Light Snacks Will Be Served

Pictures of Nong Khai

 

I've been away for awhile, busying myself with the impending opening of a restaurant. And there won't be too much traveling for awhile for that same reason. I did recently file a story at The Atlantic about a trip I took up north to visit organic rice farmers.

I will be serving rice from the AAN (Alternative Agriculture Network) at my place, so in about two months time you can stop over and see what the fuss is about. Their sticky rice is particularly good; when you steam some its nutty fragrance fills the room. I could eat it with just about anything. 

On another note, I recently read a story that described Nong Khai - a sleepy town on the Mekong which I really enjoyed a few months back - in a pretty unflattering manner (I'm not going to link). But I loved the little town with its temples and Vietnamese restaurants and funky local noodle dishes and especially the psychedelic Buddhist sculpture park, Sala Kaew Koo.

So I thought I'd share a few photos with you of my time in Nong Khai, a wonderful place to spend a few days, eating, wandering around, wondering. Have a great weekend. 

After The Disaster

Outside my door in Bangkok rests this ash-stained broom. It has a smiley face burned into the part of the wooden brush that looks up at you while you scrub. I will keep it, because this brush is my own little reminder of what can happen when things fall apart. I bought it yesterday, a few blocks away from the smoking husk that was Central World, which was Bangkok's biggest mall. 

To get there, myself, my wife and our friend Patrick Winn walked up Ratchadamri, past Lumphini Park and Chulalongkorn Hospital - places where much of the fighting between the Red Shirts and the Army had erupted only days before. Some trees were burnt the color of toast, shrubbery was torched, and bullet-ridden vehicles were being towed away from the protest area. But the streets were full of lively, smiling people. People with garbage bags and gloves. And amidst all this destruction was suddenly the happiest scene I'd witnessed in weeks. But things started to get worse as we passed the Ratchadamri BTS stop, whose eastern entrance was destroyed.

The smells of this rotten area of Bangkok were pretty intense, and lazy flies - the sort one sees hanging about garbage dumps and grim slums in South Asia - were hovering everywhere. But that didn't dampen the spirit of the thousands of people who headed out to clean up. Soap suds washed down the Ratchadamri, and garbage disappeared into the bags of crowds of cleaners.

      

  

When we did reach the intersection where the UDD had built their stage, volunteers were handing out free water and food. Some people wandered about, staring at the gaping hole in Bangkok's biggest retail outlet. Others posed for pictures in front of it. The smell from the twisted pile was, to me, very much like scotch whisky. The air was filled with smells of peat and petrol and wet.  But despite all that, people simply needed to smile.

And then we set to work on a truly horrible pile of trash beside a klong (canal), scooping rubbish that had rotted in the weeks since it had started piling there. Insects wriggled out, and maggots shimmied in the sunlight. The women who lived beside the mountain of garbage, on the canal, were too old to move it. Young Thais helped us scoop and carry big bags of the stuff up to the curb. Then we scrubbed streets in the afternoon sun, as the last wisps of smoke rose from the nearby wreckage.  

After we finished cleaning that afternoon, we stopped for a beer, exhausted and also grateful to be living in Bangkok again. The spirit of the people on the streets - Thais and foreigners working together for the good of this city - was infectious. And as night fell and Candice and I returned home I thought about all that has happened, and how we will remember this disaster some day. I don't know how I'll feel so many years down the road, but I'll keep my mop to remind me. 

   

I do know how I'll feel about the day that Bangkok came out to clean -- that was the day that I remembered what makes this city great, once again. 

The Twilight of the Trishaw

There aren't that many trishaws left in Thailand, anymore. Motorbikes are simply too cheap and too convenient, and are widely used as taxis these days, forcing out the hard working pedicab drivers. But whenever I see one, if I'm not in a hurry, I flag it down. The slow ramble of a pedicab is probably the best way to see a small Southeast Asian city (not Bangkok... I wouldn't wish that on anyone). You have time to take in the scenery, make mental notes, take photos, and smell the flowers. Seriously. You can smell flowers when you ride in a trishaw. 

