As a foreigner living in Bangkok, there are certain things you can do that Thais can’t, and certain things you can’t do that any Thai can. Similarly, there are things that Thais see everyday that we never do; it’s just part of the charming tug-of-war between cultures, personalities and egos that make Bangkok such a badass place to live. I usually try and keep the tone on this here blog fairly light and enjoyable (dare I say ‘fluffy’?), but there are times when I have to comment on the darker side of things. Unfortunately, I saw something today that has me thinking in a dark and ponderous fashion about the things we, as foreigners, see in Bangkok, and the things we never do.
Any big city around the world will have its violent acts – murders, rapes, suicides, kidnappings, what have you – and it’s no secret that this happens every day, in every city, in every country around the world. It’s not pretty, but it happens; all we can do is hope that it never happens to us or anyone we know. Bangkok is no different. Although it’s a very safe city by any standard, it does have a side that’s not generally seen by foreigners.
A big part of this is to do with the Thai press (I’ve written about this before). Thai newspapers and TV news shows are absolutely drenched in the gory details of the dark side of life (and death) in a manner that you’d never see in any newspaper striving to meet western journalistic standards. Bloody and (barely) pixelated bodies can be seen on the front page of nearly every Thai daily, which is often a shock for us farangs; that’s just simply not something we’re used to seeing.
Without being fluent in Thai, it’s pretty easy for us to float like a cork on top of the real issues that surround us. Often we have a vague understanding of what’s going on beneath the waves, but it’s out of reach, even if we wanted to understand it.
At any rate, the incident that has me all introspective is a suicide. This morning at about 9.30am, there was a commotion in my office, located on the 11th floor on a building on Sukhumvit Road. I asked what was up and they said that someone had jumped. Sure enough, there was a crowd at the hallway window, looking down at a tarp-covered lump in the parking lot, surrounded by police and curious onlookers with their hands over their mouths. Without going into too much detail, an ill-advised cursory look while passing the window a while later revealed the person that jumped – a girl about 30 – uncovered as they prepared to load her into the ambulance. Her head was a mass of black hair and blood. She was wearing a purple skirt and a white sweater.
What caught me off guard was how affected I was by seeing this. I’ve seen thousands of deaths on film, gallons of blood spilled and hours of footage of people getting hurt and even dying on reality shows… but to see it really there made me slightly queasy. What was her last morning like? Did she say goodbye to her parents? Fight with her boyfriend? Fail a test?
Always a new day tomorrow.
My guess is that this will be all over the news tonight and tomorrow (due in no small part to the fact that an exercise studio fifteen paces away is used daily by a VVIP), the poor girl barely blurred out, blood splatters clearly visible on the cheap newspaper pulp they use. And I’m probably right in assuming that Bangkok’s farang population will never know anything about it.
It never made the Channel 3 news tonight, there was another jumper somewhere in LadPrao today that they covered though. Some poor girl who’s boyfriend had left her and thought that was the end of her world. Such a waste over something that must have been life shattering for her but in the big scheme of things inconsequential.
Hope this doesn’t leave you feeling down for too long, i am sure it is one thing to see this kind of thing on TV o in a movie and quite another to see it in real life.
The landmark is a favourite for foreigners in Bangkok to check-in and check-out.
I used to work at an ad agency in the building across. Never wrote any copy that pushed this amenity, but saw the aftermath of more than one suicide.
Once a foreign jumper landed feet from the car of one of our account executives as she was pulling out of the multistorey car park. She took it in her stride – as did the hotel security, who put a blanket over the body and a cardboard box around it while they waited for the police.
Thanks for your post, Greg.
Prefer dark to fluffy.
WryEyes
And then it will be utterly forgotten by the gawkers and goremongers. All but the handful for whom her existence, or lack thereof, makes a difference.
Sad indeed.
my mom heard a scream from the balcony somewhere above her and watched some guy fly past on his way to the concrete parking lot below; the reality of death is much scarier than tv violence; imagine what a war is like…
Novelist Virgina Wolf, (who killed herself by drowning) said of death in her novel, the Lives of Mrs. Dalloway: "Death occures, so that life may be more noticed by the living".
Sometimes, Life can become more trouble than it's worth……….