absolutelyBangkok archive · Being farang
Originally published Feb. 12, 2009
Forgive my rant. I may have a bad mood, call me arrogant, but these double standards and the hokeyness around here, sometimes I’ve really had it. Most of us live in privileged islands. Once you leave them you enter a dump.
The other day I took a walk near Hua Hin toward the surrounding hills. I know the place like my own pockets. I thought. But have been rushing through the area mostly by car. Once you take your time it hits you like a sledgehammer. A metaphor for so much.
The countryside around Hua Hin is mostly a garbage dump. Thousands upon thousands of plastic bags and rubbish everywhere. We all know that affluence is not a privilege of most Thais. But why the fatalism of living like cattle in the midst of pollution and dirt. A walk in the green becomes a walk in a dump.
What a contrast to Hua Hin’s main road Petchkasem with its beautifully manicured garden in the middle reaching all the way up to Cha Am. I call it the longest garden on earth. Some twenty kilometers of lovely cared for flowers and plants. But that’s what meets the eye.
The whole area off the main road is a scattering of garbage. The trash is mostly concentrated around the people’s living areas — more than the occasional plastic bags, water bottles, styrofoam and 7/11 type food wrappers everywhere.
It’s hard for me to understand why and how such a pristine living environment can be so arbitrarily polluted. But visit any Thai island or beach. Same same, not even different at the most pristine of environments.
Once you take turn in Thailand you enter a shabby, run-down countryside with nobody wasting an inch of energy to collect the rubbish. Why should anyone. There are thousands of tons of garbage out there. You’d have to change the mentality of a population to clean up the place.
Thailand’s so perfect, so tidy, so krieng jai in the areas that meet the eye. The more real Thailand though is the world behind it. On the basis of this most profane irreverence it’s not that difficult to explain the moral and political double standards holding the country down.
Thailand has become a Potemkin village. Too many beautiful words and assurances and clichés — and people keep on falling for it. Or simply don’t give a hoot for anything outside their narrow little world, fed up themselves with all the treachery and betrayal.
Most certainly you’ll find aesthetically and morally tidy communities. The majority though is a disproportionate lash-up of contradictions. How I wish Thais would start tidying up themselves. It wouldn’t only clean up the environment.
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