Good company

We had dinner on Sunday with Mo Tejani and last night with Sasha Alyson. Mo is the American writer I mentioned in an earlier posting who wrote a memoir called "A Chameleon's Tale" (not "A Chameleon's Life," as I previously reported). Mo first came to Thailand as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1970s, was smitten with the place, then settled here about ten years ago after a career with a variety of international aid agencies. Now he does journalism and is at work on another memoir.

A big, easy-going Indian-American (originally from Bombay, his family was expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin in the early '70s), Mo is sharp and funny on the Thailand he adores and says he will never fully understand or be part of. He says he's a citizen of the world now. Affectionate and forgiving about Thailand's foibles, Mo is scathing about the corruption and incompetence he witnessed year after year in US and other aid programs. Too few of them, he says, looked for trustworthy local people to carry out manageable step-by-step projects. They relied instead on gigantic, sometimes demented, schemes dreamed up by the World Bank or USAID. Mo agrees that Thailand's ousted Prime Minister Thaksin was a dangerous crook. But he says Thaksin got some excellent programs going: micro-loans; grants to villages for self-help projects; expanded health care for the rural poor.

Mo is also amusing about the American young backpackers traipsing around Thailand whom we have ourselves observed with dismay. These are not the serious trekkers. They are the thousands of often bratty kids who come here to party. They congregate in packs and tend to be clueless about local mores and etiquette. Their obliviousness on environmental matters made news a few years ago when a popular backpacker novel, "The Beach", about a shallow yuppie who finds meaning by becoming a shallow backpacker, was filmed here with Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie-makers themselves destroyed a forest and an entire beach while filming, and the normally patient Thais were so outraged that the project was nearly shut down.

Also unamused by the packers (we've had two consecutive bash-the-American-young-fests) is Sasha Alyson, the founder of Alyson Publications, the pioneer in American publishing for gay readers in the mid-seventies. Sasha sold his Boston-based company to Liberation Publications, the outfit that puts out The Advocate, about ten years ago, started an adventure travel company, then sold that before moving to Chiang Mai in 2003. He had a Thai boyfriend, and while that relationship didn't last, Sasha's enchantment with Thailand did. He says now that "I'm here to stay."

We much enjoyed our reunion with Sasha last night. We hadn't seen him since a visit to Pittsfield more than ten years ago. With him for a dinner of tom kha gai and green curry at MD House--The Delicious Restaurant was Sipon, a young Laotian, with whom Sasha has founded Laos's first significant publishing house. When he first visited Luang Prabang, the pleasantly somnolent former Laotian royal capital, Sasha saw that the only books in Lao were boring school books put out by the communist government. Otherwise people had to read in Thai or English. Sasha's strong suspicion that a great hunger existed for books in Lao has been borne out by the steady sales of the eight or so titles now available from Big Brother Ant Publications. So far, it's children's books in Lao or Lao and English. A broader list is in the works. A small NGO backed the project initially, but now Sasha is funding the expansion himself. Farang volunteers help out, too. Joe asked if the backpackers pitch in, but Sasha said no, it's older people, including an American computer whiz and his wife. They were tourists who walked in off the street one day and stayed. We'll meet them when we arrive in Laos later this week.

Notes about this blog: no more postings until we get to Luang Prabang. Tomorrow we go by bus to the Thai border, stay overnight there, then continue on Thursday by slow boat down the Mekong, stopping overnight somewhere and arriving in LP late Friday afternoon.

Thank you to Bill Ullman, now the blog's official copy editor, at a rate of 4 baht per day. He told me how to spell exaggerate, Liege, etc. (He was disappointed that people here don't appreciate Yul Brynner, Ullman's "favorite Thai.")

Thanks, too, to Frank Kelly for e-mailing all the lyrics to Noel Coward's "Mad Dogs and Englishmen (go out in the midday sun)", including the immortal line: "The natives grieve when the white men leave their huts/Because they're obviously definitely nuts!"