neighborhoods

My sister lives in an upper middle class neighborhood in the United States. She and her husband are nearing retirement, and have no children. He has worked for more than 30 years as a salesman and marketing executive, and I think his typical annual salary over the past ten years or so has been in excess of US$250,000 per year. My sister also works as an independent contractor, earning above $50K annually. They are DINKs… big time.

My sister and her husband remind me of characters you see in Hollywood comedies; the ones that have a giant Christmas tree and plenty of fresh baked cookies, and who tell the neighbor’s kids not to trample the ‘turf’ in the front lawn. I don’t mean that I don’t love my sister and brother-in-law; just that they are stereotypical of a certain kind of whitebread American. I’ve shared this idea with my sister and she agrees.

My sister is anorexically thin, with a stylish short haircut, nice jewelry and one or two closets full of very nice clothes. Her husband is a guy with a broad smile and firm handshake who can make smalltalk about anything, just before he sells you his latest product. They have a Mercedes and a Jag in the garage, and a Chrysler that they drive to the grocery store. If you’re American you probably get the idea by now.

Anyway, they have lived in about 4 or 5 different cities in the last twenty years. Actually, I should say they’ve lived in the SUBURBS of those cities. Each time the neighborhood has been the same; large houses with football field sized yards in front and back. Fences, shrubs and trees to separate the rear garden from the neighbors and to offer privacy, but usually an open exapanse of green lawn in the front, with maybe a well-tended fringe of flowers across the front of the house and beside the footpath.

What separates them from the neighbors is distance. Houses have probably 40 meters between them; shouting distance, perhaps, but hardly the optimum situation to promote friendly relationships. I find that my sister tends to know one or two people in her neighborhood, and her ‘good friends’ are more likely to live on the other side of town (or even the other side of the country) than the other side of the street.

I spent over a decade living in Sydney. I spent part of that time living well outside the city… in an area where I was more likely to see trees, wild deer and kangaroo than to see neighbors. Later I lived in the heart of the city, in a condo or apartment building where neighbors were unknown entities behind numbered doors up and down the hallway.

Here in Bangkok, I spend a lot of time walking. At the beginning of March I moved to a new neighborhood, and I walk on the small sois of the neighborhood daily. Because one of my clients lives about ten minutes’ walk from my building I tend to see a lot of the neighborhood.

The neighborhood that I see as I wander these small sois has almost nothing in common with any neighborhood I associate with my adult years. The houses here are close together. I think in Sydney we would have called them terraces and in America I believe I would have called them townhouses.

But they are identifiably Asian in style.

There is no yard; no green space, unless you count a few potted plants that might be stacked in front of the house or on the balcony. Space is at a premium… as though every square inch has to be fought for and won.

The front room of the ground floor is open to the street; it looks almost like a garage, except that it typically has a tile floor. It is an area that can be used in many ways. Some people park the car or motorcycle inside. Some use it as an open lounge area where they sit during the day watching TV, eating, and chatting with friends. Some use the space to run a small business… they may have three or four coin-operated washing machines or a sewing machine for making repairs. They might be set up with a little 7-11 style convenience store or a small barbeqeue food stall, or they may be weaving baskets.

There is one lady on the soi that I live on who has stacks of colored cloth strip in her front room at all time. She sits in the evenings sorting through the colored strips of cloth, and obviously uses them to weave or sew something, but I have yet to figure out what it is she makes.

Some people use these front rooms as multi-purpose areas where they park the motorcycle, run the cottage industry and entertain visitors all in the same space.

The sois themselves are narrow. 99% of the time they have no separate footpath. Cars park on the side of the soi, and typically on both sides of the soi. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ‘no parking’ sign on a Thailand soi, no matter how impractical the parking became. It’s not unusual to have sois where the cars are parked on both sides of the street, and there simply isn’t enough room for a car to drive between them. This happens several nights a week on the soi leading to my apartment building, and if I come home in a taxi, I often have to walk the last 30 meters because the taxi can’t reach my building. (In this case I think that the neighbors do it in protest because they are unhappy about a 7-story apartment full of farangs being built at the end of their nice quiet soi).

But I remember when my friend Noi used to live in Bangkok; when I’d go visit her, she often had to knock on the neighbor’s door and ask them to come outside and move their car so she could get in or out of her parking space in front of her house. The neighbor seemed unperturbed at the intrusion.

To walk anywhere in the neighborhood requires walking IN THE STREET, since there are no footpaths. The streets, as mentioned, are narrow and cars park so close to the buildings that you have to walk in the street to pass the parked vehicles.

