The Mole, The Matron and the Maniac - Section 3 of 4

By : Steve Rosse
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“My journalistic career was launched when my wife tried to castrate me. I was writing the dire details to a friend in Canada when the thought struck – why not polish this gibberish and peddle it to the Bangkok Post? The editors there have a pronounced taste for the grotesque. Sure enough, “The Unkindest Cut of All” appeared in the next Sunday edition.”

And so we come full circle, back to MacDonald’s beloved Bangkok Post, though a reader has a hard time imagining that MacDonald ever would have seen his brainchild as an outlet for gibberish, or one controlled by editors with a penchant for the grotesque.

Eckardt has a similar taste for the grotesque, and for liquor, and for self deprecating humor. I don’t know if it is wise for an author to introduce his reader to his work with the word “gibberish” or, as he does in the following paragraph, “trash” and “shambles.” But Eckardt does earn sympathy from his reader this way, sympathy that on this reading unfortunately wore thin by the end of the book, thirty-seven stories that chronicle “over a dozen years” of drinking, volleyball, drinking, job-hunting, drinking, guitar playing, drinking, borrowing money, drinking, riding motorcycles, drinking, eating seafood, and drinking. Perhaps it is a function of our times, or a function of my personal bias, but it does not strike me as funny for a man to celebrate his alcoholism. Happily, what is funny, and at times very funny, are Eckardt’s descriptions of the rest of his life in Songkhla.

Eckardt gives us his résumé toward the middle of the book, “ex-seminarian, Civil Rights agitator, emergency room orderly, Peace Corps volunteer, agricultural technician, blue water sailor, long distance motorcyclist, itinerant English teacher…” Strictly speaking, Waylaid by the Bimbos is not a memoir of a time in Thailand. This is a memoir of Eckardt’s adult life, much of which has been spent in the Kingdom. By the time he published Waylaid by the Bimbos in 1991 Eckardt had been an expatriate resident in Thailand for twelve years. But the book also takes us back to his undergraduate days as a civil rights volunteer in Birmingham, Alabama, his Peace Corps days in Africa, a motorcycle trek across the Eastern United States and Canada, and even a trip to New York City.

Perhaps it is this diverse personal history that makes Eckardt seem to be the only one of the three authors examined in this study who recognizes clearly the divisions between social or ethnic groups within Thailand. He mentions that his wife is Southern Thai, “blunt and outspoken.” He mentions pale “Chiangmai beauties,” and speaks of the differences between Muslim, Chinese and Siamese Thais. He describes participating in a Songkran holiday, a very important event on the Thai calendar but one which MacDonald and Hollinger never mention.

Eckardt describes, with some authority, the manora, a rare form of Southern Thai dance. Eckardt even explains the peculiarities of the brand of Southern Thai he speaks:

“I am afflicted with a hopelessly incurable speech defect known as Pak Tai, the dialect of South Thailand. Compared to the standard Bangkok dialect, Pak Tai is a slurred, rapid, guttural shambles. All important tones are muddled, reversed or ignored altogether; words are chopped in half and swallowed; an unruly horde of neologisms and archaisms trample underfoot terms commonly accepted in the rest of Thailand. To an uninitiated traveler from Bangkok a native speaker of my town of Songkhla sounds like an angry man with a mouthful of macaroons.”

The dialect he is describing is actually called lang tai, and Pak Tai is the name for Southern Thailand itself, but as another non-native speaker whose accent comes from the South I can confirm that his description is accurate as well as very humorous. His only real mistake may be in his implication that “the rest of Thailand” speaks a single, homogenous dialect, and that Southern Thailand is unique in having its idiosyncratic patois, when in fact there are least three other main branches of the language, Northeastern, Central and Northern, with countless variations within these broad families.

But even with these minor quibbles, Eckardt is the only one of our three writers who would ever dare to delve this deeply into the Thai language. He is, without question, the most assimilated of the three authors, and thus the most knowledgeable. While Hollinger made a whole chapter out of a Thai friend keeping the corpse of her mother-in-law in the living room, Eckardt explains matter-of-factly that his mother-in-law’s ashes have a room to themselves in his home, and that his wife regularly hosts spirit mediums to commune with her dead mother.

