorbike runs into the side of your car, that’s just the way it works around here.

I’ve written before about the pleasure Cat takes in gathering wild food in the surrounding countryside. I’m quite proud too that we’re self-sufficient in obtaining our own drinking water and have so far lived to tell the tale. While many farang friends buy bottled water, releasing thousands of plastic bottles a year into the wild, we drink real organic rain water.

For six month it rains heavily and a peripheral purpose of the gutters is to channel the sweet water into the three vast ceramic storage vats we have around the house. These usually last us out over the ensuing dry season, so it’s a system that saves both the planet and my satang.

Of course the roof water’s safe, I tell myself. The air’s clean as there’s no industry with only the methane farts of buffaloes to pollute it, and I’ve never had a tummy problem from it.

But then while gutter man was still working away up top, I went around the house and saw the mud and gunge that he’d scraped out of the gutters, dropping it in heaps to the terrace below. I was truly horrified. We’d been drinking water filtered through the leaves and dirt of the five and more years we’ve been living here.

And why this extraordinary negligence with our well being and health? Essentially it’s because this is Surin and not Ubon and here they don’t make bamboo ladders. So that’s why until now we’ve never once managed to get the gutters cleaned out.

What might be a good idea would be for me to get in the pickup, drive the three hours to Ubon and buy a ladder so I can do it myself in future.

But no, I’ll buy ten of them at a good discount and I’ll cruise round the town and villages selling them. Then that way the ladder famine in Surin will in part be relieved.

While I’m at it I might as well get some tables and chairs and sell them too!

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog October 2009

Her Papa's A Hunter Gatherer!

2009-09-27T17:14:00.012+07:00

In the West there's food aplenty and Pooh Bear and Tigger can get fat on sweet cup cakes. Here in Isaan, the poor North East of Thailand, they have plastic plates but little to put on them. Tiny crabs, shrimps and shell fish are gathered from the flooded rice fields and add flavour to the rice. There's a long tradition of hunting and gathering though it's not possible now to make a living from the forests.

Fish caught in the outfall from our pond.

A bucket of bamboo shoots cut from around the pond.

Cat spent hours chopping and boiling to make them edible.

This crab just walked into our garage...

... so did this frog and ended up getting eaten.

A vicious spear for fish and frogs and whatever gets in the way.

... and this is the bucket of protein Cat brought back one night.

But it's not enough. The young have to work in Bangkok and grandmama gets left holding the baby.

I’ve written before about how the forest in the Surin countryside where my wife, Cat and I now live used to be bountiful and how it abundantly yielded birds and animals to eat, roots, leaves, nuts and fruits. Her childhood was spent gathering food in the countryside and her memories of that time seem to be happy ones.

The trouble is now that every available scrap of land has been made productive and almost all the forest has gone. With increasing population, farming cannot support the population and this unlimited resource of free food for the landless is no longer there. Thus the young and fit have to move away to the cities to find low paid work, often leaving their small children with Mama Papa in the village.

I’d never before thought of Thais as hunter gatherers but rather as prosperous growers of rice, so this is a new insight for me. Farmers and pastoralists wandering the world with their cows are the wealthy ones and the hunter gatherers are all but gone. One thinks only of the pygmies in the Congo, of the Punan in Borneo and the Orang Asli or Sakai in the mountainous jungles down the spine of Malaysia.

I’ve seen people in West Africa who wore nothing but leaves but even they grew crops. I’ve stayed with Dyaks several days up the Skrang river in Sarawak, sleeping under the huge bundles of human skulls tied up with rattan. They lived off the jungle and just before we went out hunting orang utan, they showed me the paws of a bear they’d killed a few days before. They also grew a few vegetables and kept pigs that ran wild in the forest around the long houses. This was fine by me but in the absence of a WC, when I headed off into the jungle to hide behind a bush, the pigs would come running. They were so keen to get up close and personal as I squatted down that they almost knocked me flying.

The only pure hunter gatherers I’ve ever met though were the Sakai in the Taman Negara national park in Malaysia. In the vastness of the jungle we were lucky to come across them sitting in low temporary shelters of palm and leaves. They were very hospitable as they showed us how they whittled the darts for the blow pipes with which they killed monkeys and showed us the roots and the honey they’d recently collected from the jungle. They were delightful people to meet, their most precious possession being the fire that they kept glowing in one of their shelters.

I now realize to my surprise that my Thai wife too is a hunter gatherer. There’s nothing she loves doing more in the village than collecting food and despite the loss of the forests, it’s still out there if you know how to find it.

And it also comes into the house too without being asked! The garage is a cool, quiet place where we’ve caught intruding crabs and frogs, rats and even a scorpion, and all of them have gone into the pot.

Then when it rains heavily at night, the frogs cry out noisily and Cat gets up and goes out in the dark and the wet hunting them. She takes a powerful head torch and a vicious looking spear and returns with several kilos of frogs and fish in a bucket.

We’ve had heavy rain recently and the fish pond overflowed and she made a fish trap of fine netting where the water runs out. This produced quantities of beautiful small fish of the kind that are used to make plaa raa, the foul smelling fermented fish that Isaan people so love.

Then Cat takes the bamboo shoots from around the fish pond and spends ages cutting it into tiny slices and boiling it up to soften it. One dish she made recently was to mix it with rice, chopped pork, various spices and a liberal quantity of plaa raa and fiery chilli to render it totally uneatable by any farang. Then it was wrapped in parcels of banana leaf to make a local delicacy that was truly a labour of love.

She also collects pak ah chet, a leaf that grows on the surface of the pond. And she gathers kee lek from behind the house which is pounded to make a bitter green paste or soup, and at a certain time of the year we go out to the rice fields and climb the sadao trees to collect the young shoots that again are cooked up to make a decent curry as bitter as bile.

Then there was the trap with a blue light that accumulates a huge quantity of insects overnight that are fried up and eaten as a snack. The rice fields are full of fish and crabs, shell fish and prawns, all there for the taking, just like at the seaside, so in some ways the countryside is still nothing less than bountiful.

Nonetheless, you have to have land as there is no longer enough to sustain the whole population of rural Isaan. And that’s why the middle generation has gone off to the towns to find menial and badly paid work.

