Bangkok Babylon by Jerry Hopkins (Tuttle Publishing)

Among any of us who have spent time in Southeast Asia, a common observation is prevalent--that nobody is more tedious than an old white guy who’s rooted to a Bangkok barstool. Jerry Hopkins, a man who has occupied many a barstool in Bangkok (and other places), not only disputes that point of view, he refutes it. Telling the stories of men he has met on twenty-five different barstools in Thailand’s capital, he proves his point of view. At least during his lifetime, some of the most intriguing people on earth were sitting in some of the most notorious bars in Bangkok. In Bangkok Babylon, he tells their stories and there’s not a boring one in the entire book.

Only a few of these are ones Hopkins wasn’t told directly by the profile subjects. He never met the man who has been called the inspiration for the Marlon Brando figure in Apocalypse Now, Tony Poe, nor the pianist who played for years at the best hotel in Bangkok and who turned out to be a vicious pedophile. In the case of the pianist, Hopkins quotes the lengthy confession that Eric Rossner sent to a Thai newspaper and briefly describes a videotape Rossner had made of time he spent with a ten-year-old girl. Tony Poe’s story comes from Poe’s close friend and colleague, Jack Shirley, a man who had been a self-described “journeyman killer” employed by the DEA and who worked with Poe in at least one successful assassination. 

These stories are counterbalanced by twenty-two others that are much less lurid but equally fascinating. Hopkin’s best friend, whom he terms an “urban guerilla priest,” is a man who’s devoted his life to the largest Bangkok slum, a rebel who knows how to say the Mass in Hmong and knocks back bottles of Heinneken. Father Joe is a warrior who has battled the Thai power structure successfully enough that the slum he lives in now has a school, a 24-hour medical clinic, a credit union, and housing for orphans and abandoned children. His story is followed by interviews with the man who made Lonely Planet’s guide to Thailand a bible to travelers all around the world and the college drop-out who turned abused elephants into musicians with their own symphony orchestra.

A man who once made his living by dressing up as Friar Tuck and selling advice at Renaissance Faires before making a life for himself in Thailand tells Hopkins “If you’re going to get a story out of me, you’ll have to pull and twist, and then make it up, because it’s not there.” He was wrong. If Hopkins had one religious belief, it was “Thou shalt not make things up.” Disdaining Somerset Maugham as “a predatory gossip,” Hopkins had a thousand untold stories that he refused to write, because, he said, “they aren’t mine to tell.” Every living man whom he interviewed for Bangkok Babylon was given the right of refusal. They each read their profile before the book was published and all of them approved what had been written.

The result is an oral history told by a group of eccentric expats to a reporter who likens himself to Forrest Gump, a man in the right place at the right time, who decided when he was young that he’d “travel the world, meet interesting people, and write about them.” Fortunately, one of the “interesting people” whose story is included in this book is Hopkins himself, a journalist who wrote for Rolling Stone, booked “kooks” for Steve Allen’s television show, had the first headshop in Los Angeles, and was on the New York Times bestseller list for his biography of Jim Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive, which is still in print since its debut in 1980.

Of Bangkok Babylon, Hopkins says somewhat wistfully, “ this book may be a celebration of a part of Southeast Asia that is sliding into the past…” Yes. It is—and a fine celebration at that.~Janet Brown

The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei by Sachaverell Sitwell (Weidenfeld and Nicolson)

Take one well-born aging Englishman, with a classical education that has centered around Europe, throw him into Asia, and watch him flounder when he’s not in places that were once part of the British Empire. The intellectual consternation that engulfs this sort of gentleman should be amusing but his excellent education keeps that from happening. Instead pomposity takes over, with rare moments of enchantment that veer on the naive. 

For a prime example of this, try to read Sachaverell Sitwell’s The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei.  A member of England’s hereditary peerage and the grandson of an Earl, Sitwell went to Eton and Oxford and was first published when he was twenty-five. This volume of poetry launched a career of writing over fifty more books, almost all devoted to European art, music, and architecture. When he began to age, he turned his attention to other continents, venturing to Japan and Peru, but never deviating from his Eurocentric point of view.

The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei is a misleading title which desperately needed a follow-up subtitle along the lines of And Other Travels in Asia, since only one brief chapter is devoted to what is now spelled “Banteay Srei.” This is probably a mercy because Sitwell was ill at ease in that lovely place or anywhere else in the Angkor complex. That he devotes only five chapters to Cambodia is a relief but that’s almost enough to sink this book.

Sitwell starts off in a sprightly fashion by falling in love with Bangkok. His time there is brief and comfortable, with a room in the Oriental Hotel and trips to places that aren’t yet tourist cliches--The Temple of the Emerald Buddha, floating markets which are still plentiful and utilitarian in the early 1960s, a night at a Thai boxing match. There he concludes that muay thai is “more serious and less amusing than the Sumo wrestling in Japan” and worries that an injured boxer may never be able to fight again. He’s delighted by the broken crockery that ornaments temple chedis and is impressed by the air-con in a Chinese restaurant that had his wife begging for a towel to use as a shawl during dinner. It’s sweet to see him fall in love with Thailand’s capital, which he explores without comparisons or judgements. Those he saves for Cambodia, where he seems determined to denigrate the glories of Angkor.

Although Sitwell confesses he came to Angkor “after half a lifetime of anticipation,” the heat, “of a kind and degree never experienced before,” and the humidity which “was something excessive,” appears to have flattened his enthusiasm. Although he immediately claims “the approach to Angkor Wat is on a grander scale than anything in the living world” and is later awed by the Bayon’s face-towers, he swiftly begins to describe the “sham buildings” constructed by people who had no conception of how to build a room that offered space. He lapses into memories of blitzed London during World War I and begins to long for the “cooing of doves” and a “wood of bluebells.” If it weren’t for his frequent quotes of Zhou Daguan’s eyewitness accounts of Angkor, there would be no substance to his observations, which conclude with “this is a whole dead city…too big even for poetry.”

Things don’t improve vastly in Nepal, where Sitwell becomes obsessed with the sexual nature of temple paintings. He tears himself away from erotic art long enough to write a detailed description of “a living goddess in Katmandu,” a heavily made-up child of twelve, the sight of whom made him decide she was “wonderfully, and a little pruriently exciting.” Once again he wallows in comparisons to Greece, Italy, and Spain and it’s impossible not to wish for the ability to slap him.

India, since the Empire had left it twenty years before, is a sad disappointment to Sitwell, who mourns that hotel dining rooms no longer serve proper English meals and that Delhi’s “houses with pillared porticos and nice gardens” are no longer inhabited by British families. Except for the brilliant colors of women’s clothing, Delhi is a disappointment but he consoles himself with a visit to the Taj Mahal and the Pearl Mosque, which he manages to view without his customary litany of European comparisons. Jaipur’s gardens, however, “did credit to English seedsmen,” and the Italian lakes immediately come into play when he goes to Udaipur. At Bombay he’s thrilled to find streets with English names and statues of British luminaries which might prove to console him when he discovers the Caves of Ajanta “are now too far gone with age to give pleasure.”

At this point anyone who’s persisted in reading Sitwell’s observations would be justified in saying the same of him. It’s a vast relief when he goes to Ceylon and becomes enthralled with its beauty. Perhaps his lack of jaundiced criticisms are because in Columbo he’s able to have a cocktail. “After a sojourn in India the inventor of Singapore Slings deserves commendation.”

Sitwell, sadly, does not--in fact the only way that his book should be read is in the company of several Singapore Slings as anesthesia against pomposity. The reader is warned, as Sitwell’s Victorian forbears used to say--stock up on gin and limes before entering his realm of boring ethnocentricism.~Janet Brown

Strange Foods: Bush Meat, Bats, and Butterflies by Jerry Hopkins, photographs by Michael Freeman (Tuttle)

What we think is delicious and what we recoil from as disgusting is determined by our geography, history, and sheer good luck. Nothing points that out like one of the first photographs in the opening pages of Strange Foods. If you think the image of a baby calf on a plate, still in fetal form, is revolting, ask yourself how is that more quelling than a dish made with veal? Would you rather eat a calf that isn’t yet alive or one that’s knocked on the head when it’s a living, breathing, cute little baby? What’s the difference?

This question is posed again and again throughout this provocative book and Jerry Hopkins is the right man to pose it. When his youngest child was born at home, Hopkins refrigerated the expelled placenta, later turning it into a paté for guests at the christening party. Nobody died.

