HEART
Delve behind the surface to encounter Bangkok’s diverse society.
Meet its subcultures from ancient ethnic communities and market traders to youth and the creative scenes.
Examine the capital’s sense of identity and its relationship to migrants from upcountry and overseas, especially the Thai-Chinese.
THAINESS AND THE CITY
Beyond national pride in Thai exceptionalism from the rest of the world, Bangkokians often assert their exceptionalism within Thailand, as being better than provincials in education, taste, success and discipline, not to mention political judgment. For nearly a quarter millennium, the country has revolved around what the capital wants. Yet there’s little celebration of Bangkok as an urban phenomenon. The city’s sense of its own identity is cramped by how strongly Bangkokians identify with Nation. Yet this chaotic megalopolis violates that genteel national self-image. It’s as if citizens feel proud about the capital’s national qualities, but ambivalent, or perhaps realistic, about the city’s own character. It’s been the main gateway to what’s new in the world. Understanding Bangkokness is key to understanding Thai modernity.
pictured: A cover of Way magazine about the character of Bangkokians, shy yet showing off, proclaiming love for Bangkok whilst identifying first with nation and scrubbing their city clean of whatever doesn’t fit their self-image.
BECOMING BANGKOKIAN
Polyglot Bangkok prides itself on hosting people of any origin. Its scores of ethnic urban villages are living museums that draw tourist, expat and local curiosity. Yet their diversity is now dissolving into the mainstream. This peaceful absorption of minorities is a model success in this era of migration crises. Bangkok avoided most of the racial chauvinism and communal violence that’s plagued several ASEAN neighbours. Aliens can be Bangkokian too. With globalisation, half a million expatriates add a transnational vibe to what’s flowered into a World City. Though few long-stayers become citizens, many feel a sense of belonging to their adoptive town.
pictured: Modern city, ancient mindsets. A mural-style painting, ‘Siam 2’ by Teerawat Nutcharoenpol from the exhibition Dramathais.
ROOTS
Waves of internal migrants infused Bangkok’s informal sector with rural ways, from village organisation through to farmhouse recipes and folklore. Some country migrants reconstitute elements from their regional calendar, from re-enactments of Southern ghost rituals and Northern nail dance to concerts of molam music. While Bangkok-born generations increasingly identify as Thai, many Millennials are rediscovering the indigenous heritage that their parents and grandparents suppressed to become “Thai”. The state re-edits indigenous cultures in showcases like the annual Thainess Fair. Charming and fun, it’s ostensibly for tourism, but this cherry-picked jamboree of national harmony aims at bridging the regional rifts.
pictured: urban migrants dressed up as rural folk for a Thainess festival
STIR-FRY
How Chinese is Bangkok? Bangkok can’t help but exude Chineseness, since the Chinese built most of it, are its majority ethnicity – and lived at this customs post before it became the capital. Pioneers set the tone of the settlement forever after, in both genetics and culture. Bangkok is less an epitome of Thai culture than a bubble of Sino-Thai hybrid subculture. In making themselves Thai, they have infused Thainess with Chineseness – and that stir-fry has become the national benchmark. The greatest indirect impact of Sino-Thais has been to revise what it means to be Thai.
pictured: murals of Sino-Thai benefactors at the Kuan Yin shrine in Lad Phrao.
COMMUNITY
Fellow-feeling is a Bangkok trait. The streetlife and open-fronted shophouses put private social life on full public display, making informal community a visitor’s first and abiding impression of “village Bangkok.” The civic quilt retains urban hamlets that made the city a patchwork of close-knit clans. But sense of belonging has become less rooted in place or genes. Identity has spread to other affinities: career, peer group, Thainess, brands. Extended blood relations are atomising into nuclear families. Socially diverse neighbourhoods are re-sorting by class into generic condos, gated estates or gentrified lanes. In a new migration, bonding has gone online.
pictured: the Mon enclave of Ban Kradee comes together on Buddhist days to cook food for monks and their neighbours.
MARKET
This city known for markets is turning into a city known for malls. Both indoor and outdoor shopping flourish in this supremely capitalist capital, with malls that offer celebrities as your personal shopper, plus assistants to carry your bags. Yet there’s still a market for every trade, from amulets to antiques, DJ decks to dried fish. Hawkers busy the pavements like in no other world city, and turn any occasion into a sale. Temple rites spawn fairgrounds. Indie festivals treat designer stalls like art installations. With each class defining themselves through consumption, what’s most on display in this citywide ‘shop window’ is Bangkok society itself. All these vendor subcultures build community bonds. Trade spirals through Bangkok’s DNA.
pictures: hawkers go by motorbike to sell food by the bag in the suburbs
YOUTH
Why is Bangkok’s youth protesting in the street? Ageism in the West consigns over-50s to the scrapheap, whereas Bangkok practices ageism against the young. Tradition relies on uncritical transmission of old ways, rather than critical thinking to find fresh ideas. Denied any form of space for expression, kids must conform through social initiations (ordination, conscription, student hazing, marriage). Modern pressures to loosen that grip provoke vehement backlash; after all, today’s old expect payback for their own earlier sacrifices. It was anger at the control of youth through uniforms and haircuts that sparked the wider revolt against Bangkok’s seniority system.
pictured: a girl rides a cute tank in a fair at Thonburi on Children’s Day, when Thai youth are instilled with martial values.
CREATIVE CITY
Having a ‘Creative City’ has been seen a way to vault a country into the big league. But Bangkok faces a ‘Culture vs Creativity Dilemma.’ Top-down centralised decisions, the patronage system and a resistance to critical thinking crimp the efflorescence of creative impulses found throughout the informal street life. Yet an indie experimental culture was born in Bangkok’s democratic era and turbocharged when the 1997 crisis spawned creative industries by turning from imports to local resources. Today, the skill and quirkiness of Bangkokian creatives draw global attention to this city as as a place of freewheeling ideas international biennales and even its own unofficial Creative District.
pictured: an artwork in the first Bangkok Art Biennale at Bangkok Art & Culture Centre