The streets were quiet. Dusty. Mildewed buildings boarded up. Countless stores, restaurants, and hotels renamed “For Rent” or “For Sale.”
Most of lower Sukhumvit had been mothballed or abandoned. This stretch of downtown sleeping dead.
The Wuhan Virus had struck again, had submerged Bangkok. It was apocalyptic, really, walking around, seeing shuttered storefronts, empty sidewalks, empty streets. In my ten years in Bangkok, I’d never seen so much of Sukhumvit Road empty, so many stretches of open road with few to no cars, vans, trucks, busses, or tuk-tuks. I didn’t even know what Sukhumvit Road looked like without its previously ubiquitous bumper-to-bumper traffic.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The majority of the road’s remaining traffic appeared to be delivery drivers, most of them on motorcycles, motorbikes. And in bursts and waves they went on wailing by, engines screaming like banshees, others buzzing like hornets, all of them riding ferociously down open arteries, the concrete veins of the urban jungle.
Bangkok, the “Big Mango” or better yet, the “Big Durian” had been both becalmed and paralyzed by plague. Despite the baking sun, the mood and psyche of the city was cold. And dark.
Practically every establishment was shuttered. The puppet government, the ruling military junta had even closed the parks, so there was nowhere to run or walk, except along Sukhumvit Road, or along the alleys, the sois, if one was brave enough and aware enough to dodge the motorcycles whipping around, shooting out from carparks, driveways and sideroads like errant missiles.
And there were many of these brave souls. There were scattered walkers, runners, about all of them expats. The runners wore surgical masks, and one could see in their eyes the ugly glitter of malaise, listlessness, boredom and cabin fever. It was unclear if the runners were running for health reasons or mental reasons. Or both.
Aside from the runners, there were also a few locals, Thais, out using the empty streets as gyms, doing push-ups on the sidewalk, jumping rope in front of abandoned stores. I’d hoped to spot a couple Muay Thai boxers sparring but didn’t. Maybe tomorrow, I thought…
Nearby a Thai doing push-ups on the street corner, I happened upon a bit of what could be described as karma. In a twist of irony, street vendors stood under umbrellas, selling fruits, noodles and barbeque in front of a shuttered 7-Eleven, as if the street chefs were reclaiming their turf from the Japanese mega-corp.
But altogether there weren’t that many people outside. Which was highly unusual for Bangkok. Normally every street, every corner, every alley, every nook and
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer cranny would be peopled. But the plague had done away with that. The populous was in hiding. The people were in fear.
The fear of the plague was perhaps worse than the plague itself. A sense of fear pervaded Bangkok. It was in the air. Hanging and choking the city like a noose. It was in the air. Heavier than the humidity. There was not only fear of the virus, but there was a palpable sense of dread. A seeping fear feeding and spreading and multiplying from itself. The roaring bustle of Bangkok extinguished in an ugly squall of silence…
Stopping for a second to pop into an open 7-Eleven, for a cold drink, I instinctively went to sit down to the small dining counter by the automatic door, where I’d always sit. I noticed the automatic door was opening and closing, swishing, randomly, even as no customers were entering the store. The automatic door repeatedly chiming out “Hello, Welcome!” in its childish robot voice, to welcome ghosts.
Scanning around, I saw no ghosts. But I did see that the counter’s stools were gone, and atop the counter were several stacked boxes of bottled water.
Yet more restrictions...
I felt a surge of sadness wash over me, not being able to simply sit down, have a cold drink and gaze out the window, voyeuristically watch the streets and the people. However, with so few people out anyway, I guess it didn’t matter as much.
My front pocket buzzed, my phone rattling at my thigh, and I fished out my phone from my pocket and saw a disturbing news notification. It said that for the first time ever, the daily number of COVID deaths had surpassed daily deaths from road accidents. A truly startling statistic.
I trudged out the 7 feeling disappointed, feeling desperate for more non-recirculated air. Even if the air was tinged with diesel fumes, I didn’t care. As long as it was outside air. As long as the scenery wasn’t the walls of my apartment.
Even walking down a narrow, patchy sidewalk full of holes and bumps and random tiny fire hydrants that seem installed to simply trip up pedestrians more
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer than anything else, even that, was better than sitting in my tiny apartment, with its white walls mocking me, the walls getting closer and smaller by the second.
Over the last few days, the sky had been milky, overcast, with sporadic bursts of tropical downpours, showers rapping my building’s roof like machine gun fire. But not today. Today the sky was pure blue, blue as the Andaman Sea, and the sun was bathing Bangkok in a blissful patina of bright gold. The flood of sunshine on my skin invigorating, raising my lowly spirits.
I lifted my gaze toward the clear heavens, which looked clearer than I’d seen in months. Perhaps the plague reducing traffic had had an effect. Or perhaps the farmers outside the city weren’t burning the rice fields. One can never be sure.
Still, I strapped on my Vogmask tight, and set out to continue my trek.
Navigating Bangkok on foot has always been a challenge, due to the lack of sidewalks, pedestrian partitioning.
The sidewalks, when they do exist, often double as space for outdoor restaurants or street hawkers, peddlers, food carts and sometimes feature holes (unintentionally yet perfectly) designed to snap an ankle; or are “landmines,”
loose planks of pavement that erupt and splash a plash of wastewater, rainwater on pedestrians’ feet and thighs and muddy up shoes; or whatever exists of the sidewalk will simply serve as an informal parking lot for motorbikes.
