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  hardie karges 9:35 am on February 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Thai food ( 4 ), Thailand ( 82 )   

  More Thai Food 

  Thai food has taken its rightful place as one of the world’s most interesting cuisines, famous for the subtle blend of flavors to be found in its sweet and sour and spicy soups and creamy coconut-milk curries, such as tom yam goong, gaeng kieow wahn, gaeng mussaman, and tom kha gai.  The reality ‘in country’, of course, is a bit different.  First of all, the Thai food in overseas restaurants is from the central and southern regions predominantly.  Except for lahp, which is starting to be found more in the US, almost no dishes come from the north or northeast, which are more influenced by Burma and Laos, respectively, than the Malaysian-inspired dishes of the south.  Second, some popular dishes in US restaurants, like pat thai and kaow pat, are street food in Thailand, and quite different from the stylized US restaurant versions.  The curries and soups, on the other hand, might be difficult to find in street stalls in Thailand and spring rolls next to impossible.  That’s Vietnam.  Probably the single most popular street food in Thailand, though, noodle soup, also originally from Vietnam, would be hard to find in a US-based Thai restaurant. 

   

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  hardie karges 2:12 am on February 4, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: sticky rice ( 2 ), Thai food ( 4 ), Thailand ( 82 )   

  Sticky Rice 

  Somebody needs to clear the air on the subject of ‘sticky rice’.  Some people talk about it and pay tribute without real knowledge of what it really is.  Sticky rice is not rice that somebody came along and decided to make sticky for reasons of good taste, nor for reasons of tasting good.  Sticky rice is a different breed; ‘glutinous’ rice is probably a better word.  It has more protein and is a favorite of village people (no, not THOSE village people) in Southeast Asia, particularly Thais and Tais and Dais (yes, related).  The brown sticky stuff can even be had in Laos.  It goes good with opium, unless you’ve got constipation.  Kidding aside, actually it goes good with hot raunchy stuff like lahp or somtam, since the diarrheic tendencies of those delicacies tend to balance out the constipatory tendencies of sticky rice.  Eat it with your hands.  You are what you eat, remember.  Of course city people don’t condescend to nibble rice-balls dunked in chili paste.  They only eat the finest ‘pretty’ ‘sweet-smelling’ ‘jasmine’ rice, stripped of every last vitamin and amino acid until fit for the mouth of Manu.  What indeed hath God wrought?  Of course, sticky rice can be further ‘stickified’ by cooking in coconut milk and served with mango as a dessert.  Now you can melt the hearts and minds of the most hardened city-dweller with this tasty dish.  But you better stock up on laxative or lahp, because this is triple constipation.  I ate this dish once a day for a week about ten years ago, and haven’t had a good shit since.

   
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  hardie karges 5:03 am on February 3, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: chilies, food ( 8 ), Mexican food, Tailand   

  Hot and Sabai-see 

  Thai food is an experiment in danger.  My life as a whole takes place in a test tube, and my love life as a (w)hole has been declared a disaster area eligible for federal relief, but my stomach is hereby off-limits.  I’ve done my days on the business end of a molcajete to the point that it became a health problem.  Chips and salsa was my religion long before salsa began to catch up with ketchup as the best-seller in the condiment section, long after crossing over from the pickled peppers department.  That was before Thailand.  That was under the influence of Mexico, when you simply added the BTU’s you needed to one of the variations on corn, beans, beef, salad, and cheese splayed out before you.  In Thailand they like to cook it in for flavor.  As a matter of fact, they like to cook a lot of things in for flavor that aren’t supposed to be eaten, so you end up pulling weeds out of your mouth most of the day.  With peppers it’s usually too late.  To add insult to injury, you’ll get to re-live the experience when it comes out the other end.  They call it prik, yes, pronounced just like that.  I think there’s some subliminal onomatopoeia in that word; it’ll definitely prick your consciousness, especially those little ones, likened to the rat shit pellets they resemble.  Poor country folks frequently eat nothing but sticky rice and chili paste to get them through the day, whereas city folk are more likely to eat fresh peppers in prepared dishes.  Don’t forget to wear protection.  That’s what sticky rice is for, to plug up the holes that the peppers blast in you.  Don’t handle your penis immediately after handling peppers, or you’ll be sorry.  Enough said.