A few days ago one of Cat’s aunties came in to show off a new grandchild that had just been left with her by her daughter who works in Bangkok. This woman had eight children of her own but with only one of them now still with her in the village, all the others having gone away to the south. She already has two small grandsons living with her, their unmarried mothers gone far away so a third is a real burden, not to mention the cost of milk formula. From time to time her family send back small sums of money her and Papa and the children but for them it’s a poor life, living in what an only be described as a shack. They have absolutely no other income.

The new child is of course a joy, but the burden for an old woman of raising yet another baby is hard. But that’s just the way it is in rural Thailand.

The comfortable middle classes in Bangkok benefit from a vast pool of cheap labour while Isaan is a totally different world.

The village is a real community, though under threat, but it’s sad if more of the benefits of the modern economy cannot be brought to the countryside. That tension is of course what the current political turmoil in Thailand has been all about.

Meanwhile Cat has her farang and a comfortable life, but I respect her passion for living off the land and for not running a mile from the toughness of her upbringing. That’s what makes living in the village more rewarding for me as Cat’s enthusiasm for country life brings me a little closer to what remains of ‘the real Thailand’.

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog September 2009

Remembering The Ancestors

2009-09-19T16:04:00.014+07:00

At the village wat we remember family who have passed on.

Making offerings of food and alcohol to propitiate their spirits.

The animist shrine in the temple grounds.

Tribute is paid to a small laterite rock.

“Tomorrow we go Ban Lamong… take food to grandpapa,” says Cat breezily.

“But he died years ago,” I reply, puzzled for a moment before I realize she’s talking about the annual ceremony at the temple remembering her mother’s dead relatives.

Towards the end of pansaa, the Buddhist ‘lent’, it is the custom of the Suay people to gather at the temple where their family members have been cremated and to hold a ceremony with the monks in their remembrance.

Curiously this coincides exactly with the Chinese ceremony of Ching Ming when families gather at the ancestral graves with food offerings and joss sticks and sweep the graves. I used to watch this at crowded ceremonies in Hong Kong and it looked a happy occasion when all the family made the effort to gather together and honour the departed. It was more like a party than mourning, which was thoroughly healthy and appropriate.

To me it seems a major omission that in the West we have no such custom. We cremate our dead in a clinical crematorium and quickly move on with little ritual or formal grieving. There is no grave to return to and we have no tradition of coming together to remember them at a particular time. Our elders seem to be readily forgotten.

Not so in Suay culture, of whom Cat’s mother is one. Here the spirits of the deceased are all around and need to be attended to and kept sweet. Thus it was that we all climbed into the pickup that morning and headed off to the next village where Cat’s mother had been born and raised.

It was a grey day, heavy with rainy season cloud as we arrived in the temple precincts and parked by the cremation ground. The first small ceremony was to make offerings of food and alcohol to the spirits of the dead. These were placed at the foot of a tree and the old aunties and uncles sat round, pouring alcohol into bowls and presenting the sticky rice to grandpapa.

Then mats were laid on the ground and four elderly monks in saffron robes arrived and sat in a row under the trees. There then began a long formal ceremony in which they chanted the names of those to be remembered and went through the usual formal chants in Sanskrit.

“Bhut thang saranang katchami.”

Then everyone went off to the temple hall while I waited outside. As always there were long announcements on the battered PA system, including lists of small donations given by various locals, often of ten or twenty baht.

Waiting by the pickup I'd noticed a curiosity, a small animist temple right here in the grounds of the Buddhist temple. As I watched, three ladies walked across to it and started making food offerings to its very pagan altar. On this was a large chunk of laterite rock with a ribbon around it, various small figures and the remains of old food offerings. They of course were very amused about the farang with his camera and chattered happily away to me. The one thing I heard was that one of them said they were giving food to Buddha.

I am constantly fascinated by this commingling of Buddhist and animist ritual and the complete failure to distinguish between the two. First of all, propitiating the spirits of the ancestors by the Suay was a wholly animistic ceremony, as appeared from the making of offerings at the foot of the tree. Buddhism and the temple then claim a part as the monks perform their rituals, while on the sidelines further offerings are made to a rock with a ribbon around it.

Just as Christianity, the religion of a jealous god, nevertheless accommodated many pre-christian beliefs and festivals such as that on 25th December, so every organized religion has to absorb existing poly-theistic beliefs and practices. Buddhism is especially tolerant and so happily co-exists with the animism that surrounds it. Monks participating in animistic rituals is thus to be expected but I do sometimes wonder how much of Buddhism actually remains in Thailand once animism has stripped away.

The ladies in the animist shrine said they were giving food to Buddha but what really defines a religion is not the labels but their actual beliefs. Ask a British Christian or a Thai Buddhist what they actually believe in and you’d hardly get a cogent answer. What I suspect though is that the minds of the people around here are filled with a strong belief in the spirits of their ancestors and of the forces of nature that surrounds them. What room that allows for true Buddhist philosophy or observance I have very little idea.

The ceremony in Ban Lamong though was one of the nicer ones and every society should likewise mark an annual occasion when everyone comes together as a family to remember the past and those who are no longer with them.

It strikes me that in this respect our western society is decidedly lacking.

Should we not do this too?

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog September 2009

"Thai Girl" Goes to Hollywood

2009-09-11T08:33:00.002+07:00

It’s perhaps every novelist’s dream to see their story on the silver screen, so I’m more than pleased to tell you that my novel, “Thai Girl” has been optioned as a Hollywood movie.

It’s a small studio in Los Angeles called ‘Filmed Imagination’ run by two interesting characters called Daniel Dreifuss and Marius Haugan and that suits me just fine. The big studios often option novels in large numbers and, like a developer’s land bank, keep them indefinitely gathering dust on the shelf in case the story comes into fashion.

For this studio though, “Thai Girl” is a key project and they’re strongly committed to getting it filmed. Marius, a long time visitor to Thailand developed a passion for the book and its story and had little difficulty persuading Dan that it was just up their street. They see the book as having many key qualities that would make it a fabulous movie.

