Travel Book Review ~ Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind by Carol Hollinger - An American Housewife's Honest Love Affair with the Irrepressible People of Thailand.

Category: Travel Book Reviews & Site News
Posted: Nov 26, 2010 03:18:59 AM
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Synopsis:

Mai Pen Rai is a wonderful memoir of author Carol Hollinger's expat life in Bangkok in the 1960's. A travel classic.

Mai Pen Mai Means Never Mind by Carol Hollinger. First published 1965. ISBN 9748303039. Click here to see if we currently have a copy in stock.

Imagine living in Thailand as a a well paid expat in the 1960s. Before internet, 7-11s, 9-11, mobile phones and globalization. Author Carol Hollinger did exactly that. She moved to Bangkok with her family as her husband worked for the American foreign service. What I love about the book is that the author rejects the normal paths of American expat wives: ladies luncheons, gin and affairs. Instead she gets to know the locals and takes a job at a Thai university.

As with all my reviews, I could blab on endlessly about the how good the book is, and you would have no reason to believe me because I would really like to sell a copy to you; so I select a favourite passage or two from the book and leave it up to you.

I just love this piece about her servants to bits:

Weird and extraneous people were constantly occupying our modest servants' quarters. We had been warned against this also. Squatters meant stolen food. The normal procedure was to buy 100-pound sacks of rice for your servants and they provided the remainder of their own food. I did worry a little before mai pen rai set in, but it seemed impolite to tell people that they could not have guests. Later on as we discovered that we weren't robbed, that our food bills were lower than an other Americans we knew and when I found out, astonished that the servants loathed American food and considered it uncivilized, I relaxed. Anyway, I secretly enjoyed the artistic effect of the crowd that ebbed and flowed around our compound. Siamese clothing is exotic, varied and enormously colorful, and my furtive peeks at the outbuildings made me feel as though I were living backstage on a Gilbert and Sulivan production.

One of our favorites was a long, thin, grandfatherly man who sported an aristocratic, curling Chinese goatee. He pattered through our gate every few weeks, bumping and bowing with the lacy cadence of the elderly Oriental. We never found out who he was and all the servants disclaimed any knowledg of him.

"Mai lu, mai lu" (not know, not know), they would proclaim with ostentatious honesty when we questioned them. Jack thought he was an installment collector. Holly thought he was related to somebody. To me he looked a bit overcostumed, for even a Hollywood musical and I couldn't begin to guess. He beamed roguishly at me whenever we chanced on each ther and he carved beautiful desserts from Thai fruit for our table: delicate, latticed orange baskets filled with home-brewed sugar fruit and melons carved in entrancing animal and boat shapes with lighted candles inside.

One evening as we were expecting ten people to dinner within the hour, Uthai announced pleasantly that both water and electricity had vanished. I was startled to hear my own voice murmur "Mai pen rai." Uthai gave me a gentle smile and her large liquid eyes approved my answer. As I helped her look for old candles I brooded over the fact that I wasn't in hysterics. In the usual fashion of American women I had aIways believed that public utilities were guaranteed by the Constitution. That first mai pen rai was something of a landmark, I now realize. Thailand had begun to teach me that it was possible to whittle down my gigantic list of necessities, the lesson trailed a curious freedom in its path. I do not panic any more with the cessation of utilities. I know that the dirtiest water boiled for ten minutes will be pure enough to drink. I know that if the lights vanish the next dawn will bring the friendly sun. But that first mai pen rai had sinister overtones. Although I kept it a dark secret I realized that I had begun to share the immense joy of the Siamese when Jiings mechanical bogged down . . . the exact quality responsible for more American maladjustment than any other aspect of Thai character! When the inanimate, mechanical world wheezed to a sickly halt, as it so often did in Bangkok, I wreathed my face in deceptive gloom the while I savored the beautiful moments when the twentieth century had to back down ingloriously.

