Bangkok Glutton

Fish porridge from Khao Thom Pla Saphan Lueng

I haven’t been posting much lately. If you are my dad or Karen, I apologize that I haven’t updated the blog as often as I should. It’s not because I’m busy. It’s just that I don’t have anything to say.

I’m supposed to be writing a book proposal. This is funny because to me, a proposal means a few short paragraphs hinting at what you will eventually write in a book. My publishers feel differently. They think proposal = actual book.

My proposal so far:

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Riveting, right? It doesn’t help that I am so far up my own ass in my quest to do anything other than what I am really supposed to do that I have begun voraciously reading bad fiction, REALLY BAD stuff, like boy bander fanfiction and stuff based on the various elves in “Lord of the Rings” (call me, Thranduil!)  I do not go anywhere and I do not see friends. My only consolation is that I have weathered these periods before. When I was unemployed and sitting on my couch, I went through an Oprah phase — like, a serious one — and was mesmerized by the fascinating world of outback Australian ranching as portrayed in “MacLeod’s Daughters”. Now that I am … unemployed and sitting on my couch, it only seems natural that I would go through this again, and that this addiction to the literary versions of diet Coke would eventually fade away.

Until then, I will be busy stewing in my own self-loathing. Busy times like these call for quick, easy food, food that does double-duty as both comforting and tasty. That kind of food, inevitably, is porridge, or khao thom. Unlike khao thom gub, where the rice porridge is served as pure as the driven snow, waiting for you, dear diner, to sully it with your hand-picked arsenal of stir-fried vegetables, spicy salads, pickles and dried fish, this kind of khao thom comes already packed, sharing space with whatever protein the vendor deems fitting.

At Khao Thom Pla Saphan Lueng (506/2-3 Soi Pranakares, Rama IV Rd., 084-727-8899), the protein of choice is juicy, generous pieces of deep-sea pomfret, plopped unceremoniously into a fish stock-enhanced brew. These pieces vie with salty-sweet morsels of cooked pork, added because too much is never enough for a Thai diner, and a fermented brown bean-based sauce for which this vendor is famous. There is a splash of controversy too — the septuagenarian vendors of rival Sieng Gi claim that the original owner of this rice porridge shop absconded with the brown bean sauce recipe years ago. Now manned by the son, this shop remains in its original location in the popular street food mecca of Saphan Lueng (“Yellow Bridge”), hidden in plain sight behind a “Viroon Ice Cream” sign.

Try it, preferably with a plate of steamed bread dipped in pandan-scented coconut custard (kanom pang sankaya) sold out in front on the sidewalk. And if you find the flavors could stand to be a little bit bolder, the broth in need of a more bracing slap of deep-fried garlic, remind yourself that it’s your own discontent talking, and that it will fade away soon.

Grandma Jeanette and Grandpa Tongdee on their wedding day

I didn’t really get into Joni Mitchell until recently. She and Bob Dylan always occupied the same place in my brain, the one reserved for artists whom everyone likes so much that it would become uncomfortable to say anything bad about them. If there’s anything I love a lot of, it’s comfort. So I would go along, say “Blue” is brilliant, because no one likes you as much as when you are validating their own opinion about something. But I never really got it.

I gave “Blue” a relisten after many years and found it incredibly moving. This was a big change for me because I love music that is extremely loud and full of rage. Listening to “Blue” felt more circumspect. It was like looking out the back window of a departing car at something, trying to fix it in your mind in case you don’t return.

Seeing my grandma Jeanette gives me similar feelings. She has Alzheimer’s, so she doesn’t remember me. It’s also hard to communicate because she mostly speaks only French now, peppered with some northern Thai dialect. It’s like she’s a locked box and I don’t have the key. She is occasionally happy to let me sit next to her in the living room. I am happy to spend time with her in any way that makes her happy.

Grandma Jeanette at 17 in Vientiane

I prefer to think of her as the elegant, intelligent woman who spoke three languages and loved diamonds, Thai silk suits and good French food. All the same, everything I know about my grandmother is stuff I remember from many years ago and information from other people. What I do know for sure is that my grandmother was born Jeanette Thibault in Luang Prabang, to a French government official and a Laotian woman. Her mother died soon after she was born and she was raised by relatives. A photo of her still sits by my grandmother’s bed. I have never seen a picture of her father.

In her late teens, my grandmother moved to Thailand to be a Christian missionary. That is where she met my grandfather, Tongdee Duangnet, one of 10 children in a family that had been Christian for two generations and in Chiang Rai for far longer.

