The genesis for “My Parallel Communities of Chiang Mai (ชุมขนคู่ขนานที่เชียงใหม่)” likely began on a calm, wet-season night after the rains had subsided at One Nimman, my group of friends — portrait artists from Chiang Mai University — shooting the breeze and hustling what money we could from the few remaining Chinese tourists. Or perhaps it happened two years prior, on a Friday night in the packed living room of Healing House, in between energetic performances of freestyle rap and poetry from backpackers and drifters alike. At both I stop and ask myself, “Where are the other foreigners?” or, “Where are any Thai people?”, respectively. After having lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand for four years, it gradually became apparent to me that despite this small city’s dynamic cosmopolitan appeal, a clear division exists between the foreign expat communities and the Thai communities — and I found myself split between them.
View of the central district of Chang Moi looking west towards the Old City and Doi Suthep mountain in the background.
Buried somewhere in cumbersomely translated academic texts* from Thai to English, a folk legend holds that Chiang Mai, settled by one King Mengrai in 1296 upon the floodplain of the Ping River beneath the imposing Doi Suthep (literally, Great Spirit Mountain), was bestowed with an astrological sign of “merchant” early in its history. Whether or not there is any historical validity to this claim isn’t so clear, though it certainly fits snugly into the narrative the city would like to espouse today. Throughout the years, the city has consistently attracted artists and intellectuals of various types from around what is today Thailand as well as further afield. In additional to its long-standing reputation as a traditional crafts center (it was honored with UNESCO Creative Cities status in 2018), the city is renowned among international traveler communities as a haven for the contemporary arts, as well as an affordable and cushy “hub” for expat communities: hippies, digital nomads, missionaries, and diplomats, among others. Thais, too, revere the city, and though Bangkok remains unquestionably the primate city of Thailand, Chiang Mai is the beloved “younger sibling” of the North, attracting students and young creatives from all over the Kingdom for its lifestyle and opportunities.
Despite this cosmopolitan nature, these communities — one predominantly Thai, another predominantly (Western) expat — are not well connected. In the interest of setting aside generalized remarks about language barriers between the two communities, I believe that the disparity between the two groups stagnates the development of Chiang Mai’s artistic community overall and undermines its true potential. For a city relatively small and overshadowed, it’s a wonder how thriving it is to begin with. Cultural cross-pollination can be one of the keys to dismantling some of the harshest social challenges we deal with, and Thailand — particularly Northern Thailand — is a stable, inviting, and most of all nourishing neck of the world. One would hope this city could be petri dish for radical, or at least inclusive, social experimentation.
Lan Yim Theatre’s productions of avant-garde theatre were almost exclusively attended by Thai audiences.
So fast forward to May 2020: I find myself in my seventh week of quarantine back in the United States after making a tenuous decision to leave Southeast Asia in the midst of a global pandemic. I have been cut off from community in every sense of the word in a place that, though my “home” country, is alien and dehumanizing to me. Timing, for however amorphous it may be, is nonetheless salient here; I can lend greater consideration to what the last four years have meant to me through the creation of this map.
The map depicts two versions at the same scale of Chiang Mai’s central neighborhoods; both plot the location of my eight most-frequented hang-out spots in the two artistic communities I found myself to be a part of, one foreigner-dominated (left) and the other Thai-dominated (right). The two maps are interwoven with an s-curve timeline depicting when I met people who made a significant impact on my life over the last four years, itself broken into Thai people (top, colored blue) and foreigners (bottom, colored orange). To be clear, the people listed are not necessarily friends, nor are they people I even like — some, in fact, I had rather brief encounters with. They are the Joker card in my deck. Their one common denominator is the impact they had upon my life specifically in Chiang Mai, as opposed to elsewhere in Thailand, and this denominator is expressed in the relative size of the dots.
The particulars of the map data themselves are admittedly less relevant. The attempt to quantify what is inherently a subjective experience, particularly after the fact and in an environment so thoroughly removed from Chiang Mai, feels admittedly a bit disingenuous. I further question my own methodology; I took no detailed enumeration of people who attended these venues or how often I attended them. In the interest of full disclosure, merely listing one venue as “Popular with Thai” or “Popular with Expats” does not preclude the fact that some foreigners would show up at Thai events/venues and vice versa, but rather that clear disparities exist.
