The Streets of Bangkok

I'm walking through the streets of Bangkok at dusk. I pick up small pieces of the conversations going on around me, the rapid-fire Thai of taxi drivers and fruit sellers, many of them speaking the thick patois of the Northeastern provinces.

It's a city so often called heartless, a vast and sprawling megalopolis with suburbs dribbling out across the marshy plains of Central Thailand. Expatriates cling to Silom and Sukhumvit Roads, dusty strips of pirated DVD stands and streetwalkers and seven year old girls selling flowers, office and shopping complexes spiraling upward, away from the contradictions of street-level life.

But I've become far fonder of the older sections of the city, especially around Hua Lamphong Station, where numerous passageways narrow down to a couple of meters wide. Walk down Yaowarat Road, a long boulevard lined with food stalls and hung with Christmas lights, a million chirpy conversations at every streetside table in Thai, Chinese, and English. Turn left or right, down into one of the sois, and the streets are empty, the shop doors locked. A fluorescent light glows as an old man eats noodles and drinks beer and watches the TV news, but otherwise the old neighborhoods are devoid of life.

The buildings down here are of uncertain architectural vintage. A few stylistic details stand out, an occasional Victorian window or art deco clock. Built at some anonymous point between 1880 and 1950, they look, to the Western eye at least, removed from time or place. At night, their heavy wooden shutters seem permanently closed off to the world. The power lines hang low over the pavements, and walking home through here, the walker can feel as if a net is slowly descending from above.

Largely forgotten, these streets hold the key to the memory of an older Bangkok, a sunny tropical port town where golden stupas were the highest points piercing a multi-hued tropical sky. The spirit and the memories of the old city, uncomfortable in its modern, glass-and-steel armature, shifts around in the night. It is a rotten leg twisting against the brace.

If we look deeper, below the asphalt, we find many of the old canals that once crossed the area now buried under roadways. Bangkok was built on primeval marshlands, and due to overbuilding and climate change, will quite likely soon sink into the loamy soil. Listen late at night to the storm drains, and you can hear slowly running water-- the sound of the city slowly being reclaimed by the swamps.