“No one is sure what the first humans ate,” Hopkins says, but it’s a sure thing that they wouldn’t have turned down a dish made of little pink baby mole rats that’s eaten in modern India. Probably the French during the Franco-Prussian War’s Siege of Paris wouldn’t have spurned that either back in 1871, when people flocked to stalls that sold dog and cat meat. Starvation breeds exotic tastes.

Horse meat has been a staple throughout human history, with U.S entrepreneurs in our present day buying wild horses to slaughter and sending their meat to Europe and Japan. Thirty years ago, Seattle’s famous public market had a stall selling steaks, roasts, and ground meat that came from mustangs in Montana.

Cows or horses? Both are livestock but only one is commonly raised for food. However in Mexico, when Columbus first showed up, the only domestic livestock raised for human consumption were turkeys and dogs. In the northeast of Thailand, in a distant province where life is rough, dog meat is a staple and, Hopkins reports, in the civilized modern city of Guangzhou dogs and cats wait to be bought, killed, and butchered on the spot—along with deer, pigeons, rabbits, and guinea pigs—”a take-away zoo.”

When mad cow disease emerged in Europe, suddenly kangaroo, ostrich, and zebra appeared on supermarket meat counters as “exotic meat.” Beefalo was a popular meat during a period of soaring U.S beef prices and in Alaska, consumers happily chow down on reindeer sausage, swallowing Rudolph and his colleagues without a qualm. Still, the thought of elephant meat on the menus of African restaurants makes many a Westerner turn pallid.

In the 1970s, muktuk was sold as a snack at an Alaskan state fair. Bits of the skin and blubber from a beluga whale, it was chewy and flavorless, clearly an acquired taste and to the Inuit of Alaska, almost sacramental. The Arctic offers little in the way of food and whale hunting is still one of the chief means of subsistence. This isn’t necessarily true of Japan, a highly developed country that consumes large amounts of whale meat. It’s indubitably more healthy than more conventional options. “Richer in protein, whale meat has fewer calories than beef or pork, and it is substantially lower in cholesterol.” Whales are rapidly increasing in number around the world, Hopkins reports, and opposition to whaling is decreasing. Who knows? If we can order shark steak in fine dining establishments, will whale be on the menu soon?

Hopkins made his home in Thailand where he lived until his death in 2018. Michael Freeman has spent most of his career in Southeast Asia. The two of them have encountered—and eaten— insects, silk worm larvae, bats, scorpions, and partially-formed chicken embryos still in the shell. They are proponents of a truth that prevails in their book: Anything can be delicious if it meets a kitchen with a clever cook. To back this up, recipes appear in almost every chapter to challenge the squeamish and entice gastronomic adventurers. Rootworm Beetle Dip, anyone? (I don’t know about you, but I’d rather eat that than the classic Scottish meal made from sheep’s stomach and lungs—haggis? No, thanks!)—Janet Brown

The Dragon's Pearl by Sirin Phathanothai (Simon & Schuster)

In 1956, as the Cold War took on lethal proportions, Thai politician Sang Phathanothai sent two of his children to China. This was a clandestine and potentially dangerous move for everyone concerned, one that was inspired by the ancient custom of tribute paid by one nation to a greater power. Phathanothai saw the Korean War as a Chinese victory against the United States and although Thailand had fought as a US ally in that war, he felt it was essential to establish ties with the People’s Republic. In the sort of byzantine politics that Thailand specializes in, he convinced Thailand’s prime minister that if by giving his children to China under extreme secrecy, an act that would go against US interests if it were ever disclosed, he would create an indissoluble bridge between the two countries.

When they leave for China, Warnwai is a twelve-year-old boy and his sister Sirin is only eight. Wai is old enough to carry the responsibility that he takes on when he is designated as a representative of Thailand’s Prime Minister, a task that gives him a connection to his homeland and fosters his ability to keep careful records of his meetings with Chinese officials. Sirin, an indulged and pretty little girl, has no such weight placed upon her. For her this is a bizarre vacation in a country where she has no maids to wait upon her and where the house they were to live in compares sadly with their Thai home that had twenty rooms on three floors and four gardeners to tend a profusion of orchids.

The two children are placed under the guardianship of Zhou Enlai, China’s premier who’s second only to Mao Zedong, a decision that Wai understands and records as fully as he’s able in careful notes and a daily journal. Sirin quickly succumbs to Zhou’s legendary charm and swiftly begins to think of him and his wife as her new parents. Equally delightful and much more accessible is Liao Chengzhi, a high-ranking official whose father was American-born and who has an informality that brightens Sirin’s new life.

Although she lacks the diplomatic skills that her brother had been schooled in, Sirin learned early in life that to gain the attention she wanted, she needed to be attentive as well as beguiling. By the time she went to China, she had absorbed a rudimentary political understanding that she brings to bear in conversations with Zhou and Liao. But while Wai absorbs these conversations as an observer, Sirin takes them to heart. The advice she receives from her Chinese “fathers” lets her adjust to the sacrifices of The Great Leap Forward and the precursor to the Cultural Revolution that flourishes briefly in 1957. When she learns that her father has been arrested in Thailand, she clings even more tightly to the relationships she’s forged with the men who are now her protectors.

Their Chinese lives aren’t easy to relinquish because of the secretive nature that has pervaded them from the beginning. in 1967 Mao’s wife Jiang Ching begins to strengthen her power by nurturing the seeds of the Cultural Revolution. Her Red Guards ransack Liao’s home and issue thinly veiled threats against Zhao. It’s the wrong time for Sang Phathanothai to come to China at last, bearing a conciliatory message from the US government. His children know the danger this action carries. Their father does not. When he makes the message public and then departs, he leaves Wai and Surin unprotected, their contact with Zhou Enlai cut off.

Wai defends his father and is expelled from China. Surin, alone and defenseless, says “Wai’s world was not disintegrating. Mine was.” Officials tell her “You have to choose your own destiny. Denounce your brother.”

To survive in a country that is going mad, Surin publicly denounces her family on a radio broadcast, an action that does little to soften her life in the years to come. Her life is caught in the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, where her brains and charm just barely keep her safe.

Her story is a devastating account of a time that China has done its best to erase from its history, an era that has inescapably shaped Surin’s life. Despite an escape that is close to miraculous, she has never been able to leave China completely, a country that is more her home than the one she was born in. The Dragon’s Pearl, told with the acumen and objectivity that kept her alive in a perilous time, is a balanced look at a country few understand and many fear.~Janet Brown

Bangkok Shophouses by Louis Sketcher

There are travelers who are perfectly satisfied with big fat guidebooks that tell them exactly where to go, where to eat, where to sleep, and where they will always be securely in the company of other travelers. This book is not for them. Bangkok Shophouses is slender, idiosyncratic, and fits on a coffee table as nicely as it does within a backpack. It’s a book for people who want to wander through the older streets of Thailand’s capital city, while being given an understanding of what they’re looking at. Since these are the sort of people who like to roam around on their own, unhindered by a guide or a big fat guidebook, Louis Sketcher, aka Suppachai Vongnoppadongdacha, is the man for them. 

“Because each shophouse has a story to tell…” he has taken his sketchbook, pencils, brushes, and watercolors to two of Bangkok’s oldest neighborhoods. The first is an area that almost every traveler will have on their itineraries, the historic area of Phra Nakhon that holds the Grand Palace, the city’s most revered temples, and the raucous jollity of that tourist paradise, Khao San Road. The second is less renowned, Thonburi, the Brooklyn of Bangkok, that lies across the river and has just recently attracted the attention of developers. 

Both of these areas are filled with streets that hold architectural gems and other secrets, which are beautifully divulged in this book.

Sketcher’s drawings are delicate and bright with soft colors and meticulous details. He shows the carvings and elaborate sculpted designs on pediments and balustrades, the lattice work on veranda railings, the creative use of stucco and concrete. He identifies the styles of architecture and the reign in which the buildings were constructed.  Strolling through the labyrinth of streets, he finds the diversity that exists in this part of the city--the Indian section, the lane that has been the Chinese trading center from the earliest days of Bangkok, and Talat Noi, a thriving urban village which has housed Chinese, Portuguese, and Vietnamese throughout its history. He shows where to find the three shophouses that contain Bobae Market, a wholesale clothing market that’s been bustling since before World War Two began. His drawings reveal the shuttered Palladian windows that lie above Pak Klong Talad, Thailand’s biggest flower market. And he tackles the overwhelming drama that’s found in Yaowarat, Bangkok’s sprawling Chinatown, plunging beneath its neon glory to point out quieter beauties, including an elegant colonial-style gem that’s been refashioned into a hotel.

