at long last home, and a bit about authenticity

I have finally moved into an apartment. Almost three months to the day of arriving in Asia, I finally stop living out of a suitcase. I live in a place called the P. T. Residence, a giant block of apartments located halfway between the old city of Chiang Mai and Chiang Mai University. A few days ago was the CMU graduate schools' graduation and a lot of students live in my apartment, so everywhere there were people walking around in robes and hoods. The ceremonies lasted five days. It made me think of Hogwarts or an abbey.

A bit about my neighborhood. I live down the street from barbershop called Hair Champions 2003. Tonight as I biked home I passed an elephant being walked down the street. And around the corner is Wat Suandok, an international Buddhist temple and university with more than 1000 monk students from every country in south-east asia. Three nights a week they have monk chats, where farangs sling questions at the monks and the monks brush up on their English.

But know too that I live around the corner from a Starbucks, three 7-11s and one of the most expensive day spas in the city. I live near Nimmanheiman Rd, which is the heart of the new rich nightlife and there are countless coffee bar/night club combinations within earshot of my porch.

I would like to take this opportunity to say that I do not believe that the traditional Thai life of elephants and monks is any more authentic or legitimate than the 7-11s that are on every street in this city. I have met a lot of tourists in the past month here, and so many of them arrive already thinking they know what the real Thailand is, and that they will find it on a trek to look at hill-tribe people or inside a wat. They are skeptical of places like the 7-11 and the malls for a variety of reasons. Like they want their vacation to be exactly the way they imagined it at home, filled with quaint images of monasteries and women with metal rings on their necks, and no trappings of Western culture or consumerism to taint that.

Why must Thailand remain a postcard to be authentic? In my short stay here I have come to find that Thai culture has many startling incongruities that Thais don't even blink at. Haute cuisine and street food side by side, loose traffic rules and looser schedules, a king that is revered beyond reason next to a prime minister who no one takes seriously, and the blend of Thai and Western consumerism that pervades daily life. The people in Thailand who moved in from outlying towns to serve the tourist population are just as real as their relatives who stayed at home.

It's naive and perhaps ethnocentric to think that America at its most real can be a melting pot or forerunner of a cultural evolution and at the same time ask that another country promote some false conception of untainted roots for the sake of your vacationing pleasure.