Animal Life in Bangkok

The animal life in Bangkok often became too intimate for comfort. A family of tokays lived in the rafters above our porch. These resemble alligators and if they croak seven times it is supposed to bring good luck. We never had one that could count beyond six and a half and it infuriated us. We would sit breathless as we listened and counted. "TOKAY TOKAY TOKAY TOKAY TOKAY TOKAY Tohhhhhhhha," and it would run down unhealthily. There was one awful specimen, related to the tokays, I think, but much bigger. To me it looked like a baby dinosaur. If it fell on you and bit you it had to be sawed off. I confronted a three-foot one in the pantry one night and fled in panic, but once we had screens they were unable to get inside. Returning home at night we had to wade through dozens of ugly toads at the door. Inside, the house was always full of chin chucks. The Thai like these because they eat mosquitoes. I loathed them because they looked af though they were fashioned of animated fungus and they were around in such quantity. They had huge, saucer eyes and they seemed to always be watching me and they breathed in horrid, sucking gasps.

We were also given a Cambodian Chunee, which is a form of rare gibbon. He lived in a tree outside the dining room and he had a magnificent repertoire of tricks which he did for his breakfast and he scolded us severely if we weren't fast enough in bringing it to him. If in a good mood he would thank us for food with a pleasant "Ooooo oooooo" but if melancholy he would turn around and show us his back and this always seemed very final. Most of all he loved jelly sandwiches and beer. About once a month he chewed through chain, leather, rope or whatever confined him at the moment, and we had a wild, exciting chase to capture him before he electrocuted himself on high tension wires. He would caper over to our neighbor's garden and munch her poinsettia while she swore in helpless fury. Once, he swung insanely into our house, sat in the butter on the table, grabbed a comic book of Holly's, swaggered up the stairs and by the time we had breathlessly reached him he was sitting calmly on the toilet reading the comic book upside down. My husband wouldn't believe it even as he looked.

One morning I noticed a snake sunning itself on a high branch of a tree outside our bedroom window. It lived under the eaves of our roof. Snakes are either rattlers or garter snakes to me and since this one was not a rattler I didn't worry. I forgot that I was in Southeast Asia. One day, a few weeks after my first glimpse of the serpent, we received the Siam Society's Natural History Bulletin. In it were beautiful illustrations in color of the reptiles of Thailand. Out of curiosity I looked up our languid sunbather and did a double take. There he was — exactly. Underneath him was the ominous word COBRA.

We tried in vain to capture him. He would always slither back under the eaves before we could attack and I could hear him keeping house right above my bed. There was a hole in the ceiling and I stuffed it with Kleenex as a rather frail precaution. The children were warned to make a wide circle under the tree when playing in the garden. Thus we cohabitated with a cobra for the length of our stay with no dire results.

The American Expat Housewife Set...

I AWOKE already dismal. This reaction derived from my prospective day. We had been in Thailand several weeks and although I found the country exotic beyond my fanciest expectations my life was not. The American group in Thailand had succeeded in transplanting suburbia and I was im-meshed in a net of cocktail parties and ladies' luncheons. In the morning I was to swim with American friends at the Sports Club. Lunch was to be given by the American Women's Club and I would converse and eat with fifty other American women. Dinner was to be with American friends who would introduce us to other American friends. The menu would be flawlessly Yankee and would consist of food imported by the Post Exchange from America.

The parties we attended all had an odd similarity. Proper American housewives happily abandoned their former uniform of sloppy tweeds and squishy galoshes and had adopted attire they had previously worn only in the far, far reaches of their own wish fantasy. Gorgeous cocktail and evening dresses made for a song by local dressmakers, masses of Oriental jewelry (especially long, jangly earrings), painted nails and toenails, teetering, plastic-heeled sandals and a scotch and soda became their overseas uniform. Above all this splendor peered the wan faces of Caucasian females in the tropics where, unless one worked fanatically at it, tan melted in a day. Lipstick was the only possible cosmetic because everything else eroded in the constant above melting temperature. New arrivals were usually conspicuous, for their faces gradually took on the runny appearance of an expiring candle as mascara, eye shadow and rouge melted chinward.

Except for a sprinkling of condescending royalty there were no Thai at any of these parties. Once I asked plaintively, "Where are the Thai?" There was an embarrassed pause which the hostess broke with a defensive "This is just a comfortable American party. We know dozens of Thai." For six weeks I went to comfortable American parties and failed to meet more than five or six Siamese. Everyone claimed to know the Thai intimately but I never encountered any evidence in the flesh.

