McMafia: Seriously Organized Crime
By Misha Glenny
Published by Vintage, 2009

Crime not only pays, it pays most honest people’s salaries. My review for The Nation, published in September.

“Anyone who has used a cellphone or computer notebook in the last decade has unwittingly depended on organised crime for his or her convenience,” Misha Glenny writes in “McMafia”. It’s one of many grounds for the blame he metes out to just about everyone — but mostly greedy bureaucrats — in the course of a 436-page survey of criminal gangsterism like you’ve never quite imagined it.

One of the world’s most tenacious (and thus successful) reporters, Glenny roams that world flipping over rocks to expose the handful of fungal roots that link just about every mob there is. The roots extend into your home, obviously if you smoke ganja or buy pirate DVDs, but less obviously if you’ve been the innocent victim of an online phishing scam.

The situation, it would seem, is hopeless, but then why fight crime? It’s got it’s own suite of offices at City Hall, and you can’t fight City Hall. More importantly — and this is where the politicians climb aboard — it keeps the global economy humming. At least it did until Wall Street screwed up its end of the operation, but eliminate organised crime and we’ll all really be weeping into our wallets.

The book is amazing throughout, but there are two outstanding bits. One extrapolates on what exactly happened after Mr Gorbachev obeyed President Reagan’s command to “tear down that wall”. Much of the bankrupt Soviet Union opened laundries for foreign cash and found many interesting ways to help foreigners get it dirty in the first place.

The other great part is the revelation that organised crime doesn’t always involve triads, yakuza, Russians or that guy from Sicily with the scar on his cheek. On your way to meeting the scummiest of the Nigerian scammers, you run into pot farmers in western Canada who act like they’re in “Mission: Impossible” and some very shady (but funny!) characters in Tel Aviv and Mumbai.

And here, there and in Dubai, bless his soul, our very own VIP guest at Bang Khwan Prison, Mr Viktor Bout. Read an excellent New York Times article about him here

Farang: The Sequel
By Dr Iain Corness
Published by Maverick House, 2009

Mystified? Morose? Misfitting? Let Pattaya’s best-known alien physician give you another dose of his cure for the farang flu, My review for The Nation, published on September 12.

Suspicion does arise when Iain Corness virtually admits to augmenting his visits to public squat toilets with his own handkerchief (which is cheating), but the Scottish medical doctor who transplanted himself to Thailand from Australia does maintain his esteem, if not his dignity, in this second collection of light-hearted musings on strangers’ strange experiences in a strange land.

The first topped the English-language best-seller list in Thailand (he tells me anything over 5,000 copies sold represents a best-seller), so the symptoms indicated another trip to the doctor’s office and an extra dose of experience, observation and philosophy. These are the components of his patented remedy for any farang afflicted with a misunderstanding of Thai ways, which is potentially fatal.

As with the original book, this one deals mostly in familiar topics, but the amusement is in the fresh telling, and the healthfulness of the dose is in the author’s acceptance — and, usually, admiration — for the way things work here.

Actual physician’s advice is dispensed about Alzheimer’s disease and the need for the terminally ill to prepare Living Wills, and in the form of his own “75 Per Cent Diet”.

Ranging more widely, Corness extracts the following from his medicine cabinet of curiosities: boob and penis enlargers, karaoke and gik bars, gasohol, motorcycles as sports machines and modes of transport for entire households, Chang and Eng, school and security-guard uniforms, the disproportionate ramifications of fender benders (recounted with humour amid the horror), Buddhist and animist rituals, and the ability that God gave Thais but not foreigners to seal and unseal plastic bags with a rubber band.

There is also the fundamental reality that many Thais celebrate their birthdays on a date plucked out of the air, months or years after the actual date of birth, by a relative who has more important things to do than remember long-ago events for the purpose of government paperwork.

Are Thai ways always better than those of the West? The doctor is only human, so he deigns to complain about the state of the toilet paper here, the road conditions and car salesmanship, and allows that farang countries are better at noise abatement, albeit only by suckling at the nanny state’s teat.

Education he finds to be on a par, at least for those who can afford a halfway decent school.

Sometimes Corness gets carried away praising his adopted country. A gushing essay about the Tiffany’s shows claims that kathoey are “totally accepted in Thai society”, when in fact they remain legally oppressed. He showers fawning praise on the performers (and elsewhere in book does a drag turn himself), but is surprised that there are no catfights backstage.

A chapter on the cash crunch ends up imploring readers to invite overseas friends and relatives to Thailand. Tourism will again soon flourish, he claims, thanks to “Thai friendliness”. Optimism prevails on that score, despite the political mayhem, which also gets some passing scrutiny.

Being based in Pattaya, the doctor wades into the scrum of red and yellow knights seeking the grail of democracy, but the episode turns out to be just a news recap, really, and hardly worth the bravery medal he jokes that he deserves.

There is a near-complete disdain of hyphens (an affliction so easily treated) and the choice of words tends to be rushed, weakening the heart of clarity, but these are piddling worries in a book that’s plenty of fun and, once again, a sure and dependable guide for newcomers.

