Bangkok Glutton

When I was a kid living in Pennsyltucky, I used to daydream about a place with soaring green mountains, rice paddies, and snaking rivers that I could move to someday, far away from teachers who gave lectures about how not speaking English in the United States was “rude”. It turns out, the place I was dreaming about was Luang Prabang.

Lo and behold, I actually have family in Luang Prabang. They are second cousins (or maybe third?), relatives of my Grandma Jeanette’s whom we finally got to meet for the first time last year in November. So when I got a commission to research and write about Luang Prabang for a guidebook this year, I jumped at the chance to contact them again, if only to stuff my face with more of their food.

My relatives own a restaurant, and an ice cream parlor. Could I get any luckier? Madame Noy is owned by the eldest of three sisters, who has been cooking for her family all her life. Her restaurant is known for serving Thai-style chicken rice, crispy pork on rice, and red BBQ pork on rice (it would appear, even in places as proudly Laotian as Luang Prabang, that Thai-style dishes are better known than pure Laotian ones.) That said, her expertise isn’t limited to Thai street food; she makes a mean spread of Laotian food — and not just Laotian, but dishes that are hard to find anywhere outside of Luang Prabang.

One dish that I’ve had a hard time finding anywhere else is “khao poon nam jaew”. While “khao poon” is roughly equivalent to Thailand’s “kanom jeen” (Mon-style fermented rice noodles), “nam jaew” seems confusing because everyone associates “jaew” with “spicy chili dip”.

But this nam jaew has less to do with spicy red chilies, and a lot more to do with pork: pork offal, primarily. It’s what highfalutin chefs today would call “poverty cuisine” — all the off-cuts of the pig that no one else would want — but which is quite sensibly about making sure that nothing goes to waste. To maybe hide the fact that there are so many pig parts in there, a veritable mountain of toppings are included, like chopped banana blossom, cabbage, bean sprouts, the requisite green onion and fresh coriander leaves, green beans, basil leaves, fresh lime, raw chilies, and French watercress, ubiquitous in Luang Prabang. You pile your noodles with the toppings, ladle the stew on top, and give them a good mix while flinging the whole thing with lashings of chili powder. The final flourish involves smooshing rice crackers in your hands and tipping them over the noodles like croutons. The result is milder than expected, natural and somehow refreshing, like most Laotian food is.

Like Thais, Laotians are also fond of buying their favorite dishes from valued street vendors for special meals with family. This includes the only Luang Prabang dish that Thais are familiar with, “tum Luang Prabang“, made with slivers of cucumber (not necessarily big flat noodle-like slices, but often) and seasoned with shrimp paste, water olive and lots and lots of fermented field crab juice. My cousins’ favorite vendor is in the alleyway next to the former Dara Market (it’s since been closed to make way for something, likely another high-end hotel).

Another snack that’s everywhere in Luang Prabang is “khaiphaen”, which is Mekong river weed that’s been seasoned with sesame seeds and dried in the sun. You’ll see racks of it drying along the river banks in November, when the water is as its clearest, I’m told; the rainy season muddies the water too much for collection (not to mention, it’s fairly dangerous). The river weed is supposed to melt in your mouth like a communion wafer; if it’s sticky or chewy, it’s too old — meaning I’ve been chewing on old river weed all my life. The khaiphaen I’m served is a melt-in-the-mouth revelation, but when I ask where it’s from, I get hemming and hawing about how they are friends who process the river weed themselves. Needless to say, it’s not from the Morning Market.

Finally, Madame Noy served us a dish I’ve never seen before, looking like two big logs of black, sticky matter. No, reader, it was not photogenic, as you can imagine. Or don’t have to imagine:

It was called “oat bon”, though I’ve also seen it referred to as “or bon” or “aw bon” online (though that’s not what it sounds like when people refer to it.) Oat bon is not a dish you’ll find on many menus, and if it is there, it’s probably listed in Laotian. It’s made of taro or “elephant ear” leaves, which grow in profusion around the banks of the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers that surround Luang Prabang’s historical district. The leaves are poisonous when raw, so they are marinated and then steamed, thickened with pounded sticky rice, and mixed with seasonings like chilies, galangal, lemongrass, fermented fish sauce (pla daek), ground pork or water buffalo, and pork skin. The result is a stew, or as I saw it, a chili dip that my cousins said must be eaten by hand with a rolled-up ball of sticky rice. Only then would I become Lao, they said, so I did it, after getting a bit on my white shirt (of course). The taste was salty yet somehow light, better than the sum of its parts, and improved with each mouthful. But upon asking where they got this delicacy, they said the vendor made only a few a day: “They don’t really like to work too hard,” they said, and it was the most Thai thing I’d ever heard.

Online research tells me that I can find this dish at Little Lao Culture Bar, which is something I will check out when I return (yes, return!) to Luang Prabang in October for more research. It turns out, unlike what many people would have you believe about Laos, that Luang Prabang is roiling with things to do, and I have only scratched the surface of “sights & activities” (and “food & drink” too, for that matter). I’ll get my fill of everything else that I’ve missed, and make a return trip to Madame Noy (and U-Like Ice Cream next door for their sticky rice parfait, too).