Across the Chao Phraya river,  Sketcher goes to a wooden house with an ornately peaked roof and latticed walls that’s now a riverbank cafe and to a shophouse with a concrete facade that looks like a giant honeycomb, within a corner of the city that’s famous for its desserts. In the neighborhood known as Kudi Chin which was once Portuguese, he finds Windsor House, owned by an English family long ago, a wooden house in the style known as gingerbread with a profusion of carved ornaments and “exquisite wooden fretworks above the windows, eaves, and canopy.” And he shows all the reasons why readers should brave the “long and narrow lane” that twists through the riverside Wang Lang Market.

The primary delight of this book lies in the illustrations that are scattered in the margins--sketches of the people who live and work in these shophouses, the food that can be found and eaten there, the treasures that are sold within their walls. A double-page spread of delectable specialties and where to find them, along with an index of some of the shophouses with addresses in English and in Thai, add to the usefulness of this information. Yes, you can stay in the baroque splendor of the heritage hotel, buy sarees in a 100-year-old shophouse in the Indian section of Phahurat, view the river traffic in all its chaotic splendor from the comfort of a cafe in the Wang Lang Market.

Because the text is bilingual, readers have a good chance of finding everything that’s pictured—and because there’s an illustrated list of shophouse styles and examples of architectural vocabulary, they’ll be able to understand what they see. Just in case they might want to fill their own sketchbooks, there’s a list of supplies and paints that were used in making Sketcher’s drawings. A small bibliography may not be helpful to everyone since it’s largely written in Thai.

I lived in Bangkok for eight years and have lost count of how many times I’ve visited Thailand. Bangkok Shophouses has made me realize how much I missed as I walked and stared through the areas that Louis Sketcher has illuminated. I can’t wait to go back--and when I do, this book is going with me, every step of the way.~Janet Brown

Real Thai Cooking by Chawadee Nualkhair, photographs by Lauren Lulu Taylor (Tuttle Publishing)

When I first began using cookbooks, way back in the dark ages of mid-century Alaska, they weren’t embellished with photographs. Some had a few pages of garish colored photos bound into the middle of the book, others quite dismally still offered black and white pictures of a few of their dishes. Food photography wasn’t yet a category. What was in place were snapshots of completed recipes.

Maybe that’s why two of my favorite cookbooks have no photographs at all. MFK Fisher and Laurie Colwin provided something better. They wrapped their recipes in essays instead and as a greedy reader, I was enthralled. It wasn’t until 1982, when Christopher Idone came out with the stunning coffee table book, Glorious Food, did I begin to think that cookbooks could be objects of visual delight.

However I never cooked anything from Glorious Food because I was terrified that I would mar its pages. And I infrequently used recipes from MFK or Laurie, although I picked up their books often. Several hours later I’d pull myself away from their stories and slap together a meatloaf, just in time for supper.

It wasn’t until this year that I found the perfect ménage à trois of essays,  photographs, and recipes. Real Thai Cooking has it all.

I can hear the yawns now. Another Thai cookbook? Really? Why?

Here’s the flaw in that rush to judgment. This is a pioneer in the cookbook arena, because every portion of the trinity that lies between its covers is perilously close to perfect. 

I dare anyone to look at Lauren Lulu Taylor’s food photographs without immediately feeling hungry. But they aren’t just appetite snares--her thumbnail photographs turn the ten pages of essential Thai ingredients into a guide to shopping in Asian grocery stores and her shots of street food vendors are bright, evocative, and an irresistible invitation. This is food photography at its best.

And it has to be because those photographs exist side-by-side with some of the best food writing ever done about Thai cuisine and some of the most enticing--and often surprising— recipes. 

Chawadee Nualkhair is a food explorer. Yes, she tells how to make Pad Thai but she first gives the reason why it exists. (Hint: it’s a political creation, not a culinary masterpiece.) She gives two recipes for Som Tum but neither are the version most beloved by visitors to Thai restaurants in America or in Bangkok, where som tum, Chawadee says, is a form of fusion, adapted to the palates of that city’s residents. She provides a recipe for Tom Yum Goong which is elevated by ingredients used in the dish made by Michelin-star-winning street vendor, Jay Fai.

The stars of her recipe collection illuminate Thailand’s multicultural underpinnings: Jalebi that has Persian ancestry; a pumpkin custard invented by an enslaved Portuguese aristocrat who headed a palace kitchen;  Oxtail Soup that’s descended from Arab traders who brought Islam to Southern Thailand; a pork pâté that came to Thailand when Vietnamese fled French colonizers in the 1880s to settle into Thai towns along the Mekong. These culinary surprises coexist happily with a recipe for Chiang Mai’s famous sausage, Sai Oua, which may require a meat grinder, a sausage stuffing machine, and over two hours of prep time. And just in time to combat the U.S. Sriracha hot sauce shortage, she  comes to the rescue with a recipe for the real thing, calling for fermented chilies,  as it was first invented and still made on the Thai coast in Sriracha.

Not only are these recipes clear and undaunting, they’re fun to read. When using a Thai mortar and pestle, “pound like you have a grudge against the ingredients.” If you’re brave enough to mash Thai chilies in that fashion, protect your eyes from flying chili bits by covering part of the top of the mortar “with your other hand as you pound, like watching a horror movie through your fingers.” When making salt-encrusted fish, encase it in salt “like you have murdered it and are trying to hide the evidence.” Even making a humble omelet becomes high drama when the drops of egg “bubble up like the villain in an acid bath in a James Bond movie.”

If you gather from these phrases that Chawadee Nualkhair knows how to write, you’re absolutely correct. A former journalist for Reuters and for years the writer of a delightful food column called Bangkok Glutton (bangkokglutton.com), she has studded this cookbook with a bounty of essays that have turned it into a painless and pleasurable tutorial on food in Thailand. 

She explains the differences of Thai regional cuisine, along with the history behind it all. As an ardent champion of Bangkok’s street food, she tells how it came into being and why it must survive. In a frank and possibly controversial explication of “Thailand’s Fast-developing Drinking Culture” she hazards a debatable theory as to why drinks aren’t paired with Thai food: “That is because Thais simply drink to get drunk.” In another piece about eating larb prepared with raw beef, she presents a kinder reason for drinking while consuming this dish. The consumption of alcoholic beverages “are supposed to help kill any germs.”

Her voice is as seductive as her recipes and her recipes are as easy to enjoy as Chawadee Nualkhair is herself. Even readers who may never go to Thailand can immerse themselves in the country’s food, as it’s prepared and eaten within its borders, in the company of a woman who knows it well.~Janet Brown

The Glass Kingdom by Lawrence Osborne (Hogarth)

Bangkok is where people come from all over the world to reinvent themselves so it’s no wonder that this is the city where Sarah Mullins chooses to launch herself as Sarah Talbot Jennings. She’s arrived with a suitcase full of cash that she received for letters between famous people--ones that she forged herself. She needs a place to hide until the resulting furor dies down and Bangkok, she decides, is a “chaotic, lawless choice.”

She settles into one of the city’s newly gentrified neighborhoods, one characterized by the “affable stability” of “yoga studios and espresso bars.” Presiding over this veneer of hipster chic is The Kingdom, a somewhat down-at-the-heel residential complex consisting of four towers, each twenty-one stories high. It’s the perfect place for Sarah to park her money for a while while she figures out her next move. What she hadn’t counted on was that she’s landed in a community of drifters and grifters who have come from all over the world, looking for their next target, be it another city or another sucker. 

Sarah, with her aura of wealth and her claims of being a “trust fund baby,” is the perfect victim. The women who befriend her are ones who are experts in decodng the nuances of social class and this American newcomer lacks the manners and style of the upper echelons. It’s an easy matter to figure out where her money comes from. All her neighbors have to do is persuade Sarah to hire the same maid whom they recommend and all use. There are no secrets that a Bangkok maid can’t uncover and this one quickly finds the suitcase laden with bundles of cash.

Suddenly things begin to unravel with alarming speed. Political demonstrations spring up all over Bangkok, threatening to unsettle the capitol and launch a revolution. A curfew goes into effect and power outages throw much of the city into darkness. During a black-out, one of Sarah’s neighbors shows up, covered in blood. She has just killed her physically abusive boyfriend. Sarah, steeped in the female solidarity that infects every American woman, becomes an accomplice, and as she does, reality begins to dissolve.