He is also apparently the most democratic of the three authors in his social interactions, counting among his friends Australians, Chinese, Thais, New Zealanders, Brits, Americans, Malaysians, Dutchmen, Tamils, Sikhs, Sri Lankans, Mexicans and Romanians. What role any of these people may play in the grand scheme of things is unexplored by Eckardt, in fact all of these people are simply his drinking buddies. Nobody but the author is ever described in much detail in Waylaid by the Bimbos, and Eckardt mentions the nationality of any of his drinking buddies, it seems, merely to help the reader differentiate that friend from the myriad other drinking buddies who populate this book.

Contrast this attitude with MacDonald’s comments on his Japanese pressmen and German editor: “A few months ago,” writes MacDonald, “we had been on opposite sides, fighting it out. It didn’t matter much then who the man on the opposite side was. If he was German or Japanese he was the enemy. The only thing, it was impersonal enmity. Now, the war over, Germans and Japanese had become, for me at least, persons again.” For Eckardt Germans, Japanese and residents of Pago-Pago are all persons, persons who might be expected to have a drink with the author, or maybe listen to him play his guitar, but certainly not enemies.

Finally, Eckardt is the most proletariat of the authors. He is the only one who describes complications in obtaining a visa to stay in Thailand, something that is of at least passing interest to almost every expatriate currently living in the country. (Possibly this is simply a matter of history instead of class. It may be that forty or sixty years ago expatriates were still a novelty in Thailand and thus it was easier for them to obtain visas.)

Eckardt is also the only one of the three authors who seems deeply in touch with Thai popular culture. He can describe in great and humorous detail the plot of a Thai TV show, or name the current most popular Thai movie stars, or even sing a popular song in Thai. He is the only one who describes, again in great and humorous detail, how two men armed with a knife and gun broke into his house one night and tried to murder him and his wife. (He is also the only author to experiment with style, breaking from third-person to first-person point of view when he feels it is appropriate.)

But perhaps the single most apparent thing that separates Eckardt from MacDonald and Hollinger is money. Both of the earlier authors enjoyed plenty of it, while poverty is a wolf constantly at Eckardt’s door. He takes a job singing in a hotel band and lists his reasons as “1) money and 2) free farang food.” Eckardt mentions having to borrow a tie and a pair of shoes for a job interview. I cannot imagine MacDonald or Hollinger having to borrow, or even consenting to wear, another person’s shoes. And Eckardt lived in a slum, something MacDonald and Hollinger never came near to doing. While the previous two authors’ contacts with the lower classes came only through their employees or servants, Eckardt married into a very poor family.

“Directly below the window where I sat at my typewriter squatted the sorriest-looking shack in Lang Wat Lieb. Patched together with odd bits of cardboard and slat wood, roofed with mismatched rusty pan held down by rocks, this hovel housed a large portion of the wife’s family. The wizened crock-backed grandfather who worked as a woodcutter, the uncle who guarded motorcycles at a local movie house, his wife who made babies, the uncle who peddled a samlor when he wasn’t selling or smoking heroin, the brother who used to be a boxer and now was nothing, three enormously fat aunts with mouths both foul and large, and sundry worthless cousins and hangers-on.”

From the lofty heights of MacDonald’s dinners with the King, through Hollinger’s classroom full of bright young minds and cocktail parties for the embassy wives, we have come down now to, perhaps, the real Thailand, or at least to a Thailand which is much more pervasive and heavily populated than the Thailand the previous two authors have described. (It should also be noted, however, that both Hollinger and MacDonald could be certain that their Western-educated Thai friends would read their books, while Eckardt could be just as certain that the “enormously fat aunts with mouths both foul and large” would never know what he was saying about them in the newspaper. His subjects’ inability to read English gave him a certain freedom in how he described them, and also probably kept him alive.)

It brings to mind something Hollinger says: “Even the Westerners who stay for years rarely penetrate below a certain class in the East. They meet the Westernized, the cultured and the rich, and always behind this shallow facade are the numberless Thais they cannot begin to comprehend and who are Thailand.”

Certainly Eckardt met the numberless Thais who are Thailand, and perhaps comprehended them. He met them, married them, drank their beer and ate their rice. Also Eckardt has a much better grasp of the Thai language than either of the other authors. Although he cannot spell Michelob (and, evidently, neither could his editors at the Post) he can correctly tell us the etymology of the word “ajarn.” He also explains why Thais greet foreigners with “You! You! YOU!”

