Bangkok Chinatown

We took 4 friends from Singapore on an afternoon and evening shopping expedition in Bangkok's Chinatown yesterday. This is my favourite place in Bangkok. Then we had dinner at the open-air on the footpath Red Shirt seafood restaurant that appears at 6pm each evening, takes over the footpath, and then the first lane of traffic with tables and tiny chairs. It is just across the narrow Soi from the Green Shirt seafood restaurant that also sprawls out into the traffic.

The food: fresh crabs and prawns and scampi and fish from the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea. So fresh, fast, & hot barbecued and you sit there not so much watching the world go by, but rather the world winds its way between the small metal tables, as if they are rocks sticking through the flow in a fast river. The rich, poor, old, young all pouring through; and sometimes a 1961 Vespa all-metal Motorscooter comes through as well. Strong smells of chestnuts cooked in coal, of fruit from everywhere. Carbon dust. Food smells, meat, fish and the sewers.

I think Chinatown Bangkok is the most 'historically true and living' of Asian cities in its crowded unruled way. Just as the peak hour traffic of cars and buses and tuk tuks starts to really rise into something phenomenal, thats when the restaurant chairs and tables take over one lane of traffic and the squeeze becomes 'palpable'. Thai folk ability to include and to blend all forms into a flow is quite a human achievement and its done each day in the most tolerant and considerate way. It as if everything, the society itself, is held together in fine complex webs of silk that cannot be undone except by unfortunate fire.

The crowds are everywhere as are the smiles. Bangkok was 'prettier' before the uprising a few months back. I think it would take years to get the city to that tinsel-like glittering beauty again and I don't know if that will happen because the causes of the social anger are deep and abiding and obviously reached some point of no-return with so many deaths this year. At the same time, the nature of people remains warm and smiling and kind and you really dont get that, to my knowledge, anywhere else in the world. I have great respect for the complexity of Thailand and the willingness to accept the flow of life rather than to diminsih and control it. There is a high price to this of course but there is always, always the right, and indeed the responsibility, to smile and bargain.