Many foreigners in Bangkok lead liquid lives. They have no rights and they have no roots. Without much language or cultural understanding, they float in a strange netherworld where paranoia coexists with cluelessness. Sarah, “a living ghost,” unanchored by any previous form of reality, finds herself in a place where nothing seems real and ghosts are a common feature. Spirit houses, shrines, trees that are protected by presiding spirits, a young girl who appears and disappears in odd places and at odd intervals, the woman whom Sarah assists in the aftermath of the murder who vanishes as thoroughly as if she too had been killed, the spectral flowers that gleam pale in the darkness of the nocturnal power failures--all of these things conspire to evoke an atmosphere of dread. 

Atmosphere is what Lawrence Osborne is known for and he’s become a master of it. In The Glass Kingdom, he anchors this with a skimpy plot, undeveloped characters, and a shaky command of dialogue and presents it as all surrealism. However atmosphere is almost enough to carry the book--don’t read it at night, alone. Without ever creating a tangible threat, the gothic darkness of a lonely existence and a cloud of invisible menace is almost overwhelming. 

The problem with inventing a new life is it’s as easy to erase as it is to change. Disappeared, has she? Who cares? Osborne, perhaps without knowing it, has written a cautionary fairy tale with a concluding moral that’s as plausible as it is horrifying.~Janet Brown

Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon (HarperCollins)

If it hadn’t been for America’s love of Broadway musicals after World War II, Anna Leonowens would have sunk into well-deserved obscurity long ago. The author of two memoirs of her five-year stay in what was then called Siam, back in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mrs. Leonowens had a brief flurry of fame with her stories of teaching English to the many children of King Rama IV. She faded from public attention until Margaret Landon, the wife of an American missionary who had lived in the south of Thailand for ten years, was handed a copy of An English Governess at the Siamese Court. Both this and its successor, The Romance of the Harem, had been out of print for more than fifty years but they captured Landon’s imagination. 

After an impressive amount of research, she came out with a fictionalized version of Anna’s time in Siam, Anna and the King of Siam. It became a bestseller and drew the attention of theatrical impresarios and Hollywood moguls, ensuring that Anna’s fame spread worldwide. The Broadway show tunes became enduring classics and Deborah Kerr, sumptuously dressed in Victorian gowns made from Thai silk, made Anna an unforgettable historical figure. As she swooped across the throne room floor with her royal partner, Yul Brynner, singing Shall We Dance, who could fail to be enchanted? Thailand, aka Siam, that’s who.

Mrs. Leomowen’s books, Margaret Landon’s novel, and all three of the movies that stemmed from the Broadway musical, are banned in Thailand because the portrayal of King Rama IV in these works insults the memory of the monarch and the institution of the monarchy. Even in this century, when few people in other countries know or care about the “English Governess,” her name is still reviled in the Kingdom of Thailand and books refuting her claims are still popular. 

Margaret Landon tracked down copies of Anna’s two books, met Anna’s granddaughter who gave her copies “of letters and other pertinent material,” and unearthed a volume in the Library of Congress that was a collection of letters written by Rama IV.  Even so, the book she wrote, she confessed,  was “seventy-five per cent fact, and twenty-five per cent fiction based on fact.” (Since she accepted Anna’s invented facts with touching faith and a certain amount of naivete, her figures of fact and fiction are a bit skewed.)

Eighty years later, her novel is almost unreadable. The best parts of it are the portions that draw upon facts. Unfortunately they’re sunk by the remaining portion of the book that’s fictional, and by Landon’s stilted writing, which was probably modeled on Anna’s Victorian literary style. 

Within the supposed facts, there are strange glitches. Anna’s son is often referred to as Boy, with no explanation. Since he’s originally introduced as Louis, this is a weird and puzzling insertion. A Thai prince who appears at the novel’s beginning as an absurd and frightening figure later shows up as an honored physician.  His fluency in English and  the fact that he was the first Thai doctor to use quinine as a treatment for malaria is never mentioned to counteract that first buffoonish portrayal. Another bizarre episode implies that a diamond ring given to Anna by the King was an indication that he wished to add her to his collection of wives, Credulity is completely strained by the story of a royal wife who becomes so proficient in English under Anna’s tutelage that she’s able to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and then translate it into Thai. Most shocking is a graphic description of flesh being cut from the body of a revered monk and fed to the temple dogs before the corpse is cremated, a disgusting bit of pure invention that Landon must have known was false. 

The most engaging portions of the novel are the letters written by Rama IV. The King’s English is idiosyncratic but his sentences are much more readable than the overwrought effusions that are excerpted from Anna’s own letters. 

Dramatic episodes of cruelty toward women of “the harem” are interspersed with lengthy and dull accounts of colonial incursions upon the sovereignty of Siam. Slavery weighs heavily upon Anna’s heart and mind and much later, when King Rama V, her former student, emancipates the slaves of Thailand, she gleefully takes credit for this. 

It’s difficult to understand how such a priggish woman could have given birth to so many versions of her invented life. Strangely, the life of her son Louis has been ignored, although it’s far more worthy of a book. Years after his mother took him back to England, he returned to Thailand as an adult, became a captain in the King’s Royal Cavalry, and founded a company that still exists in Thailand under the name of Louis T. Leonowens Co, Ltd. While Anna’s name is excoriated, it’s delightful to think that Thailand has kept “Boy”  as a part of his chosen country’s history.~Janet Brown

Welcome Me to the Kingdom by Mai Nardone (Random House)l

A teenage couple comes to Bangkok from the rural northeast of Thailand hoping to find the good life they’ve seen on television, only to discover the glittering metropolis “didn’t live up to our expectations.” They arrive with a 30-day deadline to find good jobs. When that expires, the girl goes to work in a bar, meets a middle-aged American, marries him, and has, despite her best—or worst—efforts, a daughter who grows into brilliance. 

A child whose wealthy family escaped from the Cultural Revolution by floating down the Mekong into Thailand loses his fortune when economies topple across Asia in 1997. His Thai-born daughters speak three languages, one which they acquire at a British International school that was built on land endowed to it by their grandfather.

A cluster of “strayboys,” rescued from the streets by a collective of former bar girls, build a shack of their own in the undergrowth of the slum they live in. Using an abandoned badminton net that they scavenged, they fish glass and plastic bottles from a canal and sell their catch to a recycler for a handful of coins.

The daughter of an Elvis impersonator is trained to take over his bar when he dies and becomes the prey of a corrupt policeman. Submitting to his appetites, she indulges her own only when she’s away from him, ordering a banquet of succulent dishes and then taking only a taste or two from each. 

All of these children grow into their destinies, with their lives colliding, intersecting, jolting apart. Within their orbits lie Thai boxing matches, cockfighting battles, clandestine gambling dens, routes of the impromptu first responders--”corpse carriers” who vie to be the first at every accident scene, the bars filled with “cheer-beer” girls who make a living by providing the “girlfriend experience” to male travelers in search of “make-believe,” the brutal, easily obtained jobs on construction sites. 

The settings of these interlinking short stories are grim, the characters within them are survivors, each bearing a hard-won form of triumph. At the heart of their lives, Bangkok blazes like a ravenous flame, its sensual beauty giving a luster to the grim environment that all of these children know intimately, regardless of how they grew into adulthood.  Placed in random order, their stories convey the jangling energy and random chaos of Thailand’s primate city, a place where social classes intersected without mingling, until everyone’s life was disrupted by the downward mobility that comes with the rapid fall of the Thai baht in 1997.

Thai American Mai Nardone was born in Bangkok and lived there into his teen years. Now he’s come back to it, reclaiming his home. He knows his city in a way that only those who have grown up in it can, while exploring every corner of it with the perspective gained from reaching adulthood in another country, another culture. His characters soar beyond the ordinary stereotypes that a lazier writer would have allowed them to assume. Each one of them is fully capable of moving on into their own novel, while living incandescent, unforgettable lives in the form Nardone has given them in Welcome Me to the Kingdom.~Janet Brown

The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit and Peril by Sarah Stodola (HarperCollins)

Blame it on the British. Stuck on their soggy little island with its chilly shoreline, bordered by a sea that could induce hypothermia if an intrepid adventurer immersed so much as a single toe into its frigid waves, once they learned that a beach could be pleasant, there was no stopping them. The south of France, the coast of Italy, even England’s sworn foe, Spain, were suddenly prime targets for English bodies yearning to be warm. Time spent on a beach became the fashion for cold and restless residents of northern countries until at last the words “vacation” and “beach” became almost synonymous, first only for the wealthy and then for the masses. Today there are over 7000 beach resorts on our planet, not including the ones that have fewer than ten rooms or aren’t directly on the beach.