   
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  hardie karges 2:54 am on February 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Thai food ( 4 ), Thailand ( 82 )   

  Thai Food 

  Thailand is all about entertainment, fun fun fun, and more than anything else, that means food, both within country and without.  Hardly a word gets spoken or a song gets sung in Thailand without the obligatory munchies to accompany it.  Thais make Italians look like dilettantes around a table.  The first Thai restaurant opened its doors in LA in the early 1980’s, and the rest is history.  Thais may be a little slow off the starting block, but they’re experts at emulating a successful formula.  The Thai word for ‘recipe’ in fact is the same as for a course of study, derived from the Sanskrit word ‘sutra’.  Thai food is some of the best in the world, but deviate from a recipe and you can hear grumbling around the table.  It became what it is by incorporating the local dishes from the areas they populated and conquered, and the influences absorbed and incorporated.  Thus Malaysian curries became Thai curries, though that fact would likely never be acknowledged in polite company.  ‘Thai-ness’ is a very dearly held concept, sacrosanct and inviolable.  Nevertheless, these dishes are largely unknown in non-Siamese, though very ‘Tai’, Laos, Shan state Burma, Xishuangbanna China, and northwestern Vietnam, and the process has become extinct and the results standardized, in Thailand itself.  To me the best cooks would create spontaneous masterpieces with no recipe at all.  The first food to have been cooked anywhere in the world may well have occurred in what is now Guangdong, China, likely the ancestral home of the Thai.

   
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  hardie karges 12:17 am on February 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: culture ( 21 ), language ( 243 ), lingua franca, Thailand ( 82 )   

  Lingua Franca 

  Cheerleading is an art form in Thailand; no football, no marching bands, no white lines or referees, just cheerleaders, like acrobats in a Chinese circus, forming human pyramids and human waterfalls, flipping and tumbling like human jumping beans.  I’m not sure if they cop the language or not, though I’m sure they emulate the actual cheering aspect.  Something is always lost in translation whenever one culture apelike imitates another, as if some benefit might accrue by sympathetic magic.  The English word ‘cheer’ has long been adopted into the Thai language, coming to mean much more than the original, though in the American, not the British, sense.  Loanwords don’t follow land borders.  Logic would make you think that words would filter across borders selectively finding additional cross-cultural use among its border crossers.  Thailand is not logical.  Thailand follows the hand that holds the money.  Nowadays Thailand borrows words from English, and English only, also known as ‘pahsah Farang’, literally ‘lingua franca’.  It’s as if the only thing that had changed internationally over the last eight hundred years was that Pig Latin had somehow morphed into Pidgin English and the people were still essentially the same, Crusaders of the Lost Ark.  Maybe they’re right. 

   
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  hardie karges 1:12 am on January 31, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Laos ( 2 ), Tai, Thailand ( 82 ), transvestite   

  Transvestite Travesty 

  Transvestite shows are popular the world over, especially Thailand, which is convenient since they have more transvestites than anywhere else.  Many of the shows in other parts of the world are comprised of all-Thai casts, also.  They are a regular feature in such Thai tourist locations as Pattaya and elsewhere.  Of course the real show goes on unofficially, transvestites posing as real girls in dimly lit pick-up bars.  Many end up going home with clients who only find out too late, to their drunken horror, that their cute little pick-up has got a cute little stick-shift that got lost in the shuffle of nickel ads and cheap brochures.  Many hospitals in Thailand have whole sections for sex-change operations, also, which ads a whole new dimension to the phenomenon.  More than one guy has had the existential dilemma of deciding whether to dump the best wife he ever had because she used to be a he.  Ethnic-Tai Laos is the same, just more hidden because of the official Communist party line.  Those parties are boring.  Chinese go by the busloads to the Burmese border just to cross over and see the transvestite shows in mostly-Tai Shan state.  But no, the phenomenon is certainly not limited to the ethnic-Tai arena.  Mexico, for one, has them also.  There they’re called ‘travesty shows’.  Look it up in the OED.   

   
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  hardie karges 2:21 am on January 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Thailand ( 82 ), Vietnam ( 9 )   