The “Thai Girl” story is set on the beautiful holiday islands of Koh Samet and Koh Chang, in Bangkok and the rice fields of Buriram province. It thus offers exotic locations of sea and islands and Bangkok city nightscapes, together with the softer contrasts of the real rural Thailand. Visually it should be stunning.

As a bitter sweet romance between Ben, a good looking English lad off travelling after university and Fon, a pretty beach masseuse, “Thai Girl” explores broad popular themes of universal appeal. When their two very different worlds collide, Ben and Fon are swept along together, grappling with the eternal confusions of a cross-cultural relationship. As Ben vigorously pursues his passion for Fon, the sparkling Thai girl of his dreams, she resists his advances, refusing to be distracted by a passing foreigner. Will Ben get his girl? Will Fon overcome her natural suspicion of this attractive young guy and fall for Ben?

The key characters are few and the story’s structure is not unduly complex, so it should adapt well as a feature film that’s every bit as compelling as readers often find the book.

A review of “Thai Girl” has described it as ‘one of the top selling English language novels ever published in Thailand’ so the story certainly seems to have a wide appeal. It also has many thought provoking themes that a movie maker could interpret and develop. Another reviewer has called it ‘the definitive novel about relations between Thais and foreigners’, so the movie should be more than just another sentimental love story.

One of the first things that impressed me about Dan and Marius before I signed up with them was that they are very committed to “Thai Girl” and its themes and so, I hope, will make a movie that’s true to the book. I put it to them that the ending isn’t very Hollywood but, they said, two star-crossed lovers called Romeo and Juliet likewise failed to overcome the forces that kept them apart and their story has made some great movies. The happy couple do not have to sail off into the sunset together for it to make it a successful movie.

I’m thus hopeful that an engaging film will emerge that is positive about Thailand, that showcases some of the finest visitor attractions here and is respectful of the Thai people generally. There’s a tendency for movies set in Thailand to focus on a seedy fantasy land of sex and drugs and crime. In strong contrast the “Thai Girl” characters are down to earth, ordinary and real. Ben is fresh and clean living and Fon is not a bar girl but is a serious Buddhist who works hard for her family.

While Ben is intrigued by the Bangkok bar scene, he thus does not waver in his passion for Fon but struggles to understand why young Thai women are so readily treated as a saleable commodity to attract single male tourists to Thailand. When he visits her village in Buriram with Fon, he begins to understand how farming is no longer a viable way of life and that young people, Fon included, have to find a new life for themselves far from home in a perilous world. His experiences with Fon illustrate for him all the stark issues that confront the more thoughtful western visitor to Thailand, an aspect to the story that can give the movie depth as well as just being entertaining.

Finally, what existing movies are there already about young travelers exploring the cultural mysteries of Thailand? Apart from “The Beach”, (which was about an anonymous ‘desert island’ community and made very little specific reference to Thailand), there really aren’t any at all. Given the enduring popularity of Thailand with young visitors, this is thus an extraordinary omission and a huge opportunity for a movie maker.

Current economic conditions aren’t that good for financing a movie but nonetheless the industry grinds slowly on. “Thai Girl” won’t be an expensive movie to make and, in difficult times it’s a great moment to produce a love story that’s poignant and beautiful and plucks at the world’s heart strings.

Writing “Thai Girl” has been a very rewarding experience for me… “Thai Girl”, the movie would be the icing on the cake.

I can’t wait to see it on the big screen!

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” blog. September 2009

Thai Education - A Small Gleam of Light

2009-09-04T11:34:00.023+07:00

Any headmaster would glow with pride at the achievement of his school in running so joyful and exuberant a sports festival as the one Cat and I have just attended at the small primary school here in our remote Surin village.

I sometimes read dire things about Thai education in the media… that levels of achievement in Thai schools are depressingly poor compared to those in similar countries and that Thai children don’t read books. Universities are said to be dismal temples to rote learning and conformity where smart student uniforms and glossy degree ceremonies are more important than academic rigour or creative thinking.

On these things I can hardly comment… all I know is that our village school is a delightful and happy place which is just how a primary school should be!

It’s a small school with about a hundred children aged from four to twelve. Funding is short, the wooden upper storey of the building is literally collapsing and the children are all from poor rice farming families. But it’s full of energy and fun, the classrooms are bright with childrens’ work covering the walls and the teachers are gentle and dedicated. I’m sure that the kids will later look back on their years here as a golden time before they faced the uncertainties of finding a life as adults in a place where farming is viable only if you have enough land.

The annual two day sports festival that’s just been held was a big event involving the whole community and it was fun all the way.

It started early with raising and saluting the Flag, followed by a tribute to the King and then a parade.

The first event was a display of dancing by some ladies of the village. I’m so glad this was traditional and dignified and not a silly imitation of the modern pop dancing that’s inescapable on Thai television.

Then came a display of dancing by some of the oldest girls. It’s hard to believe that they’re eleven and twelve, something that perhaps reflects on poor nutrition.

They were then followed by another troupe of girls all dressed in pink.

The performers then all assembled in front of the teachers and VIPs for congratulations on the work they’d done, before the running races got under way.

The children all seem to be tiny but they ran incredibly fast. An over-sixties race was devised to drag me into the limelight, my only problem being that half the field were in their forties. I managed to hit the tape first with my hand but this didn’t count so the little girl in the pretty dress brought a silver medal for me and not the gold!

The second day saw a series of novelty events and races in the morning followed by football on the afternoon. I missed Cat playing for one of the womens’ sides but I watched the mens’ match later. And was it fast and furious… far more entertaining than a dull World Cup match moving glacially towards a penalty shoot-out.

That evening there was a big party in the school hall with food for everyone, a live band and presentation of all the trophies for the two days of events. It was a riotous ending to a memorable event and it went on quite late.

The whole thing reminded me that one thing the Thais are particularly good at is throwing a party and making it riotous all the way. Fun it was but the sports festival was also important as institution building for the school and for developing community spirit within the village.

I have no way of knowing how good the school is in academic terms but that probably is not its only or principal focus. I’m sure the children generally leave the school with basic literacy and numeracy, also knowing their ‘abc’ and able to say ‘siddow pree’ and ‘stannup pree’ and all that is a substantial achievement. In any even, too academic approach is probably irrelevant for the village children.

