What follows is a (mostly) unedited excerpt from my critically acclaimed, gold-standard expat travel memoir/existentialist treatise, “Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile”:
The degenerate felon with whom I had come to briefly reside in South Georgia in 2006 through a series of unfortunate events, in my younger years, asked me for a cigarette.
Tyrone had none because he refused to buy any.
Inhaling deeply the smoke he hadn’t paid for, Tyrone once said to me: “Get it how you live.”
For sure.
November 12, 2018:
Me and Samsung (his street name), a gentle gangster of a kind and kindred spirit of Tyrone, rolled up on an Indian tailor shop on a sleazy Friday afternoon.
Rancid dishonesty sweated out of Bangkok’s pores — through its sewer drains and dripping air conditioner units…
“This is Italian silk by Armani,” “the finest imported fabric,” etc., the show owners all said.
Samsung and I were liars, as smutty and indecent as the fake Armani Indian suit peddlers who prey on silly tourists looking for some sweet street deals.
We were pigs rolling in slop, and we were deep in it.
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In the scenario we played out over and over, I was an American tourist with money to spend — foolishly. I was a consumer on holiday. I had come halfway around the world to recreationally consume — and recklessly so, to really suck the marrow out of the bone.
I was the prey; the mark; the lamb. The deer in headlights flush with local currency recently converted from the almighty dollar.
And Samsung, my tuk-tuk taxi driver, was a neglectful treacherous shepherd leading me astray. He didn’t have to role-play that hard, because that’s what he actually was in real life. Ferrying gullible tourists around was his full-time job — only, in this scenario, the tables had turned. This day, the farang tourist was in on the con game, and the Indian tailors were the marks.
Samsung delivered me to the wolves. At least, they thought they were the wolves. But, that glorious role-reversal day, they were the sheep. They should have known better than anyone: things in Bangkok are rarely what they seem.
Samsung pulled up in his rainbow-collage tuk-tuk with me posted in the back. By the time we rolled up on the mark, I was deep into my role as the clueless consumer, impressionable and vulnerable, and ready to shop until I dropped.
I didn’t even break character that much in between stops on the way to different vendors. It was easier that way, rather than having to transition between my true self (to the extent there ever was such a thing) and the bewildered tourist with money to unload on bootleg suits.
Actors call it “method-acting” — the goal being to lose all conscious awareness that any acting is occurring at all.
I feel like a vulnerable tourist, therefore I am a vulnerable tourist, etc.
You know the thing.
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I hopped out of Samsung’s tuk-tuk, and immediately began to lie to the Indians who greeted me with green in their eyes about a non-existent interest I had to purchase several of their suits handcrafted of fine quality linen.
“The best linen,” I say. “The finest.”
In turn, the Indians lied to me about their fine linen’s origins and quality — assuring me that theirs was imported Italian silk rather than mediocre sweatshop products from China sold for 10 cents a case.
This is what, above all, I beg Western newcomers to understand: Bangkok functions on a rolling tide of lies — a vast, stretching ocean of flotsam deceit floating atop uncountable fathoms of deceit. It’s turtles all the way. This is the undeniable truth, and the sooner the expat fully internalizes it, the smoother things will run.
Sometimes, it seems like everybody is lying just to keep one lie ahead of the competition. Lies beget lies, as the wise and learned say. Everyone, as a matter of survival, in Bangkok, if he’s here long enough, ends up entangled in a web of lies. Even Honest Abraham Lincoln would have.
The Indians and I both knew damn well that their entire warehouse was not imported from Italy like they claimed it was, but pretending otherwise was the Bangkok dance we had to do together, a dance that deserves its own geographically-centered name like the Charleston Two-Step or whatever the 20s flapper harlots did with the knee-banging in the speakeasies.
To try to close the sale, the Indians complimented me nearly endlessly. No one dishes out flattery like an Indian salesman in a Bangkok tailor shop when he smells blood. They’re born and bred for this stuff.
They commented on things like my good white genetics and my sexual prowess.
“Big strong American man,” they said. Then they followed it up with a “Donald Trump” and a thumbs-up sign over strong closed fist.