And while Hollinger mentions often being the only farang in Thai company, and we may assume that MacDonald might have found himself in the same situation on occasion, Eckardt goes through long periods, at times months, when he is the only farang within miles.

While MacDonald dropped names with casual aplomb, and Hollinger mentioned a few celebrities she chatted with, none of Eckardt’s acquaintances are famous, although they sport wonderful heroic names like The Beautiful Busty Baratella Sisters, Erwin the Red-Haired Giant Mexican, Henrik the Dutchman, Shanghai George, The Hash House Harriers, Mort-the-Port, Canadian Mike, Snapper Don, Malaysia Don, and Zuri Rumble.

While MacDonald kept his personal life carefully hidden from his reader, and Hollnger’s was described well but ultimately fairly tame, in Waylaid by the Bimbos there are many references to romantic liaisons, though these are veiled out of respect, I assume, for the author’s wife, and no doubt out of deference to the Bangkok Post’s editorial guidelines. There are the above-mentioned Baratella Sisters, a Tamil girl in Singapore, a harem of low-class prostitutes the author lived with in Malacca, a 19-year-old art student from Milan and various other “stray women.” Some of these conquests are mentioned two or three times. He apologizes for these asides with an honest declaration, “Man does not live by friendship alone. He needs sex.”

Eckardt mentions, offhand, “the Thai perception of farangs as drunken degenerate louts…” Certainly this was not the perception of farang that MacDonald encountered when dining with the King, or that Hollinger met on the campus of Chulalongkorn University. The author gives us his motto on a T-shirt: “Otium cum Dignitate – Leisure with Dignity.” But the book seems to be a catalogue of the various ways, over a dozen years, that he acted without any shred of dignity. “I remember sitting barefoot in a puddle of wine and broken glass, lamenting the fact that no one had the decency to clean up the mess, and the circle of guests sharing this pool of wine and glass shards solemnly nodded their heads in agreement: ‘Shameful, disgusting, look at this, somebody should do something…’” Perhaps Eckardt was sensitive to this Thai perception of farang as drunken degenerate louts because all the Thais he knew only knew farang who were drunken degenerate louts.

What Eckardt was doing for a living for most of this time is unclear. Just as MacDonald downplayed his role in the espionage community, and Hollinger described her CIA operative husband as a “State Department employee,” Eckardt will not be pinned down about his job. There are some throwaway mentions of his work like, “I was seated at my desk in my office when my wife walked in,” and some descriptions early on of teaching English in a substandard business school.

There is a lot of talk about looking for work, or looking for money, but almost nothing about whatever work he found. When I asked him, while writing this paper, he said that he had to be vague because he had a job with the American consulate in Songkhla, helping to repatriate Vietnamese “boat people” who were washing up on beaches along the Gulf of Siam. But reading the book I got the feeling that he wasn’t so much being discreet as he was telling it like it was. For MacDonald, the job was everything, and in 229 pages he tells us virtually nothing about his private life. For Hollinger her job was part of her life, and the two got roughly equal time and attention in her book. But for Eckardt, life was everything other than work, and work was not worth mentioning.

The biggest single element in these stories is the consumption of large amounts of alcohol and the food that was eaten with it.

“…the tribe convenes to guzzle cold beer and wolf down such appetizers as chicken fried in roast cashew nuts, squid steam fried in garlic, barbecued beef in peppery sauce. For those who linger for dinner there’s fresh sea bass or mullet or red snapper marinated in herbs and spices, tangy shrimp soup, roast pork slavered with sweet and sour gravy, beef strips in oyster sauce, curried crabs, giant prawns… all washed down with yet more copious draughts of mighty Singha.”

I doubt that many authors would bracket a café’s menu with a couple of mugs of beer and call it a paragraph, though Peter Mayle did all right with virtually the same formula in A Year in Provence. Since I’m virtually a teetotaler, perhaps I’m not the best market for this style of writing. Maybe it’s the difference between growing up Irish in New York City and Jewish in Iowa City, but even on my first, highly enjoyable reading of …Bimbos I grew very tired of all the drinking. On this latest reading, by the fiftieth “We were hoisting celebratory beers at Boontong’s Café after yet another thrilling volleyball victory…” it annoyed me. It also annoyed me that such an accomplished drinker, and his two editors, could not spell “Micalob.”

