Don't take this as a condemnation of Thai Culture.. it's not. Nor is it a condemnation of the Thai people.. they are still pretty likable and affable.. but Bangkok is a shit hole...
Let's start with the architecture.. I've seen bad cement architecture all over the world.. but it almost feels like it was born in Bangkok.
I have been trying to understand Thai Culture since I was about 15, when I lived with a Thai Person for two years, whom I still find to be interesting. I have been trying to understand his culture ever since, through three major trips, and a lot of research, movie watching, and book reading, and I still am intrigued... but I have had enough of Bangkok...
I'll try to explain this city, which was nothing but a flat chunk of jungle east of the Chao Praya river until the Mid 1700's, when the King decided it was time for a clean break from the apparently decadent reputation of Ayuthaya, once the biggest city in the world, about 60 miles up the river. He wanted to be closer to where the ships came in, where the money rolled in from foreign trade, and he almost randomly picked the spot that would turn into the city of 6 Million that everyone knows today worldwide as someplace you go to be indifferent to propriety. It was a flat spot on a river where they could build a new palace. There is only one tributary of any note, and the harbor is just a siding on the river. It was never meant to be what it is today, they didn't even dream of it!
30 years ago, BKK must have been intriguing and cool.. now it's just a mechanical travesty... there is no rebellion left in Bangkok among the regular people.. no one condemns you... it's all pretty pointless.. people shop, and are steamrolled by consumerism in a place with no irony or defense mechanisms towards it, mall after mall popping up on what were old paths for yaks and paddies with no defenses for what came. tourists do illegal things in crappy hotels with no real culture or charm apparent for miles...
Let me try to explain why it is what it is, before I light into what's so subtly but not subtly wrong with it. Until Bangkok became big in the last century, the only place to retreat Thai village life if you didn't fit in, the mega city, the only real city in this nation of 60 million, there was purely village life... there had been Aythaya, and Sukhothai, and there is Chiang Mai and a few other large towns, but they don't tend to be much more than just places of commerce, and a few tourist traps, all kind of sprung up in the last 50 years... Thai life was village life.. that is all there is.. you grow rice, you hang out, and you don't question much, because life is pretty good.
Some of the issues lie in national philosophies not made for the attentive attitude it takes to successfully run a city, of Buddhism and King Power.. life sucks, deal with it, and don't question authority, even though he seems like a nice guy... that doesn't create a dynamic for innovation or adaptation... so what happened when the Thai moved to a city, and turned it into a huge megalopolis.. well, no innovation, and.. no concern for comfort or charm (Buddhists will just tell you you will pay for it anyways) and in that way that the Thai just kind of keep to their families, don't tend to make close friends outside of them unless they grew up in a village among other kids, the whole place is built behind walls and little compounds, not that there is a lot of theft, there really isn't, but there is enough of a fantasy that you are under threat without big men with guns protecting you that Bangkok has no reverence for public spaces... none, Zero! There is no precedent for urban culture.. so people drop Thai behavior for what feels like a combo of Singaporean, Chinese and Japanese Norms... with the under girding of Thai Culture, but it's lost in the modernity.. there is no internal template for them to follow to act like a real city, or to create a modern functioning city.. this is the only one they have, and they kind of don't like to rock the boat.. everyone lives behind a wall and shuffles between life's obligations, surprisingly, with a smile.Again.. my fight is not with the apparent niceness of everyone, but if everyone is so nice, why is the city such a shit hole? People point to corruption.. but I will point to the people.. you have to put up with corruption, and they do.. you have to not want more than you have, and they don't seem to.. that's un-Thai.. the King gave you everything you need.. quit complaining.. complaining will make you seem like you are at odds with the King.. don't make daddy angry... if you seem to be at odds with the King, you end up like Thaksin, who wasn't really that corrupt to be honest, but he got aced out..
If it wasn't for Thaksin, Bangkok would be a completely intolerable shit hole.. now it's a barely tolerable shit hole.. what's the difference? well, he built the sky train and the metro, the new airport, and some of the highways, and returned a modicum of functionality to the place. It's just good enough that you don't leave howling about how you spent your whole vacation in trafic now.. of course they exiled him for it, even though the postmortems find barely any corruption by Thai standards in these public works, which while not perfect were the only change in Bangkok in literally 40 years...I'm not for rice farmer socialism, but the guy did some good things.. Maybe his reward is to live in exile in London, a city that actually does work.