Related: The State of Feminism in Southeast Asia
Indians and Chinese, for whatever reason, love Donald Trump. I suspect it’s because, at least in their minds, he represents the historical, romanticized Hollywood-generated caricature of the strong American nationalist patriot spreading American idealism around the globe as a force of prosperity or whatever — the Rocky Balboa, the Superman.
That idealistic perception of America lives on in the Third World imagination — even though the current US reality now is more like a dystopian juxtaposition of Caitlyn Jenner as “Woman of the Year” living his best life as a beautiful lady on his Malibu estate and a half-million homeless tent-dwellers waiting to overdose on fentanyl or die at midnight from frostbite because they’re too drunk to realize their toes are turning into icicles, rendered hopeless and cynical by postmodern post-industrialism and addicted to whatever they can get ahold of to drown out the nihilistic pain of a life chiefly characterized by pointless suffering.
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“I’m impressed,” I told the Indian tailors, both with the distinct quality of their fine linens and their exceeding hospitality.
“You guys here are really class acts, and I feel confident I’m in good hands,” I said. We moved on to price negotiations.
We danced together — pressure salesmen with naïve tourist — until Samsung sent the signal from outside.
When I saw Samsung outside turn his hat backward, that was the signal for a done deal — the sign to wrap it up. I told the Indians I’d be back real soon.
“I just have to run to the ATM really quick,” I said.
While I was inside negotiating nonsense with the Indians, Samsung’s task was to procure a 200-baht gas voucher — payment from the tailor to the driver for delivering them a foreigner to sell stuff to. That’s the scam partnership the Bangkok tailors run with tuk-tuk drivers: gas vouchers and other goodies for tourists to rip off.
That day, though, the Indian tailors got a bitter taste of their own medicine.
Split two ways, our loot was 100 for Samsung, 100 for me. 5 minutes, fast money, the sleazy way.
We ran the same basic reverse-scam with the jewelry shops we visited. I was interested in a gold elephant necklace for my grandmother, exotic Oriental trinkets for home decor, etc.
We also hit greasy travel agents, to whom I also lied about travel plans to Koh Samui or wherever. Together, we discussed overpriced resort packages — predator and prey — in which I feigned deep interest in three-day boat tours while Samsung got paid outside.
When we could do ten shops in a couple of hours, Samsung and I split the equivalent loot of 60 American dollars, 30 apiece.
Do the math. That’s 15 filthy bucks an hour, straight out of the filthy Bangkok streets, snatched from the claws of the vultures themselves.
How is that for karma?
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April 10, 2019:
After a six-month hiatus, Samsung and I hooked up again. He looked the same: hungover and smiling. He seemed to enjoy the game we played as much as I did — the whiskey he’d buy afterwards with the booty we won would just be the cherry on top.
In the coffee shop, before this, I downloaded “Changes” onto Spotify by the legend Tupac Shakur. In the tuk-tuk, I played the track on my headphones — just for that one line, for inspiration:
I made a G today
But you made it in a sleazy way…
I gotta get paid
Well, hey, that’s the way it is-Tupac, Changes
Egyptian pyramid slave labor didn’t volunteer itself.
Somebody had to haul those limestone slabs.
Make omelets, break eggs, etc.
Genghis Khan didn’t have to murder an estimated 10% of the world’s population and rape all those villagers as he marauded across Asia. But he did it, anyway. For his work, the World Wildlife Fund in 2011 declared him “the greenest invader in history.” They credit him with the removal of “700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere” on account of the reforestation that occurred on previously human-occupied land and all of his morally upright depopulation work.
Sometimes cookies crumble like that.
Thousands of 19th-century Chinese laborers died, heat-stroked or dehydrated, in the sweltering American desert — alone and so far from home with not a bamboo thicket for a thousand miles around. Definitely sad. On the other hand, that transcontinental railroad turned out to be pretty essential for fulfilling Manifest Destiny.
Morals to stories have a way of fleshing themselves out. You put the pieces together however you want, DIY-style.