One of Eckardt’s most notable stylistic quirks is his addiction to making lists, like this description of Thailand:

“…rice paddies, coconut palms, houses on stilts, gold-spired temples, saffron-robed monks, kids in school uniforms, women in sarongs, lumbering water buffalo, mongrel dogs, noodle shops, samlors, canals, mango and banana trees, chickens, goats, pigs, billboards advertising Singha beer and Mekhong whisky…” “…milling crowds, the traffic, bicycles, motorbikes, tuk-tuks, street carts vending fruit, sweets and jasmine garlands, neon-lit Chinese shops, movie marquees featuring movie stars Sorapong and Naowarat, the skirl of Thai music blaring from loudspeakers, garish curlicued Thai letters emblazoned over signs everywhere.”

This is a device that Eckardt uses endlessly throughout the book, laundry lists of items seen or heard or desired, none described beyond their names, some clumsily, like the Thai letters “emblazoned over signs.” Almost always, as in this instance, when Eckardt works hard at description it is of liquor: “I put that first Singha beer to my lips and shamelessly swigged from the bottle. As the golden nectar plummeted down my throat I drank bliss and knew, for the taste of it was in my mouth, that I was back in Thailand.” What the golden spired temples and buffalos and movie stars could not achieve, beer could.

There are frequent long passages where Eckardt repeats himself, which would have been perfectly fine when these stories were newspaper columns, separated by months or even years. But when they are gathered in a book, separated by only a page or two, we soon weary of being told that Songkhla is a tropical paradise 500 miles down the coast of Thailand’s southern peninsula, that Eckardt married a policeman’s daughter named Mem, that Songkhla’s two outer islands are called Cat and Rat, that Eckardt and Boontong like to go fishing at Rat Island, and that Sierra Leone is known as “the White Man’s Grave.” Again, I want to stress that I hold the editors, and ultimately the publisher, responsible for these repetitions, not the author. I have a lot of respect for Eckardt’s writing skill, especially for his unerring instincts for what incidents in his life will make good stories and his wonderful, witty ability to turn a phrase.

The stories in Waylaid by the Bimbos cover the years 1978 to 1990, and reading them we have no idea who were the prime ministers of Thailand during those years. We don’t know the state of communism in the Kingdom, or the world for that matter, and there is no discussion at all of the competing political systems, a subject which preoccupied both MacDonald and Hollinger for much of their books. Aside from a one-sentence reference to reading an article about Tiananmen Square, Eckardt doesn’t mention much of the world outside of Songkhla, probably because Songkhla was his chosen subject and probably because a farang publishing in a daily newspaper in Thailand, a farang with absolutely no connections in “the right places” should he need them, would have been wise to be extremely careful about what he said.

While MacDonald and Hollinger, whatever their feelings about American government involvement in Southeast Asia, took the subject seriously, Eckardt does not, which is fitting since his purpose is to entertain while his predecessors saw their duty as education.

“My companions were Roger, a university ajarn from New Zealand, and Mack, the American representative of a prestigious international aid organization. We rode in Mack’s official car, a brand new Mercedes, just a trio of good ol’ boys swigging beer in air conditioned comfort to the stereo accompaniment of Willy Nelson and Jimmy Buffett. Most Saturday nights Mack’s limousine, emblazoned with the official emblem of his distinguished aid organization, can be found parked in front of Hat Yai’s more reputable brothels.”

What a wonderful idea: The reputable brothel. But how cynical do we have to be to laugh at somebody entrusted with running an international aid organization who will park his company car, logo on the door, outside a brothel in a place as conscious of public appearance and reputation as Thailand?

We would have to be very cynical, but then Eckardt was writing in a cynical era, and for a cynical world-weary audience. By the 1980’s America, the culture from which all three authors in this study draw their references, was consumed by greed and self-interest. In that light perhaps Eckardt’s self absorption and narrow focus are easily understood. It is important also to keep in mind that Eckardt was writing for a local, largely male, largely American or European audience, the kind of guys who spend their days sitting in hotel lobbies waiting for the bars to open. An audience that likes to read about other guys doing the same thing.

And to the author’s credit, one other important theme in Waylaid by the Bimbos is that “…the bane of expatriate life is finding fine friends and then irrevocably losing them as they or you careen off to yet another remote part of the globe. Stumbling across each other after years of separation has the character of a miraculous epiphany.” As described by Eckardt, these meetings have more the character of another excuse for “foaming flagons of Singha” than any miraculous epiphany, but these episodes do show that Eckardt’s self-centered point of view is not the same as selfishness.

