Further on ‘in search’
A reader’s query
A savvy reader asked me if I am being too upbeat on Bangkok—even before he read today’s piece, perhaps. He relocated recently to Chiang Mai after retiring, noting he thinks Bangkok ‘disappointing’, especially with all of the closed store fronts.
He may be correct but it also depends on your starting point. Part of my assumptions date to the repeated national traumas inflicted on this population with massive rioting in the mid-1970s soon after I departed, along with 1992 when domestic forces clashed. Many readers will also recall the more recent Thaksin era when marches, political upheaval, and various convulsed through the city and country. I saw all of that—and Covid shutdown—from afar so I did not know what kind of visible damage it left.
I also do compare this with many trips to China and four trips to India over the years. The latter, particularly, was always worse off than anything I ever saw here so not seeing those conditions of perverse poverty as the predominant state looks good to me. China, which has not recovered from declining conditions over the past decade outside of the most select areas of Shanghai and Beijing, definitely looked shakier to me when I was last there almost five years back.
As I told him, however, I ultimately see things spruced up from the place I knew half a century ago. Poor comparison but the one I have. I confess that as I wrote my prior pieces, even I asked myself whether I was using far too small a sample and looking to overcompensate for empty tendency to be negative.
I guess I likely was too prone to pick out good where I could. Appropriate and reasonable challenges to my writing.
Thailand and Bangkok are not nirvana and face tremendous employment issues, a youth bulge, climate change problems, and other pressures of any society in Southeast Asia a quarter of the century into the new millennium. I do not want to ignore those realities at all as no Thai should.
I Thanks to any and all readers. I do appreciate you!
Be well and be safe. FIN