But there was less of that these days, due to the plague. There were actually long stretches of empty sidewalk, making it easier to navigate. Of course, one still had to be on guard for uneven pavement, holes, wastewater landmines, fire hydrant trip traps...
It was unnerving, in a way, to not see the impromptu restaurants, chaotic scenes of activity. There’d been many times when I’d lamented slogging around the overcrowded sidewalks or cursed a kamikaze motorbike under my breath. But now that they were gone, it was eerie and surprisingly unsettling. Glancing over the city’s emptiness, its desolation, I suddenly felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer And I reasoned that it’s the chaos, the insanity of Bangkok that not only makes it challenging to live in, but also gives the city its character. Without the Issan lady selling kebabs, without the granny selling noodles, without the row of motorcycle taxis ready to zip off, and without the pop-up ramshackle restaurants set up from the sidecar of a motorcycle, it just… didn’t feel like Bangkok. Right then I could have been anywhere affected by the Wuhan Virus.
Passing by the touristy businesses was even sadder. There’s nothing sadder than a closed, boarded up souvenir shop, or a bankrupt travel agent. Nothing sadder than seeing happy smiling faces on posters of waterfalls and museums and crocodile parks and realizing that all those tourist attractions are closed. Walking by hotels, restaurants, stores, all shuttered, possibly for good, heavy iron chains hanging on their doors. The chains hanging low, too, like thick lips, metal mouths, the mouths probably all too ready to say something sardonic or morose.
Amazingly, against all reason, I spotted a tanning salon. In downtown Bangkok. A most superfluous business idea! Maybe the worst ever!
However, in contrast to other businesses, the tanning salon remained open! I was perplexed. I was motivated to walk in, see just who would go to a place as sunny as Thailand and sit in a tanning salon, when they could simply step outside and burn themselves bronze. And how was such a place able to keep its doors open during the plague? It couldn’t be real, I figured. I must be imagining things. Too much time in the sun. Surely no one would visit a tanning salon in Bangkok, right?
Then there were the homeless. I’d been living in downtown Bangkok, and I’d seen homeless, here and there, but it was nothing like many Western countries where homelessness is an epidemic of its own.
Nowadays, though, with the plague, the homeless numbers had skyrocketed, and while still not approaching Californian proportions, it was nevertheless striking to see such an increase.
There’d been way more beggars, too. The beggars sitting cross-legged, wai-ing passersby, on overpasses and footpaths, and some of the beggars were aggressive, calling out desperately, in broken English, feigning eating motions, shoveling an
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer imaginary fork to their mouths, crinkling their faces into contorted, pained expressions in hopes of eliciting sympathetic donations.
But most of the homeless I’d see weren’t begging. They were sleeping. They lay supine or balled up, sleeping on slabs of cardboard, in front of abandoned storefronts. The homeless in Bangkok never seemed to have shoes, either, their feet dark and dirty and black as coal.
Across the street from my building, a row of stores, all of them closed, had lines of sleeping homeless in front of them, homeless under stripped awnings, homeless sleeping under “For Rent” or “For Sale” signs and many of the storefronts had been vandalized too, windows bashed and broken, spray-painted in crude graffiti, English curse words.
I wondered who the homeless were, where they came from...
Were they workers, unable to find a new job, unable to voyage home? Certainly a lot of service workers, construction workers, migrant workers had found themselves out of work, without money to return to their villages in the provinces, and had found themselves freshly homeless…
There’d been a couple homeless who were particularly striking. There was one, a woman, maybe 30 or 40 something, who, daily, wore the same dirty blue jeans and a long-sleeved gray sweatshirt, despite the tropical heat.
She had a thick mess of hair that’d been clumped into a wild bush of dreads, almost like a Rastafarian, and she’d been wandering up and down a lengthy pedestrian overpass, every day, her face fixed in a thousand-yard stare.
Sometimes I’d see her sitting in a corner of the overpass, hugging her legs to her chest, rocking herself back and forth. I’d read about a few desperate, despondent locals jumping from overpasses and I hoped to not read anything like that about her.
Another homeless I’d been seeing was a chunky, older woman, maybe 50 to 60.
She lived in the alley next to my building. She’d get naked, in the alley, and wash herself under a garden hose, then use the hose to clean her clothes, which she lay out, in neat rows, on the pavement, to dry in the sun.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer At night, she’d sleep in front of an abandoned karaoke bar, sprawled out, lying on her big belly, in the doorway. The way she slept, how motionless she’d be, it was hard to know if she was alive or dead.
But I definitely knew when she was awake, because I’d hear her, her shrieks, her screaming. I’d hear her talk to herself, or to ghosts. She’d scream, in an explosive, shrill voice, in Thai, lighting up the whole alley with her sounds, her pained cries, her arguments with the air.
And how vociferously she would castigate the air! Often she’d scream and no one would stop her. Though occasionally a neighbor would pop their head out a window and say something, in Thai, to calm her agitated spirit, and then she’d be mostly silent, only murmuring to herself.
By and large, however, the homeless in Bangkok didn’t appear mentally ill. And most didn’t beg. They simply remained silent, sleeping on sidewalks. Just like the city, they were somewhere between barely alive and dead.