Sometimes I forget how stupendous this city is. The lockdown has naturally led me to spend much more time cooped up in my apartment than ever before, but even with the view from my little balcony, seen through the kitchen sliding door, I somehow became walled off from the shining and megalithic grandeur of this City of Angels.
In my day-to-day life here over the preceding years, whether it’s been the hot and dusty commute on aging city buses, with their wooden floor boards rattling below our feet and exhaust fume breezes slipping through the open windows, or the impeccably clean and cool BTS Skytrain that coasts down the arterial trackways running through the commercial heart of the city, the macro view of this sprawling urban realm becomes lost in the organized street chaos. The traffic jams, lane-splitting motorbikes, hybrid motorcycle-street food stall contraptions, death-defying offensive driving–it’s all hemmed in by the towers, apartment buildings and office blocks. The street drama plays out in the shadow of dark-windowed concrete structures that house bustling lines of vendors and mom-and-pop shops on their bottom floor, but whose gloomy upper floors, concealed behind walls that have never heard of or desired power-washing to remove the sooty coatings of age, remain a mystery. At times only the micro perspective can be given attention in these furious roadways of necessity, these packed intersections and swirling roundabouts with their shrilly whistling brown-suited cops.
Which was it that spread faster, the actual virus or the lockdowns? Who remembers in the heart of this harried limbo? Borders closed, flights were grounded, hand sanitizer and thermometer guns appeared everywhere. Your public face is a mask face. We’re all eyes now. Those who couldn’t smile with their peepers, who grin only with their mouth, soon learned that the two windows in your skull hold soft power in the shape of their frame. It’s easy for timelines to become murky, even in this age of timestamped social media updates–or perhaps because of them. Our minds have grown lazy. There’s no need to organize your memories because they’re recorded in labyrinths of servers somewhere. Share a memory, dear user. One year ago you . . .
I don’t know about a year ago, but I remember midnight, New Year’s Eve. 2019 ticking over to 2020 in Thailand. I stood with friends on my little balcony where my motley family of young cacti spend their quiet lives, and we watched the city explode with fireworks. The shows along the Chao Phraya River in the distance lit up the night with burning enthusiasm for the future. It’s an enthusiasm that may be rare, that may only be represented with such expensive and spellbinding displays to denizens of the cities of the world, but it’s still an indicator of the flame of optimism that lives in the collective human heart: we survived another year around the sun, all of us watching this, all of us together drawing breath across the planet–and this year will be better.
Yes, this year will be better.
Once my Thai language classes moved online, much of my daily life completed its transition to the medium of a computer. With a roof over my head, my health, food and clean water, I can’t complain. My eyes are on the screen. I make words appear. I speak and am spoken to. Outside, aglow from above by day and within by night, is the same view that stretched before me on the eve of this insane year, even as, unbeknownst to most of us, a virus waged its biological invasion in Wuhan far to the northeast of smog-bound Krung Thep.
This is the macro view: the resplendent megacity before me. These legions of bright towers. The new golden Buddha being constructed at Wat Paknam. The placid waters of a wide khlong stretching away toward the unseen great river, and the green foliage that populates the spaces where buildings are not. Invisible from here are the uncountable spirit houses tucked away on each property, installed to honor the ethereal guardians that share the land with the millions who came to build this city, to work here, to survive, to profit. The macro take is that this place is a monument to life itself.
It’s all visible now, though I sometimes need to take a moment to truly see it, to consider all that can be taken in. That smog has lifted, at least for the time being. The air is clear. Awash in hot sun, concealing the struggles and sorrows and joys of its inhabitants, Bangkok shines as far as the eye can see.
December 2019 
May 2020
