Bangkok Glutton

There are moments in your life that break through the clouds like little shafts of sunlight, illuminating the fact that you love living in Thailand. Turning the corner to find an undiscovered temple. Finding a street food vendor at the end of a winding alleyway, bearing delicious food with a smile. Cooling drinks in a plastic baggie.  These are all Amazing Thailand moments, earmarked for the next TAT advert.

Then there are moments that illuminate something else, like the fact that no matter how much time you spend in this country, or how many family members are around to listen to your blathering about the Steelers’ playoff chances, you are in an alien place, wrestling with its alien demons all on your lonesome. You have not truly lived in Thailand until you have seen a ghost, or until you or someone you know has come down with a nasty case of black magic.

It’s easy to dismiss these cases because, you know, you weren’t brought up that way. Everything can be explained scientifically and rationally. It doesn’t matter that every Thai you talk to has had at least one paranormal experience, and that the front yards and parking lots of every establishment you go to boasts a spirit house bristling with joss sticks and food for hungry ghosts (because these ghosts are Thai, and they get hungry too.) Great, hulking bo trees are tied with ribbons, meant as warnings to leave these trees — and the spirits that live there — alone. Life and death coexist peacefully here.

But when they don’t, it’s up to your fortune teller or maw doo (literally, a doctor who sees) to fix the situation. Almost every Thai you talk to either goes to one or knows of one that can help you out. It’s just the way things work. Because just like how ghosts are entities that must be negotiated and appeased, the future itself — your fortune, the fates, what have you — is treated similarly, respectfully, kindly, like a crochety great-grandmother who could end up cutting you out of her will.

So you have heard of these ghosts, and maybe imagine you’ve felt them once or twice, and have gone with your friends to see the occasional fortune teller, choosing to believe in the good stuff and discarding all the bad. Life ticks along as usual. Until the day when a fortune teller tells you that your husband has fallen under the sway of a black magic-casting sorceress, skilled enough to make him putty in her hands. That’s when you think … Huh. And then, I’ve never been in this position before. I have no past experience to guide me. Better ask for advice. And then, finally: F@*#ing Thailand.

“Write the name of your husband and the other woman on two eggs and then throw them into the sea,” one friend advises. She laughs.  “It’s meant for when your husband has a mistress.”

“I have a guy,” offers another. And still another, “My cousin knows a guy who can help.”

The one you do end up seeing, he won’t even touch you for fear of contamination. He can feel the black magic, like a hot iron searing into the side of his torso. Your predicament gives him great pain. But he can take it. “Drink this bottle of water,” he says, before consulting with the ghost of a powerful monk who serves as his guide. You drink two more bottles before the ghost is satisfied. You are then told to make merit with monks for three consecutive days, and you think it’s over. It’s so easy, and you’re relieved. After all, the girl who comes after you will have to scrub the toilets of 7 different temples before she can get rich.

But then the ghost gets restless, and dictates come down from on high. You need him to drink special water, taken from the washing of his mother’s feet. You need to “cleanse” several of his effects. It’s not until you find yourself in your closet, rubbing a bracelet he received as a gift with his mother’s underwear and surreptitiously enclosing another pair in his pillowcase when you start to think, Maybe it’s gone too far. This may or may not have happened, of course. It’s hypothetical. You are a friend of a friend, after all. Because boy oh boy, do I love to write stories.

That black magic spell doesn’t just happen with people. It could extend to things like food. Like, goose. Han pullo to be exact, goose stewed Chinese-style in a brew of aromatic spices such as star anise and cinnamon. The most famous of the eateries serving this surprisingly hard-to-find dish is, hands down, is Chua Kim Heng (81-83 Pattanakan Road, 02-319-2510). It’s open-air and has expanded to straddle a sort of driveway that opens out into a parking lot — a rarity for what is essentially a street food establishment.

At the height of the lunch hour rush, you wander into the dining room (the non-chicken rice one) unmolested, and continue to be unmolested for the next 10 minutes as you sit and wait for someone to take your order. Someone eventually takes pity on you and brings you a platter of sliced goose breast swimming in broth and crowned in fresh coriander, plus a tart dipping sauce thick with garlic and a spoon and chopsticks. You have to ask for a bowl of rice. Goose has never been your favorite — too fatty, and subtly flavored — and the dipping sauce is like pure vinegar, peppered with chunks of garlic strong enough to scare any vampire away. It has been a struggle for you to get an iced tea drink, much less the usual clear broth soup of bitter melon and pork rib to accompany your rice. But somehow, and this is where the black magic comes in, it’s delicious.

It’s almost delicious enough to warrant a second trip. Takeaway, of course. But if you insist on basking in an atmosphere of complete indifference leavened with a touch of contempt, go for the “small” meat platter (190 baht) or, if you are a leg person, two goose legs for 80 baht. Make sure to get the clear soup (80 baht) as well. Bon appetit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thais like to think that their food is not only delicious and addictive, but that it is good for you, too. They consider the different combinations of herbs and spices in each dish to be medicine, and prescribe each dish accordingly. Feel like you are coming down with a cold? Well then tom yum goong (spicy lemongrass soup with shrimp) is the way to go. Are you a new mother who needs to produce more milk for her child? More gang liang (Southern Thai vegetable soup) for you.

