The Mole, The Matron and the Maniac - part 4 of 4

The Mole, The Matron and the Maniac

An examination of three expatriate memoirs written about Thailand

Section 4 of 4

Appendix I: Various Themes Addressed in Common

On Speaking Thai:

MacDonald: After six months in the country, MacDonald cannot speak Siamese, “beyond simple phrases like asking the way to the toilet.”

Hollinger: “Only a few hardy Westerners learn to speak Thai, and even fewer learn to read it. At first glance it seems impossible, and on second glance one would much rather not.”

On Expatriate Life in Thailand:

MacDonald: “The mosquitoes would be more than a tall story to tell the folks back home. They would be part of every night life. The having to boil every glass of water. The constant presence and the threat of typhoid, dysentery, dengue, malaria, and cholera. The frustrations at the post office and the cable station. The maddening lack of system in every public or private transaction.”

Hollinger: “The bleak kitchen, the absence of hot water, the weird telephone, the non-existent supermarket, the peculiar cuts of meat hanging in the sun as the flies feasted, the basket-hatted vendors clustered around unfamiliar fruits and vegetables, the incessant singsong of the monosyllabic Thai language as the people bargained fiercely for every morsel they bought – all these fragments of Bangkok formed into a terrible jigsaw of uncertainty and I knew that I could not cope. I realized with a now humorous inferiority that I, not they, was the foreigner. I was a coddled American housewife and my efficiency belonged to a distant land of enamel appliances and hot and cold running water. I was scared and I was miserably hot.”

On What Expatriates Miss:

MacDonald: “The homely stuff which made up a million GI dreams. There would be no more going to Grandma’s for Thanksgiving, no new plays, or fresh milk, or annual football game, or going down to the beach, or Fred Allen programs. Bangkok spelled good-bye to all that.”

Eckardt: “I thought longingly of my grandmother’s Christmas goose, cranberry sauce, chestnut dressing, whipped potatoes, red cabbage, candied yams… the big Christmas tree, piles of presents, the manger atop the TV, midnight Mass, eggnog, ice skating, the smiling circle of my own family…”

On Thai Manners:

MacDonald: “To get the hard, straight facts of a news story, you had to go out and ask detailed questions and receive specific answers. That was not the Siamese style. To be straightforward was to be discourteous. Siamese conversation, whether in diplomacy, in social chitchat, in political debate, or in a newspaper interview, therefore was notable for its innuendo. The most obvious situations were approached by indirection. In speech and writing, circumlocution had become a fine art.”

“I noticed for the first time the impersonality of these Siamese good wishes. Certainly, they were glad to see me staying on and going into business. But did they really care a hoot? Weren’t they just being their nice, polite selves? By now I knew scores of friendly Siamese in political and business life. But should I ever know any of them as close personal friends? I was an alien outsider, after all, and might always be. I might never be accepted save upon this bland, impersonal level.”

Hollinger: “The Thais present a unanimously bland face to the foreigners and are past masters of double talk. But among themselves there were few secrets, for they were impossible to keep. Every Thai is a natural spy, and information filtered through servants’ quarters and around Bangkok with the speed of a highly mechanized wire service. An example of this peculiar system is the fashion in which the leaders of the underground and the leaders of the overground were in constant communication with each other during the Japanese occupation, and were the best of friends.”

On Thai Telephones:

MacDonald: “’Nai Mac, torasab.’ It would be Boonyong, the pert little telephone girl, with another call. Someone had got through. Though the telephone was a nuisance, I was always respectful of a call that got through.”

Hollinger: “I went inside and stared at the telephone. It was French, angular, and chic, and if filled me with distrust… This was the last calm thought I had in reference to a Thai telephone.”

On Cocktail Parties:

MacDonald: “Cocktail parties in any clime, I always thought, were a barbaric institution. All over the world they had the same formula, a formula made up of ruthless superlatives: pack the most people possible into the smallest room that can hold them and make them drink the greatest quantity in the shortest time of the strongest combinations of liquors that can be concocted. To the formula Bangkok added another ingredient: the hottest weather that could be served up.”