Some of my fondest memories of my time in Chengdu, Sichuan, were late nights spent wobbling across potholes with a Snow Beer and good friends, in the back of these three wheeled bikes (bet you don't remember, AGP).  They also remind me of Penang, and the south of India, and what is probably the most interesting trishaw town of all, Lhasa. High in the Himalaya, trishaw riders have their own language of whistles - one means 'I'm passing from behind', another 'turning left, or right.' In a trishaw, you have time to whistle where you're headed. 

Above is a photo of my latest trishaw driver, Pit, who pedaled us around Nakhorn Si Thammerat this week. He is 74-years-old. As we slowly rolled through the charming provincial city, dotted with temples and mosques, he waved and smiled to almost every person we passed. You also have time to make friends, when you drive a trishaw.   

On Isolation, Inclusion and Democratic Principles

I'm riding the Shanghai metro on the way to dinner. A man and wife, who probably rode the train from the main railway station, are standing beside me. Their thick, farmworker fingers are gripping the large, plaid fiberglass bags of the countryside that probably hold all that they own. And between them they're holding hands. 

They look terrified - too afraid to speak, and totally unable to comprehend the sounds and smells and faces surrounding them on that train. It is as if they have been lifted from another planet and stuffed into that subway car. This is not a wide-eyed look of wonder, it is one of confusion and fright. I smile at them, and this seems to upset them even more. 

I kept remembering that image last night, as I sat up late reading a story called 'The Good Cook,' written by Barbara Demick in The New Yorker. It's an unsettling tale about a woman who tries to feed her family in North Korea's period of famine in the 1990s. She is a resourceful cook, a loving wife, and a budding entrepreneur. Despite her best efforts to sustain her family, cooking with food scraps and finally foraged weeds and tree bark, she loses her husband, her mother-in-law, and finally her 25-year-old son to starvation. It's an incredible and awful sort of story, and in that woman's fear and fake belief my mind kept turning to the couple in the subway car. I'm not sure why, besides the fact that maybe those two Chinese people were realizing that life outside -- like Ms Song, the North Korean woman in the story who ends up in Seoul -- was played with a completely different deck of cards than the ones they'd been dealt.

As the world fixates in China's rise, on Olympic Games and World Expos, the frightened couple on the train seems less relevant. But they're still there, hundreds of millions of them, struggling to figure out how they benefit from all of this. 

Cut to Bangkok. Over the past month or so, the so-called 'rural hordes' have descended on the city. This Red Shirt movement (the UDD) is largely criticized for its overly simplistic understanding of Thai politics. And they have a deeply flawed figurehead in Thaksin Shinawatra. There are many reds that are Bangkok-born, too, and highly educated, but I'm going to focus on the country folk here, because that's where the memories last night led me. 

What strikes me about Thailand's democracy is that, while it is maligned on all sides, there is a growing awareness that people's voices count, and someday might count just the same. It is an encouraging, empowering ideal. There is a growing awareness that there are ways to effect change in what has been a largely stagnated, class-based society.  People from the countryside can march on this cosmopolitan city of 12 million, they can shout for change and even pull smiles from office workers shuttling to lunch in their tailored suits. They don't look afraid, they look confident.

And this is exciting, and should be mentioned more. North Korea's Socialism, or even the far freer Chinese model, serves to alienate people from the state by drawing them so close to it that they can't see its form. Here in Thailand the reds march, yellows shut down airports, Newin's blues trade sides, newspapers and radio stations exchange barbs and insults, and it all seems pretty damn dysfunctional. But people know the hand that they've been dealt, and they can at least try to reshuffle the cards. 

It's a heck of a lot harder for other people, in other parts of Asia.   

Update: I wrote this post not to defame China, which has done wonders to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the last three decades. I wrote it because I think a lot of people in Thailand, and particularly in the English language Thai media, and even more specifically the Thailand-based foreign pundits that populate discussions on the web and elsewhere here, lack any sort of real world perspective and/or appreciation for what they've got. This isn't North Korea. Or China, for that matter. It's a young democracy.    