Eckardt displays a sometimes deeply touching affection for his friends. He certainly spends much more time describing them and their activities than he does on his wife and children. (He mentions offhand, at the end of the book, that his daughter Erika collapsed with a stroke in 1986 and required two major brain operations. He spends more time describing the way Erwin the Red-Haired Mexican plays softball.) But again, the avoidance of sad subjects or relationships deeper than friendships can probably be attributed to the author’s awareness of his target audience. One of Eckardt’s closest friends was named Erik Hansen, an old Peace Corps comrade who died in a motorcycle accident in Australia. “One of the most common dreams I have,” says Eckardt early in his book, “is Erik Hansen arriving in Songkhla aboard a magnificent clipper ship. No, he assures me, he never died. He’s heading for Africa and do I want to come along?”

One of the last chapters in Waylaid by the Bimbos is titled “Ten Years in Songkhla.” In it Eckardt describes changes he’s seen in his adopted home. MacDonald also described local change, but he focused on macro changes at the highest levels of government, described from an outsider’s point of view, in objective, (though still somehow judgmental) journalist’s prose. Eckardt sees change locally. While his editors allow him to arbitrarily switch from present to past to present tense with unsettling frequency in the course of this chapter, the descriptions of what Eckardt sees as he takes his daughter on a motorcycle ride through the booming town are nonetheless poignant and well delivered. “Next up the road is the infamous slum of Lang Wat Lieb, my home ten years ago. The slum remains much the same, though its muddy lanes are now concrete and woebegone shacks sport color TV antennas.” It is no mean feat to make the reader nostalgic for a slum that is succumbing to gentrification.

At the end of this chapter Eckardt writes, “On this last stretch, I think about the strange fate that brought me here and kept me here ten years. My original plan had been to complete a novel and move on. I’ve written three now, and forty stories, and have yet to make enough money to leave. Will I still be here another ten years from now?” This story was published in the Post in 1989, ten years ago. Eckardt is no longer in Songkhla, he’s in Bangkok, living alone in a backpacker’s guesthouse, still scratching out a living, still drinking.

At the end of the book Eckardt recounts how he was offered a job in Africa and prepared to move his Thai wife and children there. At the last moment the job falls through and Eckardt is bitterly disappointed. The very last paragraph in Waylaid by the Bimbos is this one:

“I’ve since reconciled myself to staying in Songkhla. We’ve got a big new house with a walled-in garden and three new puppies for Erika to play with. The kids are happy in school. Mem just opened a small restaurant and it’s booming. Yeah, life is nice at the moment. But I’m sending this story off to Jon Newfield to pass around in Mozambique. Hey, anybody over there reading this? Call me. I’ll come tomorrow!”

So, while at the end of his book MacDonald confirmed his intention to stay in Bangkok and become part of history, and at the end of hers Hollinger expressed regret that her time in Thailand had been so short, at the end of his book Eckardt seems to be saying that he would love to leave, but can’t. A prisoner in paradise.

SUMMARY

There are similarities among the three authors chosen for this study, which is why they were chosen, but there are also some glaring differences. All three authors were Americans, all three had some connection to the American government, all three were in their late thirties when they wrote their books. All three authors enjoyed some degree of success with their books earning them sizable readerships, at least compared to the vast majority of publications in the genre of expatriate memoir.

But the differences are more interesting. Two male, one female. Two of the authors were born and raised on the East Coast, one in Hawaii. Two are parents, one is not. Two spent some of their time in Thailand teaching, one did not. Two are, or present themselves to be, professional writers, one does not. At the times they wrote their books, one had been in Thailand for twelve years, one for four, one only for two. Two wrote their books while they were still living in Thailand, one after she had been gone for a couple of years. Two authors saw their books published in America and distributed there, one was published and distributed only in Thailand.

Alexander MacDonald’s point of view was focused on the world, and he wrote very little of himself. Carol Hollinger focused equally on herself and the world she lived in, and we learn a lot about her but only through her interactions with the world. James Eckardt focused exclusively on himself, and the world only mattered in the ways it impacted on his life.