“I have seen diplomats and businessmen standing in the central torrid zone (of the party) trying to make casual conversation while the sweat trickled down their legs into their shoes, sometimes to overflowing. I remember watching with fascination a bead of perspiration run down the

forehead of the Dutch Charge d’Affairs, who was declaiming excitedly on the Indonesia rebellion at the time, gather bulk at the tip of his nose, then drop squarely into his Martini.”

Hollinger: “The parties we attended all had an odd similarity. Proper American housewives happily abandoned their former uniform of sloppy tweeds and squishy galoshes and had adopted attire they had previously worn only in the far, far reaches of their own wish fantasy. Gorgeous cocktail and evening dresses made for a song by local dressmakers, masses of Oriental jewelry (especially long, jangly earrings), painted nails and toenails, teetering, plastic-heeled sandals, and a scotch and soda became their overseas uniform.”

“I grew tired of hearing the myth of how aging the tropical climate was. The cheapness of the Scotch at the PX was the culprit. Many an American matron, gloriously rid of household chores, started her drinking day with a bridge luncheon and ended it at 2 a.m. at a party, as a matter of routine. People consume enormous quantities of alcohol abroad; what is known as social drinking in the foreign service is usually termed alcoholism at home.”

On Mai Pen Rai:

MacDonald: “When I first arrived in Bangkok I recognized the mai ben rai philosophy of the Siamese as one of the secrets to their good nature. Many western newcomers made the mistake of likening it to the more indolent mañana spirit of Latin America and were impatient with it. Their error was their loss. It is not a formula for laziness and procrastination; it is a specific remedy for needless damage done by tension and haste. Because of it psychiatry, if ever it should come to Siam, will be an impoverished profession.”

“Once I asked a Siamese doctor what treatment they used in the kingdom for ulcers. He said he did not know. His patients never had them. Mai ben rai. See what I mean?”

Hollinger: “One evening as we were expecting ten people to dinner within the hour, Uthai announced pleasantly that both water and electricity had vanished. I was startled to hear my own voice murmur, “mai pen rai.” Uthai gave me a gentle smile and her large, liquid eyes approved my answer. As I helped her look for old candles, I brooded over the fact that I wasn’t in hysterics. In the usual fashion of American women, I had always believed that public utilities were guaranteed by the constitution. That first mai pen rai was something of a landmark.”

On Being Farang:

MacDonald: “The better I knew the Siamese and the more I could learn of them detachedly, unprejudiced by western rules, the more I liked and even envied them. I could not, of course, be wholly unprejudiced. By any token I was in Siam still a farang. My closest friends had backgrounds, tastes, ideals and sense of humor similar to my own. So much of humor – spoken humor, at least – depends upon the association of things, it was natural that my closest friends were farangs, most of them Americans.”

Hollinger: “I was a foreigner … a farang. I peered through a glass darkly and understood nothing. I felt drowned, battered, besieged, and intimidated by the Thais. A dark world loomed between me and the safe paths of tourists, and the cultured haunts of the diplomatically immune.” “Even those who spend a decade or so in the East, and who ‘go (ostentatiously) native,’ are deluding themselves if they claim to understand the country. The delusion is complete if they think they are accepted by the Asians. Orientals are the worst snobs on earth. You are called a farang (white foreigner) by the Thais the first day you set foot on Thai soil, and the term will still apply if your face is white although you remain there a score of years.”

On Street Food:

MacDonald: “In Bangkok, let a half-dozen people assemble for five minutes and a food wagon would be on hand, catering to the quick appetites that Siamese crowds seem to arouse.”

Hollinger: ”Usually, when one goes anywhere with the Thais, they stop every ten minutes for food and drink, and one is always surrounded by banana leaf goodies, portable charcoal stoves, and colorful, layered pots, and it takes an eternity to go ten miles.”

On the Oriental Hotel:

MacDonald: “Nowhere was this atmosphere of intrigue more pronounced than at the run-down old Oriental hotel which stood by the Chao Phraya River with its broad back to all the turbulence of the New Road. The Oriental was made for mystery and plotting. Its winding, moldy halls and dim rooms provoked at once an air of suspicion. In its shabby, crowded lobby every other man – or woman – might have been an international spy.”

