Bangkok Commerce

You can spot the hotel and tourist trade employees everywhere. They are the ones on the Skytrain wearing “traditional” Thai silk jackets and long silk skirts or slacks among the sea of denim and Mickey Mouse tee shirts. Perhaps they are even white gloved – an affectation that evokes images of British colonialism for me (yet in a country that was not colonized?). Their job is to create an “authentic” experience of Thailand for those coming to visit. They work in hotels like the Oriental, where I stopped for a late afternoon drink to get out of the heat while sightseeing over the weekend. It is a beautiful hotel, with river views and sprawling verandas. I was very glad to be there. Yet, apart from the views of the temples and the river ferries passing by, I could have been in the Grand Wailea in Maui or the Condado Beach in San Juan. The ambience was serene, hotel workers everywhere attending to those at the pool or on the decks. It could not have felt further from the teeming streets of Chinatown from which I had just come. There, everything and everyone was moving. Hawkers, street vendors, and thousands of people crowded the streets. Everyone was trying to sell you something – enough dried mushrooms to last a year (very good bargain!!), loose tea guaranteed to bring long life and vitality (a sample could be arranged….), balloons in packs of a thousand, garage tools, pots and pans, and any of thousands of options for lunch or a snack.

Indeed, as I travel to different neighborhoods around the city, it is the unrelenting and ceaseless commerce that amazes me. There is not anything that cannot be sold from a piece of sidewalk or a cart – from knock off designer watches to gems and Buddhist amulets. Walk the streets of Sumhamvit, and tailors summon you in every door, calling “Madam, madam” after you as you walk down the street, “can make you something very nice, twenty-four hours, no problem…”. Stop for a second to look at a pillow cover or embroidered cloth at one of the thousands of booths that line the streets, and the calculators are already in hand, ready to offer you a better deal than the vendor in front or behind them. Even the temples have their own kind of commerce, as people approach you, introduce themselves as students, and offer to assist you in finding your way through the gate of the wat at which you’ve already arrived.

I find myself searching my memory for a comparable American experience and wonder – the Lower East Side at its height? Jackson Heights on a Sunday afternoon perhaps? My hosts confirm that many of the street vendors are farmers displaced from the countryside – an immigration of sorts fueled by a changing economy and need to make a living. In that sense, it is, in some ways, Thailand’s version of my own grandparent’s migration, and the urgent tenacity to make it in a new world.