  Thais and Vietnamese like cats and dogs 

  After food, Thailand is perhaps best known for the beauty of its women, both real and imagined.  If the West is a man and the East is a woman, then vive la diference!  Thailand has more homosexuals and transvestites than any other place in the world, and few men would be called ‘jocks’ strictly by appearance.  Even successful businesswomen never look anything but ultra-feminine.  By contrast, American women routinely wear business suits, shave their heads and otherwise blur their femininity beyond recognition.  But you already knew that.  In America even the women are men.  In Thailand even the men are women.  But if Thais are like cats grazing up against you, purring, jumping up in your lap even though you just tossed them down, then Vietnamese are like dogs humping your leg.  They bark at you in the street, chasing phantoms, ultimately lying dead in the road from chasing enemies they could never defeat in a million years, even if they knew who they were.  Apparently mirrors came late to Vietnam.  The Vietnamese are a cursed race, more Chinese than the Chinese themselves.  While Thailand, Laos, Burma, and Cambodia took India and Buddhism as role models to ultimately circumvent, if not defeat, the Chinese, the Vietnamese took the Chinese themselves as role models in their struggle against those same Chinese.  Bad choice, unless you’re suicidal, like India trying to defeat England militarily fifty-something years ago.  The Mahatma had a better idea.  The Vietnamese DID defeat the US, true, and fought probably fairer and squarer than the US itself, but at such a cost and for such ultimately questionable goals that the Word Police are considering changing the term ‘Pyrrhic’ to ‘Vietnamic’.  The men still wear Viet Cong army helmets as a badge of honor.  Now that’s weird.  Vietnam is a question mark inverted, chip placed precariously on the shoulder, hugging the South China Sea for dear life.  In Vietnam, unlike most countries who identify with their landmass, the word for ‘country’ is the same as the word for ‘water’, as if the UN would be better off referring to Thaiwater, Finnwater, Icewater, Bechuanawater, etc.  I’m getting thirsty.

   
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  hardie karges 4:45 am on January 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Asia ( 17 ), Laos ( 2 ), life ( 33 ), travel ( 14 )   

  LAOS 

   

  Laos is a ramshackle village, a forgotten place on a forgotten map. Lights go off in the outback at nine, so do it with flashlights. Till then the crowd outside divides according to TV programs, Thai or Chinese, or maybe a French bistro roasting in Asian backwater. By day pigs wander the streets looking for something they might have forgotten, and turkeys keep watch from behind their wire fence. Buffalo jerky lies drying in the sunlight, while flies fall asleep on their pile of shit, and yard-dogs forget to bark. Akha men look like refugees from a Fassbinder film: tribal bikers on dope, kings in their naked village of naked women and naked babies. Still, the babies suck tit like there is no tomorrow, so maybe they’re right. If you want to see Thailand like it used to be, then you go to Laos.

   
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  hardie karges 1:27 am on January 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: history ( 42 ), Vietnam ( 9 )   

  Historical Relativism 

  North and South Vietnam are totally different, the north culturally Chinese, the south culturally akin to its Theravada Buddhist Southeast Asian neighbors, with which it was part until the Viets overran it a few centuries back.  They showed no mercy to the Chams in the process, decimating them almost to the point of genocide, then proceeding to wrest the Mekong Delta from the Khmers.  Siam and Vietnam were in the process of dividing Laos and Cambodia up amongst themselves when the French intervened and decided that they would take it instead, and Vietnam, too.  Nobody ever had to take Siam; just ask for what you want nicely.  Genghis figured that out long ago.  When he left Burma, he left the Tai Shans in charge.  All of which just goes to show what Vietnam can do to you.  That the tribal Tais there can co-exist with some degree of dignity is a testament to their own endurance, but the writing’s on the wall.  Tribal Tais are steadily migrating to lesser-populated Laos.  The US, too, finally decided to cut and run, rather than pursue a hopeless cause.  Let’s call it ‘peace with honor’.

   
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  hardie karges 2:02 am on January 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: language ( 243 ), Vietnam ( 9 )   

  Tieng Viet 

  Vietnamese language is another of those languages with mixed origins.  It seems like the languages of the most successful countries are so, the hybrid vigor thing and all that.  Vietnam may not be so successful, but it is strong, as America found out.  The Vietnamese greeting equivalent to “How are you?” is literally “Are you strong?”  The language sounds like somebody playing banjo with a loose string.  Try to get a handle on it and it slips through your fingers like sand through the hourglass.  That’s a bad cliché, like ‘Days of Our Lives.’  Sounds and syllables fall from your hands like chopped vegetables spilling over the edge of a hot wok, dancing lightly over a surface of super-heated oil, an experiment in theoretical physics gone terribly wrong.  The words spoken are themselves chopped karate landing on the bearded surface of your white skin, little slaps in the face each of them, just begging for a response.  Give it to them.  When you prove you can be as big an asshole as they are, then you’re part of the club, a full member with honors.  There’s no age requirement.  Even little kids are in on it.  You sit reading the paper on a park bench in Hanoi and some kid just comes up and pokes you like you’re some animal in a cage that he wants to hear squawk.  Throw him to the ground and now there’s a bond between us.  Go figure again.