Hollinger: “A few hours later we were entering the Bamboo Bar in the Oriental Hotel, a favorite hangout for old-timers in Bangkok.”

On Tourists:

Hollinger: “Of course, one is always seeing tourists in Bangkok; they mill around in the Erawan lobby waiting for tours, they stare greedily at the seductive piles of Thai silk at Jim Thompson’s, and they are guests of honor at cocktail parties.”

Eckardt: “Tourism is a kind of agribusiness. Koh Samui used to be famous for its coconuts, but since the bottom of the copra market dropped out, people here have switched to raising farangs. Like cattle, you rent them a stall and you set them out to pasture on the beach and three times a day these huge farangs come shambling and mooing into your restaurant to gobble and swill to their heart’s content. And like Guernsey cows they produce a steady and copious stream of money.”

On Street Scenes:

Hollinger: “Little children run around naked, urinating in convenient spots, old men spit, and old ladies chew betel nut and flash bloody, eroded teeth. The noise is deafening, and the heat crushing. Odd foods and bright baubles hang from strings, and yard goods and dishes cram the narrow alley so that one must push through it with elaborate care, as though navigating a maze.”

Eckardt: “Chinese matrons in flowered pantsuits, Indians in saris, Sikhs in turbans, Malays in sarongs and white skullcaps; dark-skinned southern Thai in trendy jeans and knits, light-skinned Bangkok Thai in trendier jeans and knits, a lone farang world traveler with beard, stringy hair and bulging knapsack, a busload of Thai Muslim schoolgirls, up for a holiday in sinful Songkhla, demure in long-sleeved ankle-length white uniforms, heads covered in black cowls and feet shod in white sneakers, identical as so many penguins.”

On Thai Women:

Eckardt: “As the ball went into play, the Angels giggled and wiggled and jiggled, leapt and fell in a gorgeous display of thrashing thighs and tossing torsos, rolled about sensuously in the sand, squealed, squirmed, waggled, writhed, and collapsed in heaving spasms of laughter. So we did feel a mite embarrassed at playing against these mere slips of girls. Which did not, of course, deter us from the heady pleasures of ogling and leering and gloating.”

Hollinger: “The two women wore vivid paa sins topped with the curious, sleeveless, lace-trimmed, bell-bottomed blouses worn by the lower classes. These had an easy elegance and, unlike her Chinese counterpart, the deprived Thai woman had great dash and looked as though she should be strolling aimlessly along the Riviera.”

Transcript of an Interview with Alexander MacDonald on May 28, 1999

SR: Where did you spend the war years?

AM: Before the war, I was living with my wife in Honolulu. We were both studying Japanese, lived with a Japanese family. I made a trip to Japan two years before the war. I saw that there was no question but that we would get into a fight with them. When Roosevelt cut off their oil supply, I knew war was inevitable. I signed up as a reserve officer and went on active duty on Pearl Harbor day. They gave me a very dull job reading radio and cable traffic out of the islands. My wife went to the States, she was a correspondent for a newspaper chain. I wrote to her and told her about my lousy job. She said, “Why don’t you join the OSS,” which was just starting up at that time. I applied, they accepted me and I spent the last two years of the war in Southeast Asia, particularly in Burma with Detachment 101. We were a very famous outfit, highly decorated. After the campaign in Burma the Japanese were still in charge in Thailand. The OSS asked for volunteers to drop behind the lines with the Thai underground. I trained for that with four or five Thais and in August of ’45 we were heading for Udon on the Cambodian border. I had lousy training, we had no parachutes, but they sent us ahead, sure that at least some of us would get in trouble. We almost reached Udon and we got word from the pilot that they had

word from Ceylon that the emperor had surrendered. They got a message to go to Bangkok and we just flew in and stepped off the plane. I was the first American in Thailand after the surrender, just a few hours after the surrender in fact. I ran the OSS station in Bangkok for six months before I got out of the Navy.

SR: What happened to your wife?

