Beyond the tourist's veneer

For all the breadth and depth of China, Chinatown always seems to manifest as the same soulless artifice of neon-lit profiteering everywhere I’ve been in the world.

In spite of my past experiences, however, I ventured to Bangkok’s Chinatown, Yaowarat, on the recommendation of one Lonely Planet travel guide that “you haven’t fully experienced the City of Angels until you’ve… entered the dragon”.

As expected, my first look at the labyrinth of narrow streets unveiled a Yaowarat that was little more than just another kitschy souvenir emporium.

Disoriented tourists roamed the claustrophobic maze in suffocating humidity, dodging shaky shops of shoes stacked uneasily from floor to ceiling squeezed next to locals loudly hawking cheap souvenirs “Made in China”. On the main road vehicles and people inched around each other while glossy glass windows exhibited sharks’ fins and birds’ nests on ground-floor establishments.

It takes a second look to see past Yaowarat’s touristy veneer.

Yaowarat is more Thai than Chinese, a living, pulsating testament to the near-complete cultural assimilation of migrant Chinese in Thailand. I discovered, after an afternoon of dogged wandering, that even in this enclave designed to house the concentration of all things and people Chinese, I could not find a single definitively ethnic Chinese local.

Tucked between air-conditioned hat-sellers and deliverymen shouldering towers of cartons of stuff, sleepy shops from an older era loitered in quiet alleys. Here, two old men drowsed in the cool shade of a forgotten Original Heidelberg; there, a row of home-gardens luxuriated in the midday sun with blooms of every color. The smell of Thai food lingered on every corner and the sound of Thai conversations carried through the congested atmosphere.

Just another regular day in the lives of regular descendants of Chinese migrants in a no-longer foreign land.

Yaowarat encapsulates Thailand’s success with subjecting varied racial cultures to a single national identity. It’s inspiring, in a way, to observe how so many people of such different origins can find a commonality within themselves to rally to and be united on.

Yet, as the bustling microcosm disappeared around the corner in the rear window of my bright pink taxi that blazing hot afternoon, I found myself wondering if something significant had not been lost in the endeavor.