When the invention of the air conditioner tamed the “soupy heat” of the tropics, new destinations opened up for the world’s sun-worshippers. First came the readers of Lonely Planet guides, followed by people with more money to spend and were reluctant to relinquish the comfort they were used to. Beach shacks were supplanted by more comfortable accommodations, built for the travelers who wanted to be “far from home while never having left.”  Local residents soon realized that their beaches yielded more money than any of their agricultural efforts and suddenly resorts studded coastlines all over the world.

Sarah Stodola, like many other tourists, became enthralled with the concept of a beach vacation when she went to Southeast Asia. Although she surveys seaside destinations from the Jersey Shore to Senegal, the bulk of her explorations take place in tropical Asia. This is where the idea of the resort ranges from rustic bungalows for surfers to entire islands that only the wealthy can afford, where the cheapest accommodations begin at $2,200 a night. 

People will pay for solitude. Some pay with the discomfort of discovering an undeveloped paradise while others yearn for “barefoot luxury,” “peace without challenges,” and a “frictionless experience.” Asia has both extremes and everything in between the two. It also holds the largest number of potential tourists. Before the advent of Covid, in 2018 150 million Chinese tourists traveled outside their borders, enriching the tourist industry with $255 billion dollars in 2019. China,” Stodola speculates, “has the power to remake the global tourism industry” with India as a close contender.

Chinese travelers are already changing the beaches of Vietnam, their “fourth-most-visited destination, after Thailand, Japan, and South Korea, with 4 million Chinese descending upon this small country in 2017. Most of them flock to Vietnam’s two thousand miles of coastline, where, a developer says, “you see a new resort opening every three months.” The perils of over-development have been slowed by Covid but the signs are clearly there. Dams have prevented the replenishment of beach sand while illegal sand mining takes place offshore with impunity. It’s a small indication of how the ravenous appetite for beach holidays are endangering the coastlines of the world.

An island in Malaysia points the way that disaster could be averted. One locally-run NGO is making recycling an island-wide practice. A machine that cost only $6000 takes empty beer bottles and turns them into sand. This is mixed with concrete and used in the island’s construction projects, eliminating the need to import expensive sand from outside the island and making illegal sand mining from the sea an irrelevant operation. With thousands of beer bottles emptied constantly by tourists, this is a vastly sustainable solution.

Others are less palatable and more difficult to bring into being. With a world full of paradise-seekers who are accustomed to jumping on planes to get what they want, how to stuff that genie back in the bottle by discouraging long-haul flights? Maybe by making beach holidays what they were at their very beginning, a privilege reserved for the wealthy.~Janet Brown

Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat by Veeraporn Nittiprapha, translated by Kong Rithdee (River Books)

Memories of memories, we all have them--stories of when we were small, told to us so often that they become a real and vivid part of our remembered pasts; events we’ve invented, so certain they occurred that they become embedded as false memories; tales about great-grandparents whom we never met but whose exploits are part of our own pantheon of stories that we tell and retell. 

Memory is a realm of evanescence, highly prized and easily lost. It’s the province of ghosts, spiderwebs, soap bubbles. A story emerges, shimmers, and vanishes, crowded out by many others. Which is real? Which is fantasy? 

This is the world where fiction was first invented. This is the world that comes alive in all of its gleaming spirals in Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat. 

Thai author Veeraporn Nitiprapha was brought to the attention of western readers when Kong Rithdee translated her first novel, The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth, into English. Several years later Rithdee has done it again, translating Nitiprapha’s lapidary magic realism while never sacrificing the distinctive flavor of Thai storytelling.

This novel begins slowly with the pace of a tropical afternoon when a boy named Dao explores “a melange of tattered, warped memories,” ones he thinks perhaps were never his own but were given to him by someone else. His world is one of stories told to him by a grandmother who has disappeared from a house where he lives with his mother, a woman whose presence is spectral. Only when he enters the Rain Room does he ever see anyone else, a girl within a large mirror who looks oddly familiar to this boy who has never left his house and has never met a stranger.

Dao is a vessel for memories. He’s the last of what was meant to be a family dynasty, begun by Tong, a man from China whose body is covered with “black freckles like lightless stars…burnt-out constellations.” Tong’s success in his adopted country makes it possible for him to buy the big house near a pond covered with pink lotus blossoms, next to a forest of acacia trees that fill the air with blankets of yellow pollen. Through his house Tong’s children come and go, leaving only their stories behind. 

Truth and lies, success and failure, and the curse of death by water--none of Tong’s children lead happy lives, nor does the generation that follows them. The memories of the family are anchored by history and suffused with poetry. Their stories float through the house and into Dao’s mind like curls of smoke, defying linear rules of time or place. Not until the final pages of the novel is there a shadowy explanation, offered just after the shocking acts of violence that precede Dao’s existence.

Nitiprapha has the gift that made Virginia Woolf famous, one that lets her bend time to her own uses without sacrificing her story. Although Woolf and Garcia Marquez both come to mind while reading her novel, the world Nitiprapha creates is vividly and viscerally Thai. The history, the food, the ghosts, the lingering image-filled descriptions all provide entry points to a place that lives in the memories of memories, fading fast, seen in a blink of time before dissolving into “a fragment of deep longing.”~Janet Brown

Another Bangkok: Reflections on the City by Alex Kerr (Penguin Random House UK)

Alex Kerr made a name for himself as a leading foreign expert on Japan when he won the Shincho Gakugei Literary Prize in 1994 for the best work of nonfiction published that year in Japan. Kerr was the first foreigner to have won this prize with Lost Japan, a book he wrote in Japanese. By that time, Kerr had lived in Japan for seventeen years, the country he had chosen as a home when he was still in his twenties. 

Three years later, Kerr established a second home in Bangkok, dividing his time between Thailand and Japan.  Within five years of that decision, he published Bangkok Found, a book of essays about his new life and what he discovered there. Twelve years later, he expanded upon that theme with new discoveries and a different focus, one that echoes the theme of Lost Japan, “the past and what it has to teach us.”

Another Bangkok is Kerr’s search for the “wellsprings” of culture that underpin the “chaos and ugliness” of Thailand’s primate city. He finds a wealth of “kaleidoscopically complex cultural traditions” that were originally adopted from India, Cambodia, and China and were transformed into an amalgamation that is completely Thai. Sri Lankan stupas and Angkor’s towers have become slender and elongated in their Thai incarnations. The Buddha rose from his seated position and began to walk gracefully under the hands of Sukkothai sculptors. The ceramics of China were translated into vessels of riotous color when Thai craftsmen began to use Benjarong’s five colors, bright, controlled, and dazzlingly ornate. Even Western skyscrapers have taken on surprising shapes as they dominate the Bangkok skyline, using the traditional Thai features of teak pillars and delicately curved roofs. 

Bangkok, Kerr says, was rooted in this sort of adaptivity. The enshrined city pillars are based on the lingam of Angkor. “They’re really Khmer,” a Thai aristocrat told him. The Grand Palace, Thailand’s primary national symbol, is a “treasure house” of elements from different cultures, combined into a glorious extravaganza of “exotic fantasy.”

Kerr finds quite a bit of exotic fantasy in his examination of Thai traditional culture and he writes about it beautifully. His essay on the Grand Palace alone is stunning, giving a whole new view to what has become a visual cliche. But in his following essays, his focus becomes diluted. Traffic jams and tangles of electrical wires invade his examination of Thai floral art and a discursion into sex tourism interrupts his look at classical Thai dance. His own experiences in Bangkok are mentioned in passing, along with some of his memories from Japan, in a way that’s frequently more annoying than it is illuminating. Why, for example, are expats even discussed in a book that purports to be about traditional Thai culture? Not even Kerr seems to know, torn as he is between regarding his own kind as a form of beneficial and creative “yeast” in the city or “a hair in the soup.”