My grandparents at 19 in Chiang Rai

My grandparents were together for many decades — nuer koo, the Thai phrase for “soul mate”, is what I think of when I think of them. My grandfather Tongdee passed away of cancer far too soon, but he always stayed in my grandmother’s thoughts. One of the last conversations I remember having with her was when she let out a little exclamation as I was clearing something away and grabbed my hand. “Oh, it’s nothing,” she said when I asked her if there was something wrong. “It’s just that your hands look just like your grandfather’s, with the rounded palms.” I never knew my grandfather, or that my hands were any different from anyone else’s, but when I look at my hands now, I always think of him. That was a gift from her.

Grandma with friends, grandpa hiding behind her

Another gift was a love of French food. As irritating, as pretentious, as cliched as French culinary experiences can be, I remain an unrepentant Francophile. After all, I spent a year in Paris in cooking school for my honeymoon. (Not a fun Cordon Bleu one, either, but a full-on French one with much-younger French students and instructors who get really mad when you throw away butter). How much of that love was nurtured by my grandmother, grew out of my own pretensions, or was borne by the blood of my own French ancestors, I can’t say.

I can say it started with an omelet. It’s the only thing my grandmother ever cooked for me, and it came at a typically terrible time, when I was 10 years old and desired nothing more than to be fully American. All I wanted were some eggs. But she made me a perfect oval of an unblemished, uniform yellow, pinched at both ends and garnished at the top with snipped chives, crossed like tiny swords. I ate it with ketchup.

When I got older and was living in Thailand, I discovered that my grandmother was only too happy to sit with me in a French restaurant, any time I wished. It was a two-way street — I was the only person, she said, who wanted to eat French food as much as she did. From then on, I would scan the city for promising French restaurants, planning when and where to take my grandmother the next time she came to town. Would it make her happy? Would the food here be up to scratch? It’s something I still do today.

Grandma and Grandpa with my aunt Noy, my dad, and my aunt Pung

Writing this now, I realize it was simply her way of spending time with me, in any way that made me happy.

Vietnamese-style rice noodles at Guay Jab Yuan

It might not be obvious to you from reading these posts, but I am an idealist. I like to think that, as long as I am coming from an honest, well-intentioned place, I can be as much of a weirdo as I want and people will still accept and even like me. Adopting this personal philosophy allowed me to take the “meta” out of all my interactions, to quiet down the observer who is always telling me I just did something wrong. It made my life a lot simpler.

Unfortunately, if several years of experience has taught me anything, it’s that people would prefer not seeing the authentic me. Acting like an honest, well-intentioned weirdo means you are acting like a weirdo. You gotta cover that shizz up. It’s not like no one else is a weirdo — it’s just that, if you are a normal person who must rely on other people for occasional help, layers and layers of deception are required to distract them from the bizarre, undigestible core underneath. Please, people, just keep that to yourselves. This is why rules for social discourse were invented. It’s also why the richer and/or more famous someone gets, the weirder they become. The world is not clamoring to really see me unveiled, or you, either. Let’s all just be perfectly civil to each other.

But if one dish were to be the antithesis to all that, the essential core pared down to what makes a noodle dish work and only that, it would be the Thai-Vietnamese hybrid popular in Isaan known as guay jab yuan (not to be confused with the Thai-Chinese pork noodle dish that is simply called guay jab).  A simple mix of broth, noodles, and pork with a flourish of coriander and the haunting scent of deep-fried shallot, these Vietnamese-style noodles take what is prized in our eastern neighbor’s cuisine (simplicity, freshness, restraint, subtlety) and add a smidgen of what could be called Thai flair (scent, spice) to form something that is unlike almost anything else in Thai street food: unadorned, pure, naked. This is a dish unafraid to let its freak flag fly.

The best place of have these delicious noodles? Well, as sprawling as the Thai capital is, its Isaan food can’t hold a candle to the stuff you can actually find in Northeastern Thailand. All the same, my friend Chin of Chili Paste Tours (www.foodtoursbangkok.com) — originally from Isaan — showed me her favorite guay jab yuan place in Bangkok, on Soi Sukha 1 (also known as Trok Mor) in the Old City called, unsurprisingly, “Guay Jab Yuan” (081-623-0665, 085-149-1098). Blessed with an almost pristine cleanliness and wildly efficient staff, Guay Jab Yuan gets pretty packed at lunchtime in spite of the unrelenting midday heat. And of course, the Vietnamese noodles themselves are a mix of the fresh and light (broth, herbs) paired with the comforting mush of soft, thick  udon-like rice noodles and rounds of moo yaw (Vietnamese-style pork sausage) that turn this dish into the best kind of nursery food, familiar yet slightly tweaked at the same time. It’s a mirror to the authentic in all of us.