Bangkok Glutton

Before I start, I should mention that Bangkok Glutton was selected by Feedspot as one of the top 30 Thai food blogs. Thank you. I did not know there were 30 Thai food blogs. Congratulations everyone!

Thais love their chicken. As do I. So it makes sense that, last month, when I was attempting to go vegetarian, it would be a bite of chicken that would break my resolve after a mere two days. Chicken is my Achilles heel. Even good-for-you, boring-ass grilled chicken breast, set in front of me on a plate by my scheming, undermining husband, garlanded with a mini-forest of steamed broccoli. Yes I swear, Your Honor, what did me in was that plate of food, the culinary equivalent of Mitt Romney.

Despite all of Chulalongkorn University’s best efforts, there is still wonderful chicken to be had in the Sam Yan market area — at least for the next three years. Gong Thui Gai Yang’s chicken is a standout: garlicky and juicy, wholesome with a smoky edge provided by all that endless fanning as the meat cooks on the grill.

Here I am, in a video shot by Scott Preston, talking about some of my favorite chicken from one of the street food areas set to disappear from Bangkok in the coming years. Go while you can, and indulge in some chicken, papaya salad and maybe even a bit of grilled pork collar with sticky rice. You won’t regret it.

 

 

 

As you may have already heard, the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority (BMA) had plans to bring “order” and “hygiene” to the streets by clearing away many of the vendors on the sidewalk. This is roughly analogous to telling Axl Rose that all he needs to turn back the clock is a nice black t-shirt, but that is neither here nor there.

The real story is, how far is the extent of the planned ban? Is there a plan at all, or a case of a government official being quoted on something, and then after the resulting furore, everybody going “Oh yeah our bad never mind”? Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

After widespread concern that the “world’s best street food city” ™ would go all Ghostbusters on its own street food, the final answer (so far) is that, no, the places that tourists like are all good, so you can stop writing negative stories about it now, please, thank you for your understanding.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that the street food will be untouched. Just the opposite, the BMA assures us! In a bid to preserve “Thainess” of the street food, they have many different plans to regulate quality and order, including mandatory government-run training programs for the vendors. Phew! That doesn’t sound ominous at all! Because the very people I want in charge of my street food are the same sorts of people who came up with the idea of the Thai food tasting robot. I can rest easy now.

Maybe all the BMA really needs is to hear from us street food lovers. You can let the Minister of Tourism know your thoughts on Richard Barrow’s Facebook page here, where the government has already denied its purported plans to ban street food … anywhere? So does this mean my chicken biryani vendor can come back to Thonglor?

One place that is for sure dunzo, government ban or not, might be legendary congee vendor Joke Samyan. Here, in a video directed by Scott Preston and edited by Peter Potts, we ponder the glories of congee and the future of one of Bangkok’s most famous street food places.

 

I saw the movie “Get Out” maybe a week ago, and like many people have said themselves, I am still thinking about it. After reading this wonderful Jezebel interview with the actress Betty Gabriel, who played “Georgina” in the movie, it got me thinking even more … about Thai street food.

To me, “Get Out” is a literal illustration of what cultural appropriation is. It also serves as a tidy metaphor for colonization. This is what empires did: taking over foreign lands, cherry-picking the most valuable bits, and co-opting them as their own to their economic benefit. This is frequently seen as an example of the bad old days, when powerful Western countries were less enlightened than the progressive nations they are today, having safely been enriched by those bad old days already.

