Perhaps a little case of burn-out

An
American in Asia:

His Quest for Cosmic Truth

(or at least a Decent Espresso)

Maybe I've been in Bangkok for a bit too long. I'm tied to my office desk like a chihuahua on one of those retractable leashes. It lets me go home for the evening or a weekend but the spring mechanism keeps tension in the line and I can constantly feel my thoughts being drawn back to work.

I think a lot about the tourism industry of Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. There's worse things to think about and worse desks to be tied to but I have to say I'm looking forward to a week or two back in the States.

I'm even looking forward to next week, when I'll be sent on assignment to Chiang Mai. I'll be spending all my northern Thai moments chasing down hoteliers and underpaid government workers and putting together two or four pages worth of news, but my desk will be a laptop in a four-star hotel and evenings I'll get to pound some pavement that isn't in Bangkok.

I still like Bangkok but I'm getting a little sick of my neighbourhood. I don't mind changing my behaviour to suit another culture. I'm still unquestionably myself whether I'm bowing stiffly or shaking hands.

However behaviour modification can sometimes have an insidious effect on one's core personality. I've made great strides towards perfecting the art of not meeting anyone's gaze while simultaneously keeping an eye on everything that everyone is doing or is about to do around me. I can walk with an oblivious expression on my face even as I'm ready to dodge around sellers of tourist crap and pirated DVDs. It's not a dangerous neighbourhood so much as an annoying one. And it's the sex tourists who are responsible.

Being a freedom-loving American, hopefully without also being a cut-out stereotype, I walk where I want to walk and enforce my own freedom by not allowing others to intimidate me. Don't even get me started on the world's wimpy response to terrorism ("Oh dear! Let's all stay home and let the government take care of it while the travel industry goes down in flames.")

Freedom always has a price. In my neighbourhood this means that on a trip to the grocery store I'll be called "handsome man" by two or three strangers at least, and most likely grabbed or groped by a woman, or a man who very much looks like one.

For these encounters I've developed the kind of reflexes only seen on blind monks in kung fu movies. I can walk calmly through a group of transvestites, dodging swipes of their colourful plastic nails, without making the deadly mistake of meeting their gaze and giving them the slightest reason to pursue my attention.

In any case, my eyes have to be busy keeping my feet away from gaping potholes, keeping my head away from dangling electrical wires and keeping all the rest of me away from speeding taxis.

If only I could close my ears off as easily as averting my eyes. I reserve a special kind of horrified shudder for those moments when I pass by tuk-tuk drivers who lean towards me conspiratorially and mumble the words, "Body massage." There is something about the way they pronounce the words that is like a dental drill on the spinal column of my soul. The "B" and the "d" splat to the ground like fat overripe grapes, the "o" is pronounced as a long vowel, cutting through the traffic noise with a hideous resonance. I can hear it echoing for long moments afterward and it just creeps me out. I can use my eye-trick to avoid viewing the worn page of pornography they are flapping at me but those awful words just seep right into my brain.

This is a side of Thailand that is often publicised by editors looking for sensational headlines but tourists only really have to face it if they land themselves in the wrong neighbourhood. My neighbourhood. I gotta move out of here.

However, this city does have its finer points. When it rains it really knows how to rain. Streets are flooded and everyone is soaked to the bone. Umbrellas are useless as tissue paper and shoes make squishy sounds for days and days. Afterwards the city is fresh again for a few hours and the air smells like almost nothing.

And every so often there's a government holiday or a Buddhist holy day and the city is barred from drinking. I love walking in my neighbourhood on those days and going past local bars full of disgruntled tourists who came to pickle their neurons and shag the daughters of poor farmers, only to find that they must do it all sober and hobbled by half a conscience.

Ah, I guess it's long past time for me to get away from it for a while. At least long enough for me to remember why I do like Bangkok. Four days in Chiang Mai next week ought to help, as the tourist element in that city largely consists of backpackers who the Thais have learned are too poor to bother scamming. But I'm going to have to get back to the US pretty soon. Hopefully with a few days in Tokyo to pick up some amazing food at a Daikanyama cafe run by hipster dropouts.

Jeffrey Studebaker has been (in no particular order) a SE Asian correspondent for a Singaporean travel magazine, a teacher, consultant and translator in Japan, a guitarist with the band, Swoon 23 in every city of the US of A, a coffee roaster in Seattle, a bike messenger in Portland, a marine fire system repairman in Seattle, an osteoporosis clinic researcher in Providence, a mental ward counsellor on the night shift in Portland, a brief success in New York, and he has now returned to the US after nearly a decade in Asia to pursue a publishing career.