Guest Column: A Mother’s Perspective of Bangkok

To a mother, is there anything better than spending a vacation, even very short, with a child who has long since left home? I don’t think there is one. This is how I felt when I, over the past two weeks, visited Linda and her boyfriend Mitch in Bangkok, Thailand. Time passed by so quickly, and now I am going back to Beijing with many precious feelings and sweet memories of the trip left behind. With Linda’s and Mitch’s careful plan, in these two weeks, almost every day we went out and ate at different Thai restaurants that always came out with something just wonderful. I enjoyed Thai food very much, even though sometimes they were too spicy for me. But the dishes were fresh, light, and very tasty. I have to say that now I prefer Thai food to the Chinese food I have in Beijing, the latter usually being overly cooked and very oily. Every evening we played games, the way families spent times together in the pre-TV age. I wouldn’t say that I was a good player by any measure, but I enjoyed every minute spent with them immensely. We chatted, laughed, and ate a lot. Sometimes, Mitch and Linda cooked some American/Italian food that I have been longing for for a long time. Let alone to say that I was staying in their lovely lovely loft-styled apartment, modern, with high ceiling and a beautiful view especially during the night and rainy days.  I swam every day, in order to get my strength back for more hard work, and for most of the time, I had this long and narrow pool all by myself.

Manila, the Other Face of Asia

Last week found us in Manila.  We were headed to a remote island in Palawan to celebrate Mitch’s XXth birthday, a vacation that promised nature reserves, sunken Japanese warships, unparalleled underwater marine life, and cozy grass huts on the beach.  It sounded too good to be true, and it was, since heavy rains in that region caused all flights to be canceled. Instead, we spent Mitch’s birthday at Manila’s Ninoy Aquino International Airport, waiting for a flight that never happened, before we finally relented and spent the weekend in Manila, and then stayed in Manila some more the following week in order for me to get a special visa.  We wanted to like Manila; after all, the city sounds like a blend between Milan and Vanilla, and suggested Spanish ruins, American apparel, and fusion foods.  The city, however, bore a close resemblance to hell on earth.  Was it dirty, ugly and polluted? Yes. Was the food truly inedible or at best unremarkable? It’s true. Did it rain for 7 days straight? Sure did.  But what was most upsetting about Manila was the very apparent poverty, palpable income inequality, and this feeling of depression, rather than the vital energy that comes from knowing you are headed upwards.  The Philippines has witnessed tremendous economic growth in recent years, but as seen in the picture above, that wealth is largely concentrated in the hands of a few, while most of Metro Manila is more like the foreground – incredibly poor, and with few opportunities for improvements in quality of life.

Will you resign, or will you be dismissed?

I recently finished Suketu Mehta’s amazing “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found”, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist book about the city’s underground lives, such as gangs, police-gang warfare, prostitutes, and transvestites.  One of the most striking stories concerns a family of Jains who, having accumulated incredible wealth in the jewelry business, now decide to give up the world to become Jain monks and nuns.  The family of five give up all of their wealth, shave their heads and go forth into the world in winter, barefoot and with only two sets of clothes.  The men separate from the women, each parent now regarding the accompanying children as disciples only.  The father recalls reading a Jainist book with a sentence that electrified him and ultimately led him to this renunciation: “Are you going to be dismissed or will you resign?”

Mehta writes, “For a long time afterward, in my life in the cities, I think of Sevantibhai, of the utter final simplicity of his life. In New York I am beset with financial worry. How will I educate my children? Will I be able to buy a home? Approaching the middle of my life, I feel poorer every day compared to my friends who went to school with me, who are making money in technology and on the stock market, and who are buying up apartments and cars and raising their prices beyond my reach. I am earning more than I ever have before, and I am also feeling poorer than ever before. Each time it feels like I almost have it within reach at last – financial security (if not wealth), a working family, a career – it slips out of my grasp…