On the Road: the Cultural Heritage Tour of Southeast Asia

2-28-08
from Bangkok, Thailand

I am at the end of my second day here in Bangkok, and it has definitely been an education. I am exhausted but full of delicious Thai food and completely ready for bed...in the Massage Parlor King's hotel.

What?

Our troubles at the Davis started yesterday when Kecia, who had requested a nonsmoking room, was assigned a smoking one. I’m not entirely sure how the desk clerk didn’t see this coming; if he had any discerning capacities he’d have understood from her long, unbound hair, her organic-textile skirt, and the beads bejeweling her neck, ears and fingers that she’s not the kind of woman who smokes. In fact, she’s the kind of woman who walks around barefoot to “feel the earth,” eats seaweed, and uses nontraditional grains in her bizarre salads. She doesn’t even have a chair in her office; she uses a burgundy inflatable ball. A smoking room is something she didn't take lying down. Picture a righteous yogic anger compounded by transoceanic jet lag, and you’ll arrive at something akin to the clerk’s experience.

While we waited for the scurrying clerk to rectify Kecia’s room situation, we went to collect our "welcome drink" at the hotel bar. When we requested wine (necessary to dull the edge of the jet lag), we were informed that the welcome drink was 7-Up only. Rolling our eyes, we ordered a wine chaser with our 7-Up. We were quietly sipping our purchased wine when out of nowhere, two scantily clad Thai ladies clambered aboard a makeshift stage in their knee-high leather boots and proceeded to sing cheesy pop songs into microphones, about two feet behind us. All signs indicated that a restful trip to Bangkok wasn’t in the stars for us.

Then today the bombshell dropped.

Yes. We discovered today that the owner & designer of our hotel, Chuvit Davis, is a notorious character around Bangkok. He made a fortune on massage parlors, which he then parlayed into a massive hotel complex (that mistakenly brands itself as a boutique hotel - it is certainly not). While I can make no comment about his political qualifications, the hotel décor is a hideous, sour version of the W hotel meets traditional Thai decoration. Something about the whole scheme is saccharine, fake, artificial, like you could just peel back the entire wall, the entire hotel suite. But now that I know that I am staying somewhere decorated by the "massage parlor king," everything makes more sense...Every Thai we told where we were staying (including cab drivers) has smirked. Also, Mr. Chuvit is trying to run for public office, on the platform of being a watchdog for Thai decency and morals and culture. Jay told us that he puts huge billboards of himself all over Bangkok. We unwittingly are contributing to his advertising campaign! His marketing campaign for the hotel (which is on free postcards, and the calendar in the room, and everything) is "The Way We Live in the Davis, Bangkok." Living as a madam? Pimp?

Yesterday Kecia and I had gone to Siam Paragon to get cell phones and do some basic shopping, and today we headed over to SPAFA (our partner) to do some workshop business. Our partner Jay is wonderful (she also very kindly informed us the true nature of our hotel owner). She sent us out with her colleague Mo and a driver to do some shopping. We had thought we were being clever by not buying most of our supplies in the US, but instead planning to buy them in BKK. After all, BKK is sophisticated and a business capital of the world.

Not so much a capital of laser printer labels or flipcharts of white paper...our lovely friend Mo did the best she could do, with all five feet of her tiny adorable self leaning over various counters in her sparkly shoes and speaking rapid-fire Thai accompanied to hand motions ("big paper" "flip" "stick" "divide") but to no avail. We were met only with blank looks, not blank paper, and squiggly eyebrows. We are label-less, and our flipchart will be man-made. As in, large pieces of paper that we literally clip together. First class all the way, Getty.

As we drove the streets of Dusit and Phra Athit (n. Bangkok), we noted that many Thais were wearing black and white. I remembered from my visit last year that many Thais wore yellow polos with the royal crest on them. The Thais love them some king. Mo explained that the black and white is for mourning, and for 100 days. The King's sister, a beloved princess, passed away earlier this year, and there has been ordained 100 days of mourning, during which all government employees are required to wear black and white (for the rest of the population, it is merely a recommendation). The Royal Garden outside Wat Pra Keow is now a mourning ground, where mourners come to the royal palace to pay their respects to the princess. There are buses of students and country folk who come in, as well. It is difficult for me to imagine something similar in the US for a political figure or ruler - I cannot imagine us wearing black and white for 100 days as a nation to commemorate anyone...

Mo also told us as we passed the ministry of defense that originally all the canons decorating the carefully manicured lawn had been pointing out towards the street - and across the street at the Royal Palace. A few years ago, someone made a stink about it, saying it was inappropriate for even decorative canons to be hinting at firing at the King, so in the middle of the night the canons were turned, and now face north and south instead of west towards the palace. The idea of an army of tiny Thais grunting to turn canons 90 degrees in another direction in the middle of the night is hilarious to me.