Nam prik (chili dip) could also be considered a medicine, in as potent a form as Thai cuisine allows. There is no iteration of this Thai dinnertime staple that is seen as bad for you. My friend James calls it “high tea for healing herbs”, and I want to believe him, I really do. So I find myself on the hunt for a decent nam prik vendor that peddles the kind of healing I am looking for.

At the entrance to Sathorn Soi 11, open most workday mornings until 1pm, a som tum (green papaya salad) vendor works ceaselessly doling out parcels of fried meat and freshly pounded Thai-style som tum to hungry office workers on the way back to their desks. I find this a terrible waste, since she is one of the few vendors here who sells both soup kanoon (young jackfruit salad) and soup makuea (Thai eggplant salad, a particular favorite of mine), two dishes that are like nam prik writ large. When I saw the tiny little baggies of jackfruit and eggplant glistening in the sun, I turned to her and asked whether it really truly was thum kanoon she was offering, because it is a dish that is inexplicably difficult to find in Bangkok, even in Northern Thai restaurants.

I was met with a “Huh?” because in Isaan, a Northern Thai thum turns into a soup. That is not the only difference. An Isaan-style soup is also right up on the edge of being unrelentingly, unbearably spicy, a sort of cry in the dark that can be stifled with a spoonful of rice or a handful of cucumber slices and hard-boiled egg should the need take you.  A lot has been made by well-meaning people of the need for “chicken soup for the soul”, but to my mind, there is more of a need for some motherfreaking napalm for the tongue, something that means business, something strong enough to pull you out of a serious, sleep-addled funk. If this is medicine, bring me more. But not too much because yikes, that was hot.

 

 

I’d been keeping a list for days. It detailed all the symptoms I’d been experiencing, but read like a litany of generalized misery. “Tingling spread from hands and feet to legs, arms and face (since Nov 4).” “Muscle twitching in legs and left arm (at night).” “Difficulty sleeping (since Sunday).” “Lightheadedness when standing (2 weeks).” “Frequent thirst (since Thursday).””Soreness in left index finger (Friday).” “Stiffness in right thumb (Sat).”

Like a third grader giving a book report, I would dutifully read my symptoms to my doctor, who would dutifully jot them down. Other doctors got involved. They got the same report. Such was their delicacy that it took me a full week to figure out that they all thought I was crazy.

Brains are tricky. They tick along with the occasional twinge, but usually pretend to be under our control. Until they stop. They coax twitches and pains out of nooks and crannies and bend your reality to the shapes of their own whims. Unable to pretend we are our own any longer, the things we once care about start to turn remote and fade away. I struggled to find things to read and listen to. I started to eat for convenience.

Perhaps this is unusual for a self-professed “food writer”, but I actually don’t read most food writing. A lot of it is clubby, insular, self-satisfied. It is so frequently smug. It is the writing equivalent of listening to Justin Bieber: pretending to some genuine feeling beyond supreme complacency, confident in the knowledge that our approbation, our acceptance, is inevitable. If you charge me with writing this out of envy, it is very true. I — who must now remind herself to be in the moment at all times, who must remember that she is surrounded by the people she loves — I envy these people and their ability to rest easily within themselves.

Jeffrey Steingarten was the reason why I wanted to write about food. His writing first introduced me to Japanese beef so tender it could be cut with a fork, what it would feel like to butcher your own pig, who Alain Ducasse was, many-coursed French meals that tested the boundaries of what could be accomplished in a kitchen. Sure, he could be pleased with himself once in a while. He wrote for Vogue, after all. But what set him apart was his charm, his restlessness, and the overarching curiosity that informed nearly everything he wrote. He had to know how everything worked, and the best way to do it, no matter what the cost. And he was rarely truly satisfied. I loved that about him. If you are a food writer, I don’t care if you are BFF with David Chang or the best cook in your apartment building. But the endless questing, the need to consume the knowledge as much as the food, that is different.

None of us asked to be here; burdened with this knowledge, we navigate our lives with varying degrees of ease. All of the people I admire are aware of this, and have the generosity of spirit to allow for how difficult it can be. We all have our strategies for how to make our way through the world, like living our lives for others, or immersing ourselves in our faith or our work, or, like Jeffrey Steingarten, searching for the perfect Everything. When we forget how to live our lives, we can only live by example.

So this year, I am thankful for Jeffrey Steingarten. I am thankful for my friends and family. I am thankful for the people I listen to and read. I am thankful for freshly baked biscuits slathered in homemade apple butter, and pie crust straight out of the oven, and bolting down a Northern Thai breakfast of thinly sliced eggplant flavored with the juice from pulverized black field crabs and many, many handfuls of sticky rice eaten so quickly that your throat hurts with the pain of it. Thank you, everyone, for being here. Thank you for whatever the future may bring.