Suan Plu nice life

We keep discovering new attractions in our neighborhood. A few days ago, Poe led us deep into the byways of the Suan Plu market, which is several hundred food and merchandise stalls that seem to have been flung off the back of a convoy of trucks, shoved one on top of another by a bulldozer, then roofed over. It's a lively and redolent hodgepodge of Suan Plu humanity and its needs and habits.

One of those habits is a good massage. If you go straight ahead for about 100 feet, turn left at the shrine, then take the first right, you come to May Massage. There are actual buildings in the rear of the market, and this is one of them. You enter into a quiet, dimly lit room where other customers are semi-recumbent on chaises getting their feet reinvigorated. We opted for the 100 baht "traditional" Thai full-body massage of one hour. (A hundred baht is just over three dollars.) The same massage with oils or creams would cost two or three times that amount, and naturally the price doubles for a two-hour workover.

"Massage" means any number of things in Thailand---many parlors include a "happy ending" for an additional charge---but May's is "traditional," meaning it doesn't get sexual, and the masseur or masseuse uses not just the strength of his or hands and arms but his full body weight bearing down through the arms to knead tension away. Joe and I were led up to the third floor, where we lay on adjoining mats. The kid who worked on me looked too frail for the job---we learned later he was 15---but he was strong enough and enormously skilled. Traditional Thai massage has been taught for centuries at the country's monasteries, and it's one of the culture's defining arts. A Thai woman was being massaged by an older masseuse in a nearby curtained-off area, and occasionally we heard her happy sighs. The lighting was pink and subdued, and the music was new-agey. I almost laughed when I thought of our friend Bill Herrick's famous last words, "Enough of the schmaltzy music already!" Oh, Bill, how you would have loved Thailand and a Thai massage!

Downstairs, we rejoined Poe and his happy feet. We were served tea and sat about and chatted for a bit. The young masseurs, we learned, were actually probably Burmese and they tended not to go out, because their papers were not in order. Life in this region can be complicated in its own ways.

Speaking of Burma, we received our visas. Somebody told us the consulate is grilling Americans now---"Why are you REALLY going to Myanmar?"---but we had no trouble. We go March 14.

Joe is working hard at understanding all manner of Bangkok street food. He's constantly coming home and saying, "Taste this." It's often something wrapped in a banana leaf with a bamboo stick through it. It's usually good, but sometimes it's just odd. Nothing seems to make us sick. Though recently we ate in an actual restaurant where other farangs congregated, and I became queasy after a dish of some kind of pork curry with ferns.

I finished my book, Strachey # 12, and sent it off. It's a political thriller tentatively titled RED WHITE BLACK AND BLUE. (See Joe's proposed cover above.)

Sunday we go to the seashore at Hua Hin for five days. Just in time. We heard it's warming up in the U.S. Here too.

Bill Ullman on Egypt

Our friend Bill Ullman sent Joe and me what I think is the keenest take on Egypt and world press coverage of the uprising that I've seen anywhere. It is reproduced below. Bill is a former Africanist business operative/do-gooder/good world citizen. He now lives in Undisclosed Location, Maine. Bill has been this blog's most faithful reader and busybody fact checker and persnickety copy editor for four years. Over the years he has performed the latter task for others, including the late Ted Sorenson. There are many Ullman Africa stories. My favorite is, the newspaper in Windhoek, Namibia, once referred to him, after he left the country, as "the mysterious William Ullman."

Hello Dick,

I probably spent more time glued to Al-Jazeera over the past two weeks

than anyone other than Mubarak’s intel goons. The unfolding of the

drama/chess game had me enthralled from start to finish. First ever

experience watching (most of) a revolution live from beginning to end

(of the first stage only, to be sure). Emotionally I was on the side of the

protesters, of course, and occasionally shouted out in glee or dismay

as the tide seemed to be running one way or the other. My enthusiasm

was informed, but not diminished, by the uncertainties of the

geo-political consequences of success, the possible costs to U.S.

strategic interests (I’m not sure I give much of a shit about Israel

anymore, though we cannot allow its annihilation) and the knowledge

that revolutions often replace the awful with the horrible. The pot

boiling over in Egypt entails all kinds of risks for the stability of

the status quo, but in my view the status quo has been heading us in

dangerous directions for a long time. We’re going to have problems, but

they won’t be quite the same frozen in place problems that were on the

table up to last Friday. (And frankly, losing much of our access to

Arab oil might be the best thing that could happen to us, bringing a

little reality into the mixture of myth and delusion that governs many

American perspectives these days.)