How Far Can We Get From Food?

 

One of my first memories takes place on a sunny, whitewashed morning. I'm sitting on Florida's Intercoastal Waterway with my grandfather, who smiles at me from a folding aluminium beach chair. We're fishing.

And then something happens. I get a nibble, yank on the rod, and set my hook. It might be the first fish I've ever caught - I Have Arrived - and I smile and laugh and clumsily reel it in. But, suddenly, a pelican slaps against the water's surface in front of us, and eats my catch. And now, a very small boy finds himself fighting against a great big bird, his fishing rod tip turned skyward, in a surreal turn of events for a five-year-old.

My grandfather speedily cut the line, and explained to me that we couldn't catch the bird, because we didn't want to eat it. I was disappointed. But for the rest of my life I would always want to be a fisherman - I'd never felt so thrillingly connected to the natural world. Bird, fish and child had collided. 

In the years after that I learned how to fillet and gut fish, pluck pheasants, skin squirrels, and break down the carcass of a white-tailed deer. These experiences, whether you approve of them or not, made one suburban child appreciate the animal world, and what it had meant to man for so long. I crisply remember the first time I shot a grouse and it was not quite dead, and my uncle told me to snap its neck between my fingers. It did not feel good to feel its life disappear in my hands, but it did make me think, and I appreciated my supper that night in a way that is difficult to describe.

I think that my life as a fisherman and a hunter shaped my ideas about cooking and eating more than any other force. I don't throw away anything from an animal that can be used - the bones from a roasted chicken go to stock, as does the spine and head of a filleted fish. Pig skin from pork bellies gets rolled and frozen for gelatin, extra beef fat is rendered. There is still something reverent and slightly sombre about breaking down a big piece of meat in my kitchen; something that my wife, who was long a vegetarian, doesn't understand. But if she grew up like I chose to, I think she would. 

I write this in disgust, after reading this blog entry in The Guardian by Alex Renton. It involves a rural school teacher who chose to slaughter a lamb from the school farm, with the overwhelming approval of her student council, and sell the meat to raise money for the school. It seems sensible, even enlightening, that children should be taught where there meat comes from, and how that process happens. But she was maligned by an indignant mob on facebook. She was harassed and threatened, and finally, she resigned. This, in a town that celebrates its sheep farming heritage. 

The distortion of animal eating, of reducing furry creatures with faces and voices to shrink-wrapped blobs of red stuff, might allow a lot of people to eat without feeling pangs of guilt. But it also causes them to throw away the 'nasty bits', to ignore the consequences of eating too much, or to let it waste in the fridge till past its expiration date. And because the factory farming system is so far removed from sustainable agriculture, creating meat in such a recklessly abundant supply, this is all possible.

A few months ago, I was walking through Bangkok's Chinatown - on a dark street between the bright lights of Yaowarat Road and the mash of traffic on Chaoren Krung. And I came upon a poultry slaughterhouse, where a large measure of the ducks that end up hanging chestnut brown in restaurant windows begin their trip into the afterlife. A temple was lit across the street. There were feathers scattered everywhere, and a smell like death filled the air. I lifted my camera to take a picture, and a butcher glared at me and shook his head severely. He was probably a Buddhist, and didn't want to be captured in such an unholy frame. I also think that when he orders a chicken or a duck, he probably doesn't let a single shred of meat go to waste. I think he understands.   

       

(For a great piece on humane slaughter, see Barry Estabrook's Politics of the Plate blog) 

A Snack Up Isaan Way

Over the NYE holidays, I traveled in Isaan, stopping to cook with families in Chiang Khan and Nong Khai (you'll hear about the cooking in Nong Khai - with some great recipes - a little later). While up in Thailand's northeast, we also got to eat some regional things that rarely make their way down to Bangkok. I was reminded of that today, when I passed a local vegetable seller on my street, who happened to be selling some of these remarkable tomatoes that we found in markets along the Mekong.