One particularly humorous episode finds Dr Iain setting a Brisbane neighbourhood ablaze while trying to lure people into his Thai-food restaurant (there’s a couple of good Thai recipes at the back of the book), but he’s completely at home on Siamese soil, and makes no such blunders in judgement.

Read my review of the first “Farang” here.

Many of the good people of Thailand are agog at the prospect of coming up with the winning name for the panda cub born last month at the Chiang Mai Zoo.

The fact that the winner gets Bt1 million helps, of course, but the nation’s hearts have gone out to the little baby regardless. Will the child be named Kwan Thai (meaning Thai darling), Thai Jeen (Sino-Thai), Yingying (complete and fertile) or Lin Ping (the mother’s name combined with the name of Chiang Mai’s river)?

What people are forgetting, though, is that giant pandas are vicious monsters, which is why China is so eager to loan out its entire panda population to unsuspecting zoos around the world.

Chinese experts are loaned out too, ostensibly to make sure the animals are well cared for, but in fact they’re there to make sure the enclosures are completely secure, because if one of their rented beasts ever clears the moat or fence or glass wall, all hell will break loose.

Just look at the fear in the eyes of mother Lin Hui in the photo below. She knows all too well what she’s brought into this world and can only hope that she survives when her offspring reaches wrestling weight.

See my pictures of the Chiang Mai Zoo panda containment area here and see if you think it’s anywhere close to being secure enough.

Former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra showed up on Facebook on Friday, the eve of the eve of his 60th birthday — apparently the real one, not one of the fakes who’ve borrowed his name previously to chat up FB babes.

Of course I beseeched his comradeship and was soon enough accepted as an official Facebook Friend. Good thing I didn’t wait, too: When I applied for chumdom he already had about 400 friends, and by the time I was accepted, just a short while later, he had twice that number.

So I poked him.

Ladyboys: The Secret World of Thailand’s Third Gender
By Susan Aldous and Pornchai Sereemongkonpol
Published by Maverick, 2008

The lives, heartaches and breakthroughs of Thai gender benders, shared in a weave of miserable lament and giddy fluff. My review, at the request of the publisher.

I suppose Susan Aldous and Pornchai Sereemongkonpol’s book makes a decent guide for young people pondering gender — and the possibility of changing it — and a warm companion for kathoey who can identify with its many familiar episodes.

Other than that, I don’t see the point.

The argument that not enough is written about transgenders in Thailand is patently false. Who doesn’t already know how surgeons turn a penis inside out to form a vagina? Or that effeminate boys go through hell en route to realising they’re really girls?

The justification that straights reading this book will come to understand and empathise more with kathoey might stand up if it were better written, with answers to more probing questions, rather than being a lazy transcript of nine women’s not-altogether-edifying life stories. Besides, the bigots are never going to read this book.

The authors seem to think they’ve got a closet full of secrets to share with the world about ladyboys following their interviews with the nine disparate individuals.

Unless I’m badly mistaken, these “secrets” are that the ones who still have penises tape them tightly into their crotches to appear more like women, and that breast implants have to be massaged daily following the operation to keep them from assuming unsightly shapes.

This stuff is common knowledge to anyone who’s ever read a magazine feature about the women-trapped-in-men’s-bodies who seek new identities under fresh but misguided labels like sao praphet song (second kind of woman) and phet thi sam (the third sex). Why the authors are so caught up with taep — the Thai word for penis-taping — is beyond me. It’s just “tape”, just as com is the “Thai word” for computer. (NOTE: Please see the comments below.)

And are the authors really “authors”? Each of the kathoey featured tells her own story with no interjections from an interviewer, first person all the way through. Presumably Aldous and Pornchai have stitched together the segments and fixed up the syntax, but in doing so, their approach is exposed for its affectation, because all nine women misspeak the same, and surely that’s not their fault.

Everyone refers to their place of origin, for example, as “the Ubon Ratchathani province” or “the Nakhan Sawan province”. Why “the”?

Finally, while Aldous and Pornchai gush in their introduction about the “willingness, warmth and openness” their subjects displayed, only two of the ladyboys come across as likeable. One of them is Parinya “Nong Toom” Charoenphol, the celebrated former kick-boxer, who KO’s any desire to embrace kathoey wholeheartedly.

“It is very disheartening to find a group of people who you think understand you, only to discover that not one among them is genuine,” she says of the ladyboys she’d sought out as companions.

“I have plenty of friends who want to eat with me in nice restaurants and have fun, but none of them are willing to be there for me when I’m down. I don’t intend to stop socialising with them, though. I think it’s important to be able to acknowledge their flaws and keep them at bay. I just won’t be giving them any further handouts.”

TEXT BITE: From airline hostess Nicky, one of the “success stories” in the book: “The only real difficulty we now face is that some of his friends and family don’t know about my true identity, and he insists that he doesn’t want them to ever find out. His parents are very fond of me and often ask when we plan to marry and how many grandchildren I expect to give them. I feel so flattered by their expectations that I hate the thought of dashing their hopes.”