Finding your Siamese twin

The reports are all positive.

Destination: Asia - Coming to Thailand & Asian Adventures

By Carleton Cole

Published by Bangkok Books, 2008

Available at Asia Books, Kinokuniya, B2S and Nai-In,  Bt375

Reviewed by Paul Dorsey

The Nation

 The titleof this debut book from former Nation sub-editor Carleton Cole might lead shoppers to think it's a travel guide, but despite its visits to many Eastern landmarks, this is very much one man's memoir.

 Why someone as young as Cole wants to write a memoir is a puzzle, even with as much to share as he has. Its real value as a "guide" will be in helping other

young Westerners who are thinking about transplanting their roots in oriental soil.

 The travel accounts are a bit madcap - impressionist glimpses of Brunei, Tibet, China, Laos, Cambodia and of course Thailand, plus a sprint through India and Japan's most beckoning destinations.

 The reports are all positive and the main focus on faith, with temple visits aplenty. Cole was raised a Christian Scientist, and its gentle tolerance is the bright light in his personal character as well as his writing. It certainly helps explain why he's "an atypically quiet American", as is noted on the book's cover (a truthful blurb, this one, as his friends and colleagues can attest).

 But the kid from Columbus, Maryland, was a Thai and a Buddhist waiting to be born. He saw a star in the East early on and, unable to dissolve into the great American melting pot, began stashing aside income for a planned year's sojourn teaching in Thailand.

 A puddle he was mopping up on the floor of a supermarket somewhere in the chilly US Midwest formed itself into Thailand's outline. He became a Siam junkie, getting his fixes at museums and libraries and waiting tables at a Thai restaurant in St Louis called the King & I.

 His dad, wary of Bangkok's fleshy reputation, recommended 50,000

condoms in a suitcase pocket, but his son wasn't migrating for sex on the sly.

 Cole came, saw, conquered and decided to stay forever. He jumped into journalism and only this past autumn left The Nation when the economy slashed the

newspaper's staff. Cut loose, he landed a sweet job on a travel website ... and wrote

this book.

 The chapters at the back were originally published in The Nation, and there's quite a contrast with the prose that precedes them. I can't resist saying that they constitute better writing and editing, and that Nation staff might have steered Carleton clear of a few grammatical slips that show up in the early going, such as "I wondered what lied ahead for me".

 But that's the funny thing about writers and editors. Hemingway turned in almighty garbage for his editors to untangle.

 Someone else who did that (but was given a much longer leash) was

Jack Kerouac, and I swear that most of this book reads like Kerouac in breathtaking mid-flight, careening across the continent trailing clanking strings of crazy phrases, bits of grammar flung to either side like nuts and bolts rattled free.

 Adding to the impression, of course, is the fact that Cole really did criss-cross America a couple of times.

 It can be dizzying, but it's a really fun ride.

 The plan at one point, he writes, was "to cross a third of the country, and then cross all of it, making it a trip of a few thousand kilometres. But on the way back

out to the Midwest, in West Virginia - the stinky town of White Sulphur Springs, which, indeed, smells like sulphur - I broke down. As I had done in 1990 while returning from the eastern US to Principia, I had forgotten to check the oil, and was suffering the consequences."

 A state trooper helps him wait for a lift and asks where he's heading. "I found myself just blurting out 'Thailand'. He considered the meaning of that while tipping back his hat. 'Via St Louis and Francisco,' I added."

 Interestingly, the majority of the wild stuff is about his last years in the US, when he was odd-jobbing around for airfare. Once in the East, Carleton settles down to some dignified looking around. This appears to be aided greatly by his wife, Sutamon, known as Mai.

 As in Andrew Hicks' "My Thai Girl" books, there's nothing like a good Thai partner in a starring role to round out a farang's book about this country.

 Their combination of charm and rationality has a balancing effect on Westerners' spurious claims to understand the place and, in Mai's case, a guiding hand on the keyboard too.