The Washington Post [29th May 2005]

The big break of a writer’s career comes — unexpectedly — at a wild, drunken party in a remote Thai village.

“Shun security,” I advise aspiring novelists when they complain to me that they are stuck. “Get disoriented. Maybe your agonizing writing block isn’t agonizing enough. Your enemy is comfort.”

It is quite amazing how hard the subconscious works when it is made to understand that this life is not a rehearsal, there is no safety net and no assurance of any final closure. It is also quite appalling to realize how catatonic the imagination can become when we hedge our bets, opt for the safer direction at every fork in the path. These truths I discovered reluctantly and by accident after decades of resistance.

I wanted to write a thriller set in an exotic location. It was to be that make-or-break third novel. I first tried Morocco, but it was simply not known well enough in the West. I flew to Hong Kong, where I had worked as a lawyer for more than a decade. Under the surface, Hong Kong is as Asian as any other city in that part of the world, but it presented itself as far too Western for my purposes. I then tried Bangkok, which formed part of the Western frame of reference but looked exactly as Asian as it was. I stayed for a year, made friends with many of the young women who worked the bars, talked to cops whenever I could, studied the Bangkok Post as if it were a legal brief, forced my tongue around Thai syllables, learned to love the place with a passion, but produced no work of any value. I was desperate and on my third draft, which yet again I had written in the third person. I know now that I was leading too comfortable a life in my Western-style apartment with air conditioning, cable TV, Internet, lunches and suppers with Western chums at excellent French and Italian restaurants, first-class medical attention at the internationally accredited Bumrungrad Hospital, and this comfort made me risk-averse at all levels, including the creative.

Then my friend Nong invited me to her home for Songkran.

Songkran, at the beginning of April, is the old Thai new year, which they take far more seriously than January 1. It is a water festival that originates in ancient mythology (a snake god called a naga lost a fight with other, younger gods and in its flight from heaven carved out the course of the Mekong). People ambush each other with water pistols and buckets of water, get drunk, have plenty of fights and get into traffic accidents. It is the hottest time of the year in Thailand, and the holiday provides relief from the unrelenting sun.

Nong was doing very well as a bar girl in Bangkok that year, so — since the only purpose of having money in Thailand is to build status, or “face” — she decided to throw a huge party with live entertainers. I was with her on a bus to her village in the steaming central plains when she decided this. I stayed with her family in the Petchabun region, in a tiny hamlet of half-a-dozen wooden shacks, all built on stilts around a well. The communal toilet, which Nong had paid for, consisted of a hole surrounded by a wall with an opening on one side. Her elder sister could not stop drinking rice whiskey and was wasted in body and mind, wholly dependent on the bottles of Mekong that Nong often supplied. Her younger sister could not stop having children by different men and depended on Nong’s financial assistance to bring them up. Her mother was illiterate and almost blind from glaucoma (Nong wanted to pay for the operation, but her mother was afraid of doctors and hospitals). Her father had died young, having displeased the Buddha by killing five men with a knife.

Halfway through the party, when everyone was drunk and a female singer was in the middle of a haunting love song in the Isaan dialect, there was a great commotion at one end of the compound. It seems a young man named Lek had insulted an older man, something you simply do not do in rural Thailand. Perhaps the older man was eager to be insulted that fetid night, for he was carrying a machete that he used to slash open the young man’s face, across his left eye. The band and the singer were immediately told to go, the party cut short. Nong tried to call the police, but they would not come unless someone guaranteed to pay them. I said I would do so, but the desk sergeant was not sure a farang (Westerner) really understood the system. Somebody took Lek to hospital, where we went to see him the next day. I was amazed at how cool everyone was, especially Nong. Lek’s injuries were extremely serious, of a kind that we in the West would probably see as life-wrecking, but I could not detect any shock at all. People kept repeating the phrase jai yen yen : Keep a cool, cool heart.

Young Lek’s face was a dreadful mess with no more than a socket where the left eye had been (the surgeon in that country hospital had simply scooped it out rather than try to save it). But he was jai yen yen , too. Nong told me the Buddha had provided him with a great opportunity. Since he would never be able to find a wife now, there was no point in his leading a normal working life. As soon as they let him out of the hospital, he would be ordained as a monk. He would no longer be imprisoned by mundane continuums; his parents would be able to hang on to the skirts of his robes when they died and thereby enter Nirvana with him. Meanwhile, Lek’s father was looking for the culprit in order to kill him, but the culprit’s brother took him to another part of the country, and he was never found.

I wanted to leave immediately for Bangkok, but Nong said that would not be good — she would lose face if I did not stay for the whole holiday. In shock, disoriented, almost incapacitated by the heat, feasted on by mosquitoes, I stayed for a week of sweaty, near-sleepless nights in the wooden shack where Nong had grown up (the totality of her mother’s belongings was stuffed in bin-liners under the bed). When I could summon the energy in the stifling air, I helped fetch water from the well (there was an electric pump to fill the bucket, but you still had to carry it across the compound) and tried to learn how to tam kao (collect the rice grains from the paddy stalks). Everyone was extra friendly, realizing that their reality was somewhat out of the ordinary for a pampered farang like me. I didn’t mind paying for beer (people in the countryside often survive with no cash at all, bartering for survival in the ancient way), so a group of us spent much of the time drinking beer with ice, throwing water at each other and watching Nong’s nieces and nephews lounge on the broad backs of silver-gray buffalo, which Nong had bought so her family could use them to plow the paddy fields. In sober moments I reflected with irony that I would be 50 come July.

When eventually I reached Bangkok, I realized that Nong had initiated me into the authentic Thailand. I looked with contempt on the three previous drafts of my novel and started over again with a first sentence in the first person. I had found the mind-boggling audacity to narrate the whole yarn in the voice of a Bangkok cop. The rest of the book quickly followed. I sent it to my agent in New York, who said it was the best thing I’d written so far, worthy of the best publisher. It was published as Bangkok 8 .

Of course, I realize my experience at Songkran that year was trivial enough in the scheme of things, but that is not the point. The problem with my writing about Thailand had been that I was seeing it through the anemic gaze of a farang who had been charmed by the people, especially the courageous and resourceful young women who work the bars. I had allowed myself to be charmed because it was a lot easier than facing the tragic reality behind the smiles. (There was a pattern here: A long time before I had chosen law as an easy option and very nearly bored myself to death.) Now I knew what pressures had produced that courage and resourcefulness, what incredible nobility it took for them to send 60 percent of their earnings home to support their families, buy buffalo, pay for day labor during the rice harvest, build toilets — and indulge alcoholic sisters and brothers. Now, when I watched them dancing in the bars, I knew where they were coming from. I had penetrated the surface at last.

Nong and I have remained friends, and I am still grateful to her. She called the other day on her cell phone to explain that she was in jail in a police station, having been busted for possessing a small amount of ganja , and could I lend her 5,000 baht to bribe the cop? I gave her aunt the money, and Nong came to see me, grinning, the next day.

“How was jail?”

“Fine, except for the mosquitoes.”

In Thai jails there is not the same heavy judgmental pressure that we exert in the West; people are left to chill out in their own ways and reflect on the negative karma that leads to insect bites and other tortures. For me, that somehow sums up the whole country. The analogy works on the creative level too, for human consciousness is a tiny, frail craft atop a wild ocean without a shore, and you must submit to the wonder and terror of it if you want to go fishing.

John Burdett is the author of “Bangkok 8″ and “Bangkok Tattoo”.