Reality and Randomness

Yesterday, I was at the Gallery Drip Coffee in the Bangkok Arts and Cultural Center, listening to some music on my laptop and watching the traffic crawl back and forth in front of MBK Center, all to the pleasant aroma of slow-drip, hand-poured coffee.


It was a peaceful afternoon.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Peaceful is needed. I am on the cusp of more big changes in my life, and am aware of the inexorable dislocation to come, the need to get things done before this big change, to meet up with people, and say my goodbyes yet again. What is it about this world and the frequency of goodbyes? Do departures mean as much anymore when everyone from Merriam Elementary School (my beginning) to Thammasat University (my latest job) are a click away on Facebook?


Well, they do to me, perhaps because I've been through so many of them (welcome to the expatriate lifestyle) especially the face-to-face ones - with the imperfect pauses, the need to say something but not knowing what exactly, the last hurried hugs, and the wakes left after one's departure ... it's a new globalized world, but we're all processing essentially the same stuff we always have been, the comings and goings that pepper our lives.

Anyway, I have managed to veer from the spine of this story, which is the unexpected “invasion” of the random real. There I was, plugged into audio-virtual land, when GiGi (pronounced with two hard G's), a young Chinese woman, sat down opposite me at my table, and began striking up a conversation. She had been admiring my Macbook Air, but we only spent a moment on that before moving on to all the other topics of a good, sprawling conversation (home, travels, work, life in the city, America/China). A Shanghai native connecting for a time to a New Englander in a coffee place in the middle of Bangkok.


It was a sparkly stand-out moment of the day, of random realness, in a world that has gone into a systematic kind of computerized virtual isolation (albeit with elements of hyper-connectivity on a wider scale). How many random conversations do you have with strangers on an average day, sitting on the bus, Skytrain, and subway? In the daily stress factory of Bangkok, probably not a whole lot, although the majority of them probably do occur in coffee shops (and bars). Everyone is too wiped out to connect, too plugged in to look up, and most cursory greetings in this gray city end with a smile and the almost obligatory “you speak Thai well. How long have you been here?”


This is why I love to travel, especially outside of Thailand, when I can get cut off from the grid, from the moorings of language, and where the ordinary hustle and bustle of life is subsumed by a kind of wandering wonder. India (where Tan and I traveled in 2011) had this feeling in spades. I remember vividly the myriad conversations of India (the invasions of the all-too-random-and-real) - a student in Calcutta interviewing us and guiding us along to where we needed to go, the bored hotel employee in Santiniketan who couldn't stop checking in on us, and the sad, slumping man on the train from the latter town to the former city, who bemoaned the lack of efficiency in India with a sad existential “what are you going to do? This is the way it is!”


Couple travel is great, but you can get lost in a kind of bubble with this, and my periods of solo travel have been as enlightening, if not more, for the chances of random encounters go up exponentially when you are on your own. It's no fluke that I ended up wandering around with three Brits for several days in New Zealand in 1996 (an afternoon of white-river rafting in Rotorua became a pub crawl later that night). And, I might note, this was at the very cusp of the internet invasion. No machines could distract us ... no one could check their phone.


There was not only randomness in meeting people, but also in basic communication. One took a chance connecting to people on landlines, and letter writing is a lost skill. Back in my Peace Corps tenure (1994-1996), there was an art to it, with the folding of aerogrammes (and carefully writing to fill every space) as well as a 10-day wait before any mail arrived at its destination overseas. Anticipation made the fruit of communication that much sweeter, the thrill of solid mail landing in your inbox.


I'm not sure people were any friendlier pre-internet, especially in cities like Bangkok, but I want to believe they were, that the art of conversation was practiced with delicacy and tact, and that random encounters and dialogues occurred with regularity. Perhaps that's just wishful thinking, and people buried themselves in newspapers and books and in their own thoughts.  

We do have the Twitter-verse, where you can build a random audience and start real-enough conversations, but on the flip side we've generated a whole generation of shadowy trolls who spew out snide comments from the safe distance of their computer screens.  There was less of that pre-internet.   


All of these thoughts of the “real” also make me think of my second favorite class to teach (after creative writing), media studies, where I always have students survey their own media use and then try to fast from using media for 24 hours. The latter is usually excruciating for them, and instructive, as it would be for any of us. You don't realize how much media takes over your life until you actually try to log down your daily connections or cut yourself off from it entirely. And I can't say I don't find it slightly ironic that I'm typing about “the random real” into a laptop for a blog in the corner of another coffee shop in Bangkok.


The internet beast and the systematized machines always win in the end, don't they?


But thanks, GiGi, for your reminder of the random real ...