Travels (17 page)

More courses. They kept coming for hours. You got accustomed to having something put in the center of the table, picking at it for a while, and then getting something else.

At one point, a cooked fish, one of many, was placed in the center of the table. I was talking with someone, and I looked back—the fish was gone! Picked clean. Yet it had only been there a few seconds. What happened to that fish? I asked. That fish is a great delicacy, I was told. Everyone appreciates that fish. That fish costs four hundred dollars.

Having missed this fish, I was alerted. I immediately made a stab with my chopsticks at each new thing put on the table. Pretty soon there was another fish everyone liked. In a few moments the top was picked clean. Now we were looking at the backbone, and the flesh beneath. It seemed a simple matter to flip the fish over or to remove the backbone, but nobody at the table was doing this. The fish just lay there, half eaten.

Finally I couldn’t stand it. I said, “May I turn the fish?”

“I don’t know,” said the Australian woman next to me.

“I mean,” I said, “is it acceptable to turn the fish?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then why isn’t anyone doing it?” I asked.

“Well, because of how they came here, I expect.”

“How they came here?”

“And how they’ll go home, of course.”

I didn’t understand. We seemed to have drifted from the primary question of the fish. I said, “Then it’s all right for me to turn the fish?”

“How will you be going home?” she asked.

“The same way I came here, in a taxi, I imagine.”

“But won’t you cross over water when you go home?”

“Yes …” We had taken a little boat to come to this restaurant.

“Then you can’t turn the fish,” she said. And she explained that if you were going to cross water after your meal, you couldn’t turn the fish.

“Perhaps if I just remove the backbone?” I asked hopefully.

She shook her head. “Sorry.”

Then she said something quickly in Chinese, and a waiter came over and flipped the fish. And everyone started to eat again.

“He lives here,” the woman explained, nodding to the waiter.

So it went on like that, with all of us sitting next to our piles of shrimp shells, drinking toasts with our fingers on the bottoms of the glasses, and nobody able to flip the fish. You never knew what would happen next. Finally, at the end of the evening, the guest of honor, an elderly man who was a Chinese movie star, gave a martial-arts demonstration. He flung his body around the room, quick, agile, graceful, strong. He was sixty-seven years old.

I thought, There’s a lot I don’t know about.

When I landed in Bangkok, I was met by my friend Davis, who had lived in Thailand for five years. “What were you doing in Hong Kong? It’s so
boring
there, completely Western. Not the real Asia at all. You’ll have a
much
more interesting time here.”

Driving back from the airport, Davis gave me essential advice for getting along in Bangkok. “There are four rules you must never break while you are in Thailand,” he said. “First, if you are in a temple, never climb on a statue of Buddha.”

“Okay.”

“Second, always keep your head lower than the head of a Buddha statue.”

“Okay.”

“Third, never touch a Thai person on the head.”

“Okay.”

“Fourth, if your feet are lifted off the floor, never allow them to point at a Thai person. That’s
very
insulting.”

“Okay,” I said. Personally, I thought that these circumstances were pretty unlikely. I told Davis I thought I could get through my visit to Bangkok without breaking any of his injunctions.

“I doubt it,” he said, gloomily. “I just hope you don’t break all four.”

Next he instructed me in how to say my street address in Thai. I was
staying at Davis’s house; he explained that I had to be able to tell a taxi driver where to go, and since the driver wouldn’t understand English or read Thai writing, there was nothing to do but commit the oral address to memory. I still remember it:
Sip-jet, Sukhumvit soi yee-sip
.

Davis’s house was beautiful, all elegant polished hardwood, opening onto a lovely garden in the back, with a swimming pool. I was introduced to the servants, reminded to remove my shoes at the front door, and shown to my bedroom on the second floor.

“Now, the Buddha in your room has been moved,” Davis said. “We’ve put it on top of the armoire, which is the tallest piece of furniture in the room, but in your case I don’t know if—ah, no, you see, you’re still taller than the Buddha when you stand. That’s not good. I’ll speak to the servants.”

“What about?”

“Well, I think they’ll agree to make a special case for you, since you’re so tall. But it would help if you would sort of hunch over when you’re in the room, so you won’t be taller than the Buddha any more than necessary.”