It seems that Thai education is not over-academic but looks to wider aims of community and nation building, of developing collective responsibility in its pupils, protecting them from the dangers of drug taking and promotes team spirit and good health through sporting activities. And these things our school seems to do very well indeed.

I like and admire the dedication of the teachers to the children and that’s why Cat and I have worked hard, initially with a generous Japanese friend, to provide school lunches for the children. While not exactly malnourished, these little Thai school girls and boys are evidently very tiny and a large proportion of them are in fact under the correct body weight for their ages.

As official funding does not run to providing lunches throughout the year, the children just bringing a small quantity of rice with them to school, Cat and I have been collecting donations from friends and readers of this blog to make sure they have a proper cooked meal with meat and vegetables every day. (See my blog articles, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’, 12 Dec 2008, and ‘Thai School Girls Are So Appealing’, 19 Jan 2009.)

A second project has been to build a large chicken shed for egg production. The chickens are now laying about a hundred eggs a day but the money to pay for the chickens and for feed has been borrowed and needs to be repaid. Thanks to readers of this blog, some donations have come in but we still have a little way to go. (See my blog article ‘A Quick Trick Chick Factory’, 13 August 2009.)

Living as I do in this village community, I feel it’s important to make a contribution of some sort and how better a way than this. The school is a real credit to the teachers and to everyone else and is worthy of whatever help we can give.

It’s a bright spark of light that counters the doom-laden criticisms one too often hears about education in Thailand and I love it because it's such a happy place.

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog August 2009

'Thai Girls' v. Western Ones? - To Be a Bitter Man! Revisited

2009-08-27T11:49:00.003+07:00

Bangkok Dangerous! A retired farang art teacher with two professional women (a primary teacher and an insurance salesperson). Is he at risk of getting gobbled up?

My last two blog articles have been long and serious and so perhaps it's time to lighten things a bit.

The topic of sleazy old western men proposing marriage to Bangkok bar girls and what each expects from the relationship is an endless subject for debate. Of course really the men are honest and decent and the girl has a heart of gold and only wants to take care of her mother. And they'll live happily ever after with never a tension about money or the fact he snores and won't eat insects.

In February I posted a blog under the above title and it had a huge flow of readers, mainly males of the long nosed variety.

Having today received an interesting new Comment from 'Bluebird',a Thai woman on the topic, I now want to draw your attention to it.

Ugly western men have regularly made offensive advances to Bluebird, she says, on the assumption that 'all Thai girls are for sale'. How can these men expect happiness if they take on a Thai wife years their junior, expecting her to be 'a docile mouse who'll be their whore, nursemaid and housekeeper'.

In my Comment that follows hers, I then regret the fact and ask why Thai womanhood has got this terrible reputation of being open to all offers. Is it their fault, the fault of Thai men who accord them too lowly a status or governments that have connived at rampant sex tourism?

So let's revisit that blog article, please read Bluebird's new Comment and let battle recommence. The truth is out there somewhere!

TO FIND the February blog article, "'Thai Girls' v. Western Ones"...

....scan down the right hand margin to 'Blog Archive', click on February, scan down to 'Blog Archive' again and click on the article's title that should appear.

Can Oxfam Really Help Thailand's Rural Poor?

2009-08-22T09:20:00.010+07:00

Home to a large family, this house in our Surin village is quite typical around here.

Once their modest rice harvest is threshed, many of them will leave to find work in the cities as there's no livelihood for them here during the long dry season.

An old hunter gatherer enjoys the luxury of his new kitchen.

The wealthier old men spend every day out in the fields looking for grass for their two or three buffaloes. By feeding up and selling one calf a year, their notional annual income is thus about 10,000 baht or 200 Pounds Sterling.

[This blog is long but please scan down it and you’ll find my appeal for your Comments and thoughts on the wider issues below.]

Tackling rural poverty...

Lifting Thailand’s rural poor out of poverty is the key to the country’s future, but how to do it? I for one don’t have any real answers.

My efforts to promote egg production at our local village school (that I wrote about in the previous blog article) reminds me though of my long-standing interest in the small scale development work of Oxfam, the well-known NGO based in Oxford in the British midlands.

Their philosophy always seemed so very right and principles of sustainability chime so well with the more recent ideas of integrated farming and sufficiency. But how effective can this really be for solving the problems of rural Thailand?

Oxfam still has the right approach but the huge limitation that I see from living in a rice growing village in Thailand’s North East is that with a large population in the countryside there just isn’t enough land to go round. Agriculture is thus only a part of any possible answer to rural poverty.

My wife, Cat, has vividly described for me her childhood in a poor landless family here in the North East of Thailand where they lived essentially as hunter gatherers. Papa rarely if ever had any paid work and so they lived by foraging in the forests and hunting for insects, frogs, fish and rats and whatever else flew or crawled on the face of the earth. Her experience is quite typical of how life has been but now in some respects it’s even more difficult today.

In this way they raised a family of seven children and all the aunties and uncles had similar large broods. All of them eventually inherited parcels of rice land but these are small. When Papa gets old and the land is again divided among the seven children, the tiny plots hardly provide enough rice for their own consumption let alone a surplus to sell for cash. Most families do not have enough land to provide even a marginal living. To add to the problem, the forests that Cat describes as their main source of food are now all gone. The harsh truth is that the countryside can therefore no longer support its growing population.

Agriculture is of course still hugely important and governments and NGOs such as Oxfam can work to make it more efficient but any suggestion that the land is the sole or principle answer to rural poverty would be highly misleading.

I was therefore interested recently to learn something more of Oxfam’s approach to this conundrum as Oxfam and I go back a very long way and I have a lot of respect for its development work. If in my life I’ve done anything of permanent value it was being instrumental in establishing Oxfam Hong Kong, now a major independent Oxfam.

In the mid-seventies when lecturing at the University of Hong Kong I joined the local Oxfam group which ran the usual small shop selling second hand clothes. I then persuaded the committee to allow me to start general fund raising based on articles I wrote for the South China Morning Post on development issues and Oxfam’s work in the developing world.