It was one of those weeks when I was furiously scrambling around town, trying desperately to get something off the ground that will probably never see the light of day. I was going home late at night and leaving early in the morning, with no idea of anything around me except for the appointments I had to keep. So when my daughter told me, after a farewell dinner for the people we had been ferrying around, that someone had brought a doll to the empty lot across the street to our house and set it up directly across from our entrance, I had no idea what had happened.

The next morning, looking out from my daughter’s room to the banana tree-strewn plot of land across from us, the hairs on my arms stood up. It was a doll, probably carved of wood, standing as high as a 6- or 7-year old child. It wore saffron-colored clothing and it had golden designs painted onto its back. It was facing away from us — this is an important detail — and looking like it was striding away from us. But it was there. And it was very unwelcome. Even with its back to us, it was not a good sign.

Ask a Thai person near you about what it means when someone puts a doll in front of your house, and they will tell you that it is bad. If you have no Thai people around to ask, what I’ve gathered is this: it’s called a “ku man thong”, which normally means a baby spirit, summoned by an evil and powerful sorcerer who can make the spirit do his or her bidding. In the past, terrible things had to happen in order for a ku man thong to be created (sort of covered in the hit Thai TV series “Evil Lawyer” on Netflix). Today, you just have to go to the amulets section on Trok Nawa in Bangkok, which, coincidentally, is where we took our guests one afternoon.

There are, last we saw, two stores which sell “black magic” items, one of which devotes its time exclusively to the black arts. It’s a cursed-feeling place, where the items emanate a palpable feeling of hatred and where even people who don’t have an affinity for the stuff (or aren’t totally suggestible like me) get freaked out. The photo above, taken by my friend Nong, is one of the more benign photos she took. There’s one image with a chalk-whitened baby doll with blacked-out eyes that I swear is cursed. I would never pass that on.

I similarly felt it would be a bad idea to take a photo of the doll in front of my house, which — to a Thai person at least — denotes a high level of animosity against you, enough to want to curse you and your house. Again, it was facing away from us, which seemed like a relief. But the back was directly opposite of the door we use to enter and exit the house. It felt personal. It felt like someone really hated us.

I asked around, of course. My housekeeper, who believes in that stuff as much as I do, said that people “not from the neighborhood” left it one night, blindfolded, and then returned a few days later to remove the blindfold. That made the doll seem doubly dangerous. The elderly man down the road said the people who did it arrived in a black van. There was no other information forthcoming: a neighbor? A pissed-off former business partner of my husband’s? The chef at a restaurant I wrote about? There was no way to know.

I told my friend Nong, who kindly sent me a package of cascarilla with which to purify the house, both inside and outside. I made my housekeeper dust the perimeter and I scattered it in every room, leaving powdery white streaks on everything. Nong said I should make offerings at three temples and get a spirit house, where I should obtain a man, woman, and rooster figure for the house. I could then invite monks to bless the house and ask the monks the best place to set the spirit house up.

I had my husband ask the monk he gives alms to every day about what to do with the doll. “Our temple is full of these things,” he said he was told. “We don’t have room.”

I began to worry about the doll. Every day, I asked my husband for ways to get rid of it. I was told it was difficult because the land it was on wasn’t ours. But when I asked about contacting the actual owners of the land, he would resist. “I don’t feel anything from it,” he’d tell me. “It doesn’t bother me at all. If it bothers you, then it’s aimed at you.” That distressed me further, and I began to lose weight — something that only happens when I am very unhappy.

But after only a few days, I had to leave for a research trip in Laos. The doll issue was still unresolved. On my last trip back from town, I’d made the mistake of exiting the taxi from the wrong side, and the taxi had overshot my house. I’d caught a glimpse of the side of the doll’s face: black, with bubble cheeks like a young child smiling. I asked my husband if that was bad. “I don’t know,” I was told.

I flew to Luang Prabang, but on the tarmac on the way to the airport, I remember fantasizing about just giving in. I would walk onto the loamy soil on the other side of the street and face the doll, just like it wanted. I would hug its wooden body and clutch it as I fell backwards onto the ground, the weight of the doll pushing me further into the dirt. Only then could I be reclaimed by the mud, the bugs, the vines, all the things that I had somehow dug myself up from but had never managed to fully escape. I would go back to where I belonged.

A few days later — exactly 7 days after they had placed the doll — a traveling junk truck asked us if we would let them have the doll. We said yes. So they took the doll, using bare hands and everything, into the truck that trawls the Samut Prakan streets in search of trash to sell, and that was the end of that. I have yet to go home, but I think I’ll go see where it once stood, and see if there’s any bit if it remaining there. It doesn’t hurt to be sure.

