I set out on foot from On Nut Road –
a bow-shaped arterial which links the Sukhumvit corridor to the Lat
Krabang area on the eastern edge of Bangkok – to the Ekkamai
intersection. It was an uncharacteristically cool morning, and ideal
for a bit of exploration.
It's a fast-changing strip that I
walked through. It was not long ago that this area was mostly known
has the haunting grounds of Mae Nak, subject of one of the most
celebrated ghost stories of Thai folklore. According to legend, she
dies while her husband is off fighting the Burmese, and unable to
leave her beloved, she stays behind, only to be left again.
A shrine to her remains at Wat Mahabut,
but now the rice paddies and mangroves she wandered are but a distant
memory, long since replaced by oil refineries and textile plants,
and, more recently, the condos that have mushroomed up as the metro
system has pushed further east and south, the wooden houses torn down
to make way for 30-story towers, the cottage-industry workshops
superseded by “lifestyle centers,” deep-fried mackerel and cheap
coffee made sweet with condensed milk replaced with mediocre espresso
and unagi rolls.
But the new can only displace the old
to a certain extent, and in fugitive corners, the old still thrives.
I walk down Sukhumvit, first past a row
of shops selling bargain appliances wrapped in plastic, followed by
another row all selling caged doves and goldfish. And as I cut down
below the bridge over the foul smelling Phra Khanong Canal, itself
beneath the entwined concrete serpentines of a freeway interchange, a
few open-air barbershops ply their trade, ancient men clipping away
at military flat-tops underneath insect-swarmed lights, each stall
with a single, torn brown leatherette seat.
Perhaps “fugitive corners” is the
wrong term, because they aren't corners, but margins. Much like how
in the American Midwest, prairie species continued to thrive along
the embankments of railroad lines and cemetery fences, the remnants
of the old Bangkok form a tentacular pattern, likewise along railroad
lines and canals, underneath highways, pressed hard between six-lane
roads choked with barreling delivery trucks.
Underneath the shadow of the
crystalline new city, the lumpenproletariat make their living among
rust-stained concrete and rebar, and these spaces are filled with
hidden patterns, specialized markets, ethnic and linguistic links to
the parched Burmese plains, the hills of Java, the swampy ground of
the Mekong Delta.
I haven't explored these areas
thoroughly. When I've walked through their hearts, more often than
not, I've felt unwanted, an interloper, past living rooms open to the
street where families gathered on duvets on the floor to watch the
evening game shows and soap operas, before foyers that seemed like
junk shops gathering years of scrap wood and old calendars, into
engine shops and hardware stores smelling of oil and metal, parts of
antique Fiats and Datsuns oxidizing on creaking shelves.
The cinnamon shops, I think, as I cross
the bridge over the canal.
In 1934, Bruno Schulz published his
story of that name, the story of a young boy adrift amid the magical
junk shops of Schulz's hometown of Drohobycz, now part of Ukraine,
but variously Polish, Russian, and Austrian in previous times. The
cinnamon shops, to Schulz, were the wondrous repositories of the
exotic and the forgotten, “Bengal lights, magic boxes, the stamps
of long-forgotten countries, Chinese decals, indigo, calaphony from
Malabar, the eggs of exotic insects...”
And this resonated so closely when I
read Schulz. For as long as I could remember, I had been attracted to
the ancient and the forgotten, and had scoured garage sales and used
bookstores for antique atlases and postcards. I was just at the age,
when I read Schulz, when I dove headlong into the “vintage,”
wearing shirts that had been worn for years by Iowan farmers. To see
this desire reflected in a totally different time, that of the
Galician steppe 70 years before, but in identical form – and what
the fuck was calaphony? –
was bracing.
So
wherever I have lived and traveled since, I have been aware of
entering the cinnamon shops. I had seen them in vellum scripts in
Oxford, their 18th
Century handwriting verging on the illegible, in the dusty
junk-drawer Main Street storefronts of Iowa and Minnesota, in a pile
of old printing blocks in Nikko, an hour north of Tokyo.
As the
city moves upwards, what were once the main form of commerce in
Bangkok become the cinnamon shops. The standard Chinese remedies are
now patent medicines in dusty jars. The weekly magazines of the Thai
housewives of the 1960s are now a mildewing pile. The decorative
temple-mural pattern on a notebook becomes a cheap relic. The once
brand-new row of masonry houses now lurks beneath the expressway.
In the
digital era, will our relics experience the same fate? Is our
Instagram photo, already cinnamon'd, already filtered to look like it
was taken with an old Lomo, going to be a talisman of a bygone era?
Our
lives are as still images. We never see the subtle shifts in the
aesthetics around us until they're gone. Then they're gone and we
look back, and call it nostalgia. And we archive our nostalgias,
relegate them to the museum of our own past, whether that our
is a single person or the entire human collective memory.
And we
organize those nostalgias into gestalt images of a place, a time,
forming these abstractions, and if the abstractions become objects of
fixation, they run the risk of becoming caricatures, grotesques.
I
arrive at the Ekkamai intersection, now fully back in the modern
city. To cool off a bit, I walk into Gateway, a disorienting
Japanese-themed mall, where women in cosplay uniforms bark at you to
take a shampoo sample or come into a sushi restaurant. A man clumsily
trods past in a giant robot outfit.
I'm
thrust from a hazy, dusty nostalgia, into another abstraction, one of
Shinjuku hypermodernity. 50 years, five minutes. As I walk out into
the blinding sunlight, the whole city seems to fall quiet for just a
second.
