Thailand Confidential

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When people asked me why I chose to leave Hawaii—nearly everyone’s idea of paradise—and moved to Thailand, I had an answer so long it qualified as a speech. I started visiting Thailand sometime in the 1980s, I said—so often it sounded as if I were pulling a string in one of those Chatty Cathy doll’s necks, giving a recorded reply—and by 1993, I was spending as much time in Southeast Asia as in the United States. I had lived too long in the islands, where every day was precisely like the last and I knew the next would be the same. I was single, my kids from a long dissolved marriage were grown and gone, and I figured I had enough money put aside to last two years, so I decided to go where it seemed more interesting.

I picked Thailand over other countries—I droned on—for its hospitable population, alluring women, light-yet-healthy cuisine, affordable cost of living, historic culture and varied geography, tropical climate, the most interesting expat community I’d encountered anywhere, the contemplative nature of Buddhism (and its lack of a god or dogmatic creed), a reasonably free press, an entertaining government and an abiding sense of fun. It also had a major city where there was cable TV and the phones worked most of the time, whose location was proximate to just about everywhere else I wanted to spend most of the rest of my life; in under three hours I could be anywhere from Hong Kong to Bali to Kathmandu. There was a rawness, a messiness, an attitude that defied Western-style logic. Thailand was a place where time wasn’t linear, and property was given more value than life.

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