Off the Beaten Track: I Came to Casablanca for the Waters

We're pleased to have writer Jake Needham as our guest blogger this week. Jake is an American crime novelist who lives in Bangkok. His crime novels set in contemporary Asia include: THE AMBASSADOR'S WIFE, A WORLD OF TROUBLE, KILLING PLATO, LAUNDRY MAN, and THE BIG MANGO. His latest Inspector Tay novel, THE UMBRELLA MAN, will be released next month. The print editions of Jake's novels are distributed only in Europe, Asia, and the UK, where they have all been bestsellers. Happily, the e-book editions of his novels are available worldwide. Jake has lived and worked in Asia for over twenty-five years. Read more about Jake's books at his website, http://jakeneedham.com.

            

When I am in the United States and my city of residence comes up in conversation, I am usually asked — and almost always in a tone laden with wariness and suspicion — why in the world I am living in a place like Bangkok.

Bangkok. All photos courtesy Jake Needham.

Sadly, I cannot simply reply with Humphrey Bogart's famous line when he was asked how he came to be in Casablanca. I can make no claim to being misinformed. I had lived in Asian cities for a long time before I took up residence in Bangkok, and I knew exactly what I was getting into.

I have come in a perverse way to look forward to this track conversations with my fellow Americans seem to take whenever they learn that I am living in Bangkok. Instead of expressing curiosity about my life in the distant and exotic city that I call my home, my interlocutors seem far more intent on telling me what they think of the place.

Of course, very few Americans seemed to know much of anything about any place that is not America, but still it surprised me that I hardly ever meet anyone back in the United States who has anything at all to say about Bangkok, other than on one of two topics.

Food is one of those topics, naturally. Everyone claims to love Thai food. Going out for Chinese is cheap. Going out for Thai seems somehow hipper. Of course, most Westerners have no real idea what they are actually eating in either case, but Thai food is both cheap and hip, so how can you beat that?

The other topic, as you might guess, is sex. Bangkok is inexorably linked in most people’s minds with stories they have heard somewhere -- although I notice few people admit to remembering exactly where -- of an unabashedly dissolute life and the ready availability of free sex. Well, perhaps not exactly free, but certainly pretty inexpensive sex, at least by world standards. Thai sex is a little like Thai food, cheap but with a kind of exotic style to it. Can’t beat that combination in any context, can you?

With all that going for it, you might think that the idea of me actually living in Bangkok would be pretty interesting to most people, wouldn’t you? You might think that, but you’d be wrong.

A couple of times I tried joking that, well, a man could sure make a lot worse choice than taking up residence in a city that is internationally famed for food and sex. But when I saw the solemn expressions that crack generally engendered in most Americans, I swiftly eliminated it from my repertoire. Maybe the suggestion that food and sex are important parts of life makes Americans uncomfortable. Maybe I ought to have more friends from France.

Anyway, the inevitable view people express when they find out that I live in Bangkok is something I have learned to live with. Oh, the place is no doubt interesting, people murmured, but yet . . . somehow it's still a city where a lot of people go who aren’t particularly…well, nice.

To be absolutely honest with you here, I have to admit that perception isn't really too far off the mark.

I have often thought there has to be some kind of international network devoted to coaxing social rejects and dropout cases worldwide into coming to Bangkok, because come they do. By the thousands, they walk away from third-shift jobs in places like Los Angeles, London, Berlin, and Toronto, pack what they have, buy a cheap airline ticket, and make their way to the Land of Smiles.

Some are looking for a cheap tropical paradise; others hope they’ve joined a nonstop orgy; but almost every one of them is intending in some way to make a fresh start on a life that until then had very little to recommend it. Many of these refugees from reality probably couldn’t have located Bangkok on a map before they decided it was the place for them, maybe they still can’t, but now Bangkok had become their last, maybe their only hope.

In the empty hours, this army of the dispossessed takes control of the part of the city where most foreigners live. Tuk-tuks, little three-wheeled motorcycle taxis, fly back and forth most of the night ferrying carousers between the two clumps of bars that anchor the neighborhood: Nana Plaza on the west and Soi Cowboy about a mile to the east.

They are all there. The lonely, the frightened, the guilty, the lost, the vulnerable, the depressed, and the psychotic. Soaked with sweat, they rush back and forth from one bar to another, reeking of that peculiarly sour, metallic odor habitually given off by the emotionally overmatched and underachieving.

So, I hear you ask, how in the world did you end up in Bangkok?

It happened this way…

Back a couple of decades ago now, HBO hired me to produce a movie they were making from a screenplay I had sold them. It was to be filmed in Bangkok and, since I lived in Asia and presumably knew something about it, they thought it sensible to add me to the corps of so-called producers that every movie drags around behind it like a modern version of the old time camp followers that every army attracted.

Regardless of HBO’s wisdom in putting me on the payroll, I must tell you now that I am grateful beyond measure that they did.

The woman who is now my wife was born in Thailand and educated in England (thank heaven it wasn’t the other way around). She was doing a stint at the time as the editor of the Thai edition of the UK magazine, Tatler, and she came out to the set one day to interview me. A year later we were married. Twenty years later, we have two sons and are still living in Bangkok .

