Tone Deaf in Bangkok
by Janet Brown, photographs by Nana Chen
a book review by Kristianne Huntsberger
My friend Greg called this book a love letter. When I think of the love letters I have written and received they rarely include the honest chaos and complexity of Brown’s book. Love letters celebrate the passion and the often unrealistic expectations one has of one’s lover. Brown’s is the story of a marriage, a good marriage, a partnership of equal parts trial and reward. It is a believable love story about learning to live well with one another. As Brown explains in the first chapter: “The most impossible question between lovers—‘why do you love me’—cannot be answered in a simple twenty-five words or less. It’s always so much easier to enumerate those things that make love less than perfect.”
Brown moved to Thailand to teach English and became, herself, a student of the country. Her education is one of experience: learning Thai from a five-year-old, learning approved feminine behavior from the pressures of social stigma and learning how to let go at Songkran festival by getting soaked. These stories are Brown’s account of the pleasures and problems of her love affair with Thailand. Possibly the most difficult of these problems is recalling the family and identity she had to leave behind in the states. In contemplating the allure of food and the weight of the heat in Bangkok, Brown notes, “as a transplant, I occasionally felt dizzyingly rootless in a culture that ordinarily entranced me. In a country that was foreign to me, I was the foreigner, the two-headed elephant who was always out of step.” As she becomes acquainted with the ghost residing in her new apartment and learns where to buy coffee or how to eat durian, Brown gives us the chance to witness a couple’s quarrels and reconciliations. She shows a relationship in all its stages.
A love letter is addressed to the lover, but Brown is writing to us, explaining the secret of her satisfaction and the unpredictable pace of emotions. Thailand knows about its festivals and food, its people and their idiosyncratic behavior. We are the ones who delight in this peek into another world. Brown gives us more than a peek, she gives us an intimate walk through her home. Together with Nana Chen’s beautiful photos, which manage to make the country feel familiar, the book introduces Thailand not as a remote place, but as a friend’s dear friend.
