Sandstone Press

Soi 26

Posted by Ron McMillan on 10th December 2009

I am coming to understand, and certainly to appreciate, that I presently live in a village. A village in the middle of a sprawling city the exact size of which no-one seems able to accurately estimate, but a village nonetheless. I mentioned before that Sukhumvit is not only the best-known street in Bangkok, it is the most renowned in all of Thailand. Stretching as it does all the way from downtown Bangkok to somewhere near the eastern border with Cambodia (about 400 km away), its fame and familiarity is in some ways synonymous with the nation it dissects.

I first set foot in Bangkok in 1981, and I remember walking miles along Sukhumvit seeking out the shop-house of a Thai friend and fellow backpacker with whom I had trekked Himalayan foothills in Nepal a few weeks earlier. It now seems remarkable enough that I actually located his parents’ shop with nothing more than an address in English and a hand-drawn sketch map, but it is with great fondness that I remember the welcome I received. Somewhere that address remains written down at the back of a dog-eared, long-ignored diary; I really ought to look it out and see what has become of the soi, or side street off of Sukhumvit where my friend once lived.

That the family may still be trading from the same shop-house nearly a generation later is not so outlandish, never mind that we are in the middle of a giant city that is changing by the day; on my return to Bangkok three weeks ago I was astonished to notice quite so many shifts and changes in the urban outlook in the relatively short eight months since I was last here: buildings gone or replaced or newly occupied, not only visible signals of the far-reaching recession, but also evidence of how this astonishing city is ploughing forever upwards atop a steep development curve the likes of which no Western city has experienced for at least a century.

And yet, in the middle of all this, I find myself living in a village. Not a village buffered by paddy fields and methane-producing livestock, but a living, breathing inner-town community of folk whose existences are intricately linked in ways that I have seldom experienced. People who have lived in certain parts of Glasgow’s West End will understand immediately. A close-knit miniature segment of a much larger population where much of what its residents require on a day-to-day basis is never more than a short walk away. A real-life example of the mind-numbing, rose-tinted idyll that is Coronation Street or Victoria Square.

Restaurants, coffee shops, corner stores, rice merchants and noodle stands (two of the best in the entire city in fact, operated from either side of a dividing wall by feuding brothers who had to split into two their late father’s prosperous business and run the new shops from adjacent premises; in my benighted home town of Paisley, two piano stores operate within yards of each other from premises with near-identical titles, the result of a very similar fraternal divide). Hairdressers, office blocks, hotels (including that Asian peculiarity, the ‘love hotel’ whose entrance is blanked off from the street to allow its short-term guests the heightened level of privacy required of those ‘playing away from home’); foot massage shopfronts, Japanese restaurants and karaoke bars (trivia point: karaoke is from the Japanese/Japlish phrase, ‘kara oche’, the first word meaning ‘without’, the second a peculiar Japanese abbreviation of ‘orchestra’); a combination coffee shop/internet cafe/flower shop whose kindly young proprietors prepare a strawberry smoothie to die for; more shops and restaurants, the requisite 7-11 (of which there are more in Bangkok than in any other city I have ever visited), more offices and the occasional hold-out against rampaging property prices that is the private home in the large palm-tree-studded garden. Fine old homes going slowly to seed on land plots worth millions, with high surrounding walls and permanent security guards and even the occasional aging Rolls Royce seeking shade in a car port.

My return to the village that is Sukhumvit Soi 26 after months in exile was met with heart-warming welcomes, and not only in stores and other businesses that can rely on me putting a modest amount of business their way. My favourite is the ever-smiling night security guard at the tourist hotel who never fails to yell a friendly ‘hello’ in Thai, often bracketing it with hitherto unexplained cries of ‘thank you’ in English.

I’m back, at home in the village. And it’s a damn fine place to be.