So there you have it. That is how I came to be resident in a city that most Americans seem to think of as little more than adult Disneyland for the dodgy and the disreputable. Only with better food.

Admit it. You're actually a bit disappointed, aren't you? Maybe you expected something a little more…well, spicy?

I rest my case.

Off The Beaten Track: Shamini Flint

Practicing law in Malaysia and Singapore before becoming a successfully published author, Shamini Flint traveled extensively around Asia for work before resigning to become a stay-at-home mum, writer, part-time lecturer, and environmental activist – all in an effort, she says, to make up for her “evil” past as a corporate lawyer! In addition to writing two excellent children’s novels – Diary of a Soccer Star and Diary of a Cricket God published by Allen & Unwin, Australia and Puffin, India – Shamini also writes cross-cultural crime fiction (our favorite kind), taking her main character – of whom The Guardian says, “it’s impossible not to warm to the portly, sweating, dishevelled, wheezing Inspector Singh” – through Malaysia, Bali, Singapore, and Cambodia to solve all kinds of perplexing murder cases. With the publication of Shamini’s latest novel in this excellent series, her protagonist finally makes it to India, the land of his ancestors. A bit like Shamini, in fact.

“Incredible India!” That’s the advert that’s been running for the last year or so on television here in Singapore and probably the rest of the world too. In it, India casts its spell on a wide-eyed man of Caucasian origin who sums up his experience on a postcard – Incredible India! My feelings about the motherland are far more conflicted so an entire novel – my latest crime fiction, Inspector Singh Investigates:  A Curious Indian Cadaver – hasn’t been sufficient to air my thoughts.

Both my grandfathers arrived by boat in Malaysia (then known as Malaya, which was a British colony) almost a hundred years ago. They settled in a small fishing village called Kuantan and set about carving a future for their children. One was a nurse, the other an estate clerk. Having found jobs, they sent for wives from back home and committed themselves to the production of numerous progeny. Their assimilation was impressive in that they adopted local hobbies – mahjong and badminton – and learnt to speak Malay, the native language of the country. Their daughters were raised to be teachers and the sons doctors. I often wonder whether they thought of themselves as Malayan at this point or whether they assumed, as so many of their peers did, that this sojourn in the tropics was temporary and would end with their triumphant return to their ancestral villages some day.

However, when Malaysia became independent in 1957, a choice was forced upon them and both chose to remain, abandoning any dreams of returning to India to accept citizenship of this new land while it was on offer.

Their offspring, the teachers and doctors, produced children who were lawyers and doctors (with a couple of engineers and accountants thrown in), and my grandparents were cremated knowing that they had achieved what they set out to do. All their dreams had been economic – the bottom line was the bottom dollar –  and in the success of the grandchildren, they were content.

Which is how it came to be, that I, a lawyer by training, grew up a Malaysian, unable to speak more than a few words of Tamil or Malayalee (the languages of my grandfathers) and never having been to India. The irony, of course, was that, in multiracial Malaysia where ethnicity determines university places and access to government jobs, my Indian-ness was singularly important. So there I was – an Indian in Malaysia, comfortable with my identity, wont to speak of the depth of Indian culture in a smug tone and to take pride in the Indian economic miracle. I did not go as far as some of my elderly uncles who – sitting pretty in Singapore or Malaysia – would attribute much that was good in the world to India or an Indian.

Apparently, for instance, an Indian discovered gravity long before Newton, penicillin before Fleming and invented the games of rugby, cricket, and football in the village square. My all-time favourite was when an aunt told me in in no uncertain terms, ‘Shakespeare was also Indian, you know.’ And don’t lets get started on Ben Kingsley …

So much vicarious pride! What fine Indians we were! Until the day I made my first trip to India in the late ’80s and discovered I wasn’t Indian at all. There were two dimensions to this. First of all, I didn’t feel I belonged. But more importantly, no one in India thought I was Indian, not even for a moment. My distant relatives were shocked at my short hair and kept asking if I was a boy. They didn’t like it if I went sightseeing on a hot day in case I was burnt any darker by the sun – fair skin being a pre-condition of marriage unless the dowry was to set you back a long way. Strangers pointed at me on the streets because of my short sleeves and jeans. And every single taxi driver overcharged me on the grounds that I was a foreigner and wouldn’t know any better. Finally, I fell ill and spent the rest of the holiday making use of the hotel facilities. I had severe culture shock in the place I had always assumed, in some distant but comforting way, was home.

I’ve been back many times since and India has changed a lot. I’m no longer viewed as an escapee from Mars/the zoo/prison. But this is largely because we have a reached an understanding, India and I. I am just another tourist from some foreign land – like the Chinese or the English or the Russians. From my point of view, I can appreciate the history (as if I was in Rome), the architecture (as if I was in London) and the food (as if I was in Beijing). I am a stranger finding beauty and culture and inspiration in a complex and fascinating land. But I know that I’m not an Indian anymore, and that is a huge loss.