When Pearl and Dean, the advertising agents for the new mass rapid transit railway were failing to fill their huge advertising hoardings, I persuaded them to let us have some space for free. We splurged on quality posters depicting classic images of starving Africans and the money came pouring in. This way we raised hundreds of thousands of pounds to send back to Oxfam’s head office in Oxford and when the Somali famine hit, we employed a full time fund raiser. Millions came in through the generosity of Hong Kong people, many of whom could remember poverty, and the rest is history. Now Oxfam Hong Kong is a huge independent organisation with its own extensive development programs throughout the region.

For me it was an exciting time. Every year I visited Oxford and had meetings with the Oxfam big wigs, including Frank Judd, then the director. And they in turn visited us in Hong Kong, always staying in my large university flat. At the time China was opening up and there was a steady flow of Oxfam staff planning new projects there. They were interesting men of the generation who’d gone through World War Two and had later found new and exciting work with Oxfam. I best remember Bernard Llewellyn and Guy Stringer, the deputy director, both larger than life characters sprung from a very turbulent era.

Bernard’s wartime experiences with The Friends Ambulance Service in China became the subject of a book he wrote and I’ll never forget Guy telling how he took the first shipment of emergency aid into Phnom Penh after the overthrow of Pol Pot. The stories of a barge being loaded in Hong Kong and towed up the Mekong (where they were charged customs duty on the shipment!) and how their engineers worked on getting water supplies going and restarting the cotton mill are worthy of books in themselves.

Guy and his wife Mary later stayed with me in Singapore when we tried to perform the same miracle again, to launch another new Oxfam, but sadly we hit a brick wall. The Singapore government refused registration of ‘Oxfam Singapore’ with no reasons given and despite the strong support of many individuals that was the end of a great idea.

Only this summer I was saddened to see an obituary notice for Guy Stringer in The Times, Mary having died a few years ago. Characters like these pass one’s way but rarely and I’m grateful for my involvement with them and with Oxfam.

In April I was thus very pleased to see on the agenda of the FCCT (Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand) that staff from the Bangkok office of Oxfam were to make a presentation of a new Oxfam report entitled “The Right to Survive: The Humanitarian Challenge for the Twenty-First Century.” The key point of this paper is that because of climate and environmental change the number of people affected by natural disasters will double and plans must be made to mitigate the impact and to provide additional emergency relief.

I of course went along to the meeting at the FCCT in Bangkok where one of the three Oxfam staff also presented information about work they are supporting in Yasothon promoting the growing of organic rice. According to the hand-out, one farm had actually doubled its yield of rice as well as presumably getting a better price for the organic rice produced. How this was achieved was not explained and while I stood up and asked some questions of the Oxfam panel, I am still intrigued and perplexed as I thought that organic yields would be lower.

It also came as a surprise to me that Oxfam was doing development work here but their website tells me (www.oxfam.org.uk/oxfam-in-action/regions/eastasia.html) that though Thailand is a middle-income country, pockets of poverty exist. Their work here focuses on achieving sustainable livelihoods through crop diversification and developing organic standards and practices. They also promote training of farmers on soil improvement and ecologically friendly pest-control as well as rice breeding and seed selection. Finally, it says, they aim to achieve community marketing so that farmers can get a better price for their crops.

After the FCCT meeting I chatted to a couple of the Oxfam staff and expressed my dismay at the struggle the people in my Surin village have trying to make a living from the land. One of them was distinctly upbeat though and, he said, with a few relevant tweaks from Oxfam they could soon change their lives for the better.

I am still unsure what these ideas might be though and felt frustrated that my questions could not clarify what exactly Oxfam had in mind. I therefore wrote a long ‘stream-of-consciousness’ memo and emailed it to the three Oxfam staff who had made the presentation at the FCCT.

Understandably, all I got was an ‘out of office’ reply from one of them (on 21 April 2009), but I received nothing more. Though I realize public relations is not the focus of their work and that they’d have no time to read a long memo from a nutty enthusiast, I admit I was a bit disappointed at their silence.

I have therefore added the text of my Memo to the end of this blog in the hope somebody reads it and, needless to say, I long for your Comments on the issues raised here, whether you be a Thai or a farang who loves rural Thailand and are concerned for its people.

Middle class urban Thais (who of course run this country) may often know little of the lives of the rural poor on whose cheap labour they rely for their comfortable life-styles. At least Thaksin Shinawatra when prime minister, made an effort to get into the villages and to inform himself, even if this was political grandstanding. Even so, he had no real answers other than pouring in money and, for example, his million ‘rent-a cow’ project lifted nobody out of poverty, except perhaps the overpaid administrators who spent huge sums for each cow put into the scheme.

In strange contrast there are many farang who live, as I do, deep in the Thai countryside who become knowledgeable about country life and farming. I would especially love to receive some thoughts and comments from you. So do please post a Comment and tell me your thoughts on the future of the Thai countryside.

The memo that I sent to Oxfam in April now follows on…

Some Reflections on the OXFAM Global Warming Report

From: Andrew Hicks
Surin
arhicks56@hotmail.com

1. Your report is impressive and covers a vast canvas. As I have lived for some time in a small rice village in Surin, the case study on organic rice in Yasothon was an interesting focus. I am still perplexed though how it is possible to produce as good a yield as rice chemically fertilized. The number of buffaloes has fallen substantially in recent years and as they are already grazed in the fields over the dry season and the manure from their stalls is used on the fields annually, I do not see where any additional natural fertilization comes from. Mangorn, my brother in law also ploughs in the stubble soon after the crop partly to avoid the scourge of neighbours burning theirs off and the fires spreading so I am not sure what else he can do to improve fertility. I also wonder how pests are controlled.

2. The land in our village is very flat and water seems well managed with the water courses canalized by weirs, so there seems to be little further run-off and water loss that could be reduced. Being flat there is also little opportunity for reservoirs. Small ponds cannot contribute to rice cultivation so I’m not sure how water management can be better achieved. How about seed types that need less water?

3. Mangorn produces good quality khao hawm mali rice and I’ve always thought that the way to improve his income would be to cut out the middle men. If only he could be part of a co-operative or fair trade association that would allow the rice to be bagged and retailed or even exported (value being added locally) without the intervention of so many middle men. How can he do this without getting murdered by the millers?