But perhaps the three points of view are products of the three distinct eras they spoke in. One of our authors published his book in 1949, one in 1965 and one in 1991, and in these dates we may find the source of the most important differences in these three voices. In 1949, when MacDonald wrote Bangkok Editor America was still crediting itself with winning the Second World War. Americans saw themselves as the saviors of mankind, and responsible for building the future out of the shards of the past. But trained by four years of war to view the world through a prism of polar opposites, Americans found it impossible to live without an enemy. The new enemy they chose was communism and the new battleground appeared, to Americans in 1949, to be in Asia.

Uncle Sam was the father figure who would protect his black and brown and yellow children from the Bolshevik Boogie Man, and MacDonald, a product of the Puritanism of New England and the paternalism of General MacArthur’s Pacific Command, still saw himself as a soldier four years after Hirohito’s surrender, but now a soldier fighting for the hearts and minds of newspaper readers.

His unique access to the upper echelons of the Bangkok power elite, both Thai and foreign, gave him a unique perspective, that of an outsider inside Thai politics, and an insider outside of American policy. That perspective was only possible at that particular moment in history; once the Thai government solidified under Pibun Sonkhram it became more and more independent and farang, whether they were from America or the Soviet Union, were pushed further and further outside, until as Carol Hollinger found out, she learned more about an impending coup from her students than her husband did with all his CIA contacts and listening devices.

By 1958 America, and Americans, had changed as well. The second world war was thirteen years in the past, and the grand struggle that MacDonald had prophesied was being played out in miniature in various bloody, ill-conceived battles in Africa and South America and Southeast Asia. Writers and artists and composers were questioning American values even as the television sets which American prosperity brought into every living room were beginning to show images of the forgotten and disenfranchised people within America.

Carol Hollinger reflected this new uncertainty about American ethics in Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind. She is willing to concede that the Thais might be capable of running their country unassisted, something which MacDonald might have thought impossible. She was willing to learn from the Thais, and to concede that “If opportunities for the lower classes in Thailand do not improve, the path of Communism might be her only way out.”

And if Carol Hollinger learned the meaning of mai pen rai, then James Eckardt certainly learned the meaning of sanuk, the Thai ethic that teaches that nothing is worth doing if it’s not done with great enjoyment. By the time Eckardt wrote his columns for the Post, American involvement in Thailand had been reduced to a single token military exercise each year and millions of tourists of every nationality spending American Express traveler’s checks.

By the 1980s Americans had replaced the president who was a war hero and looked like a movie star with a president who was a movie star who had played war heroes. After surviving countless assassination attempts by the CIA, in places like Cambodia, Hungary, Angola and Cuba, communism died at home, in bed, of starvation.

MacDonald saw himself involved in a fight for nothing less than the future of the entire world. Hollinger saw herself involved in a process, through her students, that would lead to the future of Thailand. Eckardt saw himself engaged in a struggle to put food on his family’s table and beer in his glass, and nothing more.

Thus Eckardt could perhaps enjoy his time in Thailand more than MacDonald or Hollinger. He could certainly spend less time in soul searching or philosophizing or nation building or in shaping the minds of the next generation. He could spend his time playing volleyball, eating seafood and drinking too much. And he could spend his time writing about these pursuits without any pretentions that he was an ambassador of goodwill or a player on the big stage. He could just be Jim, good friend, proud father, amateur guitar player and Boonrawd Brewery’s biggest customer.

I began this study by saying that these three books define a place and time for me, and that I consider their authors friends. So what of Steve Rosse, in Iowa, in 1999? After re-reading these three books, back-to-back, I am left with these impressions:

If I ever talk to Alexander MacDonald again, I will ask him this: “Do you ever regret leaving Thailand?” After dining with kings and princes and premiers, after publishing and editing a major metropolitan newspaper, after living in the castle of his boyhood dreams, after tasting the lotus (as he must have done, though he doesn’t say so in the book) was anything he ever did later in his life so exciting? When he left Bangkok, to work again for the CIA in Africa and South America and finally retire as the manager of a resort on Cape Cod, did he look back on his time in Bangkok as the most exciting days of his life?
I wish that I had known Carol Hollinger. Her daughter Holly sent me two pictures of her and the eyes that look out at me from those photographs are full of warmth, humor and intelligence, just like her books. I wish she had lived to write more books. I hope that if I only have one book in me, it will be as fine as Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind. I would be happy with that even if I never live to see my book published.
By any rational estimation James Eckardt should have left Thailand long ago. But I’m glad he didn’t. I gave up my life there and I will learn to live with that. But it would be depressing as hell if Jim ever gave up.

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

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