I thought, This is a single bedroom. No one is ever going to see me in here. I am all alone in here, and Davis is telling me to stay hunched over because of the Buddha. It seemed a little crazy, but I said I would try.

I thought perhaps Davis was kidding me, but he wasn’t. The Thais are wonderful, easygoing people, but they take their religion seriously, and they are not, in these matters, tolerant of foreigners. I later saw a Thai-censored version of a Peter Sellers film,
A Girl in My Soup
. To watch the movie was a bizarre experience: Peter Sellers would stand up from a table, and suddenly the Buddha statue in his wall niche would explode like a black-ink sparkler, which continued until Sellers sat down again. Then you could see the peaceful Buddha once more. The Thai censor had inked out the image of the Buddha, frame by frame, whenever Peter Sellers was higher than the statue.

So the Thais were serious, all right, and the servants were spoken to, and I stooped in the privacy of my bedroom. But, technically, one of the four rules was already broken.

The next day we were walking down a Bangkok street, and we passed some young kids. They were cute and friendly as they clustered around us; I patted one on the head.

“Ah ah ah,” Davis said.

Two of four broken.

“Buddhists,” Davis explained, “believe the head, the highest part of the body, is sacred and shouldn’t be touched. It’s barely acceptable with kids,
but don’t ever touch an adult that way. I’m serious. In fact, it’s better not to touch an adult Thai at all.”

Chastened, I said all right. That night we were at a dinner party, and I was talking with a Thai cameraman who shot commercials for Australian companies, as well as feature films for the Thai market. He was a very interesting fellow; we talked about crew requirements and methods of working. Then the hostess called us in for dinner. We walked together, and when we came to the door, I gestured for him to go through first, and put my hand on his shoulder, to ease him through. It was a very natural, casual gesture. The cameraman stiffened for a fraction of a second, then went through the door.

I looked over. Davis was shaking his head.

So, this second rule was more difficult than I had imagined. I had to watch my natural tendency to touch people.

After dinner, we sat on pillows, around a low, round table. There was a Thai woman across the table from me. She was rather aloof, talking to someone else. As the night went on, she began to give me dirty looks. Later she’d break off her conversation at intervals to glower at me. I didn’t know what her problem was.

“Michael,” Davis said. “Ah ah ah.”

I looked down at myself. Everything seemed okay.

“Feet,” Davis prompted.

I was sitting on a pillow, leaning back on my elbows on the ground. My legs were crossed. My feet were fine. No holes in my socks.

“Michael …”

Because my legs were crossed, one foot was off the floor—and pointing at the Thai woman. She was giving me dirty looks because my foot was pointing at her.

I uncrossed my legs, put them flat on the floor. The woman smiled pleasantly.

“Try and keep your feet
on
the floor,” Davis advised. “It’s really the only way.”

Three out of four rules broken.

Meanwhile, I was making all sorts of minor mistakes as well. I could never remember to remove my shoes when entering people’s houses. Also, I became enamored of the Thai greeting in which you bow and make a temple of your fingers in front of your face. This is called a
wai
. I liked to do it, and the Thais were amused to see me doing it. One day a little kid in a tailor’s shop did it to me. I did it back.

“Never
wai
a kid,” Davis said.

“Oh God,” I said. By now I was becoming accustomed to my clumsiness. “Why not?”

“To
wai
an adult is a sign of respect.
Wai
a kid, it shortens his life.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Never mind, the parents didn’t seem too upset.”

At least I didn’t break the fourth rule, about climbing on a Buddha in a temple. Tourists are jailed in Thailand for that. The Thai temples are exquisite, beautifully maintained. Often they sit as tranquil, gilded oases amid an ugly expanse of roaring traffic and gray concrete buildings.

Thailand was the first Buddhist country I had ever been in. I was surprised by everything—the gaudiness of the temples, the way people behaved inside them, the flowers and the incense and the yellow-robed priests.