When I was an undergraduate student at Bryn Mawr, I remember reading Edward Saïd’s “Orientalism” and having my mind blown. It has colored my perspective of the world ever since. One of the things I love best about food writing in Asia (since it definitely doesn’t pay well, at least in my case) is that I think it allows me to see how modern Orientalism evolves and shapes itself around commonly-accepted views of “the East”. Like Gustave Flaubert, Ernest Renan and and François-René de Chateubriand before them, countless food and travel writers (including St. Anthony of Bourdain) have intrepidly traversed the length and breadth of Asia, reporting on what they see through their own particular lenses and inadvertently (in most cases) painting an image of the continent that adheres to a Eurocentric lens. It’s not their fault. They are Westerners. If there is someone to be blamed, blame the people who prefer their views of Asia this way: Michael Bay’s Chinese “coolies” snarfing down noodles at a broken-down fishing pier in, of all places, Hong Kong; Steven Spielberg’s savage human sacrifices to the Indian goddess Kali, imperiling our handsome hero Indiana Jones and his scrappy little sidekick Short Round; and countless YouTube videos about how disgusting durian is, suggesting that only Asians would eat something disgusting.

Which brings me to a piece in The Spectator about “The Dark Side of Japanese Convenience Stores“. At first I wasn’t going to link to it, but then I found it quite funny, so here it is. The central thesis is that Japan, alas, has fallen prey to, of all things, creating structures that cater to the local resident instead of to the foreign tourist. Some Japanese women have even gone so far as to run away when our author tries to make conversation with them while they are working!

Perhaps surprisingly, given that I am pro-street food and anti-7-11 here in Bangkok, I disagree with our author here, in that I find Japanese convenience stores to be oases of cheer in an urban landscape that, to me personally, often seems baffling (I have a bad sense of direction). The difference between Tokyo and Bangkok is that there is not much street food in Tokyo, necessitating a convenient place where people can grab food during those few moments when modern capitalism gives them a break. To be honest, Tokyo could do with a street vendor or two, but then, what to do with the sidewalks that will then need liberating? Think of the poor sidewalks!

I digress. My point is, the author would find similar fault with my new neighborhood, Bearing, which isn’t even in the province of Bangkok. It’s in Samut Prakan, south of Bangkok, closer to the ocean and bearing (ha) a more blue-collar reputation among the locals. There is no romance to be found in my neighborhood, which is studded with factories and construction sites, as well as a sneaky dog that bit my husband while he was jogging, forcing him to get a series of rabies shots. This is my hood now, and no one is coming here to take photos or reels for their social media (the newest incarnation of Orientalism).

Mostly-industrial landscape aside, there are good things about my new neighborhood: being surrounded by mostly Thais (aside from that sneaky dog), mostly good air, a lot of space, and some good food. If pizza is the food of Naples and tonkotsu ramen is the food of Fukuoka, then the food of my particular neighborhood is boat noodles, quite possibly the most “Thai” of all the Thai soup noodle dishes. Said to have been invented on small boats traversing the region’s canals, boat noodles are traditionally served in smaller bowls than their more Chinese-influenced brethren, with a broth thickened by either pork or beef blood and seasoned with cinnamon, star anise and (skewing more Thai) coriander root. Why there are so many boat noodle places in my neighborhood is still up for debate; maybe its close proximity to the water is a reason (there is good seafood around here too). What I can say is that I have formed opinions on where I like, and that the noodles here possibly rival anything found around Victory Monument (though maybe not Ayutthaya).

The most popular boat noodle place in the area is undoubtedly Guaythiew Ruea Ayutthaya Setthi Ruea Thong, aka Golden Boat Noodles (@goldenboatnoodles). It’s frequently packed, proudly displays the old-fashioned wooden Thai boat in front (the mark of all good boat noodle places), and offers a “salad bar” of fresh toppings with which to garland your bowl of noodles (another mark of all good boat noodle places).

It’s clean and friendly, has a decent parking lot, and is not so unbearable to sit at even if it’s open-air, which are all good things for Thai people, so it’s little wonder why it’s so popular. In terms of the noodles themselves, they are comparable to anything you’d find at the famous places, including the inexplicably popular Thongsmith.

But if you are looking for an even better bowl, you’ll find it at Guaythiew Ruea Solak, which has a parking lot, but nothing else that would otherwise compare with Golden Boat Noodles or Thongsmith. The smell of the nearby fetid klong occasionally wafts over as you’re eating, it’s sweltering hot, and sits right next to the road alongside which carts and pick-up trucks careen past, sometimes uncomfortably closely. But it’s still packed, and the reason is the flavorful broth, the tender meat, and the prompt, efficient service (and great prices). In its own, particular ways, this vendor epitomizes the soul of the neighborhood: occasionally off-putting, but great at its core.

I will tell you the moment when I felt proud to be living in my new neighborhood. While I was in a car, stuck in traffic close to the Bearing BTS station, I saw a rooster walk, unaccompanied and on its lonesome, along the sidewalk, unbothered by other passersby, in heavy morning traffic. It perfectly encapsulated what this neighborhood is, to me, a place where roosters are also pedestrians. I think of that rooster now and am sure that it’s fine, either back at its owner’s house or picking through the trash next to Ton Sai Market. Whatever it’s doing, I’m sure that it, too, is getting a good taste of Southern Bangkok.