I do not mean that I was more adventurous or cultured than other Americans. The truth was that I had a sentimental fixation about "getting to know the natives." The bulk of the Americans I met overseas were a credit to our country and far removed from the Ugly American stigma with which we torture ourselves. They were apologetic about not knowing Thai. The Thai have a superiority complex; they despise our food, loathe our manners, and are hard to cultivate. If the Siamese were not found at American functions it was not for lack of invitation. My only personal criticism of us abroad is that the neurotic at home tend to be more so overseas. In the women especially the habit of servants (a habit that can be found in approximately two minutes) seemed to foment strange delusions of grandeur. The excessive leisure threw them prematurely into that vacuum the middle-aged face when their children enter college or marry. In America a thousand different possibilities may fill this void, but in the Far East alcohol and parties are the route of least resistance.

During our first month we were invited to a riverboat party. The Chao Phya River is the heart of Bangkok life and I had been so incarcerated by the "comfortable" American parties that the trip seemed a foray into a new world. We passed the muted brown of waterlogged teak boats piled high with the dark ocher of unhulled rice. I stared at the carnival piles of gaudy food stuffs in the floating markets, at the intricate, retrained patterns of Thai batik, the saffron Grecian robes of he many priests, the nobility of tightly drawn and ancient Asian faces, the alert, saucy faces of the naked children, and he towering gilt of the temples. I watched the absorbed dignity of a beautiful Thai girl as she bathed in the river with the most circumspect modesty, pulling her clean pasin down over a mellow gold body as she allowed the wet one to fall.

Inside the main cabin conditions were less romantic. Our hostess was in ruthless pursuit of a husband other than her own. The woman had four children and at home I was convinced that she would have been one of those horrid creatures who wander around all day in a faded bathrobe with their air in curlers. She would wander in a house bursting with dirty dishes, unemptied ashtrays, runny-nosed children and sour diapers. In the East, where she had lived since the birth f her children, the care of her offspring had been handed casually over to ayahs and she had become a femme fatale. The wife of the pursued husband had been reduced to alcoholic chaos by the end of the trip and the whole journey ecame a nightmarish drunken din. Empty beer bottles were tossed carelessly into the river despite the strong probability that a native head might be in their path. The Thai crew watched us impassively with horrifying sobriety.

Social life during the day was not so lurid but equally exasperating. The veiled, malicious gossip of our myopic society led to agonizing caution in conversation. To avoid all accusations of gossip, unless solidly engaged in it, women clustered limply around such stultified topics as "servants" and "inconvenience."

American women were always having monthly luncheon eetings in huge groups. At these gatherings we sat at tables Ith six or seven other women we hardly knew and discussed servants. At my first luncheon my conversation proved unacceptable.

A lady sitting across the table from me tried pleasantly to make me feel at home by asking, "Are you happy with you staff?"

Happy! I was ecstatic. I opened my mouth to inform every one how divine life was away from the kitchen sink when my questioner added, "I simply cannot get my Number One to clean under the refrigerator."

My open mouth closed frantically like a guppy. It had never occurred to me to clean under the refrigerator. Nowhere in the world would I have even thought of there being anything under the refrigerator. With gloom I decided that, by some fantastic freak of sampling, all the other women were superb housekeepers and lived in shining, immaculate homes in America while I lived in self-induced filth. Although none of their servants was up to their standards our servants were humiliatingly above mine. Indeed, I hoped uneasily that my husband would not notice how clean they kept our house.

"Our servants are very good," I mumbled miserably. A miasma of subtle disapproval emanated from our table of women, good housekeepers all. Many women fired whole sets of servants every three weeks or so. They would sit with pursed lips and chronicle the outrageous actions of their hired help. "They sleep all afternoon." These women embarrassed me because the ones most militantly demanding of perfection I sneakily suspected of never having had a servant before they had been popped into Paradise. Others told of the absolute necessity of locking all cupboards to keep servants from stealing. A few cans of Spam such as we had lost to Kau seemed a small loss compared to the cost of insulting the vast majority of the honest with a padlocked pantry.

After two such luncheons I was surfeited.

Mai Pen Mai Means Never Mind by Carol Hollinger. First published 1965. ISBN 9748303039. Click here to see if we currently have a copy in stock.