Coming Home: The Year in Review

By David Simmons

Pigeons home. Dogs home. In the late 1970s we learned, in the Fawlty Towers episode “Basil the Rat”, that even Rattus homes under the right circumstances, in this case the tender, loving care of a kindly waiter from Barcelona who thinks it’s a hamster (“You have rats in Spain, don’t you, or did Franco have ’em all shot?”).

The homing instinct of cats is also renowned, although it can be as much of a curse as a blessing.

And this raises the question (purists say we’re not allowed to say “begs the question”, as its actual meaning is irrelevant to most real-world purposes): Do people have a homing instinct?

It also speaks to one of the two most significant events in the Simmons family in 2013.

Not all of us get as stubbornly attached to a domicile as cats (or hamster-impostor rats). When early this year my wife and I decided to move out of our rented townhouse in south-central Bangkok and into the house we had built a few years ago in the town of Pak Chong, in the province of Nakhon Ratchasima in northeastern Thailand, it became an issue.

We (by which I mean my wife Pong) decided that for this move, about the eighth we had endured since moving to Thailand from Hong Kong in late 2001, we would not hire movers or rent a truck but move gradually, utilizing the pickup trucks owned by her family and their friends. Since there was no rush to make the move, this took place over several weeks, and the townhouse became more and more empty.

One day I went downstairs to the main living area, looked around the barrenness and – a little to my surprise, as it was quite a nice place and we had lived there since 2005 – I felt not even a twinge of sadness. 

Outside the Bangkok townhouse.

This may have been partly due to my anticipation of moving, for the first time in my six-decade life, into a real house that I “owned”, rather than renting. The quotation marks are there for two reasons. The most obvious is that the mortgage still has a few years to go until we can finally wrest the place out of the hands of the bank. The second is that I am not a Thai citizen, and therefore cannot legally own property. The house is in the name of my wife, a Thai national.

To make this move possible, I had to get approval from my employer to work from home, as it would of course no longer be possible to commute to the newspaper’s office in Bang Na, a district of southeastern Bangkok. The boss agreed, and the paper’s tech department arranged for me to get remote access to the server, so that I could do my copy-editing job normally. I had already been doing something similar for my secondary employer, a paper in Hong Kong; nowadays with nearly universal Internet connections, the old concept of a physical newsroom is becoming as obsolete as the manual typewriter.

Before we moved, my wife’s family (who live in the same area) oversaw the construction of an extension to the house, which was to be my office. I didn’t have time to make the trip up to Pak Chong to see what was happening, and when I finally saw what they had done, I was stunned. The office extension was huge, covering nearly all of the yard. The interior was in pink tile (for no reason other than it’s a favourite colour of my wife and our daughter, as of course I wasn’t consulted on this or anything else) and very spacious, necessitating the most powerful air-conditioner in the house. It was fully equipped with Internet and satellite-TV connections.

But what about Onet the cat? What was her verdict on the move?

She generally approved, but of course didn’t confine herself to exploring the boundaries of the house itself, or the yard. She wandered down the soi (lane) to where it joined the subdivision’s main street. Then she wandered out to the thanon (main road) through the village.

Then she got lost.

She was missing for a week before an alert neighbour spotted her in a vacant lot about 300 metres down the road and told my wife. They drove back to the spot on the neighbour’s motorbike and fetched Onet, who had lost a bit of weight but was otherwise fine, and now confines her travels to parts of the soi from where the house is still visible.

Onet, party animal.

So the cat came back and lived on in comfort and health. Her master was not so fortunate.

One day I was busy in the office, struggling as I do every day to translate Thaiglish business stories into publishable English, when I noticed my left foot was swelling a bit. At first I ignored it, as this happens sometimes when I’m sitting for a bit too long. But when Onet banged on the office door and I got up to let her in, I found I could hardly walk.

At first we thought I must have been bitten by an insect (kids found a red ant in the office later), and then we thought a spider bite was more likely. Anyway, when the swelling didn’t go down overnight, Pong drove me to a nearby private hospital to have it looked at.

It turned out I’d contracted a serious infection, which had spread out of my foot and into my circulatory system, bringing my blood pressure down to dangerous lows. The doctors put me on general antibiotics, though they still didn’t know what exactly the infection was. Not wanting to take a chance on it, they transferred me by ambulance to a bigger hospital in the same chain, in the provincial capital about an hour away. There I was slapped into the intensive-care unit and poked full of intravenous tubes to fight the (still unidentified) infection and get my blood pressure back up.