So in the 70's Bangkok was the place, and in the 80's, everyone heard that song from the play Chess.. and we were all intrigued... a place with no rules.. a place that will change your northern European perspective on almost anything... the truth is that that can describe almost everyplace in Asia as lax, commercially driven and permissive (except Malaysia for some reason.. I think his name was Mohammad..) but somehow Bangkok got the rep for having no reservations whatsoever about being totally Asian... so now it's just filled with expats who don't have the creativity or drive for places where things are really happening like Singapore or Hong Kong, or more fascinatingly, Phnom Pehn or Yangoon or Shanghai or some places I haven't even thought to think about yet..Battambong or Yogyakarta or Dili or Bali, or just the countryside... or Korea where things are happening fast..The tourists who come to Bangkok are a pretty uniformly unimaginative bunch.. it's in the collective psyche as 'where you go in Asia' so generation after generation falls for it.. cheap flights and no entry visa, great food you have been eating since some cool kid took you to a Thai restaurant in college. Buddha Ex Machina.. the Thai machine has savory sweet spicy tentacles everywhere!
The Thai way is to accept while not changing.. it's hard to explain that precisely.. they allow for change, but they don't own or embody it. Foreigners and rich people want a highway? sure..ummm.. stick one over there... skytrain.. why not.. that'll work.. but they don't rise or fall on success.. what they do isn't who they are like it is in a more ambitious place like China. everything is kind of good enough... good enough works great in a rice village... it's what's so great about Thailand.. but not in a city.. it just doesn't work...
I try to imagine when it was still intriguing for Thai people to see foreigners.. it must have been back in the 30's.. after WWII they were over us, but we kept coming, so instead of trying to trade cultures, people blew wind up the Thai nations ass like they were super special, and I will admit in some ways they are, and now the Thai take our money in exchange for charmless uninspired access to their hum drum existence that has been on a downhill slope since the first car hit Thailand...
what makes it hard to be mad at Thailand is that they are hard to demonize.. almost to a person, the Thai can smile and disarm you.. but they do stupid shit... and they never really hold each other to task for it.. they just avoid each other.. so it's like a consequence free society... a lot of third world countries are, but you tend to see the dysfunction a lot quicker in places less beguilingly charming as good ol' Siam.
Want to read more about Thailand?
this is a post on The Environmental State of Thailand
Here is another on the simple Pro's and Con's of Thailand
You kinda skirted around why Thais don't really address the reality of modern society and I think it's rooted in their culture of not losing face. They can't accept any slight unintended suggestion of criticism, nor gracefully accept any well meaning suggestion of how to improve their work, business or life and as a result two-faced dysfunction rules their daily lives through all tiers of government or administration. Sadly they are also very media superficial in their thinking - the way you look scores way ahead of brains and ability and it is no surprise that their great bureaucracies are staffed by incompetents. Add to this a poorly paid police force where senior officials buy their appointments and recoup their investment by institutionalised backhanders and you have endemic corruption to add to incompetence. Thailand's saving grace is it is a net exporter of rice but it has managed to mess that up too in recent yesrs with scandalous corrupt practices.
ReplyDeleteMikey,
Deletesorry it took me so long to respond to your comment, and I agree.. Korea is about the only country I have visited in Asia where face isn't a big deal. you can insult people, but they take correction and disagreement pretty well. The Rice pricing stuff was kind of a sad outcome for the Shinowatra's whom I do have some sympathy for. Before he got elected, nothing had been done about anyhthing in a long time. Imagine trying to get around Bangkok today without the light rail, and sadly you see what happened there. It's a kind of petty society underneath the kindness, but thankfully the kindness is there, but again, bangkok and other parts of the country are becoming kind of a big shopping mall, and while it's in keeping with kind of a feminine thai culture, it's consumeristic as heck and they have no irony or defense mechanisms against it, although it's not as bad as singapore, it's heading that way.
I don't agree because here in America when you criticize the country of it's culture (like gun violence or corruption in the government), what I usually hear is even worse than in Asia. They would yell "if you like America get the f out of America," and everyone knows this is a fact. The Brits are not that different ... There are reasons why some people are more proud than others. People of countries that have never been colonized or lost a big war are usually very proud. Whereas, If a society is deep in colonial mentality like in the Philippines and the Latin Americas, they would laugh with you (if you are a white European) when you criticize their countries. It's this colonial mentality shit that kept their countries shitholes even though they appear more willing to take criticism. The Thais, Chinese, and Japanese (the Japanese has been tamed pretty well by the American though), on the other hand, have been freer people; and they want to express themselves in equal terms with the westerners. They don't like copying the west, even if it'd take longer for them to reach their goals. But these are what make them unique. If you understand this you can have a conversation with them. However, it's the westerners who usually approach other cultures with a mentality of feeling superior. These folks never wanted to truly understand any other culture apart from their own set of beliefs and values. That's why the Europeans and Americans still shit their pants when it comes to the growing influence and presence of muslim (and now Chinese) in the world. These people inherit ancient traditions and civilizations, which continue to move the earth, they are not gonna change if they don't want to. And now they are powerful, with demographic advantages and time on their sides. In the end, the European's mentality of superiority prevent them from accommodating other intellectual and cultural forces from other traditions.