AM: We were divorced just before the war. My wife and I are still very good friends, and we write at least once every two weeks. I got married again in Cape Cod, but that one didn’t last either.

SR: At the end of Bangkok Editor you are still in Thailand. When did you leave?

AM: I think about 1955.

SR: Was the Bangkok Post just a front for continued espionage work for the American government?

AM: NO! They wanted it to be, though. I made it clear to the CIA that the Post was a private enterprise. The new CIA man at the embassy said I was doing a great job in Bangkok but ought to get out in the countryside, and I told him I was too busy with the Post. Eventually I quit the CIA for that reason.

SR: What have you been doing since you left Thailand?

AM: I did do more work for the CIA. After I got home I was sent to Africa for three years, then Indonesia, then South America. I’ve published eight books. One of them, A Wandering Newspaper Life, is still easy to find. I sent my latest book to the CIA for clearance but they chopped the hell out of it and it was unpublishable. So I published it by myself for my friends. I’ll send you a copy. (Such a book never arrived. – SR)

SR: What do you think now about the death of King Ananda? Who was Pridi protecting?

AM: I’m sure that he (King Ananda – SR) took his own life. He had a love affair in Switzerland with a common foreigner, and they made him give her up when he came home to be king at the end of the war. He was very upset about that. Also he was just a very moody and sickly young man.

SR: What was the reaction in Bangkok when your book was published in 1949? You mention things that cannot be mentioned in print to this day, like the idea that King Phumipol might have accidentally shot his brother, for instance. Also, you describe people that you were still working with at the Post. Were they displeased?

AM: I had a few royal friends and they dropped me after the book came out. It didn’t make any difference to my social life otherwise.

Transcript of a Phone Interview with Dan Wakefield on May 28, 1999

SR: When did you meet Carol Hollinger?

DW: I was teaching at Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. I don’t remember which year, but I taught there for the even years during the 1960’s, so it was likely 1964.

SR: What was she like?

DW: She was a very pleasant and very attractive woman. Like all the students, she submitted the book as a sample of her writing. All the students got to have a one-hour private conference with one of the professional writers on the faculty, and Carol asked that this manuscript be the subject of her conference with me.

SR: What did you think of the book when you read it in manuscript?

DW: We always received the students’ work prior to the conference, and when I went to the conference I was elated that this was, finally, somebody who had actually written a publishable book. You must understand that all the students wanted to be discovered at Bread Loaf, and in most cases their work wasn’t nearly ready to be published. I knew on first reading that Carol’s was. I think she did too, but she had no contacts in publishing, and had come to Bread Loaf in hopes of making some connections. I was very enthused about the book and immediately sent it to my agent, James Oliver Brown. He usually represented fiction writers, but he was charmed by her book and taken with it, just as I had been. Then he met Carol, and he was charmed and taken with her. The first publisher he sent it to was Houghten Mifflen, and they immediately signed it up. It is very rare for a book to sell to the first publisher who sees it.

SR: Did she tell you anything about her life?

DW: I asked her once, how did you happen to be over there, meaning over in Thailand. “My husband is with the government,” she said. Finally, after we knew each other better, she said, “He’s in the CIA.” She told me that she had known from her students at the university where she was teaching over there that a coup was imminent and she told her husband. He said that the government was stable and she was nuts. Then when the coup came he was very embarrassed.

SR: In the book she says, “Things at Chula were not as simple as they might be at the University of Iowa.” Did she have any connection with Iowa?

DW: I don’t think so. But I did. I taught at Iowa about the same time I met Carol. I taught in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Some of my students went on to do quite well, Tracy Kidder, Tom Jones. I taught at Bread Loaf for six years and never had another student like Carol.

SR: Why didn’t she publish the book under her married name?

DW: Well… Jim Brown and I thought that Hollinger sounded better than Turton.

SR: How did the book do when it was published?

DW: It got very little attention in the States. She wasn’t known, and had no connections, so she got few reviews. I think it was reviewed in the Saturday Review. John Chiardi was the reviewer; he was the director of Bread Loaf when she was a student there.