Kerr seems to find comfort in the creation of “a beautiful surface” that’s more important than substantial content, a practice that he finds in Thailand as much as he has in Japan. Another Bangkok slides gracefully over its own beautiful surface, a fusion of memoir and research that’s essentially “charming but trivial,” much more like a series of articles written for a variety of magazines than a thoughtful and coherent book. ~Janet Brown

Clash of Honour by Robert Mendelsohn (Prion)

Clash of Honour is Robert Mendelsohn’s debut novel and was first published in 1989. The story will take you to Thailand, Singapore, Burma, Spain and Japan. It centers on the theme honor, deceit, betrayal, loyalty and obligation. It is mostly a story of revenge and how far a person will go to achieve their aims without giving thought to the consequences of their actions.

The story opens in Bangkok, Thailand in December of 1975. A young English woman, the daughter of a British soldier and a Spanish mother, has come to the country and is heading Bang Saray, the place where her father died. 

Anna Bellingham is the daughter of Lt. Derek Pritchard, a soldier who was captured by the Japanese Imperial Army after the fall of Singapore. She is determined to find a man named Yoshiro Katsumata in the hopes of leading her to his father, Lt. Keichi Katsumata,the man she believes was responsible for her father’s death.

Yoshiro Katsumata is a businessman climbing his way to the top of Sato Kaisha where he works. He may become the first outsider to head the family-owned company. He has no idea that a foreign woman would come looking for him to seek revenge for her father.

After the fall of Singapore in 1942, Lt. Derek Pritchard and an Englishman colonel, Dr. James Hedges became Prisoners of War. However, they were not sent to a P.O.W. camp. The two soldiers became a pawn in a secret mission for the Japanese government. 

As the story progresses, the reader begins to question what really happened between Pritchard, Hedges, and Katsumata. Of the three, it is only Pritchard who died in the war. Anna and Yoshiro are told the stories of their fathers by surviving members of the ordeal. 

Hedges was friends with the Pritchard family. As he was present in Bang Saray, Pritchard’s wife insisted on knowing the circumstances of her husband’s death. Listening to the evils committed upon the one she loves, she instills in her daughter the venom and hate against the Japanese and especially against Lt. Keichi Katsumata.

Yoshiro hears the story of his father from his father’s commanding officer. It is after Anna meets him and is seduced by her that he finds out the truth about her. He feels obligated to ask Pritchard’s family for forgiveness and believes it is his duty as a Japanese son to bear the responsibility of his father to retain the honor of the family name.

It isn’t until the very end where the reader learns the truth surrounding Lt. Derek Pritchard’s death and the motives of those involved. In this story the sins of the father do fall on the son but not all is as it seems. 

In this day and age, having the son bear responsibility for the sins of the father seems to be an outdated idea or at least one where the Bible is misinterpreted as it states, “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father.” 

Japan also has a feudal tradition called katakiuchi which is also the taking of revenge against someone who has killed an ancestor of the avenging party. Fortunately, in today’s society, it is against the law to take the law into one’s own hand. If not, who knows how many unnecessary deaths would continue. ~Ernie Hoyt

Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok by Emma Larkin (Granta Books)

Comrade Aeon roams the streets of Bangkok, barefoot and ragged, searching for truth,  measuring and recording the world around him in “empirical data,” that can’t be contradicted or whitewashed. His life has been reduced to a kind of invisibility. Once a teacher of history, his insistence upon honest records has ruined his career, giving him a life of “walking his songlines” and resting in a shelter made of discarded billboards. His sole possession is his collection of notebooks, filled with his observed facts. 

When he was a young student rebel, he fled to Thailand’s jungle, the place where he was given a new name that reflected his passion for the past. Now he lives in a patch of jungle in the middle of Bangkok, a vacant lot filled with “verdant mesh...feeding off itself, growing out of its own decay.” Both this land and Comrade Aeon hold a buried secret, a part of Bangkok’s suppressed and laundered history.

Few people know Aeon but he is the link between vastly disparate residents of his city. A beautiful actress with whom he is obsessed is married to a real estate developer who sees Aeon’s jungle as the land that will increase the magnate’s fortune. An old woman who lives in the slum near Aeon’s refuge feeds him, gives him clean clothes, cuts his hair, and is troubled by odd dreams that are fragments of his secret. An expat wife, who feels an encroaching physical weightlessness calling her to her death, stumbles upon his hut one drunken night and gives Aeon another name, “the bonekeeper.” In her walk through the jungle she has seen bones protruding from the earth. They’ve been uncovered by the bulldozer that has begun the first stage of the developer’s project, bones that may belong to the man’s son who disappeared seventeen years before in a bloody political crackdown.

This could easily turn into the sort of soap opera that the beautiful actress has begun to write, the kind that serves as a Greek chorus, underpinning the plot of this novel. What saves it from stereotypes and banality is the beauty and the knowledge of Emma Larkin’s writing. She links the expat wife who haunts the jungle on her nightly expeditions, as “pale as a dead woman,”  to “another weightless woman,” the horrifying Thai ghost called Phi Krasue. She reveals the close relationship that exists between Bangkok business interests and the underworld, and shows how rumors and gossip easily gain strength and take the place of truth. She skewers the “hi-so” world of wealthy Bangkokians with a restaurant meal in which “essence of roasted beetroot” bleeds on a plate and acknowledges the beauty of the “balletic performance” given by the city’s nonstop traffic.

Her descriptions are precise and painterly, displaying the often overlooked beauty of Thailand’s capital city: “the soft pale lotus pink” of its morning light, its night sky of “watered indigo tinted with amber...never truly dark,” the “curious shimmering light” of its river, and the “densely knit constellation” that Bangkok becomes after sunset.

This debut novel has its flaws. Larkin’s knowledge of her characters threatens to sink them in voluminous backstory details. The length of more than a few of her sentences would make readers turn blue if they tried to voice them in a single breath. These are distractions that could have been avoided with some judicious trimming. Even so, her plot soars with its originality and her evident affection for her characters keeps them afloat and alive. Of all the novels that have been written in English about Bangkok and its people, its history and culture, this is by far the best.  No other writer has pierced the layers of Bangkok’s multileveled society with the insight and knowledge that this lifelong resident has brought to bear upon it. Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok is a literary guide that steers readers into the city’s heart without leading them astray.. ~Janet Brown

Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America by Mark Padoongpatt (University of California Press)

Thai food has become a staple for American eaters, with Thai restaurants found in the most unlikely places throughout the U.S. Even more surprising are the number of Thai temples in America, but as Mark Padoongpatt points out, food and Buddhism are tied together in Thai culture. Thai immigrants want the guidance and community found in their temples but “Thai people must have Thai food.” 

With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965 which replaced the draconian Exclusion Act, young Thai students came to attend U.S. universities. Soldiers who served in the Vietnam War came home with Thai wives who gained entry under the War Brides Act.  (By 1980, 40% of Thai women in America were the wives of veterans.) 

Los Angeles became a popular destination for Thai imigrants, who rapidly found that the food of that city wasn’t what they wanted to eat every day. Worse yet, they were unable to find the ingredients that are the crucial underpinning of Thai food. 

American women who had lived in Bangkok came home with recipes that they gathered into truly blood-curdling cookbooks, with dishes that substituted sour cream for coconut cream, anchovy paste for fish sauce,  and cayenne pepper for Thai chile. Thai people found a better solution, although a risky one. They smuggled ingredients back to the U.S. in their luggage, ones that were often confiscated by customs officials. The result of this culinary deprivation meant that by 1971, there was only one Thai restaurant in Los Angeles, and no Thai or Southeast Asian grocery store, until Pramote Tilakamonkul opened the Bangkok Market.

Realizing the precarious nature of smuggling food, whether in a suitcase or a container vessel,  Tilakamonkul turned to Mexico and its Free Trade Zones, along with its climate that fostered the cultivation of Thai ingredients, grown from Thai seeds. The Bangkok Market flourished and attracted Thai small businesses to its neighborhood, including a large number of Thai restaurants.

This coincided with America’s love of dining out, which went from being a special occasion to its transformation into a regular event in the ‘70s and ‘80’s. Once it was discovered by food writers, Thai cuisine became a sensation with its distinctive, sophisticated flavors and its healthful dishes. Thai restaurant owners brought Thai art and artifacts to set their businesses apart from those of other Asians and brought the civility of Thai culture into the front of the house, while employing young and attractive waitstaff who were predominately female. As the owner of an upscale Thai restaurant said, “Whether we like it or not, we represent Thailand culturally.”

