A book review I wrote for The Nation in 2005 that was not used due to an editorial mix-up.

‘Thailand Confidential’ more chaos than edge

Jerry Hopkins, a former Rolling Stone scribe who wrote a great book about Jim Morrison and the Doors and a not-so-great book about Jimi Hendrix, now rocks out (sort of) about Thailand, having traded Hawaii in 1993 for our food, climate, religion, friendliness, vistas, “alluring women, entertaining government” and “the most interesting expat community I’d encountered anywhere”.
That all sounds nice enough, but it’s with a few of his fellow expats that Hopkins says he occasionally sits down for a good old whinge about everything else in the country. In the introduction to his new book “Thailand Confidential”, published offshore by Periplus Editions, he says he’s only written one letter to the editor – urging that Thai holidays be publicised in advance – but most of the 256 pages here are yelps about the Kingdom’s shortcomings. He does warn in advance, though, that he’s a “grumpy old man”.
Having been in Thailand about as long as Hopkins, I share his resignation that farangs will never really understand the place, and I share his delight at living here among “the energy generated by surprise, the edgy feeling that accompanies disarray and portends chaos”.
But mixed feelings have produced a mixed-up book. There’s nothing at all “confidential” in its purported revelations, and certainly the cover art – a finger to a pair of neon lips suggesting something hush-hush – is misleading. Like most grumpy old men, Hopkins is just an old softie, so his barbs are deliberately dulled, and the screed that he’d perhaps love to unleash is muffled in a silk pillow. The book is a “love letter to a peculiar place”, he says, and Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner gushes in a cover blurb that “his vivid portrait projects that love from every page”.
Love doesn’t get a look in when Hopkins is complaining about commercial scams and tourist rip-offs, the war on drugs and nightclub pee-checks. He touches unhelpfully on the drowned princess and Chalerm Yoobamrung’s naughty sons and issues a primer on local superstition (“We in the West fear [computer] viruses; Thais fear ghosts”) before managing to get a little deeper into things, so to speak, with a look at phallic worship in a bar.
The velvet-glove approach dallies with elephants and water buffalo, nam pla and look khrung, bargirls and mia noy. Some of these essays were first published in magazines like Metro, the UK version of Maxim and Thai Airways’ Sawasdee – and sound like the soothing family reading you get on a plane. (Both faeces and a vagina are referred to as “you know what”.)
He toys amateurishly with topics like Tinglish and krieng jai, making the mistake in the latter piece of quoting Mont Redmond, whose keener observation is like a crystal in the murk of Hopkins’ discombobulation.
In fact, Hopkins wears his journalist’s credentials on his sleeve to the extent that there often seems to be more of other people’s observations than his own, and a lot of the best lines are sound-bites he’s gleaned elsewhere. He even reprints a much-circulated e-mail of warning signs that you’ve been in Thailand too long (“You stand in the shadow of a telephone pole while waiting for the bus”, etc).
But he can be a dull reporter. He spends several uneventful nights snuggled with Poh Teck Foundation body-snatchers before finally getting to see some already retrieved corpses being delivered to the morgue. Even without a mangled car wreck it’s an opportunity for some moving, insightful or even amusing commentary, but there’s none.
A bit of the “edge” Hopkins mentioned emerges in “The Country Club”, not about political haymaking on the golf links but guys who compete for the most nationalities notched on the bedpost, and “Thailand’s Beer Wars”, a solid retelling of the time the elephant sat on the lion.
There is much better stuff, though, I’m happy to say. He gets quite graphic as an eyewitness to sex-reassignment surgery, gives us a brief peek into that grumpy old chest cavity when he undergoes open-heart surgery at Bumrungrad, and does a remarkable encapsulation in just five pages on bird flu, drivers fleeing the scene, Black May, the Apec slum cover-up, unreported suicides and the news media’s criticism of and complicity in most of the above.
“Thailand is not alone in donning the loose robes of denial,” he equivocates, still refusing to bare his teeth, though it’s one of his best lines.
A bit of humour would be nice here, and it pops up in a grouse about how Thais scam Hollywood moviemakers, in which the censor board also gets a wedgie. Hopkins’ stream of anecdotes is pretty entertaining, especially the one about Danny Glover blowing his cool on the set of “Operation Dumbo Drop” when someone called him “Khun Danny” and he thought they were using the epithet for a black person.
The editing gets a bit sloppy toward the end, but this is where some of the best writing resides. In “The Backpackers”, Hopkins fashions a neat pair of generational bookends using Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and Alex Garland’s “The Beach”, and finally comes up with an opinion worth savouring.
He closes the book with a discourse on the different types of farang muddling about in the Land of Smells – sorry! – Smiles, and decides, “In the end we likely haven’t got a clue,” Bernard Trink (who gets a mention here) might say, “I’ll clue ya!” and tell him to write a book about Thailand with some real gusto, like his Doors book “No One Here Gets Out Alive”, Maybe he could reuse the title.