4. Things are changing fast even in the six years I have been in the village. There is now a labour shortage so that some small farmers cast the seed rather than pricking out each seedling which leads to lower yields. For the first time this year Mangorn used a combine harvester as he despaired of finding labour. The full story and pictures are on my blog at www.thaigirl2004.blogspot.com. The Tyranny of Rice, 23/11/1008. (See also There’s Fish in Them Rice Fields, 19/1/2008, Harvest Home, 15/12/2007 and Whither the Rice Harvest? 12/7/2007, and many other blog articles on the local economy in the village.)

5. I’m not sure that talking about food security in the context of Isaan is relevant any more. This is now as much a remittance economy as an agricultural one. Families of my wife’s generation typically had seven children and as Papa divides the farm between them, land holdings become pathetically small. The fit thus have to leave the village to find work leaving behind children and grandparents and creating a massive social problem of which you are well aware.

6. How can economic activity be created to keep people in the village? It is hard to see how to improve the efficiency of such tiny land holdings. The ‘modern’ way that tends to occur is that the successful buy up the farms of the failing farmers and larger and more efficient holdings result. This also means more landless families, bringing the problems of poverty and an increasing wealth gap, as for example is so stark in the Philippines. It’s what may gradually happen in Isaan too, unless there is strong official intervention to keep the local economy intact. However, when officials talk about Isaan they tend to focus only on agriculture which is a big mistake.

7. The problem is beyond the scope of small scale development assistance which nonetheless still has a role to play. What is fundamentally needed is an official policy of regional development, devolving official agencies out of Bangkok and more importantly providing infrastructure and incentives for small industry in the regional centres. This would bring jobs and the modern wage economy to the people rather than uprooting them and cramming them into an overcrowded capital and Eastern seaboard. As a stimulus package and a populist policy, regional development going beyond agriculture is an opportunity that is sadly being missed.

8. In our local market town, Sangkha, there is one small garment factory employing a few hundred people that has been set up recently. With lower land and labour costs I hope it is a success as it could be a model for this sort of development. Could Oxfam study it and present it as a model for policy makers? (In passing, Khun Mechai of Cabbages and Condoms fame has promoted a small industrial estate, called T Bird as I remember, in Nang Rong, Buriram and this is a great experiment, but how to build on its success?)

9. Small isolated development projects are of course a drop in the ocean unless they inspire replication and a pyramid effect. This needs the participation of strong local agencies. I often wonder how effective official agricultural extension work is for example. I’ve never heard of it being used in Surin and I wonder if our local farmers’ instead just work traditionally on a hit and miss basis. Language excludes me from a full understanding of what goes on but I do not get the feeling that rice farmers are very professional in their approach. I cannot for example imagine anyone reading a conventional manual on converting their farms to organic rice. How about therefore developing handbooks on integrated or organic farming or whatever in the cartoon style of story book found on every news stand in Thailand? (In the eighties Singapore was having an economic downturn and presented its pay cuts and stringency measures to its populace by means of cartoon books… and why not.)

10. Local schools are another opportunity to promote development aims if you could get local education ministries on side. In our village school, my wife and I are working on a very small scale assistance scheme with the generous help of a friend in Japan, starting first with a free lunch programme… 45% of the children are under their correct body eight and otherwise eat only rice during the school day. (See www.adoptavillageschool.org and www.thaigirl2004.blogspot.com, Do They Know It’s Christmas, 12/12/2008.) My daughter in UK has just given us 50,000 baht (sadly not tax deductible) for a project in the school. The teachers who are most impressive, immediately proposed a chicken/egg house which is now newly built and when I get back to the village I will photograph it and post a blog of the story. It is a dream project if done well. The children will do all the work of running the project and I think the teachers see the potential for integrating the project into the curriculum with teaching of mathematics etc.

11. Formal employment is limited in the rural areas so most people start small businesses. Sadly they have limited expertise in managing the money so most businesses should never be started or unnecessarily fail. Nobody does a business plan even on the back of a cigarette packet and they seem to have a limited concept of profitability. If their business generates a flow of cash they just spend the money and have a good time, keeping no accounts. Teaching basic business skills as part of the early curriculum in schools could thus make a huge contribution to poor areas, helping to avoid the many hopeless projects that people throw themselves into, miring them in debt. Within a few hundred yards of our home three of the poorest families bought brand new Nissan pickups (top of the range of course) as these were on offer for a deposit of 9,000 baht. Within a year all had failed to use them to generate sufficient income to pay the finance and all the pickups were repossessed, leaving the families with massive unpaid debt. One of the families has fled the scene and disappeared, probably beholden to loan sharks, leaving their house derelict.

12. I do not yet know if the chicken/egg project would actually be viable as an independent business. Eggs may be so cheap that the capital cost and inputs such as feed will make it unprofitable. At present local chickens are free range scrawny things, but at least they cost nothing to feed. If hopefully raising chickens under cover is viable, a generation of children should leave the school with a grasp of how to do this and most essentially how to manage the money and of the concept of profitablity.

13. A development agency could work on a project such as this and create a blueprint on how to do it, with costings and designs for the building and equipment, feed and finance and with classroom materials such as maths and accounting and cartoon style manuals on how to run the business. Then it would be essential to promote the idea to school authorities and to assist them to launch multiple projects in rural schools. Our school runs from age five to twelve and this is a good age when the children are receptive to ideas such as this. A new generation could be given essential small business skill that at present are lacking.

14. Our school has a large fish pond but at present there is no money for fish food. They want to develop this as the next project, perhaps using organic methods of creating a sustainable eco-system in the pond. They are already trying, but no big fish I think result.

15. Returning to agriculture, in the last six years in Surin I have seen a big diversification into rubber, cassava and sugar cane. Rubber is a long term risk but the story about cassava and sugar that I usually hear is that prices fall during the growing period and money is lost. Farmers generally have no money to put into diversification and when the hoped for profits fail to materialize, they fall further into debt. Rather than focusing on farming, the only answer is for the men to go and work in the factories and building sites and the prettier girls go off to Pattaya, Patong and Patpong. All very sad.