When the first official Thai Buddhist temple, Wat Thai, was opened in 1979, its suburban neighbors were surprised at how jovial and social an entity it turned out to be. Thai people from all over the region came to participate in everything a Thai temple offers, including the traditional temple fairs which in America became frequent food festivals. The food sold at the fairs was cooked for Thai tastes, not adapted to American palates, and it became wildly popular with all residents of Los Angeles. Neighborhood parking was soon a contentious issue, as was littering and live music sent out from loudspeakers. This wasn’t the quiet and deferential mood that diners found in Thai restaurants and the neighborhood rebelled, with the result that the festivals no longer took place once a week. Instead that facet of Thai culture found a more congenial spot, in the area near the Bangkok Market, which has been given the official title of Thai Town.

Second-generation Thai American Mark Padoongpatt posits that Thai Americans are constrained and stereotyped by the American Empire’s placement of them as purveyors of food, “privileging Thai cuisine over Thai people.”  He points out the cultural appropriation practiced by David Thompson, whose encyclopedic volume, Thai Food, collected recipes from aristocratic Bangkok sources and launched Thompson’s mini-empire of Thai restaurants, and by Andy Ricker, who did the same thing with Northern Thai food and spread his chain of Pok Pok restaurants from the Pacific Northwest to New York City. He excoriates the bamboo ceiling that has driven Thai Americans into making their fortunes in kitchens and the naivete of Americans who take the image constructed by those restaurateurs and apply it to every Thai person they meet. He blames the adaption of Thai food into a bland and sweet bastardization upon the culinary colonization that the American palate has forced on an unfamiliar cuisine. His argument is passionate and wide-ranging, raising issues that have been ignored for much too long~Janet Brown

The Stone Council by Jean-Christophe Grange (Vintage)

Jean-Christophe Grange is a French mystery writer. His novel The Stone Council was published in English by Vintage and translated by Ian Monk. It is a mystery and a thriller and also involves telekinesis, hypnotism, clairvoyance and other elements of the paranormal. The book was also adapted into a feature-length film in 2006 and was a joint production between France, Germany, and Italy. 

As a child, Diane Thiberge suffered a traumatic experience which made her adverse to being touched by anyone.  She is a single woman who works as an ethnologist living in France. Her specialty is studying the habits of predatory animals. She is also an avid practitioner of martial arts. 

Diane is fast approaching thirty and believes this may be the last chance for her to become a mother. “Turning thirty reminded her symbolically of one of her biggest secrets: never would she have a child. For the simple reason that she would never have a lover.” However, she was not giving up on becoming a mother. 

Diane considers artificial insemination but this “meant doctors penetrating inside her with their cold, pointed, jagged instruments”. In her mind, “this would have been a sort of clinical rape.” She also thought about in vitro fertilization, but this still meant the doctors would have to invade her body in some way. Diane becomes depressed and nearly has a breakdown but after resting at her mother’s husband’s villa she decides to take a different approach and considers adoption. 

Diane adopts a five-year-old boy from an orphanage in rural Thailand. The people running the orphanage have no idea where he is from and have only heard him say “Lu” and “Sian” so they called him “Lu-Sian”. Diane decides to call him Lucien.  Once she’s back in her homeland of France, she gets into an auto accident and her little boy is left in a coma. The doctors tell her that his chance of survival is slim to none. However, one single doctor, Dr. Rolf van Kaen, says the boy can still be saved by using acupuncture and Eastern medicine. 

The boy is saved but Dr. van Kaen is later found dead. The cause of death - his heart inexplicably exploded. The police trace the unusual method of death to a tribe in northern Mongolia. The police also discovered that Dr. van Kaen was an East German and worked in the former Soviet Union at a nuclear power plant located in Siberia near the Mongolian border. 

Diane, with the help of an anthropologist, discovers that her son Lucien is not from Thailand. In fact, he’s not from Southeast Asia. The words he uses were determined to be Mongolian and used by a certain tribe called the Tsevens who also lived near the nuclear power plant and were victims of an atrocious accident. This confirms Diane’s suspicions that all the deaths are somehow related to this nuclear power plant, the Mongolian tribe, and her adopted son. 

The story takes you on a roller-coaster ride starting from a flight to Thailand, back to France, then Germany, Russia, and finally to Mongolia where the mystery reaches its conclusion. Fast-paced and absorbing, you will not want to set down the novel until you reach its end. You cannot help but root for Diane as she travels all over the country to save her son. I’m sure any mother would do the same. ~Ernie Hoyt

Vanishing Bangkok: The Changing Face of the City by Ben Davies (River Books)

Perhaps because it’s a metropolis that sinks farther below sea level every year or maybe because it’s where “the ordinary has little cultural value,” Bangkok sees little reason to preserve any building that isn’t a temple or a royal palace. Within its central business district, old neighborhoods have been decimated to make way for palatial shopping malls and towers of glass and steel that look as though they emerged from a scene in Blade Runner. Modern is already out of date; cutting-edge architecture is what Thailand’s capital yearns for. Every year the skyline grows higher, obliterating this city’s history.

But beneath the high gloss of 21st century Bangkok is a deeper layer that is difficult to find yet worth the search. It’s an underlying shadow city, ghostly but still alive, beautiful but disregarded, threatened by rampant development.

This is the face of Bangkok that Ben Davies reveals in Vanishing Bangkok: The Changing Face of the City. A photographer who has lived in Southeast Asia for decades, he began to explore hidden corners of Bangkok in 2014, launching a quest that would last for five years. In his search to capture the images of old buildings, he turned to a photographer from the mid-19th century for inspiration, a Scot named John Thomson, whose “pin sharp, carefully composed” images reminded Davies of still life paintings. This mood is what he wanted in his own work and to attain it, he found a camera that was reminiscent of Thomson’s time, one that used film and a variety of different lenses. His process of photography evoked old movie scenes, with his camera perched on a tall tripod and his head covered by a black cloth, helping him to focus on his subject. “Just to set up this unwieldy camera in a tripod could take ten minutes,” Davies says, “frequently exposures lasted for up to thirty minutes.” 

The results of his painstaking efforts are works of art. Each photograph fills an entire page in crisp black and white, with startling detail and clarity. His images are haunting and compelling, beautiful and sad. He shows the Art Deco splendor of Hualamphong Railway Station in its final days, before its vibrancy was dimmed by its new incarnation as a museum. Mansions that housed the aristocracy of another era are now devoured by vines and the twisted roots of banyan trees, surrounded by debris or tilting menacingly toward the waters of a canal. A perfect replica of an English country house stands on stilts above the Chao Phraya River, incongruous in its British elegance but not an anomaly. The wealthy of Bangkok happily adopted architectural styles from England, France, and Italy and incorporated elements from China and Portugal in more plebeian structures, which oddly are the buildings that most remain in use today.

The bottom floors of Bangkok’s old shophouses are grim-looking with their doors locked behind forbidding gates, but their upper floors hold the grace notes of Palladian windows and elaborate wood carvings. They still house businesses and families who have owned them for generations but know they may be the last to work and live within those anachronisms.

These photographs are poignant, showing a way of life that will probably soon disappear from sight and memory. A shrine to Kwan Yin that is one of the oldest in the city, where the faithful still bring their offerings and prayers; a grinding machine for traditional medicine that’s supplied a pharmacy for fifty years; an eighty-year-old welding shop where the owner tells Davies, “This is the house where I was born. I love everything about it; a barbershop on the banks of a canal where customers have come to sit in old leather chairs for one hundred years--all are still in use and all are doomed by progress.

And yet maybe not. In the heart of Bangkok, beneath one of the city’s busiest Skytrain stations, are two low-lying wooden buildings, their walls bordered by a wild ganglia of utility wires, their doors wide open to the street. Surrounded by gleaming shopping centers that sell imported luxuries from all over the world, these anomalies survive, bringing a vital reminder of Bangkok’s history to the fashionable, trend-ridden glaze that too often characterizes this city. Perhaps the beauty of Davies’ photographs will bring strength to the battle for preservation that has recently emerged in Thailand. Certainly the artistry of his work will claim the attention of historians and photography collectors for years to come.~Janet Brown

The Song Poet by Kao Kalia Yang (Henry Holt and Company)

When Kao Kalia Yang was eight, she saw a crowd of people weep at a Hmong New Year celebration as her father sang poetry, his words and music “blending hardship and harrowing hope.” The songs he created gave shape to the story of leaving one country for another and evoked the beauty and loss of what had been left behind,  “a reminder, a promise, of home.” 