Thailand has many superior agricultural products, but tomatoes aren't one of them. While slightly better than, say, the grainy, pale pink specimens that were the only kind I could find in much of China, Bangkok's tomato selection ain't great. Asia is not a place for good tomatoes (though I hear the Japanese have an heirloom fetish - of course they do). 

But these little guys - crisp, juicy, sweet, sour and even citrusy - were very nice. Both thick and thin-skinned, the small tomatoes varied dramatically in taste. Some added a fruity note similar to tomatillos, others were bitter or sugar sweet. They complimented a dish we encountered several times in Loei, which I've been craving lately for its simplicity.

We ate it once on the way from touristy Chiang Khan to Nong Khai. My wife and I spent two hours in Pak Chom's dusty parking lot/bus station/food market, before boarding a wooded-floored Mercedes bus, that seemed to move as much laterally it did forward. During that time, we tried the local specialties.

These noodles were a nice change from Isaan's meat-heavy cuisine, where occasions to eat a vegetarian dish are fairly few. In Loei we ate this simple, fresh noodle dish, where strands of batter are squeezed into boiling water, and are then cooked with some Chinese cabbage.  

 

The noodles are topped with some of those tomatoes above, and dressed by the diner with fish sauce, sugar, and a sauce made of fire-roasted chilies and coriander. Locals mixed with their fingers, then ate with their hands in the beds of pickup trucks. We ordered a few plates, then admired the delicate texture of the dish. There was a subtle, green sweetness in that plain, boiled cabbage. And in it an opportunity to do something Thais rarely let you do - taste a single flavor or two.  

Then we boarded the bus, and the grinding commenced.

There was five hours of rattling, squeaking, shaking, rumbling and shuffling ahead.  

Jump!

Two and a half years ago, in Kullu, Himachal Pradesh, my girlfriend (now wife) and our friend Rajeev hiked up a mountain covered in wildflowers and wispy marijuana bushes (hashish seems to be the primary cash crop in dry, dusty Kullu). 

After a fairly strenuous hike, we found ourselves on a ridge that overlooked the town below - where the wild Dussehra festival was just getting started. Floats were wiggling in from countryside towns on the narrow road that runs beside the river. Drum beats carried clearly through the crisp air, echoing up through the valley that seemed miles below. And on the other side of the ridge, the High Himalayan plateau spread before us. It was an incredible scene - and so we did what anyone would do under those circumstances - we jumped.

(Rajeev, if you see this, send me an email. I seem to have lost yours.) 

On Google, Censorship and Heading South

I didn't leave Shanghai for lack of work, 14 months ago. In fact, I took a big hit moving to a small and comparatively insignificant country that is thick with writers and photographers. Being in Bangkok felt like getting fished out of a deep lake and thrown into an aquarium.

I did leave China for other reasons. My wife really wanted to go. At first I didn't, because I had studied and lived there for the better part of a decade (7 years, in Chengdu, Beijing and Shanghai). But the China that I fell in love with as a wide-eyed (and freezing) student in Beijing, as a long-haired backpacker in Yunnan, and as a wasting-away English teacher in Chengdu was not the China I found myself in in 2008. Change was afoot, but it wasn't the sort of change I had ever anticipated. Far from it, actually.

I'm reminded of this because of the controversy that lit up the interwebs yesterday (namely, that google has been aggressively hacked for information, and for that and reasons of censorship is now pondering pulling out of China entirely). This is not surprising to many China observers, and it probably won't do much to persuade the government there to open channels of information. But it is significant because it is perhaps the first major commercial reaction against China's increasing surveilance, censorship and secrecy.

I was affected by media censorship in a closer way than some. Each week I submitted manuscripts to the government agency that censored our harmless city magazine in Shanghai. We could not mention homosexuality or sex or politics or drugs in our text, even in a passing manner. Another media organization i worked for was wrenched from the hands of its foreign founder, because in China the government holds your publishing license. 