Tonight, after braving an hour of traffic to at rush hour to cross the town from SPAFA to return to our hotel, Kecia and I stopped to have dinner at the Lemongrass restaurant, near the Emporium mall. It was amazing - we had a dish that was eggplant, yellow bean, and peanut, pomelo salad (well, Kecia did - I don't eat shrimp), and the spiciest green curry ever. Our waiter didn't tell us it was spicy - perhaps because Kecia is Asian he thought we were able to handle it? No. I thought my lips were actually burning off.


Now, I'm back in my hotel to finish up a few loose ends for the workshop while I watch Chinese MTV. (I know! I didn't know they were allowed to have MTV). The music here is so amazing - Kecia keeps making fun of me for knowing all the pop songs in malls, taxis, and lobbies - hey, a girl's gotta have some Backstreet Boys knowledge if she lived in Europe in the 90s, right? My choices are Chinese MTV and something called the Australia Network, which, when I watched ten minutes yesterday, was an instructional video on how to casually invite people to hang out with you, and featured a 50-something gentleman repeating phrases slowly and with subtitles. "Would you like to join us? It would be great if you could join us. Do you want to join us?" Since I already speak English I didn't find it super helpful, but it was interesting to see Western manners of hospitality reflected, detached from their standard cultural context.

Anyhow, meetings with UNESCO tomorrow, probably more shopping for things we won't find, and then finally some relief on the weekend - shopping at Jatujak, Wat Pho, massages. And hopefully more 3-flavor mangos to dip in chili sugar!

Book Review: Cultural Democracy by James Bau Graves

I picked this book up off the shelf at my work's library, intrigued by the title and its promise to discuss arts, community and culture in America. Bau Graves lives and works in Maine and has a long career in running arts and cultural programs there. With his experience attempting to integrate and bring into dialogue diverse immigrant and foreign cultures with "mainstream" American culture, Bau Graves brings a voice of experience to the narrative even if that voice is not an academic voice. He falls prey to a few dangerous binaries that trouble his attempt to call for increased cooperation and a more representative cultural scene, which is a laudable goal and critical if the arts are to serve a larger social purpose.

As Bau Graves discovered and relates in Chapter 1, the dynamics of communities are complicated. It was not clear to me whether Bau Graves understood the danger of applying terms like "insider," "outsider," and "authentic." There isn't one Asian community that is monolithic here in Brooklyn's Chinatown, but many communities. While Bau Graves pays surface homage to this, it isn't clear that this understanding has deeply penetrated his thinking. He seems to think that there is a way to infiltrate the secrets of authentic (or authentic-enough?) culture, which is perhaps reflective of his work which is practically oriented (and my issue reflective of my academic training).

Sentences like "the attending outsiders miss out on the ambiance of ethnicity, the feeling of being presence of the Other" or "we're still a lot better at putting ethnics on stage than at getting them in our seats" (both p.71) are offensive in their presumption that "the Other" or "the ethnics" aren't involved in the cultural scene except as potential spectators, and in the automatic homogenizing of a white, upper middle class audience in a position of power and creation in the arts. Careless word choice here reaffirms divisions and simplistic and insulting binaries, inherited from colonialist thought, rather than undermining them. The arts are a place for Americans to break down barriers and encourage diversity that reflects our society. My academic training rigorously stressed the thoughtlessness and idiocy of Orientalizing those different from myself (which, if you think about it, includes everyone else), and I think it is necessary to deconstruct this line of thinking about ambiance, authenticity, and ethnicity and the American arts scene. It's completely unacceptable because of its sheer hypocrisy: putting "Others" on display for their novelty or considering "them" exterior to "us" reinforces preexisting notions of difference and harkens back to the late 1800s concepts of Worlds Fairs, where people of different ethnicities were put in cages for "we the civilized" to observe. I would hope that by 2010 we could think outside the cage.

Bau Graves does address deconstructing accepted norms of time and structure in America's attempt to democratize the arts,an important call to collaboration and acceptance of other world-views. Constructions of authority, time, and power structure shift across our blue planet and it is key for arts leaders to recognize and be sensitive to working with others (not "Others"!). After my experience working abroad, I can definitely attest that this is a key and necessary learning if one is to be truly collaborative. It is also noteworthy that Bau Graves articulates how precarious the cultural mediator position is, and interrogates the power of the arts administrator.

Bau Graves cites Martin Luther King, who said, "I doubt if the teeming problems of our ghettos will have a great chance to be solved until the white majority, in genuine empathy, comes to feel the ache and anguish of the Negro's daily life" (197). It is this spirit of openness and empathy which I believe Bau Graves wants to encourage, and which I applaud and join my voice to the call for an American arts and cultural scene (as well as political, while we're at it) that truly reflects who we have become as one nation of many gorgeous and unique pieces. Part of that openness and empathy comes in dropping Orientalist ideas, removing our blinders, and questioning all our assumptions to come to a place of more considered sharing and learning.