I was sitting in the upstairs food court of the __________ shopping mall, twirling my fork into a sizzling plate of spicy noodles. With the skyline of Bangkok hanging in front of me, I cast my eyes over at a row of floor to wall windows and soaked in the sweeping city views.
It was dusk in Krung Thep. And the city sat in its usual outline, its usual patina of haze. The city’s glass-plated skyscrapers pumping their usual neon blasts. Then the sky began dimming, as if a knob were turning, and I glared in open-mouth silence as a mass of dark clouds crept forth, threatening a torrential downpour.
I returned my focus to my food, and while chomping on big bites of noodles, I noticed a stranger’s silhouette sitting down to a seat nearby.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Weirdly, he wasn’t eating, and his body was shifted toward mine. Suddenly I had that feeling one gets when they know they’re being watched. And I could sense the stranger looking over toward me. I could feel his eyes.
But I minded my business. Didn’t meet his gaze. I’m not usually one to start random conversations with strangers. Especially in Bangkok. Bangkok (and Thailand) is sometimes referred to as the “Land of Scams,” due to its preponderance of dodgy characters and wily strangers who’ll try to cajole you into a vast array of confidence tricks, so it’s best to be cautious who you talk to.
It’s worth mentioning, too, that the Thais are generally an inherently shy, reserved people, and not apt to speak randomly with strangers. So if a person approaches me, unsolicited, especially in a public place, in Bangkok, I’m highly skeptical of their intentions…
(It could be reasoned, too, that anyone, anywhere talking to random strangers, unsolicited, on the street, is likely NEVER anything good…) A perfect defense for unwanted, unsolicited salutations, I’ve found, is wearing earphones and pretending as though I can’t hear anything, even if I can, and to smile, shake my head, politely, avert gazes, walk briskly, and continue on my way.
That’s not to say anyone speaking to strangers in Bangkok is a scammer. There are some expats who like talking to strangers, usually other expats, and I understand that, have nothing against it; possibly they’re just friendly, outgoing folks.
Then there are also some expats who’ve lived for years in non-English speaking countries, and when presented with the chance to speak with someone of similar origin, they’ll jump at it, start talking like they’d just snorted a line of cocaine.
And hey, I can understand that too. They might see another expat as someone they might finally be able to have an intelligent conversation with, someone they can talk football or politics or visa issues, 90-day reports, or someone just to grumble to.
Or maybe they’re just lonely.
Being an expat can often mean much time spent in solitude. And there are some who like it that way… And others who struggle with it…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer A spiral of noodles I bit into were spicier than I anticipated, exploding in my mouth with searing heat. The noodles must have been packed with additional hidden clumps of chili peppers, and the intensity of the taste caused me to tense up and sneeze, clearing out my sinuses. As I was blowing my nose into a wad of napkins, I heard a European accent cut through the collective hum of the food court. It sounded German, the accent, and it was asking, “Is it spicy?”
“Sure is, but it’s tasty. I love Thai food,” I replied, shifting my eyes and laying them on the stranger who’d been sitting next to me, wordlessly, for the last few minutes.
“Are you American?” the stranger asked, and I estimated his age at 60 something.
The stranger had a somewhat stereotypical, stout, Germanic look to him, with a bit of a beer belly, and a bushy white mustache spreading over his upper lip like a bad rash.
“That’s right. I’m from Buffalo,” I replied, averting prolonged eye contact. Then I wiped beads of perspiration from my brows and returned to my noodles.
There was a certain fire in the stranger’s glare that was unsettling. Of course, this being Thailand, it would have been easy to label him as a child molester of some sort, as Elon Musk did to that diver, and yes, the stranger had that tree jumper, kiddy fiddler type look to him, like a guy you’d see on To Catch a Predator, that kind of creepy old guy gestalt.
But I tried not to rush to judgment. Look, despite widespread perceptions and beliefs, and despite that I even recently heard the comedian Andrew Schulz, on Theo Von’s podcast, shitting on Thailand for its pedophile problems, despite that, the truth is, after several years in Thailand, I’ve not heard or seen much about pedos. Allegedly they’re in Africa, South America nowadays. Pedos are like a species of parasite that flock to wherever they can feed, satiate their sickness, and most recently, at least according to an article I saw on Vice, that’s in places like Madagascar.
So yeah, maybe the guy was just starved for conversation. And I obliged him.
Started spitting small talk. ----
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The stranger went on to tell me he’s from Berlin, Germany, and had worked for Puma for 25 years, all here at a factory in Thailand. His English was perfect, only slightly accented, and not in a cartoonish Nazi way, but more in a sophisticated slow drawl.
For the first couple of minutes, we were having the typical expat conversation, about travel, nice places to see in Thailand, the best islands, all that.