Cars on the street are coming in both directions. There are frequent bottlenecks as pedestrians walk past parked cars in the path of oncoming motorcycles, tuk tuks and cars, and drivers wait for each other since the road is too narrow to pass wherever a car is parked. The result would be mostly unimaginable in places like America or Australia. I can imagine “the Council” being called in Sydney if a street had 1/20th the issues I see daily on every soi in Bangkok.

It would be dangerous if drivers weren’t so aware of pedestrians, and if things didn’t really move quite slowly.

People hear about the crazy traffic in Bangkok and I think it’s easy to imagine a place where people are speeding along in merry disregard of the traffic rules. In fact, my experience is that the corollary is true — people disregard the ‘rules’, sure, but they mostly drive slower, and simply follow the path of least resistance. I unhesitatingly step in front of cars in Thailand all the time, knowing full well that the driver is going to brake and let me walk in front of him. In Sydney, the driver would be expecting me to wait until I had the right of way or a clear road, so stepping in front of him would probably result in my own injury or death.

Here, it is a sometimes awkward, sometimes graceful ballet on the streets and sois of the city, as drivers alternately attack and yield using an unwritten set of rules that they all seem to understand. Horns here are used somewhat sparingly, and are not usually blown to say ‘get out of my way’ but as a polite warning that says, ‘watch out, I’m coming past now’. When I first arrived in Thailand, it terrified me, but somehow — through osmosis I presume — I’ve become unconsciously accustomed to those rules. Somehow I understand who will accelerate, who will yield, and when its the right time to take the four steps required to cross the soi. I have become part of the ballet.

One of my favorite shows as a kid was the Andy Griffith Show. Andy lived in Mayberry RFD, and he and others would walk around the small town of Mayberry visiting, chatting and being ‘neighborly’.

I notice that Thais, at least in the smaller middle class neighborhoods where I spend much of my time, have this same thing going on. They know the people in the neighborhood. During the day they wander up the street and drop in on friends. They are always welcome, and there is plenty of chatting going on, whether it is in the open front rooms of the homes or in the middle of the quiet soi with the occasional car or motorcycle gliding past.

People know each other; they recognize each other. They are, in the truest sense of the word, neighbors. They are neighbors in the way that I remember the area I grew up in when I was a kid. My parent’s house was in a middle class neighborhood where us boys were in boy scouts together, we played football and baseball on the same teams together, and we went to school and graduated together. Our parents knew each other.

My mother owned a small beauty salon for nearly 30 years. When I was very young I wondered how she always seemed to know about everything that I did, until I realized that she cut and styled the hair of all my friends’ mothers, as well as my school principal and homeroom teacher. The adults were in constant contact with each other, and everyone knew everyone else’s business.

Well, that’s what it’s like in the area I live in here in Bangkok.

Now that I’ve lived here for about 10 weeks, I’m becoming part of the neighborhood too. People are getting used to seeing me walk around. The puzzled stares I got at first are beginning to show up as friendly smiles and waves. The place where I eat lunch on Saturdays is on the road where I pass it 2 to 6 times daily. They always call out a greeting and a smile. The girls at my local 7-11 broke the ice the other day, asking my name, asking how I learned Thai, and introducing themselves by name. The lady who lives in the house next to my apartment building is Hong Kong Chinese, not Thai, and I met her a few weeks ago when she was talking to the landlord. I saw her as I was walking out to go to Thai class just after 8 a.m. this morning. She recognized me and called out a cheery ‘hello’.

It’s a part of life that I appreciate about Thailand. The neighborhoods.

People know each other. They seem to like each other. The pace of things is slow, from the driving to the chatting, to the unhurried way that food is delivered.

If you value order, efficiency and organization above all else, it might drive you mad. As the son of a military man, I spent much of my life with these being among my highest values, but I find that as I mellow into early middle age I am appreciating the friendly chaos of the Thai neighborhood where I live. I love seeing and smelling grilled chicken at 8:45 a.m. as the lady with the tongs and the apron smiles at me in recognition, though we’ve never met.

I no longer tense up at the sound of an engine behind me, knowing that the driver will calmly wait until I pass the car parked on the side of the road, and will not be shaking his fist and cursing the fact that my slow pedestrian progress is making him late for an appointment.

Thai neighborhoods are different. Small streets, curbside businesses, dirt and disorganization, noise — there are plenty of things to complain about. Friendly people, familiarity, calm unhurriedness and smiles — there are plenty of things to love.

As usual, I opt for the latter. I am growing to love my new neighborhood. It’s part of the Thailand experience that I enjoy.