Travel to New Corbuzon

...For twenty minutes the bus had been stuck in a multi-kilometer traffic jam. The talkative guide, trying to entertain the despondent tourists, compared Bangkok with St. Petersburg - here you have canals, a “window to Europe,” and a relatively young city founded in the 18th century. For me, after many hours of reading China Mieville’s trilogy on the plane, the view outside the window persistently reminded me of New Crobuzon (a city-state with an ultra-capitalist society, the central setting of the steampunk trilogy of the left-wing British science fiction writer - editor's note). Scattered skyscraper towers, the dirty Chao Phraya River crossing the city, overpasses of the elevated metro, millions of people of various races and nations, brand new penthouses adjacent to landfills and ruins... Not without garudas - images of the bird man decorate government buildings in Thailand. There are even some “converted” ones here – the capital of Thailand is an important center of medical tourism, where, among other things, hundreds of gender reassignment operations are performed. Bangkok – or more precisely Krung Thep, the “City of Angels” (this is the abbreviated Thai name for this city) is an excellent example of a materialized capitalist dystopia.

Thailand's New Crobuzon is probably a good place to make money. In this sense, it can even be compared with some gold mines in Alaska or South Africa. It is the availability of jobs that attracts hundreds of thousands of migrants to Bangkok, both from Thailand and abroad. The official number of city residents fluctuates around 8 million people, but according to unofficial data, more than 20 million residents already live in the capital. The fact is that Thai statistics take into account only officially registered citizens of the country. The emigrants and migrant workers who fill the city streets are simply not included in these reports. This is getting ridiculous - for example, Pattaya, with a population of half a million, only recently acquired the status of a city, with 104 officially registered thousand inhabitants.

But, unfortunately, the place for a successful business is not yet synonymous with the noosphere. It is difficult to find a less suitable place for people to live than Thai cities. First of all, they are simply hard to be in. The subequatorial heat, combined with humidity, is accompanied by air pollution. There is either no public transport in Thailand, or it is a pitiful sight. In Pattaya there are only minibuses - tuk-tuks. In Bangkok, minibus taxis complement short metro lines and private buses, apparently introduced to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. The main burden of transporting passengers falls on cars and mopeds, which leads to crazy multi-kilometer traffic jams. It would seem that flat Bangkok is ideal for cycling - but there are even fewer bicycles in Thailand than in Russia and Ukraine, and the only sign allowing the movement of two-wheeled friends of man I saw was only in the parking lot near the royal palace, completely filled with tourist buses. I don’t know what the Thai authorities think about this - apparently, they hope for the “invisible hand of the market” that will “come and fix it.”

Green spaces are considered exotic in Bangkok. Thus, the park area in the capital of Thailand does not exceed 1.82 thousand square meters. meters! Not much for a city of 20 million. Note that in other cities of the country the situation is no better. Even in a tourist center like Pattaya, the only Nuk Nooch park is actually located outside the city, and the entrance ticket to it costs 500 baht (500 rubles).

It seems that only representatives of non-human races can feel comfortable in Bangkok - and not all of them. The watermen in Chao Phray would definitely have died out long ago - the main waterway of the capital was irreversibly polluted back in the 70s, when the country became a center of weaving production, and all kinds of dyes were poured into the river.

And yet, people go to Los Angeles in Thailand to earn a living. Bangkok is the largest and almost the only industrial center of the country, as well as a huge construction site. In contrast to the relatively mononational cities of Europe, the diversity of the inhabitants of this metropolis is amazing. Millions of Indians and Chinese populate entire neighborhoods, where shopping arcades stretch for kilometers. The petty bourgeoisie, which has become a tourist attraction in developed countries, still constitutes a fairly significant segment of the population in Asia. During the tourist season, peasant women from the poor north come to work in the sex industry, while Laotians and Cambodians work on construction sites. There are many Europeans in the city. The words Andre Vlcek once told me about the mass of illegal Europeans in Southeast Asia turned out to be true. Russian-language newspapers in Thailand are filled with advertisements for help in obtaining a Thai visa - but many guides privately admitted that they live and work in the country semi-legally. The economic crisis forces our people to look for food in the most “exotic” countries - although for Thais Europe is exotic. This situation is even more amusing when we consider that according to some local religious beliefs, hell is located in the West and is characterized by extremely low temperatures, snow and ice...