You correctly note that A-J’s coverage was biased, but it was a

different kind of bias from what we are unhappily getting used to from

Fox, MSNBC, talk radio, et al. While the emotional tilt of the

reporters was clear, they didn’t express it in the words they spoke;

they pretty much simply described what they were seeing and what the

people they had access to were saying; and since what they saw we did

too, it didn’t take any pro-protester presentation-bias to persuade us

about where we stood. The actual events, day-by-day, said it all.

As for the actual events portrayed and the hundreds of interviews

conducted, the A-J producer on the ground and his many reporters

repeatedly said that they were trying to interview pro-government

people, whether village peasants, cops, government functionaries or

thug groups. What they invariably met with was threats of violence,

actual violence, confiscation of equipment, detention and a refusal to

say anything or be filmed. This response was orchestrated non-stop by

the regime, whose state TV was broadcasting until early Friday morning

that A-J was not a legitimate news organization, but an arm of U.S. and

Israeli intelligence. Still the A-J kids had the guts to keep trying.

Bottom line: the coverage bias was not A-J‘s doing; it was the product

of the regime’s fear of letting even its own supporters speak out

freely.

The A-J- “kids” (they were mostly quite young) were superb. When it

came to providing background info, they were vastly more informed and

relevant than just about any of the U.S. press; they had Egyptian and

regional history at their fingertips; there was absolutely none of that

relentless self-congratulation that pollutes CNN coverage, or that

“Look at me, a big personality reporting from a dangerous location”

crap. Being both multilingual and multi-cultural they knew how to do

interviews that spoke both to local and foreign audiences, and they

took full (often risky) advantage of mixing with the crowds while

almost all of the big-shot western reporters were clearly comfortably

removed from the immediate action. There were a few isolated

exceptions, but not many.

I’ve been tracking Al-Jazeera for a long time. I can’t speak to the

quality/bias of coverage by the Arabic division which has different

producers and reporters, but the English section consistently offers

better coverage of international (not just middle eastern) news than

anything we still have after the budget cuts and general dumbing-down

that have reduced American TV news to the level of a morning cooking

show for women, mixed with what could pass as trailers for the

latest sadistic chainsaw movie. A-J has the money, the technology, the

reporters and the motivation that CNN has lost (and sadly, BBC is

losing, though it’s still pretty good). As for NPR & PBS, their

international news budgets were gutted years ago (and the Republicans

may well succeed in a few weeks with their efforts to totally de-fund

the Corporation For Public Broadcasting).

Viewership of A-J in the U.S. has been extremely limited by (1) the

refusal of big cable companies to carry it, partly no doubt influenced

by (2) our government’s frequent insinuations that A-J is somehow

related to terrorism (channeling Mubarak!) and (3) the willful, utterly

self-defeating ignorance of the vast majority of our Know Nothing

citizenry whose indifference to the rest of the world and its

widespread child-like credulity about domestic issues are now earning

it the fucking that the Republicans (and not a few of the Democrats)

are so eager to deliver.

I feel good that this year you have up-graded to air conditioning.

