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