But then the dialogue turned dark. No, he wasn’t a pedo, thankfully, or not that he disclosed. But he’d obviously gotten himself into an unfortunate situation.
He mentioned something about trying to get his pension, that he was relying on it, and that the German Embassy in Bangkok refused to help him receive it. And that now he had no money. And that he’d gotten into an argument with the staff at the embassy and they’d asked him to leave the premises. And that he was thinking of going back there tomorrow. To kill someone.
Laughing it off, figuring (and hoping) that it was the sarcastic, black humor of the northern European variety, I chuckled and spat back, “nah, definitely don’t do that,” and kept at my noodles, trying to plow through them quicker so I could get away from this situation, before the German divulged anything incriminating.
I started worrying a bit, too, thinking, like, shit, what if he really does walk into the German Embassy tomorrow and stabs someone… What if I read about that in the Bangkok Post… Should I call the cops? Would the cops in Bangkok even do anything about such rantings, possible threats? The “Boys in Brown,” the coppers here, aside from collecting “tea money,” aren’t known as the most proactive of police forces…
Of course, too, I was thinking the German might be one of those deranged foreigners in Thailand I hear about jumping off a balcony, another farang joining the Pattaya Flyers Club… He definitely looked the type. There was a discomfiting, quiet rage to him, and he reminded me of the old flick, Falling Down, that variety of older white guy fed up with the world and ready to kill.
I’d read on the CIA World Factbook that more Americans die in Thailand, per year, than anywhere else in the world. But I’m not sure about the Germans, where they die the most.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Normally, though, in Thailand, random violence is rare, and violent crime committed by foreigners is even rarer. Normally, from what I’ve seen, in Thailand, foreigners are more of a threat to themselves than anyone else.
In fact, at this very shopping center, there was an Italian, an older fellow, too, who, not far from where we sat, had done a swan dive from a fifth-floor ledge, landing splat, face down in a mess of bone and blood, on the ground floor, giving that day’s shoppers a most unforgettably gruesome spectacle.
Oh, and this stranger definitely had that look; the German looked like a future suicide case. And speaking of his look, he had a certain shiftiness to him, a really dishonest face, with a jawline that was almost too squarish. It was almost like his chin and his jaw were too small for his skull, giving him a certain unnerving, creepy appearance, almost like a bottom-feeding fish, like a fish you’d see only at the deepest depths of the ocean.
Although he wore brown-tinted eyeglasses, I could see that his blue eyes were bright and small, small and beady, like two blue dots punched into his skull, which rendered his countenance even more sinister, and his skin was bad too, reddish and leathery, speckled in uneven clots of scraggly white body hair, and he had wrinkles in his forehead that ran deep, like cracks in stone, and they were loud wrinkles, too, wrinkles that told stories, stories of woe, stories of sleepless nights, stories of too much booze.
Again, I tried to put aside my prejudices. Look, I’m also a guy who escaped the clusterfuck of my home country to travel, roam, explore, have fun. I’m also a guy who found a job in this crazy beautiful tropical land. And I really don’t care about what others do in their personal lives. As long as they aren’t pedos, as long as they aren’t violent pricks, as long as they aren’t hurting anyone, who am I to judge.
Right?
A red flash from the corner of my eye caught my attention, and I craned my neck, saw a muted flatscreen TV hanging from a wall nearby. It was showing a news story about a Czech billionaire who’d died in a helicopter crash, during a ski trip in Alaska.
The German joined me, glaring and gasping at the ghastly images of smoky black and gray ‘copter wreckage strewn over a jagged white hilltop.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The German sighed and then commented on the horror of being in a helicopter crash. What it’d be like, as a passenger, inside a helicopter going down. The claustrophobia and fear the passengers felt in that helicopter cabin. The passengers, confined in that metal box, plummeting from the sky, their weight heavy with gravity, their screams, and what must have been going through their minds in those final minutes as their bodies rocked and swayed and shook and the emergency lights flashed and beeped. He wondered if the doomed passengers had resigned themselves to death, if they were saying final prayers, or if they were thinking they’d survive the impact…
After taking a deep breath and exhaling loudly, he exclaimed, “Then whack! Lights out. His money meant nothing,” and the German clapped on the table to punctuate.
A moment of silence followed, and we both turned our attention away from the TV. The profundity, enormity of his words sank in, and I wondered if the isolation of the pandemic, the lockdowns, if that’d made me even more socially retarded, made me into a total jerk, made me figure this guy all wrong, guessing him a chomo or boozer. What if he was alright after all? ----
But then the stranger started getting weirder. Going on and on about his money problems, how he couldn’t eat, how he had absolutely nothing, and I suspected that this was likely a hustle. He probably made a habit of this, hitting up other foreigners for cash, likely because he’d dropped all his monthly pension bucks, as some expats do, on booze, or gambling, or maybe hookers and booze.