=Bill=

Update

There’s a scene in one of Charles McCarry’s superb Paul Christopher espionage novels where Christopher and his wife---or girlfriend, maybe somebody can help me out with this---return to Italy after a sojourn in cool, tidy, reserved Northern Europe. In the morning, the wife throws open the shutters in their Rome pension and declares happily, “Oh, it’s the human race!” That’s how I feel about Thailand every day when I wake up to it. The Thais are voluble in a quieter way than the Italians. And they certainly don’t parade from place to place in seried ranks of fabulousness. Here only the royal family does that. But Thais give off that same air of “I’m so glad I got up this morning, and I’m lucky to be alive.” We sleep in an air-conditioned cocoon, and I can’t wait each morning to open the windows and balcony doors for the aromas from the food stalls to come drifting up, along with the nonstop gabbing and good-natured industriousness and kidding around.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where we went on a visa run over the past weekend, is markedly different. It’s mostly Muslim, it’s multi-ethnic---Malays, Chinese, Indians---and it’s tense. It’s not really dangerous, even though there are signs downtown warning shoppers to beware of “snatch thieves.” But it’s a city of the Big Hustle---sidewalk touts selling knockoff watches and swindler taxi drivers. The first night, Joe said, “It’s the wild west!” People on the street look somewhere between glum and bitter. The Islam in KL has been described as “Islam-lite,” like Turkey’s, so it’s not entirely religion that’s the problem. But the clerics do put a damper on things. On Monday, the government warned people not to observe Valantine’s Day because that could lead to “immorality.” We heard later that the cops hassled young people holding hands in a park, raided some “clubs,” and arrested 16 people.

On the other hand, there’s a discreet but lively gay scene in KL. Our American friend Dick Sandler was there from Thailand for a few weeks visiting his Malaysian boyfriend, who’s a teacher. We didn’t meet the BF---he was off teaching jungle survival skills to other teachers. But we had a nice Dim Sum lunch with Dick’s friends Gabe and Paul. They are Chinese Malaysians; Gabe works for an NGO promoting corporate responsibility, and Paul is the marketing rep for a Swiss watch company. Gabe went to college in the U.S., and interestingly he said he has encountered more racial prejudice in Malaysia than he ever did in America. Because the Chinese long dominated the Malaysian economy, quotas are now in effect guaranteeing ethnic Malays a percentage of certain jobs and contracts. These two young men and their British boyfriends (yes, they are “potato queens,” their boyfriends “rice queens”---a couple of unfortunate terms) have pretty good lives. Although, Gabe said that in conservative Sarawak, where he grew up, gay men are careful not to congregate, out of fear that their families or employers will put two and two together and have a fit.

The best tourist attractions in KL---a city that looks like a kind of Tulsa with palm trees and afternoon tropical downpours---are the gorgeous Islamic Arts Museum and, next to it, the KL Bird park. The museum, a modern white marble wonder of an edifice, has one of the best collections of Islamic decorative art in the world. The ten-plus-acre bird park is a rainforest under a high net with resplendently feathered red and yellow and green and iridescent blue birds of all sizes and national costumes on delightfully garish display. We also hiked over to the Petronas Twin Towers, KL’s signature skyscrapers. They look like the Chrysler building with boils. I had assumed they had been built by somebody named Nick Petronas, but it turned out that Petronas is the National Petroleum Company, which produces Malaysia’s vast oil wealth.

Here in Bangkok, Joe has been continuing to research his pocket guide to Thai street food---he is happily eating his way across the city---and I have nearly finished writing Strachey-12 (no title yet). A distraction has been our TV set. We receive just two English language channels. One is a CNN-like news channel from Singapore. The other is Al Jazeera, which we find impressive. Its 24-hour-a-day live coverage of the Egypt uprising was biased in favor of the demonstrators, and why shouldn’t it have been? Watching this was terrifically suspenseful and finally thrilling.

Plans: we’re off to the seashore at Hua Hin and our friends Simon and Poe February 26-March 2. Then we go to Burma March 14-27. This afternoon we have to haul ourselves over to the Myanmar Embassy , crawl under the razor wire, and apply for visas. It’s a dreadful place, every visitor’s first taste of that dreadful government.

You may have read that Thailand and Cambodia are having a border-demarcation spat and are on the verge of war. The dispute went to the U.N. a few days ago, and the Security Council wisely said, “You’re grown-ups. Work it out.”

A morning of revelation... and several snacks

Khao chae

Jasmin rice with the

various condiments

The first year we were in Bangkok we visited the small island Ko Kret, on the north edge of Bangkok on the Chao Phraya river. It was our second day in Thailand, and we were thoroughly doused in royal palaces, gleaming gold Buddha images dripping with jasmine garlands amid clouds of burning insense. All this made it hard it differentiate between the jet lag and the otherworldly feeling of the place we actually were in. On the island of Ko Kret we passed a banyan tree wrapped with layers of colored fabrics and more garlands and offerings and a concrete turbaned man on a horse. The next sight was a vendor with a wheeled cart selling an array of deep fried flowers and greens.