Across the United States, Hmong people heard about Bee Yang’s songs and begged that he record them. He made a tape with six songs that yielded a profit of five thousand dollars. Instead of putting that money into another album, he turned it into “grains of rice and strings of meat” to feed his children. Although he continued to write songs and recorded them on a basic tape recorder, he never made another album again. But his poetry surrounded the lives of his children, who “took it for granted that this would always be so.”

Instead, when Bee’s mother died, he lost his songs. His poetry vanished.

What stayed with him were his stories that he embedded in the memory of his daughter, a girl who became a writer herself (The Latehomecomer, reviewed in Asia by the Book in April, 2008). Listening to her father’s recorded songs and translating his poetry into English led her to the story of her father’s life, from his birth in the Laos mountains to his struggles in the United States.

Hmong song poetry is an art in which the singer “raps, jazzes, and sings the blues;” it holds “humor, irony, and astute cultural and political criticism.” Kao Kalia Yang tells her father’s story in his voice, in answer to his songs, entering his heart, mind, and history.

Bee Yang never knew his father, a man who “did not live to see his son yearn for a father, or struggle to become one.” A child of two shamans, Bee searches for his own answers in the words of the people around him, looking for beauty within what he hears in his village and what he sees in the natural world within which the Hmong people coexist. 

When war makes Bee and his family flee for safety into the jungle, he falls in love with beauty in the person of a young girl, one whose spirit challenges and sustains him as they reach the safety of a refugee camp, get on a plane to live in America, and work to raise their children by doing jobs that would cripple their hands, tear at their lungs, and lacerate their spirits.

“When I speak English, I become a leaf in the wind,” Bee admits, as his children become interpreters of life in America and he a storyteller of life in Laos.He watches his children grow away from him as they work toward the goals he has set for them; his dream of them becoming doctors, lawyers, successful Americans. He rages at his oldest son who, racked by bigots and bullies at school, drops out and follows his parents into manual labor.  But in spite of the gaps that yawn between his children’s lives and his own, Bee’s family holds together, bound by the persistence of his love.

Haunted by the memory of an adopted brother who was tortured into madness by Laos soldiers and died as “a collection of open pits, broken trees, and burnt houses,” Bee longs to return to his country and honor his brother’s memory. Although his oldest daughter gives him a plane ticket to Southeast Asia, he’s stopped at the border between Thailand and Laos with the warning that if he crosses into his homeland, he will be killed. Instead he and his wife climb to a Thai mountaintop and stare down at a country where Hmong people once fought against Communism and from which they are now exiled as a result.

In the country that has never been his own, Bee, old, deaf, and physically beaten down by factory work, proves that his spirit is unbroken when he stands up against unfairness in his workplace and walks away, never to go back. “I leaned on my children, who told me “...Everything will be okay.” They help him buy a house on a hill where he gardens, raises chickens, watches his grandchildren play. “Each breath I take, each song I hear, gives my heart something to sing about, silent songs…”

Kao Kalia Yang has reached into her father’s poetry and used it to illuminate his life, honoring him and the many men like him, who live “in this land as strangers, beneath the foreign sky,” so their children can find peace. In a time when immigration is threatened, this book is a potent reminder of what the US owes to these men and their families.~Janet Brown

Phra Farang : An English Monk in Thailand by Phra Peter Pannapadipo (Arrow Books)

There comes a point in time in many people’s lives when they begin to question their own values and direction. Perhaps they feel a need to buy an expensive sports car or need to change professions. Perhaps they will give up everything they own and live as an ascetic. Some may call this a mid-life crisis. Others may call it a spiritual awakening. Whatever it is, it is a time when a person makes a decision that can change his or her life. 

Peter Robinson reached this point in his life. He was a successful businessman living in comfort in London. He had a nice house, fancy clothes, and had enough disposable income to indulge himself in various pursuits. Peter says, “Sometimes I used my money wisely, occasionally generously, usually wastefully, to help me try to achieve happiness, or at least the ultimate ‘good time’” He never found it.

Phra Farang is Peter’s journey of leaving the world he knows behind. Once he is ordained, he is known as Phra Peter Pannapadipo. Phra Peter shares his story of the ten years he spent as monk meditating in various monasteries in Thailand and tells of his trials and tribulations of trying to follow the teachings of the Buddha. 

Phra Peter says his most often asked question is, “Why did you become a Buddhist monk?”. He thinks “they expect my answer to reveal some personal inadequacy or character flaw, a dreadful tragedy in my past, or some other dark secrets.”  None of the reasons cited influenced Phra Peter in choosing his path. He says, “If that had been the case, I’d have joined the Foreign Legion.” 

The catalyst in setting Phra Peter on his path to becoming a Buddhist priest was the death of his older brother. His brother David was only two years older but was the embodiment of success. He had a lot of money and knew how to enjoy it. He lived in Paris, had a chateau in the countryside, a Ferrari, a yacht...and yet, he was dead at forty-two. 

Around the same time as his brother’s death, Peter had made his first trip to Thailand. He was not interested in the beaches or the nightlife but checked out as many monasteries as he could, even the ones that were in little out-of-the-way places. He was impressed with the calmness and tranquility and the sense of purpose at the monasteries that he was determined to learn more. 

Thus begins the transformation of Peter Robinson to Phra Peter Pannadapido. The Thai embassy put Peter in touch with a monastery in London called Wat Buddhapadipa. In a short time, Peter would make the first of hundreds of visits to the temple to study and would continue his studies in Thailand. 

Phra Peter Pannapadipo shows great courage in giving up his comfortable life to ordain as a Buddhist monk. He knows he’s often seen as a novelty to the eyes of many Thais who call him Phra Farang, farang being the Thai word for “foreigner”. His friends and family don’t understand him but that doesn’t stop him from practicing what he believes to be right. The path of monkhood might not be for everybody but it was the right choice for Peter and he may inspire you to find your own spiritual awakening. ~Ernie Hoyt

Almost Home : The Asian Search of a Geographic Trollop by Janet Brown (ThingsAsian Press)

Back in 1995, Janet Brown left her home and family and went to live in Bangkok, Thailand. She fell in love with the country and decided that was where she was going to spend the remainder of her life. However, blood-ties were stronger than the love of a new country and she found herself moving back and forth between the States and Thailand during the six years she called Bangkok her home. Bangkok “puzzled, infuriated, delighted, and engaged me as no other spot had ever before.”

Between the years 2001 and 2008, Janet lived in the U.S. but lived her life as she did when living in Bangkok. “I cooked jasmine rice and noodles with Thai chili peppers and fish sauce. I listened to Thai music, I rented Thai DVDs, I read the Thai-English newspapers on my computer.” If she had enough money to go on vacation, she would go to Thailand. 

Almost Home is Janet’s continual search for where she can settle down, with Bangkok at the top of the list. Now at sixty, she “packed two suitcases and came home, to a city where I knew I’d remain for the rest of my life.”  Unfortunately, Janet says the Bangkok she came back to wasn’t the same. The times have changed and so has her city. The political situation was making living in Bangkok a dangerous prospect. Perhaps it was time to search for a new home. 

In Hong Kong, Janet found a place she would return to again and again- - Chungking Mansions in Kowloon. The place is a community in and of itself. It also has a bad reputation for being dangerous and full of drugs, but for Janet, she took to the mansions like a duck takes to water. Still, it wasn’t some place she would think of as a permanent home. 

Beijing was “beyond any easy pigeonholing of ancient traditions contrasted with modern luxury. It was a place that took everything that had happened within it for the past three thousand years and jammed it all together to make a hybrid city, huge and impossible to duplicate anywhere else.”  

However, Beijing didn’t quite have the hold on Janet as Bangkok does and she finds herself returning to her old haunting grounds. On her return to Bangkok, the political situation hadn’t improved and this time, there was a series of bombings. She knew she had to get away and took a short trip to Penang in Malaysia. Penang was quite a contrast from Bangkok and Janet found it to her liking….so she moved there.

Unfortunately, Penang was not as idyllic as Janet first imagined as she had to contend with bedbugs, listen to a cacophony of music and worst yet, being asked a series of personal questions in English where it got to the point of annoyance. After two months, Janet, who thought she could make her home anywhere, realized she made a big mistake and took the next train back to Thailand. 

Does Janet eventually find her home? Janet has traveled and lived in different countries in Asia, but something more than countries and newfound friends draws her to what she really considers home….and that would be living near her children who are now grown men. Janet says, “Although I’ve found my anchor among the people whom I love more than anybody in the world, wherever I am, I’m always almost home.” ~Ernie Hoyt