SR: Do you know what she died of? In the book she mentions that she had a throat operation in Thailand, and she writes that her husband smoked two packs a day.

DW: I don’t remember her smoking, and I don’t think it was cancer that she died of. It was a well-known disease but I can’t remember what. She knew at the time of Bread Loaf that she was sick. It begins with an M.

SR: Multiple sclerosis? Muscular dystrophy?

DW: No, those don’t sound right.

SR: Did Carol Hollinger live to see Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind published?

DW: I think she did live to see the book published. I got a nice letter from her husband after she died.

Transcript of Interview With Holly Kinglsey on May 28, 1999

In the book Hollinger writes lovingly and at length about her daughter, Holly. Through Jack Turton I found Holly Kingsley, nee Turton, in Jamestown, Rhode Island. She is 49 years old, married with no children. She has a Masters degree in Marine Affairs, and until recently was the Assistant Director of the Sea Grant Program at the University of Rhode Island. For many years she was also Assistant Editor of Maritimes, an academic journal for oceanographers. Now she works two days per week for a graphic designer in Newport.

SR: What years did your family live in Thailand?

HK: We went there in 1956 and left early in 1959. We moved back to Washington, DC. Actually to Maryland. That’s where she wrote the book. She had the stroke the week we were supposed to move to Paris. Eventually my father and I did move to Europe, and that’s where I finished my schooling.

SR: Was she in graduate school there?

HK: No she taught History and English and Drama in a junior high school in a black neighborhood in DC. She had a wonderful rapport with the kids. They would often vandalize other teachers’ cars and things, but the word was out that nobody was to mess with Mrs. Turton. I think those experiences would have been the next book, if she had lived.

SR: What was the reaction from people mentioned in the book?

HK: Well, I really don’t know how many of them reacted. Khun Amorn (a major character in the book – SR) and my mother kept in contact over the years, and he was very sad when she died. When I read it, and I was about fifteen by that time, I hated reading that I was a snotty little eight-year-old, but I was, and I was spoiled. A lot of my memories come from the book. I was fifteen when it came out, but I don’t really remember what that was like. There are some parts of my life that I’ve blocked out, perhaps consciously. I’ve probably read the book fifteen

times since then. A therapist suggested I read it every year on the anniversary of her death, and I do, but not every year. Usually every couple of years. I own two first editions, and a couple of subsequent editions. I really hate the cover of the current edition, with those grinning kids in the boat.

SR: Did your mother ever go back to Thailand?

HK: No.

SR: Did you?

HK: I went through a period, for about ten years, when I couldn’t fly, so I never visited.

SR: The book still sells very well in Thailand, and the frontispiece of my copy says it is published in part by the Estate of Carol Hollinger. Do you get any money from the book?

HK: No. My father was so distraught after she died that when it was time to renew the copyright, he neglected to sign the papers. I don’t know who owns it now, but we don’t see anything from it.

SR: What did your mother look like? She writes in the book that she is awkward and too tall and overweight. Do you have any photos I could see?

HK: She was beautiful. She was a model for a little while when she was young. All the family photos are gone. I don’t know what happened to them. But I’ll hunt around and see what I can find.

SR: When did your mother die, and what was the cause?

HK: She died on the Fourth of July weekend in 1965. She never saw the book, but knew it would be published.

SR: What killed her?

HK: It was a cerebral hemorrhage. Her brother and mother died of the same thing.

SR: How old was she?

HK: She was forty-five years old. You know what? The week before she died, as we were packing to move to Paris, she said to me, “I feel like I’ve completely finished one chapter of my life, and I’m ready to start a new one.”

E-mail Message from James Eckardt, June 22, 1999

(Eckardt responds below to specific questions I had sent; unfortunately there no longer remains any record of what my questions were – SR)

Dear Steve:

We may have passed each other over the Pacific in 1988. To answer your questions:

Yeah, it was a consulate job and the reason I was vague is that some American ambassadors didn’t think I was funny at all. One in particular would have his staff aide flunky call the Consul every time a story of mine appeared in the Sunday Post to complain: “Once again, James Eckardt has embarrassed himself and the entire American mission…” Whenever this Ambassador would come to Songkhla, the Consul would say, “Jim, get out of town. If he doesn’t see you he can’t complain about you.”