It was not just the flowers he was selling but the fact that around his neck hung eight or ten amulets. A stuppa in the background, the amulets in the mid-ground, the fried flowers with a sweet and spicy sauce, became more than just deep fried flowers.

This year, I wanted to revisit this place and photograph those flowers for my street food project. So Poe and I went back yesterday early in the morning before the throngs would arrive, as it was the middle of the Chinese New Years celebration.

We started our snacking with a bowl filled with an array of deep-fried flowers and vines with a sweet hot chili sauce. I was unable to differentiate the subtleties of flavors, but the textures were quite different. And after all, there are worse ways to start the day---how bad can deep-fried batter doused with a spicy, tangy sweet sauce be? Thai fried food is rarely greasy, as they fry in very hot oil and always cook small batches. Although it was the flowers that drew me, they turned out to be the least interesting of what I was to encounter.

The second encounter was with Kao Chae. This may be the most remarkable dish I’ve eaten since I first had tom kha gai 25 years ago. We sat on locally made clay stools around a small table. There were six small clay bowls. Two were filled with a couple of tablespoons of white rice, some ice chips and jasmine water. The other four dishes contained sweet shredded pork, stir-fried salted white radish, pork stuffed banana pepper wrapped in egg and tiny shrimp paste balls fried with a light egg coating. Now, I know that none of this sounds like what you want to have for breakfast. But I can assure you that having a spoon full of chilled jasmine water with a few grains of rice in it between bites of the savory side dishes was all quite remarkable. I felt giddy with delight with this discovery. Normally khao chae is eaten in the summer to cool oneself.

Next we bought some banana leaves that contained fermented rice. With them came a small square of chewy coconut sticky rice flour pudding with bits of peanuts in it. A little like having a little Noilly Prat vermouth pudding with coconut and peanut bits. Very fun.

Next came the Khao Kuai (black grass jelly).
Grass jelly is made by boiling the aged and slightly oxidized stalks and leaves of Mesona chinensis[1] (member of the mint family) with potassium carbonate for several hours with a little starch and then cooling the liquid to a jelly-like consistency.[2] This jelly can be cut into cubes or other forms, and then mixed with syrup to produce a drink or dessert thought to have cooling (yin) properties, which makes it typically consumed during hot weather. The jelly itself has a slightly bitter taste, a light iodine lavender flavor, and is a translucent black. It can also be mixed with soy milk to produce a milky white liquid with black strands in it.
Very sweet but again very tasty.


I marveled watching a woman who was making skewers of tiny green pouches ever so deftly. These were meing kam. Normally this snack is make-your-own. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try these. Wrapped in small spinach leaves they contain a mixture of chopped shallots, ginger/galangal, lime with skin, fried garlic, shredded coconut chili, and a sweet dark salty sauce. The ginger and lime rind were wonderful with the sweet paste. Tasty and weird.

As we were about to leave I noticed a woman selling what I thought were some kind of flower bulbs. I had run across a woman cooking orchid bulbs on a trek in Burma. It turned out that this Thai woman was steaming what are called buffalo nuts. Of course I had to try them as I have never seen them before. They tasted and had the texture of roasted chestnuts. These were apparently cultivated but quite a rarity. Naturally they too were tasty. The Devil Pod, also known as Bat Nut, Goat Head, Bull Nut, and Buffalo Nut, is the seed pod of Trapa bicornis, an aquatic Asian plant. Glossy and black, it averages 2 1/2 - 3 inches from tip to tip, and when dried and oiled, its surface texture is similar to that of a chestnut.

The New years throngs had arrived and it was time to get off the island. Soon we were on the ferry heading back across the Chao Phraya dodging the clumps of water hyacinth and trying to figure out where to have lunch.







Deep fried pea flowers














One of the flowers they were deep frying

Bougainvillea

Meing Kam finished on the skewers and in the process

The ingredients

The black grass jelly-khao huai

in the making and ready to eat

liked the jelly scoop which was made from a Chang beer can

A spicy tamarind paste often eaten with rice

The buffalo nut vendor steaming her nuts