But some say a hidden type of colonization still exists. Of course, this belief is often derided as coming from arch-conspiracists and the sort of non-American ethnonationalists who rail against the evils of McDonald’s and Hollywood. I would say, however, it’s not that far off (*adjusts tin foil on head*), because that is something like my experience with McDonald’s and Hollywood. Just because we aren’t asking God to save the queen every time we make a toast or saluting a foreign flag doesn’t mean we aren’t in thrall to a foreign way of thinking — a way of thinking that makes us, deep down inside, hate ourselves and see ourselves as the enemy. And just because that isn’t your experience doesn’t make it untrue. We, me, a non-white on the rural Western edge of Pennsylvania: from very early on, we see in magazines like American Vogue or movies like “Ghost in the Shell” (“Oh God,” ScarJo sighs, sipping a margarita poolside in Cabo. “This again.”) that white is prettier. Smarter (if not in a nerdy sense, then at least in a “street smarts” way). More rational. More relatable. More interesting. And, if you are Asian, more manly. More important. The blue-eyed, blond “anak” dude in the Philippines tourism commercials on CNN: the world is there for him to explore, to be given free sweets, to be treated like family, smiled at and coddled even if he makes a mistake. How lovely for that guy. How often I’ve wished that “anak” meant “moron” or “dickhead”.

In “Get Out”, people are just like suits, identities to be discarded when the next “in thing” rolls around (is that a spoiler alert? Aw, sorry, anak). It’s assumed that they’re not as important as the stars in everyone’s show.  And that does something to us, we, me. We start making ourselves the supporting actors in our own head-movies: at best, the funny best friend in “Crazy Stupid Love”, perhaps, or Nicki Minaj in “The Other Woman.” At worst, we are Georgina, the shell hiding an entirely person on the inside, a person who hates and fails to identity with her outside (in Betty Gabriel’s words, “the worst kind of assimilation.”) That begs the question for us-we-me: where do we fall on that spectrum? Am I Georgina? Probably sometimes. How could I not be? Why wouldn’t we want to be a part of the stronger team, and how far would we go to get there?

Let me revert to nerd-speak for a moment. Georgina is like Sansa, before Ned’s sentencing in front of the Great Sept of Baelor. Sansa, who wished to marry Joffrey, and rushed to tell Cersei of her father’s plans to leave King’s Landing. How we all hated Sansa and claimed to identify with Arya, just like all those Harry Potterheads who think they are Gryffyndors (although one could argue that Arya is her own kind of Georgina, rejecting her own “feminine” qualities to take on the “active,” “strong” characteristics of the far more powerful men). Maybe, to paraphrase the movie “The DUFF”: Everyone is someone’s Georgina.

Including Bangkok. See, I finally did get there. Bangkok appears to have internalized the image of Asia as written by people like Rudyard Kipling: a collection of rickety warrens filled with dirt and squalor and bleating live animals, populated by untrustworthy, nattering natives (not to mention the things they get up to when left to their own devices on what to eat — bugs, intestines, yuck!). In other words, we’re a background to whatever Indiana Jones is doing at the moment. Bangkok thinks of itself as a city of extras. It is Georgina-ing itself, of its own volition.

Maybe that is why, in the interests of “cleaning up” the streets and imposing some “order”, Bangkok authorities are methodically clearing away the “mess” on the sidewalks that the authorities never walk on, simply telling vendors to move elsewhere … until they have to be moved again. Presumably, the idea is to make Bangkok more like modern-day Singapore, an artificial city built as a commercial port for the British empire. The problem is that, when trying to turn yourself into someone else, you will invariably become a pale imitation of the original. Sure, you can try to become Singapore, but Singapore will still speak better English and, sorry, remain far more efficient than you. Just sayin’, Bangkok.  Don’t get so upset. Why do you always have to take things so hard? You had your own things that make you pretty, too. Isn’t that what we always tell little girls? You were pretty in your own way, Bangkok.

The latest area to be “tidied” is Ekamai, Thonglor and Phra Khanong. Unlike Sukhumvit 38, where both local residents and tourists ate, this latest clearing is really a strike against the regular people who work the many restaurants, shops, banks etc in the area: the regular working Thai. Where are they to eat? I guess Emquartier/porium, where all the Bangkok authorities eat? But where will they really eat? Undoubtedly 7-11. Bangkok is condemning these workers to a diet of instant noodles, cream-filled buns, white bread mayonnaise sandwiches, and sausages of dubious origin. That’s better food, right? It’s “cleaner” and certainly “tidier”. It’s more “progressive”. And if a cursory look at what’s available by the highways nowadays (Starbucks, Burger King, McDonald’s, and of course 7-11), it’s the food of the future.