Old Asia fades, and doesn't

Is it possible to feel nostalgia for a place or time one has never experienced? I think someone else has written on this subject, but I can't remember who or what. I'll go ahead---Bill Herrick joked that when a writer writes something that feels a little too familiar, but the writer can't recall where he might have seen these words or ideas in print previously, then it isn't plagiarism.

While I never set foot in the city before last year, I am vaguely nostalgic for the Bangkok of the 1960s and earlier. I've read accounts of Rama IV Road, a main thoroughfare half a block from our hotel, when canals ran along either side of it 40 years ago, and herds of cattle were driven down the street to a downtown slaughterhouse. Canals criss-crossed the entire city, in fact, carrying goods and passengers about, and emptying into the Chao Pryha river. No developer has yet figured out how to fill in the river. But the canals are nearly gone, along with most of the gorgeous old teak houses on stilts.

While Bangkok's skyline now looks a little too much like Houston's, it is still very much a Thai, not Texan, city. Houston has no Buddhist temples with gilded spires nestled serenely among the skyscrapers. And there are no "spirit houses" in front of Houston bank towers where passers-by can leave offerings of food and flowers for the natural spirits the structures have inconsiderately displaced.

An apparent real loss, however, is the consistent high level of Thai food. Overall this is still as satisfying a place to dine as anywhere in the world I have ever lifted a fork, or a set of chopsticks, or my right hand. But farangs who have lived in or visited Thailand over several decades claim that it's only the street-stall food that has stayed consistently fresh, zesty and surprising, and a lot of the restaurant food has been "adapted" to Western tastes. It's a result of the dominance of industrial tourism in the Thai economy, a decidedly mixed blessing.

While Joe and I nearly always choose carefully and eat well, we have run into the diluted stuff a few times. One was when our friend Poe Suwatchie arranged a dinner meeting with a gay Thai police official. (The cop turned out to be both fun and helpful with my research for the new Strachey book.) Because, Poe said, it would be quiet, and perhaps because it was what the official expected, we went to a place called Le Siam that was more "Le" than Siam. It had big satin bows on the backs of the chairs, smiling elephants carved in stone, and an Altoona-style cocktail-lounge singer/piano player warbling bad hits of the eighties. The food was like mediocre Chinese-restaurant food in the U.S.--- heavy, monotonous, possibly chemical-laden.

We vowed to avoid joints like Le Siam in the future, but two nights later fate intervened, this time entertainingly. At the departure gate, our Thailand to Myanmar flight was cancelled at the last minute on account of "technical" problems with the Myanmar Airways International aircraft. We and 60 or 70 others were told to come back 22 hours later. Meanwhile, for anybody with nowhere to sleep, MAI would put us up overnight at a place near the Bangkok airport called the Miracle hotel. Joe and I were in no hurry, and this sounded irresistible to us.

After a Long March from one end to the other of the very large Suvarnabhumi Airport (the Thais pronounce it swah-nah-BOOM), Thai Immigration confiscated our passports (technically we had left the country), and 30 or 40 of us were placed in a convoy of vans. (See Joe's blog photo of the young woman leading the Long March.) We soon arrived, minus our passports and our luggage, at what Joe described as "an upmarket penal colony." It was the "Miracle Hometel."

Miraculous indeed was the speed with which the front desk doled out room keys to the glum MAI (and MIA) refugees. (At least there were no screamers in the group---perhaps because, except for us and an Austrian man married to a Burmese woman, they were all Asians, who rarely stamp their feet and holler.)

A miracle, too, was our room, a boutique-hip expanse of muted wood tones and rubbed-back aluminum leaf, with a bed the size of Sumatra. The flat-screen TV had nothing on it we wished to look at, but the bathroom, commodious in every respect, had on offer (new) toothbrushes and toothpaste, which we needed. (Despite rumors to the contrary, we never saw our bags until the next day in Yangon.) Our room listed at $150 a night (MAI surely paid less.) That's nothing in New York, but in Bangkok we pay $37 at the Pinnacle, a pleasant tourist hotel near the city center.

Perhaps the Miracle Hometel will get away with charging those prices because what it offers foreign tourists is safety. Especially safety from---"Earl, are they going to make us eat fried squid on a stick?"---Thai food. The Hometel dining room, whose overall decor resembled an undergraduate dining room at Penn State in 1957, had the legend AMERICAN CUISINE emblazoned across one wall. Nearby had been hung an American flag, and next to that was a five-foot gilded replica of the Statue of Liberty. Would I make this up? Yes, but this time I have not.

Our American-cuisine free meal, courtesy of MAI, consisted of a cream soup of undeterminable origins, boiled vegetables, steamed rice and, cozy under a blanket of tomato sauce my aunts in Pennsylvania in the 1950s could reliably have been assured contained no "seasoning," a slab of what I guess has to be called chicken-fried-steak fish.

The live dining-room music at our Hometel away from home(tel) matched the food. A local Thai band was playing and singing hits by the Carpenters off-key. The man at the table next to ours, a Burmese-American who sells telephone systems to prisons, applauded vigorously after each number.

Okay, okay, the Americanization of wide swaths of the tourism business in Southeast Asia (we saw similar trends in Vietnam last year) is not the worst thing that can happen in this region. Hey, remember Pol Pot? But it is sad nonetheless. It's also still avoidable---we eat wonderful classic Thai food all the time. But care must be taken, we now know firsthand.

We flew to Burma the next morning, by the way. The attentive and resourceful Henry Nyan Htun, of Peace House Travel, got us on a 9 a.m. Air Bagan flight. That's the one where the handle clanked down on an emergency-exit door, and a monk was recruited to go and sit next to it. Reassuringly, this was still Asia.