But I also found that I
liked
being in these temples. I wasn’t sure what I liked, certainly not the exhausting ornateness, but something. I liked the feeling. I liked the way the people behaved in a temple. I knew absolutely nothing about Buddhism. I didn’t know what the religion taught, what its principles were. In one of the temples, a Thai who spoke English told me that Buddhists didn’t believe in God. That seemed pretty extreme, a religion that doesn’t believe in God.

I found it interesting, that I liked this religion, because for many years I had been vociferously atheistic and antireligion. But here in the temple it was just … peaceful. I went to a bookstore and started to read books on Buddhism.

Other things were happening, too. Davis had a dinner party for Peter Kann, who was then the Asia correspondent for
The Wall Street Journal
. I had known Peter from the Harvard
Crimson
many years before. He was still easygoing, funny, very smart and very competent, but now there was also a tough, worldly quality that I admired. Peter had been a correspondent in Vietnam and had remained in Asia after the war was over. He could wear shirts with epaulets and get away with it.

At the dinner party, I was seated next to an English hairdresser whose hair was dyed red on one side of her head and green on the other. I suspected this might be the latest thing in London, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t even know whether I should refer to it or not, so I kept my mouth shut.

Conversation at dinner was desultory until someone casually mentioned that Peter had been to Hunza. Instantly the table became charged with excitement. Hunza, really? How incredible. How fantastic. Nick Spenser, a neighbor of Davis’s, was full of questions. “Did you go to Gilgit, then?”

“Yes,” Peter said.

“Fly to Gilgit?”

“Yes.”

“How long did that take?”

“A week in ’Pindi.”

“Not so bad.”

“No,” Peter said, “it was all right.”

“And Chitral as well, did you?”

“No, not this time,” Peter said.

I was trying to figure this out. Hunza, Gilgit, ’Pindi. Hunza was obviously some geographic location. But I was very much at a loss, and I couldn’t imagine how everyone at the table could know so much about a place I hadn’t even heard of. What was the appeal of Hunza, anyway? Some sort of local resort?

I never found out, because the conversation moved on. “Been to Bhutan as well?”

“No, never,” Peter said. “Can one go?”

“Billy’s been to Bhutan.”

“Has he! Never mentioned it to me. How’d he manage it?”

“Knows a friend of the ruling family. Did it from Darjeeling.”

“What about Nagar?”

“Yes, well, see Hunza, might as well go to Nagar.”

The conversation continued in this way, affording me no deductive opportunities. I listened in silence for about fifteen minutes. When I couldn’t stand it any more, I turned to the hairdresser with the red-and-green hair, and said quietly, “What are they talking about?”

“Countries,” she said.

I was ready to collapse. They were talking about
countries
and I hadn’t heard of any of them.

“Bhutan and Hunza are countries?”

“Yes. In the Himalaya.”

Well, I felt a little better. Who knew what was tucked away in the folds of the Himalaya? I felt my ignorance could be excused. But as the conversation continued, I realized that the world I inhabited was a world where, if I did not know everything, I had at least heard of most of it. My
ignorance about Himalayan states, on the one hand so embarrassing, was also in its way enlivening. I’d certainly do some reading when I got home.

Davis’s friend Ed Bancroft, a handsome investment banker living in Bangkok, was a rake. He was the only rake I had ever met. As the dinner guests departed, Bancroft announced to Peter and me that he was taking us to see the famous nightlife of Bangkok. Davis begged off, pleading fatigue.

In Patpong, once a Vietnam R & R district, there were clubs with names like “The Playboy” and “The Mayfair.” In The Playboy Club we saw Thai girls demonstrate varieties of muscular control with cigarettes and bananas, all done under ultraviolet lights while the crowd shouted and screamed. The spectator appeal of this activity struck me as limited unless you were really drunk, as most of the spectators were.

We visited several more bars, and then went to a massage parlor. It was a gigantic modern place, the size of a hotel. Ed Bancroft suggested that, as out-of-towners, we might like the full-body massage, where the girl slithers all over you in a soapy bathtub.

We were taken to a one-way mirror where we could look into a room full of girls, all wearing starched white uniforms and number tags. The girls were all looking in our direction, because there was a television mounted just beneath the mirror. The idea was, you picked a number and the manager called the girl out to give you your massage.