There is work in Bangkok, although salaries in the country are negligible even by our standards. Emigrant workers (among whom there are many children) receive 3,000 baht per month (the baht exchange rate is almost the same as the ruble exchange rate), and the average earnings of a “successful” Thai fluctuate around 15 thousand baht. Emigrants from Europe receive a little more - the basic salary of a guide from Europe is 15 thousand baht + interest. Competition from Russian and Ukrainian guides causes dissatisfaction among local tourism industry employees: the “those who come in large numbers” take away the bread! And tourists can only get to a number of sites accompanied by a Thai guide.

There is practically no social security system in the country. The few public hospitals provide only basic services, which can only be obtained by waiting in long queues. State old age benefits do not exceed 500 baht. Only the military and employees of large corporations who receive a full social package feel relatively good. All this is our tomorrow.

But in Thailand everything is fine with spirituality. There are more than 30 thousand Buddhist monasteries in the country, and the number of monks is approaching half a million. The business acumen of the followers of Lisa Simpson’s religion is simply amazing - the Russian Orthodox Church is still learning and learning. All the temples are tourist attractions and places of brisk trade, and advertisements hang on the walls of the pagodas - on a bench in one Pattaya temple I even noticed an advertisement for visa support in English... Entire streets in Bangkok are occupied by shops with objects of Buddhist worship. The life of the monks themselves is not always devoted to prayer and asceticism. Some of them prefer watching football together on a plasma TV to collective vigils. And in the west of the country, near the Burmese border, I was amused by a clergyman smoking a cigarette at a gas station near our bus. The monk clearly strived for Nirvana...

According to the guides, the Thai people love their King Bhumibol Adulyadej very much. Judging by the countless portraits of His Majesty on the streets and public buildings, this is probably so. True, in November 2010, in Tunisia, I saw even more portraits of President Ben Ali - and the guides also unanimously asserted that the Tunisian president is loved and popular for the market reforms he is carrying out. But a month later, Ben Ali was overthrown, which marked the beginning of the Arab Spring. Considering the long history of guerrilla warfare in Thailand, waged by Thai communists and Muslims, a series of military coups and the bloody events of October 1976, when student protests in Bangkok were crushed by tank tracks, it can be assumed that the Thais' love for their king was not always unchanged. Now, when Bhumibol is rumored to soon follow his Cambodian colleague Sihanouk, there is room for warm feelings - after all, as we know, the dead don’t bite. Moreover, Maha Watchiralongkorn, the king’s son and one of the direct organizers of the bloody “clean-ups” of the 1970s, is vying for his place.

As the reader has already understood, according to the author, Thailand is by no means a convenient country for living. But many of our compatriots like it there. The new post-Soviet consumer feels at home there like a fish in water. On the beaches of Pattaya and in the supermarkets of Bangkok, he can satisfy his passion for consuming cheap consumer goods, cheap food, cheap sex and cheap sea. Everything else is indifferent to him. Willy-nilly, you recall the words from Schwartz’s “Shadow” - about holidaymakers suffering from “acute satiety”: “acute satiety suddenly takes hold of even worthy people. The man earned a lot of money honestly. And suddenly he has an ominous symptom: the special, restless, hungry look of a wealthy person. This is the end for him. From now on he is barren, blind and cruel” (curiously, this phrase, like other anti-capitalist and anti-philistine passages contained in this brilliant play by Schwartz, was removed in the 1991 film adaptation). For such people, Thailand remains the “land of smiles”, the “bounty paradise”. But I wouldn’t want my northern Leningrad to be like its southern “twin” Bangkok. Cities should exist for people, not for business.