16. Are there no new magic crops that can be pulled out of the hat? Is there anything the Israelis do that does not need heavy irrigation or capital inputs? How about ground nuts, cotton, sorghum and cassava that are key cash crops in the savannah of Northern Nigeria which has a similar climate of rainy season followed by a six month drought. Indonesia grows black pepper and vanilla which are called ‘green gold’ and I wish there was something new for us here in Surin. One can talk glibly about integrated agriculture and growing vegetables to lift people suffering drought out of poverty but in reality it is desperately difficult. Plants shrivel in the heat and even if successful they sell in the market for very little.

17. Raising pigs, frogs, insects, mushrooms and cat fish are all possible projects but it isn’t easy to be successful. Inputs such as feed usually deny a profit.

18. On my blog at www.thaigirl2004.blogspot.com there are numerous articles and photos about Mangorn and his struggle to support his family through farming. Also about our efforts at the school and about social problems in the village generally. If OXFAM can use any of the text or photos in any way, I’d be delighted.

19. I have also written on these subjects in a book now widely available at all bookshops in Thailand, called MY THAI GIRL AND I. This is my story of meeting my wife, Cat, and coming to live in our Surin village. (See www.thaigirl2004.com) It is also a vehicle for me to describe in a popular style the crisis in agriculture and for example the struggle of Cat’s brother, Mangorn to feed his family. There is one mention of OXFAM in it. During the late seventies and early eighties I lived in Hong Kong and with my then wife, we joined the local Oxfam group which ran the usual shop and persuaded them to let us begin general fund raising. When we managed to raise many hundreds of thousands of pounds a year Oxford showed great interest and support, we employed a part time fund raiser and the rest is history. Hong Kong was a ‘virgin’ community for such fund raising and I’m sure you know much more about the success of Oxfam Hong Kong than I do. I’m proud though to have been instrumental in getting it started and for several years Oxfam was a big part of our lives.

It is good to have made contact and I shall in future follow your work here more closely.

Andrew Hicks
April 2009

A Quick Trick Thai Chick Factory!

2009-08-13T09:40:00.013+07:00

Children enjoy Guides and Scouting at our village school

Cleaning teeth after the lunch we've been providing for them.
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With a big donation we've just built the school a new chicken house

Headmaster and staff inspect the eighty new chickens.

The headmaster signs for the first 20,000 baht towards the costs.

A record is kept of money paid for lunches and capital items.

Children look after the chickens and record the eggs laid each day.

Three months' feed has cost 21,420 baht, eighty chickens 16,000 and cages 7,500. We now need to raise donations to pay off the 45,000 baht borrowed to pay for them. (Approx US$/Baht 34, Euro/Baht 48, Pound Sterling/Baht 55.)

Helping Out At Our Village School

Times are particularly hard at present for the people in my rice growing village in Surin province in Thailand and as a wanderer from a wealthier world I’d really like to do something to help.

It’s Thai children who have the simplest needs and so the village school in Ban Mahachai is the obvious place to try.

In my blog called, “Do They Know It’s Christmas”, 12 December 2008 I told you about the plan set up through the generosity of a Japanese friend to benefit the school. You can find the details on www.adoptavillageschool.com in which our key project has been providing the children with lunches during the school day.

My blog of 19 January 2009 called “Thai School Girls Are So Appealing” tells how your generous response enabled the lunch program to be continued.

At first our idea was to provide the school with IT equipment but on hearing that almost half the children were below the recommended body weight, we started with something more basic, to make sure they have at least one proper meal a day.

The teachers tell us that the childrens’ general health and their concentration in the afternoon has improved since we started and we are keen to raise more donations to keep the lunch program going. In response to my appeal, readers of this blog gave us many donations for lunches, though more funds are still needed of course!

The new school chicken factory!
The big news now is that we have recently had a major donation of 50,000 baht which has been used to build a substantial shed for raising chickens for eggs. When news came of the offer, the teachers leapt at it, had estimates quickly drawn up and within weeks a substantial shed was built, using that money.

Now eighty chickens, cages and feed for three months have been bought and eggs are being produced. The bad news is that the cost of these was 45,000 baht which has been borrowed and we now have to raise the money to pay off the loan.

At present the shed is at half capacity and on the same figures (ignoring the cost of additional feed) a further eighty chickens and cages for which there is plenty of space would cost about another 24,000 baht. In the longer term this should be our aim.

A first donation of 20,000 baht has already come in to reduce the loan, collected by an energetic friend from his contacts and colleagues in Thailand and Europe. This money the new headmaster received and signed for a few days ago.

However, to pay off the rest of the loan we still need 25,000 baht and perhaps as much again if we are to expand capacity with a second purchase of eighty more chickens. The aim is therefore to raise 50,000 baht if the project is to reach its full potential.

Like the lunch program, I therefore hope the money will come in as it’s a dream project that has everything going for it. All the hard daily work with the chickens is done by the children themselves. Every day a team of three kids are responsible for measuring the feed and putting it in the bins for the chickens, ensuring the water is flowing, and collecting the eggs and putting them in trays. They then have to report to Khun Thongchai, the teacher in charge and account for the number of eggs collected and for any eggs broken, and make up and sign the accounts book.

Another book records sales of eggs to local people and already shows the money slowly flowing in. All this provides a valuable discipline to the children in demonstrating how a business should operate with proper accounting. It always strikes me that as there is little formal employment in rural Thailand, this is an essential skill for the poorest of people running small farms and micro-businesses in the countryside. No accounts are generally kept and nobody knows what if any profit has been made.

At present the eggs being laid are small but their numbers are increasing and the chickens should be productive for about two years. When laying at their maximum, I hope that the eggs will provide sufficient income to make the project self-sustaining and allow a surplus of eggs to be used for school lunches. If the teachers could then include calculating the profitability of the business within the school math curriculum, the project would feed both the childrens' bodies and minds.

That’s why it’s such a perfect school project. Chickens round here are scrawny free range things and this experience of how to raise eggs properly in an efficient commercial way should be immensely beneficial for a generation of children.

We now need some donations to ensure that all the hard work that the teachers have put into the project comes to full and long-term fruition. They are very proud of their achievement so far and immensely grateful for what has been given to the school.