Unknown to me at the time, the doctors warned my wife that if these measures proved ineffective, the infection had already spread so far that it could kill me.

Eventually they decided I needed surgery, to drain the poison out of my foot. I think it was at that point that they diagnosed the infection: necrotizing fasciitis, or flesh-eating disease, which in severe cases can

only be halted by amputating the infected limb. In my case, the surgeon was able to carve out the worst chunks, and after a week or so the infection was subsiding satisfactorily, I was taken off the IV, and sent home (after excellent care by nurses not all of whom looked like the one on the right) with a bagful of oral antibiotics. A month later I was fine.

Other than that little adventure, the move into our home has been a success. As I had no medical insurance, the hospital stay blew us out of the water financially, but thanks to the assistance of a family friend, we avoided taking out a second mortgage. And despite my above-noted long-standing indifference to the concept of home ownership, I confess to a change of heart. This place gives me great pleasure.

That pleasure is enhanced by the fact that it is a very nice house; it was mostly designed by my wife, and she spared no detail to make it her personal “paradise”. She has used that word dozens of times since we moved in. She grew up in a poor farming family and has always dreamed of having her own

Lukyi and Dang.

house. Now she does. She has established a garden in the front where she grows jasmine and other flowers, and there is a small mango tree. And the climate in this part of Thailand is cooler and much cleaner than Bangkok. I’ve even started going for walks in the evening.

Our daughter Lukyi transferred from her small international school in Bangkok to a large privately run school in Pak Chong. Unlike the Bangkok school, the medium of instruction is Thai, not English, and her Thai literacy wasn’t up to snuff in the opinion of the administration, so she is repeating Grade 4. But she likes the school and has made lots of new friends, and I think she’s doing OK academically. I help her with her English reading at home.

Her biological brother Dang is staying with us. His parents have split up; his father Ut lives here in Pak Chong and comes over frequently, but his mother Nok is busy in a construction business in Bangkok and comes more rarely. They pay for his schooling, and Ut, who is an excellent handyman, helps us maintain the house at little or no cost.

View from the Floating Bar

My friend Martin and I made another trip to the Philippines in March. We went to Subic Bay this time; he is a scuba-diving fanatic and wanted to explore the shipwrecks around that former US naval base. We stayed at the Arizona International Resort, which besides a good dive shop to keep Martin happy, also featured an excellent restaurant and a floating bar. 

The best way to get to Subic Bay from Thailand is via Clark airport, just outside Angeles City, so this trip also allowed a visit with my old friend Ted, who runs an Internet cafe there.

As I write this, life is passably normal. Pong is still convinced an insect or spider bite caused my foot infection, so I’ve been banished from the office and moved into one of the bedrooms in the main house, which is deemed more bug-proof. I’m working six-day weeks to make a dent in our debts.

There is little sign here in sleepy Pak Chong of the reactionary movement that has nearly paralysed Bangkok with protests demanding “reforms” aimed at somehow preventing a succession of governments favoured by the “uneducated” rural majority. There is an excellent chance of another bloodbath early in 2014, possibly even a civil war.

But hey, it’s the festive season. Let’s keep a good thought.

Pong (Nuannoi), Lukyi (Natinicha), Dang, Onet and I wish you all a great 2014.

Why the villains win

By David Simmons

Like many baby-boomers whose fathers fought in World War II, I was mystified in my youth by how quickly the Western Allies reconciled with the Japanese, Italians and especially the Germans. In the early 1970s, I travelled around Germany to try to make sense of it. I saw Dachau, the memorials in West Berlin, the still war-damaged buildings of East Berlin.

And I met wonderful people.

Years later, I went to Israel, where I saw the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. I spent three months on a kibbutz, where I met more wonderful people, including our Israeli hosts and the Arab labourers, along with the foreign volunteers from Britain, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, the US, France and Canada.

And Germany.

How could this be? How could these young Germans, these intelligent, fun-loving, perfectly normal people, be connected in any way with those monsters who slaughtered Jews by the millions? Young, bright-eyed, idealistic like the rest of us, and working hand in hand with Jews, eating, drinking and playing with them, including some who still had memories of those dark days in Europe?

