I'm writing this column through a fog of jetlag.
I am a reluctant flyer at best, but there are some places, if you want to see them, you gotta fly.
I spent 15 hours in the air yesterday. I just returned last evening from 17 days in Thailand.
Not the tourist's Thailand.
And I wasn't partaking of that segment of Thai tourism that draws the world's dirty old men, either.
A Thai friend of mine who owns a business in Seattle invited me to travel with her and stay with her family in Bangkok. To see Thailand the way working-class Thais live in it.
I'd never been, and so I jumped at the chance.
Thailand is called the Land of Smiles. I previously lived two years in Hawaii, the place where the vaunted "aloha spirit" supposedly predominates. But the word haole is uttered a lot more often that aloha. Hawaiians and locals even have a word for the way many of them look at haoles who make the mistake of moving there: stink eye. It means what it says.
Aloha, unless you get close to locals in Hawaii, is a publicist's crock. But the Thais almost to a man and woman live up to their publicity.
Thais seem to enjoy everything, even work.
They have a word for it, sanuk (phonetic spelling), which basically means lighthearted and fun. Almost everyone I met was smiling.
After I learned maybe 50 words of Thai, I would try halting conversations with strangers. Taxi drivers, tuk tuk drivers, store clerks. They all, every single one of them, acted as if they had just encountered Albert Einstein.
The place I stayed in Bangkok had four floors, two rooms to a floor, above the family restaurant: four tables and a streetfront counter that more or less supported more than 10 folks. There was no hot water, and the toilets were built level with the floor.
And yet everyone seemed happy all day every day.
Within days I felt as if I had been part of this family for my entire life.
People would perform so many unsolicited kindnesses I had tears in my eyes at least once a day.
Oh sure, Thailand has its problems. Muslim agitation in its deep south, the only part of the country that isn't almost totally Buddhist. Some random crime. The craziest, most dangerous traffic in the world.
According to the Bangkok Post, one of two English-language newspapers serving the capital, two Thais die every hour in auto, truck, tuk tuk, motorcycle and pedestrian-versus-vehicle accidents. Never assume anything while perambulating around Bangkok. Always keep your head up. The bigger vehicle has the right of way whether the light is green or the sign says walk.
All that said, I never felt unsafe in Thailand, excepting traffic. Even walking around at 3 in the morning in the neighborhood where I was staying, despite the fact that farangs (whites) were almost nonexistent there. People are always smiling, talking, eating and laughing.
This morning I walked out into my Lower Queen Anne neighborhood. A place I have been been walking around, smiling and talking in for more than two years. My favorite place in Seattle. Granted, it was gray and a little nippy. But the air wasn't as cold as the looks on many of the faces.
Now the owners of Zingaro's, where I have my daily coffee, greeted me with big smiles.
"Our till's been down," they said.
The clerks at Larry's asked me where I'd been. And a couple of friends stopped me to ask if I'd enjoyed my trip.
But most folks were bustling around, familiar passive-aggressive frown-smile-scowls on their faces.
Yep, I'm back home, I thought. Surrounded by people who mostly have more money than any of the Thais I met in the particular stratum of Bangkok where I was living. But you'd never know it just by looking.
I am an American. And I've lived in Seattle 10 years in the past two decades, in between stops in Idaho, Hawaii and Bremerton (all for jobs). I like it here better than in Los Angeles (too random and too violent), San Francisco (too expensive) or Portland (a tad too small and self-satisfied).
But every time I travel to Central America, and now to Southeast Asia, I realize that Americans, however nice they may be to their families and immediate neighbors, lack a real sense of community and confidence with each other.
I had determined on the plane coming back, in the midst of a very good conversation with a Cambodian man who's lived in Tacoma for 20 years and said people still some-times make him feel slightly alien, that I was going to smile at everybody except the obviously deranged.
Experiment Smile, Day One, was pretty disheartening.
A few folks smiled back nervously. But the majority either looked away, grimaced or seemed frightened or puzzled. "Why is that nut with the glasses looking at me?" is what they were probably thinking.
I'm a social being. I have a lot of friends. That's how I got invited to Thailand.
But we are not friendly as a culture.
We have more stuff than almost everyone else in the world, but we act as if we have less. Or as if someone is going to snatch what we have away from us.
Nowhere in Bangkok is cleaner or safer than Lower Queen Anne. And yet nowhere I went in Bangkok did I see so many people avoiding each other or barging into each other (two sides of the same coin) without looking each other in the eye.
About 1 in the afternoon I gave up and went into Phuket ( pronounced poo-ket, for all the dummies who think it's a curse word and not the name of a gorgeous slice of Thai-land) on Mercer and was greeted with smiles and friendly sawadees (hello). I ate my curry as hot as they can make it and, smiling, walked home.
It occurs to me, back in-country less than a day, that we are missing something because we've adopted dog eat dog instead of sanuk as a cultural ethic.
But I've decided I won't be deterred. At least not quite yet. For the next week, that goon you see smiling at you just might be me. Smile back. I don't really want nothin' you got. I ain't got all that much, but it's been enough so far. Keep your SUV, your designer jeans and your stock options. Just give up a real smile, not that teeth-only business version.
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