DeleteAgain, you say some smart things,but I disagree this is eurocentric..
DeleteI would rather be in a smaller city anywhere that doesn't suffer from some of these issues.. to include Chiang Mai, Chiang Rai, etc.
Any culture doesn't like to see people make the same mistakes they made.. they would love it if people skipped to the reinfements that another culture learned in it's learning curve, especially when it comes to environmental things where it doesn't just hurt them, it hurts all of us, but it's hard to influence that way, or people like you call it colonial arrogance.. say what you will, it's what the chavismos say about global warming, but when people are suffering from problem's another culture already fixed it's hard not to see it as a mistake. But it's true that distinct and organic solutions are way cool when they do happen!
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ReplyDeleteIt is a shithole the police are twisted and corrupt beyond control, they randomly stop white westerners to demand bribes for no reason there have been huge numbers of murders of expats sometimes by their wives to get their property and money, if there is any trouble you can guarantee the police will blame the foriegner, the country is a corrupt degenerate haven shithole and massively overrated
ReplyDeleteNot just white foreigners, any foreigner (non-asian i.e)
Deleteit's better outside bangkok, but it sounds like it's falling on desperate times.. the pwoers that be are always threatened there.. they are afraid of the true dynamics of democracy.. hence there isn't much progress so people are always desperate while trying to be kind, but outside bangkok, it's better.
ReplyDeletebut there are many cooler places to be.. people say that burma is incredible right now, and Laos is much easier to take on a day to day basis.. calmer.
ReplyDeleteThis is the most fucking fake news shit I ever read. It's fine if you don't like Bangkok, because I also don't really like any big crowded city. But I spent time reading and could not find the reason you don't like it. Or is it because you don't have the knowledge of the place (Thaksin didn't build metro, it was long in construction before he even entered politics)?
ReplyDeleteThe Thai used to agricultural people, yes. But who didn't. The Japanese had the caste system, for a thousand years, in which if you were farmers you have to remain like that ... forever. They just changed that 150 years ago. The Thai society is multi-cultural. The Thai who built and inhabited Bangkok were (initially) the Thai-Chinese who never farmed. So they bring with them Chinese culture. This is why modern Bangkokian practice and enjoy both Thai and east-asian culture. Certainly their mindset was not one of provincial farmers. But it's kind of mixed.
Today, they may be laid back. But that's because the economy has slowed down. Like you said, the place used to be more upbeat in the 70s and 80s. Now their population is also peaking and will start to decline (which is not bad since they still get cheap labor from neighboring countries). But if you think a city is great only when the country GDP grows at 6-7% a year then may be you deserve a shithole like Phnom Pehn or Manila - where 60-70 million live in a space the size of south korea and with nothing to speak of in terms of infrastructure.
Other than the fascist 'Fake News' crap ( you seem too smart to waste your time with facist baiting..), you say some interesting things here.The Thai Chinese thing is certainly true, so maybe why BKK has a lot of the intensity of a chinese city. I've never been to manilla, but most of asia and LAtin America and I have had other people say the same thing about it, so agree that BKK is better than that, and I think most people would point to Catholic Family planning ( or lack thereof) in how the Philippines became what it is today. But it's not about growthor lack of growth..I think it's about bad planning, the unpleasantness of BKK is that it's so big that the bad planning is kind of insufferable, like say Nairobi or Mexico City. The bigger it got the less people invested, and now it's tough getting around and it has little charm away from the River..I agree that people should be left to their own devices to fix problems, and while it ain't manilla,it ain't paris or Singapore either.
DeleteI agree, it's shit hole and people there just mock at you and want your money! that's all they care about. Will never return there and will advise against going there to all of my friends! brrrr never again!
ReplyDeleteprostitute and hiv infested cesspool, the whole country, the people are counts too
ReplyDeleteThais are cunts
Delete100%. I understand Thai after spending 3.5 years. Was buried with work for the first 3 years so i never really understood thais except for how stand offish and segregated at work they were. After that I realized all they do is mock you (last one was random thai guy asking to the thai girl cashier about me, a random customer - he has the body of a guy but is he a guy or a girl?) Then after I stare at him, she goes "oh did he listen to us". Then I reply in "yes and i don't have a memebership, just let me pay my money and get out." To which the guy blabbers with no shame "oh look like he works here". Uncultured, envious and rude lot.
DeleteTook a year for my security guards to wai me though, so they can be slowly won over I think if you have a lot of patience.
Bankok is becoming like Orange Cunty!!
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