And yet they were not monsters, those Hitler Youth members of the 1930s, those brave soldiers of the Wehrmacht, maybe not even the guards at Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and the rest. They were people, humans who trod a path spared others only by the grace of the gods. They loved their country but saw no hope for it to rise from the ruins and reparations of the Great War, the hyperinflation, the exploitation of the bankers, many of whom were Jews.

Until an ugly little man with a swastika on his armband stirred their aspirations, and their hatreds, with his bold rhetoric.

As I write this, I hear the television in the next room, the anti-government Blue Sky channel that my wife watches day and night, spewing bold rhetoric from an unattractive man with a Thai flag on his armband. He offers hope to save Thailand from – what? Hyperinflation? Mass poverty and unemployment? Enslavement by foreign powers?

No; the Thai economy is one of the strongest in Asia, poverty has been nearly eliminated, unemployment is less than 1 per cent, foreign investment is pouring in, factories are popping up all over and churning out cars and computer components. Wages are rising, and the worst villains of exploitative capitalism – the garment industry – are fleeing to havens like Bangladesh and Cambodia.

No; he will save the land not from any of these things but from a family from the northern province of Chiang Mai who exploited the democratic system to establish themselves in the once totally dominant Central region. He will save the land, therefore, from the real culprit – democracy itself. For it is a flawed system, empowering the lower classes to install governments that promise them a better life and, worse, spread the wealth around outside the great city of Krung Thep, the City of Angels, the seat of a quasi-divine monarch.

Western media haven’t been able to grasp what is happening. They are used to covering street revolutions, but those are nearly always struggles to rid their lands of dictators, absolute monarchs and military juntas. Here in Thailand, it’s the complete opposite.

It’s not logical. And ironically this anti-democratic, anti-unification, pro-class-war revolution flared up at almost exactly the same time as most of the rest of the world was mourning the loss of a black man who spent decades in prison for fighting apartheid, but who went on to become his country’s president and forgave his former tormenters, who preached reconciliation.

But as in 1930s Germany, logic is not the main issue. Yes the man from Chiang Mai they now demonize was a crook and a murderer, and the current bureaucracy, security forces, and Parliament itself are deeply corrupt. Yes some of the populist programs favoured by the rural majority have been ineffectual, even damaging. Yet the real momentum comes not from meaningful solutions proposed from the protest stage, but from soothing words backing the myth that the fair-skinned Central tribe with its strong Chinese ethnicity is superior to the Lao and hill-tribe-tainted Northern highlands and Northeastern plateaus, and let’s not even talk about the Malay Muslims in the South. In fact let’s not talk about anything but how much we hate that one family, and by extension all those who support them.

Let’s not focus on the usurious Jewish bankers who are getting fat on the misery of Aryan Germans, said the ugly little man with the swastika; let’s exterminate all the Jews, even our friends and neighbours and co-workers, our children’s teachers. And let’s not stop there; let’s celebrate our superiority by conquering the lower races, the Slavs and the Latins, to expand our Lebensraum. For we are not of the world; we own it.

I have often thought about what my life would have been like if I had been born thirty years earlier, and not in Canada but in Germany. Would I have been among the Righteous Gentiles who protected Jews from persecution? I doubt I would have, not just in Germany but anywhere else in Europe at that time, for anti-Semitism was rife everywhere – the Germans (and the Soviets) just took it to its logical extreme. I might have been skeptical of National Socialist fantasies and uncomfortable with its aggression, maybe. I really don’t know.

We don’t have to look far, after all, to see the power of rhetoric over logic. The Cold War was mostly based on the former, and that decades-long conflict wasn’t embraced primarily by naive little Asians or goose-stepping fanatics, but by the great democracies that dominated much of the world after 1945.

And we have not been permitted to enjoy our complacency of having survived the Cold War without nuking one another into oblivion. Now there is a new struggle, currently being lost by working people everywhere, against out-of-control corporatism and financial terrorism that threatens not just civilization, but possibly the ecosystem itself.

So there are villains everywhere, and they win by exploiting our own failings, our refusal to think for ourselves, like the whistle-blowing mobs now paralysing Bangkok. They too easily breach our weak defences against the prejudice, greed, close-mindedness inside our own hearts, that can fester into hate so quickly.