Every Little Helps!
Donations for lunches or the chicken project can be made in any currency to my Paypal account at www.paypal.com with reference to Andrew Hicks at arhicks56@hotmail.com.

Or do please email me at arhicks56@hotmail.com if you prefer to do an ATM transfer in baht direct to the project’s account with Kasikorn Bank.

Why Donate?
Most people round here are pretty poor. Farming is marginally profitable and there is little paid work. A daily wage is perhaps 150 baht or three Pounds Sterling, yet things such as medicines cost much as they do in the West. That’s why the needs are great and hy a small project such as this can really help the children. Because it’s still small, donations are not tax deductible though every cent, penny and satang is used effectively as there are no expenses or deductions before the money is spent.

Small surely still is beautiful!

Andrew Hicks

The “Thai Girl” Blog August 2009

Cook Chilli Sauce Burns Pork Frame Uncle

2009-08-06T09:31:00.006+07:00

A new line in paints? Good cover, I hope.

Can anyone identify the dishes on the menu?

Cook the menu, yes but who's believe this one!

Infectious enthusiasm for a photo shop.

The saga of Mama’s sickness looks like it’s going to run and run.

The crisis recurred only a day or two after holding the spirit ceremony to stop the shade of her grandmother calling her back to the spirit world. (See the blog article below.)

Since then she has been completely inert, unable to move from where she was lying on the floor and refusing to do anything for herself, clearly still in a state of emotional collapse. Then early one morning I heard noises down in the wooden house and could see the lights were on and that Saniam, who’d been attending her overnight, was up and about.

When I saw him coming up the garden, I went out onto the verandah and asked him what was up. Mama’s ‘mai sabai maak’, very sick indeed and needed to be taken to hospital immediately. Suffering from very bad back pains, she almost had to be carried to the car.

Still hardly light by the time we got to the local hospital, they quickly admitted her to a ward. Clearly her condition was critical and only intensive care would pull her back from the brink. Or so everyone seemed to think.

Saniam stayed with her while we went back to the village to find her younger sister who would surely want to be with her at this difficult time. We drove out to her village and found God, for such is her name, (though as nobody can pronounce God it sounds more like ‘Got’). We then returned immediately to the hospital and to our alarm found an ambulance about to transfer Mama to the big hospital in Surin, the provincial town an hour away.

It was a relief when Saniam and God went with her in the ambulance as we had children to look after back home that we couldn’t leave behind. And yes, the X Rays showed that her spine had collapsed and was crushing her kidneys which perhaps, explaining her incontinence. So as she believed, her transfer to the Surin hospital was a last desperate hope.

Cat and I made it to Surin the next day, having arranged things so that we could manage a bedside vigil for at least five days. That’s the Thai style… the whole family camps out at the hospital, perhaps sleeping on the floor under the bed, though as we had a four year old with us we found ourselves a small hotel and Saniam did the hard overnight shift.

As it turned out, Mama was discharged within forty eight hours and now seems as right as rain. The nice doctor seemed to know one word of English and that was “osteoporosis”, though he was totally lost when I asked about ‘HRT’. I often wonder how Thai doctors can qualify without apparently absorbing any English whatsoever, but nonetheless I had confidence in him and the diagnosis wasn’t very difficult anyway. Thankfully Mama’s kidneys are fine and she now has about six packets of different medicines that she’ll almost certainly fail to take and an appointment for follow up in a few weeks time. So that’ll mean another day trip into Surin which probably won’t advance her state of health one bit but will be useful as therapy.

We did manage a few amusing moments while in Surin though. Slipping away for an evening meal, we went to the Hua Moon Steak restaurant near the Tawan Daeng nightclub that I’d highly recommend for its menu. (082-156-7651.)

The food was imitation farang food of the kind that makes you feel at home but then subverts the cuisine with bizarre anomalies… the mayonnaise covering the salad is sickly sweet, while the steak is massive but with a garnish of only about five chips. Euro-food in Thailand is often a bit different, more confusion than fusion, but what was really good was the menu itself.

For 59 baht you could have, “Cook chilli sauce burns pork frame uncle with rice”, or “Cook the vegetables Yes, pork frame uncle with rice”. Our sides were splitting not from overeating, though I had a generous fish steak (with five chips) and so never discovered what these culinary delights might be.

Can anyone suggest what they could possibly be? A result of misusing a dictionary, though I cannot begin to identify the errors.

I also stopped off at a builders’ merchants to get some paint and discovered that the CIA has moved into the market with an attractive brochure. Remembering that they ran an airline, ‘Air America’ to support their illegal activities in Indo-China during that ill-fated war, selling paints should be no surprise and is much more benign.

Meanwhile, in the hospital everyone was wearing face masks, swine flu being the obsession of the moment. I even saw a photographic shop with a picture of a white looking bunny and a white looking baby on the front called “Virus Studio”.

Perhaps H1N1 is not a virus at all but is really a football score… ‘Huddersfield Town 1, Newcastle United 1’.

Though I remember the economic damage to Thailand caused by the international media playing up the threat of SARS as a good news story. The rest, as they say, is hysteria.

Anyway, on the way back from Surin I insisted on stocking up our little shop that Mama used to sit in all day before she so dramatically withdrew from life. It was fun for her handing out alcohol to the old boys on tick and my losses on the shop were far better value and more therapeutic for her than any medicine. So I’m more than happy to see that Mama is more herself today and is now back in the shop as usual, enjoying the long vigil between customers.

She’s had a hard life and, being a few years older than me, is very old indeed and deserves a crisis or two. I just hope she doesn’t have too many more though. It’s not the first time I’ve seen neighbours dragged away to die, only to be seen wandering down the soi with their buffaloes a day or two later, so perhaps this is normal behaviour.

So how do we now help her deal with osteoporosis and all the problems of ageing?

Should I have a late life crisis myself and how should I now face up to the problems of living in Isaan with an extended family of farmers whose health beliefs are so very different to mine?

Life is a constant process of substituting one problem for the next and I never know what’s just around the corner, living here in Thailand.

At least the mower’s running okay now!

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl Blog” - Retirement and Relationships in Thailand.

August 2009