When I became a freelance writer, I was forced to get a work permit from an ad agency to avoid getting caught writing without proper papers. Deportation was always in the back of my mind, even if I was writing benign pieces about food and travel. Lack of papers was used to threaten me in a few instances, to quell restaurant criticism ('write that and I'll report you to the authorities!) 

The Chinese mechanism of foreign press control operates in two effective ways: it forces licensed outlets to watch what they say or risk being squeezed out, and it forces independent writers to censor themselves for the same reasons. I know several writers living there who won't speak out on this issue for their own good.  I probably would not have written this, while living there.

In the leadup to the Olympics I had already decided to leave a country that I'd spent many years attempting to understand, finally conceding that I didn't understand much about it at all. When I was a student in Beijing, I imagined a China becoming increasingly free and interconnected with the world. I didn't imagine a China that would appear increasingly isolationist, and occasionally frightfully nationalistic. But that seemed to me what was happening, and so we packed our bags and headed south to Bangkok. During our first week here, the government fell, and I wrote a story about it for The Atlantic. It felt strange and liberating.

I write this from a country that has its own set of problems - from corruption to class division to an impending political crisis of great magnitude. But every single time I walk into a store, and see shelves lined with books and magazines, or attend a lecture or a political demonstration, or page through the Bangkok Post, or sign on to this blog without a proxy, I am reminded of why I moved here, and why I no longer wanted to live there. 

I'm not writing this because I hate China. It's quite the opposite, actually. I genuinely love and care about that country and its people. I spent most of my adult life there, and feel just as strong a connection to it as I do to the place where I was born.  

Everybody's got problems. But when you don't address them, when you flat-out refuse to discuss them, that's when the shit really hits the fan. And I suspect that some day in China it will, because the relationship between the nanny state and its diverse and emotional people is a dysfunctional one, and it's getting worse. Google has simply shed light on this situation in a way that few other organizations could.

By building these barriers of secrecy and censorship that cause a company like google to pack up and leave, China might just end up tearing itself down.

 

Ningbo, 2007.

New Year Country

I was going to make a list of all the delicious things I ate last year and tell you how awesome it was eating them, but then I thought that, well, everybody's probably done that already. But I did have a great year of eating on the road. It started brilliantly with a feast in Nahorn Si Thammerat in the south of Thailand, and ended up on the banks of the Mekong in Nong Khai, in Isaan. In between, I married my wonderful wife and started a new life here. 

I also scoured Goa for colonial Portuguese food and sausage, got sick in Java, ate great Chinese food in Kuala Lumpur, gambled for pork links in Taipei, cooked hairy crabs with my grandmother in Shanghai, made tofu in Lombok, got silly in Seoul, learned what its like to dine in exile in Taiwan, headed to Dharavi for a little Oscars celebration, roasted water buffalo and set off rockets in Yasothorn, and got straight up gluttonous in Sydney. 

That's just a sample. A lot can happen in a year.

One thing I did do that most people probably didn't this New Year was kick it with some tobacco farmers in Isaan, who happened to be cooking a boar in a thicket on the side of a dirt path. Isaan is a remarkable place to get off the road and explore, as the people there are some of the most generous on earth. And they like a good party... See?

So we're dancing a little, and we have a few swings swigs of rice whiskey, and they invite us for a bite to eat. From, um, there:

Which was an enormous pot of bubbling water filled with tough bits of boar. Which, when washed down with warm whiskey, felt like an especially festive treat on a hot winter's day.

 And in the end Chris and I even got kisses for the road...

 

Here's to happiness. 

A Man and His Mangroves

I wrote a short piece about Babu Nyansee, a Imam and village head in Thailand's Trang Province, who, with the help of Yadfon, an environmental NGO, has reintroduced crucial mangrove habitat nearby his fishing village. You can (and should!) read the full story here.

I only spent a few hours with the old fisherman, but was really affected by his resolve. The pride  he feels for his conservation efforts in Tamarind Cape seem more tangible because they've not only benefited nature, but have also improved the local fishing economy. Huge thanks to Pisit at Yadfon for introducing us, and thanks to Babu and his family for a morning spent cruising the mangroves that I won't soon forget.