Eat bugs

A good farang introduction to Thai life and society is "Thailand Confidential," by former Rolling Stone editor and writer Jerry Hopkins, published by Periplus Books in Singapore. The title and cover are sensational, but Hopkins is sensible, honest and affectionate about the country he moved to and married into 15 years ago, and still doesn't pretend to understand. Hopkins has a chapter urging people to emulate the Northern Thais and include insects in their diets. He points out that cattle-grazing is destroying the rainforests, and almost all the world's soy goes to feeding livestock. Humans who eat bugs are the people of the future.

Yesterday we were ambling around Chiang Mai and came to a fair on the grounds of a wat (temple). Chiang Mai has more wats per capita than any other Thai city, and funds are raised through donations and events like this colorful assemblage of food stalls under the tamirind and frangipani trees behind the whitewashed temple walls. One vendor was selling bugs to eat. We wish to survive on this planet, so we got busy. Among the fried items heaped on platters were grubs, big grasshoppers, little grasshoppers and larger roach-like creatures. We purchased for 30 cents each small bags of grubs and small grasshoppers. The vendor asked if we wanted sauce with our insects, and we said sure. She squirted what turned out to be a soy-fish sauce concoction into each bag. She also provided little sticks for retrieving our snacks.

It's an acquired taste, and we may not acquire it. The grubs were crunchy, like mini-Cheet-Os, except beige instead of irridescent orange and not so salty. The earth-colored grasshoppers were crispy, too, but the predominating flavor was the fish sauce. Fermented fish sauce is a staple here, as it is across SE Asia, and is mostly used sparingly, as a flavor enhancer like salt. It also turns up in Thai salads, often with green mango. I confess that we did not eat all of our bugs, as we do our green mango and especially our green curry soup. (Before we started eating bugs we'd fallen into a culinary rut. For three consecutive days we ate lunch at "MD House---The Delicious Restaurant." There we had the green curry soup with its baby eggplants that are not much bigger than peas and its fresh green peppercorns still on tiny stems. Today Joe is taking a course on cooking Thai curries.)

A local visitors' guide announces: "Chiang Mai (New City), the Northern Capitol of Thailand, (often referred to as the Rose of the North), was founded by King Mengrai at 4 a.m. on the 14th April 1296." My theory---and Poe, who was here for a few days, agrees---is that astrologers came up with this date and time. Thai Buddhism is interesting in the way it accepts modern science unqualifiedly---creationism will not be found in Thai schools---and at the same time incorporates unscientific or even anti-scientific ancient beliefs such as astrology. Poe, a thoroughly modern Thai man, toots his horn three times for good luck when driving past a temple. When the new Bangkok airport was being built (on a cobra swamp), construction problems were endless. A spirit house was built to placate the spirts displaced by the terminal. When problems only got worse, Thai experts were called in. They recommended a larger spirit house. (It didn't work. The airport, which opened in September, is an international embarrassment: cracked taxiways, bad air, overcrowding. The duty-free shops, owned by cronies of deposed Prime Minister Thaksin, take up so much space that a Bangkok Post columnist has called BKK "a department store with air service.")

Yesterday, outside a wat, Joe and I had our palms read. The elderly Thai man doing the forecasting spoke enough English to inform us---Joe first, then me---that we were both destined to be long-lived, healthy and rich. I.e., Americans. He also declared that Joe did not work with his hands. I don't know how he missed all those filings and chunks of metal.

Joe and I remain outside most Buddhist and animist beliefs. However long we stayed, we would always be strangers here. While we subscribe to Buddist ethics---basically Eastern variations on the Golden Rule---the spiritual and mystical aspects are alien to our Western rationalism. Reincarnation, good or bad, won't happen to us. And yet we love being near this way of seeing the world. We went to Wat Prah Singh yesterday while a ceremony of some sort was in progress. (Anyone can enter a temple of this universalist religion; just leave your sandals at the door.) Monks in their orange robes were chanting their monophonic prayers, and it was mesmerizing. Later in the day we rode out to Doi Sutep, a Buddhist shrine atop a mountain six miles northwest of Chiang Mai. A dazzling gold stupa gleamed under the blue sky, and dozens of gold Buddha statues---and a strangely glowing green one---received offerings of incense and lotus blossoms from the many hundreds of pilgrims who had come to this holiest of Chiang Mai's shrines. Doi Sutep was established in the 14th century when a relic of the Buddha miraculously duplicated itself in a town wat. The duplicate was placed atop a white elephant and carried out to Sutep mountain, where the elephant died and a wat was built for the relic. At the central gold stupa, pilgrims walk around the base of the tower touching small bells and chimes as they go, so there's a constant jingling and tinkling, as well as an occasional deep bong from one of the nearby big brass bells being struck. It's all a wonder. And for all my rationality, this charged yet placid spectacle feels far closer to reaching the mysteries of the universe than does a roomful of Presbyterian kids singing "Jesus wants me for a sunbeam," my own long-lost spiritual teachings.

We heard a good monk story. All Thai men are expected to spend a month or two as monks, but they don't always leave the world entirely behind. A young monk approached a tourist (a friend of Candace the caterer). The monk seemed to ask, "Do you have a secret?" Respectfully, the tourist said, "No, it is you who have the secret." Again, the monk asked, "No, no, do you have a secret?" And the tourist again replied, "No, YOU have the secret." Then the monk made himself clear. "No, I am asking, do you have a cigarette?"

Plans: tomorrow we go on a three-day trek in the Karen hills northwest of here. It is said to be quite beautiful, and we asked for a trek that is minimally touristy (as if were were anything but tourists). I asked the travel agent if this trek might be too strenuous for me. She said, "No, there are shortcuts for girls." Afterwards, I asked Joe, "Did she really say there were shorcuts for girls, meaning me?" He had heard it too. We have yet to figure out when it's appropriate to be direct and when to be indirect in conversation with Thais. There is a culture of machismo here that I would have thought precluded a travel agent's calling me a girl---apart from my not be very girlish. But it may have been a simple statement about physical capabilities. Anyway, for a man to be called girlish here is not all bad. Last night we went to a movie at the University of Chiang Mai. (It was Tony Bui's sad, beautiful "Three Seasons," about Vietnam's dispossesed.) Afterwards, an outdoor dance recital we passed that had the audience cheering seemed at first to be lovely young Thai women in traditional costumes performing traditional dances, until we realized that they were in fact lovely young Thai men in traditional dresses. The Thais are entirely comfortable with gender-bending. But on the trek I'll still make a very poor girl.