"Reading 'Bangkok Wakes to Rain' Helped Me Imagine a New Normal"
from YES! Magazine:
Reading “Bangkok Wakes to Rain” Helped Me Imagine a New Normal
BEENISH AHMED
4 MIN READ
For the past several years, Bangkok has been the most-visited city in the world, drawing 22 million visitors in 2019. Like urban centers across the globe, this metropolis—once filled with selfie-stick toting and sunscreen-slathered tourists—was eerily stilled because of a strictly enforced lockdown that is now being eased. The Thai New Year, which usually draws throngs of people into the street for days in mid-April—splashing one another with water guns, buckets, and even elephants to cleanse away past misdeeds—saw almost no action this year. Millions of people who had planned to visit Bangkok are also under some form of social distancing or stay-at-home order, nursing a sense of uncertainty not only about when traveling safely will be possible again, but what sort of world we’ll re-enter.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain, a novel by Pitchaya Sudbanthad imagines both.
The novel offers a guided tour of corners of Bangkok that may well be overlooked by the average visitor, as well is its temporal contours. The debut novelist deftly cuts across present time, slipping in and out of the past and future to bring forward a slate of characters who inhabit different periods in Bangkok. Sudbanthad maps a sense of perspective and possibility that feels urgent for a city that has faced existential threats long before the current outbreak of the coronavirus.
Bangkok is sinking as the sea is rising around it. Experts predict that 40% of Bangkok will be underwater by 2030 if no major changes are made to mitigate the damage. The city’s precariousness adds a certain morbid twist to its appeal as a destination that has only added to its woes. Bangkok has faced rapid industrialization to accommodate so many tourists and tourist industry workers, leaving the city with fewer of the green spaces and natural coastlines that serve as natural defenses against flooding.
“The snakes were the first to seek higher ground. The people of Krungthep began finding them in places they weren’t often spotted before—curled around roof antennas or slithering up parking garage ramps,” Sudbanthad writes, using the Thai name for Bangkok. He takes us along for an imaginary tour of what might become of the city, with roads turning into canals and the lower stories of building filling completely with saltwater. ...........(more)
https://www.yesmagazine.org/opinion/2020/06/10/coronavirus-bangkok/
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