Or perhaps he was one of those unlucky souls who’d fallen in love with a bargirl from Nana or Soi Cowboy, only to discover she was already engaged, or even already married… Perhaps he was one of those unlucky souls to discover this AFTER he’d already paid for the marriage ceremony, bought her a house, forked over a hefty sin sot...
Of course he could just be poor. Maybe Puma didn’t pay well. Many Thais often think that any foreigner in Bangkok is rich, but that’s not always true. There are those with limited means who live in or venture to foreign countries. Then there are even some who venture to faraway lands and turn to begging or busking, playing guitar on the street for cash; “beg-packing” as it’s sometimes called.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer But this guy, he looked too old for beg-packing. I couldn’t see him staying in a hostel, singing or dancing or begging on the street. Or maybe he just couldn’t carry a tune, or didn’t play guitar, I don’t know.
Really, I’m guessing he pissed away his cash and then guilted others, in food courts, to fund his meals, so he could splurge on more important things to him, like hookers and booze. I concluded this summation, too, while glancing at his neatly cut helmet of gray hair, and, most notably, his clothes.
His clothes were too clean. Observing his pair of blue jeans, marshmallow white sneakers, and plaid polo shirt, it struck me that his duds were stainless and wrinkle-free. This being such, obviously he wasn’t sleeping rough, camping in the park, eating lizards, like some of the “beg-packer” hippy types I’d heard of, seen online, those hippies with their dreadlocks and pungent potpourri stinks of body odor and patchouli oil.
It was close to Easter, and I noticed that the German wore a crucifix. So I asked him if he went to church and if he could talk to a priest, get help. I’m sure there are plenty of priests who’d help a person in his self-described dire straits.
(Although a cynical side of me suspected that possibly he’d already been using the priests too, had probably eaten breakfast at the church.) He vaguely brushed the church suggestion off, saying the church nearby was
“closed,” which I’m sure was a lie.
(When he said the church was closed, I couldn’t help but be reminded of certain shady locals, usually short fellows with smiles too big for their faces, the bloodsuckers who approach tourists outside the King’s Palace in Bangkok, telling tourists the “temple was closed today,” in order to set the tourists up for whatever scam…)
Then I suggested the German talk to his family, to which he replied that he had no family left. They were all dead or estranged. “25 years in Thailand, hard to keep in touch,” he bemoaned.
It most certainly is. That was no lie. And herein sits a cruel example of expat life.
The loss of ties with one’s homeland and all in it and the reality that one is in a
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer country, like Thailand, an ethno-state, where an expatriate will always be a foreigner, a guest, and can almost never achieve citizenship, or even permanent residency. Especially a person like this German guy. A guy with limited means. A guy with few to no Thai connections. A guy so broke and down on his luck he must rely on the pity of others.
Seeing where all this was going, I knew it was time to split, and I swallowed down the last savory bite of my spicy noodles and rose to leave. But before I did, I decided to make merit and plucked out 50 baht from my pocket, and handed him the folded purple bill, patted him on the back and wished him the best…
My encounter with the German made me think of how lonely the escapist dream can end. The dream of spending one’s final days in a tropical paradise. Then that dream turns into an old man dying by himself in a crappy apartment or guesthouse. An old man slumped atop a toilet, like a Far East, far-less fortunate version of Elvis… Or an old man supine in a messy bed, beside a bunch of empty booze bottles, his bloated corpse discovered by a cleaner or a landlord because of a neighbor complaining of a rotten stench…
And I wondered about my own 40-square-foot furnished apartment... Had anyone died there? Had anyone died in the bed I sleep in? How would I know, either way, and what would it really matter… Anywhere one goes, someone probably died, in that place, sometime throughout the course of human history…
(I don’t believe in ghosts, anyway, but at least my apartment has a nice spirit house outside, so if anyone did die in my apartment, before, maybe they’re living happily in the spirit house, with the other ghosts, just in case any of that is actually real…)
Pondering the long-term expat plight further, like, maybe, though, for some expats, I guess it’s not always a terrible, lonely ending, dying in Thailand.
Perhaps, for some, it’s a perfect way to retire, to end things, enjoying their golden years, in golden sunshine, in a warm exotic place. Heck, maybe they find a cute local lady, make buddies at the bar, and have heaps of fun times to close out their spins around the sun. There’s a beauty to that, for sure, and I respect that. I’ve
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer seen several older retired fellows in Thailand, often appearing to be ex-military, and they look happy as can be. And good for them.
But then there’s the German guy. The cautionary tale. The way not to do Thailand.
The way not to do life.
Honestly, however, most of what I got from this encounter was a potent reminder of why it’s better to wear earphones and avoid talking to random strangers in Bangkok.