I started working for the Post in 1981 and I ran into trouble with my fourth story, “Down and Out in Songkhla,” which the black head of USIS (United States Information Service) thought was racist, so in collaboration with the Consul conditions were laid down that I had to use a pen name, submit my copy for inspection, etc. I just waited till that Consul had left and another one came, who didn’t care what I wrote, and went back to my old tricks. By the time the Ambassador who hated me took his post, I was already something of an institution so there wasn’t anything he could do.

The work in the beginning was much like I described in Boat People (a novel Eckardt published in 1995 – SR), reporting on the Vietnamese refugees, piracy, camp intrigues. Later I moved more into economic reporting – tin, rubber, palm oil, fisheries, tourism – and consular work: taking care of stiffs and “distressed Americans,” of which there became more and more in wonderful places like Phuket, Koh Samui and Krabi.

I worked in the Consulate from June 1990 until June 1992. The Consulate was doomed and as an economy measure they made my job half-time and cut my salary 50%. How I landed the job at Manager in Bangkok you can read about in On the Bus with Yobs, etc. (A memoir Eckardt published in 1995 -- SR) When the American Consulate closed in July, 1993 it was promptly taken over by the Chinese. All they had to do was raise a different flag.

One of the first things I did at Manager was finagle a story about Singha beer which meant a trip to the brewery and 14 big bottles with the brew master, Peter Mittmann, who told me he wanted to send me a case of Singha in gratitude for all the free advertising I’d been giving his beer, but the Post wouldn’t release my address which was c/o American Consulate. I always referred to the place as “the firm.” Only a couple years ago did I write a story in the Post about my Consulate years: “Vice Consul in Paradise.”

I’m not absolutely sure about the 1988 date. There are some stories earlier in the collection, like “The Social Event of the Year” that happened later in 1989. The book came out in 1991. Anyway, I went back to the States one more time, in June, 1994 for a reunion with my Peace Corps buddies at a lake in Texas. That’s in On the Bus… too. Manager paid for that trip and that was the last time I’ve been back: so four times since 1977.

Christmas ten years later? In 1997 I was lucky enough to be flush with 100,000 baht I got from writing 20,000 words of TAT’s Amazing Thailand mega-magazine. So the kids got new bikes. In 1999 (sic) I was just back from eight months in Cambodia covering the elections for the Phnom Penh Post and the kids were lucky to get groceries. After scruffing around as a freelance hooker for three months, I landed this job in March and I am grateful for it. If I ever had to sink to the streets again here, I’d head back to New York instead. I’m at home here but no place is good without money.

I just talked to my editor at Asia Books this morning. The new book’s ready for the printers, except for the cover: 220 pages. This is Bangkok People. My other project is to finish The Year of Living Stupidly which is mostly about Cambodia by September for Post Books.

I don’t know about Africa anymore. If it came to the point I couldn’t make a living in journalism in Thailand, I’d try the publishing industry in New York, on the strength of having published six books here.

On typos. Waylaid by the Bimbos is not full of them, but On the Bus… is. The copy editor at Post Books was real sloppy. Some kind soul in Penang sent me a list of 22 typos in On the Bus… The novels are pretty much typo-free because White Lotus hired a professional copy editor, a British lady who was brilliant. The same goes for Richard Baker at Asia Books. Bangkok People is going to be a beaut, with line drawings and a design by Robert Garlick.

And no, I never sold the Civil Rights novel, though Simon and Schuster gave me a $5000 advance and an editor and I worked through two more drafts. In the end, they decided it wouldn’t sell. I’d still like to publish that one.

Glad to hear you enjoyed the book again. I’m going down to Phuket to the Boathouse on August 27 to do a literary show. Will be the first time I’m back in a year and a half. Looking forward to a massive carouse.

Yr. Hmble & Obt Drudge,

Jim Eckardt

The author can be contacted at: shavethemonkeys@gmail.com

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