Dawk Rak (ดอกรัก), a New Age conscious community, for instance, made a concerted effort for a period of time to invite a few young Thai to teach Thai language to the foreign members of the collective on a weekly basis, but this amounted to about two or three people at most, all of whom were in romantic partnerships with members of the collective and had had decent exposure to Western education. Ultimately, their presence there felt more like tokenism than anything else, and unfortunately lacked the sort of spontaneity and invested exchange of ideas that artistic communities à la Paris in 1920 or Greenwich Village in 1950 were noted to have.
Scenes from a monthly rave held at now-closed The Edge Chiang Mai. Attendees consisted mostly of foreign expats and tourists passing through Chiang Mai. Though a minority of Thais would attend, they typically had prior exposure to Western culture through studies, foreign partners, and/or extensive time in the West.
Yet Thai are not immune to tokenism — or, as one friend put it quite well, status symbolism: Among the few foreigners I know who make consistent efforts not only to speak Thai but place themselves in situations where they are actively engaging with Thai social groups, some have experienced being the “trophy” in the room, admired for their sign of something foreign and therefore advanced, yet no one would dare “touch” them. Even if your Thai is good enough to understand that people are talking about you and your foreignness, they won’t speak to you directly about it. One’s best social move in this particular situation is to learn how to be comfortable being uncomfortable, a skill whose importance carries a particular sense of urgency now when many of those with privileges are learning in visceral ways how being “uncomfortable” is fraught with far more tension and higher stakes for people who are legitimately oppressed.
If thematic maps are intended to express stories through data, then some undeniable trends still emerge. As one might expect, the overwhelming majority of the most significant people I met — Thai or foreigner — I met within my first year of Chiang Mai. Because of the nature of the disparity between both of these groups of people, clusters of encounters with new people would shift from periods of meeting mostly Thai, and periods of meeting mostly foreigners. I spent most of my first six months encountering only Thai, a trend that swung abruptly to an 18-month period where I encountered almost all foreigners, a shift that can be attributed to meeting two particularly impactful people that helped me get a job and invited me to join the core crew of a music festival we would go on to build over the next several years (and still do, technically).
Illustrated sketches from a notebook kept from August 2019-May 2020. The map reads: “We only show the places you know.”
What this process lacks in statistical rigor it makes up for, at least, in consistent attention to whom I encountered and how. My primary sources for the timeline of encounters comes from a series of journals and sketchbooks I have kept over the years: nine books in total, with the first entry dated to January 21, 2016, until leaving Thailand — unbeknownst to me at the time — for the last time on February 27, 2020. Through these I document the ebb and flow of friendships; record encounters that begin subtly enough and then blossom, sometimes indirectly, into something significant much later. There’s an entry dated March 14, 2017, that maps out a list of people I consider to be most inspiring in Chiang Mai at that time. And another long entry from March 3, 2018, aptly summarized through its title: “A THOROUGH BREAKDOWN of (nearly) EVERYTHING that happened at BROTHERS WORKERS aka ‘SALA INNI’ (or whatever it’s called).” And then, a personal favorite, from January 26, 2020, while speaking to my partner at the time:
J: “Oh, hippies…”
N: “I love how we refer to these groups as something distant…other…”
J: “Oh no, they’re definitely not distant from you…”
A fair point that I happily admit, at least personally. Functionally, within the wider community, my discontent with the foreign crowd and my frustration with how I perceived their self-absorption actually led me to take deliberate steps to distance myself from them. As foreigners, we were living in the home of Thai people, yet doing little to engage with them or recognize them beyond cursory, “Oh, Thai people are just so shy/conservative/docile.” Recognition which, by the way, is notable for the presence of unconscious bias towards a group of people for perceived social handicaps. I was never able to quite reckon with the fact that a community made up of people from countries all over the world, diverse in background yet unified in the stated intent to include and love one another openly and radically, would succumb to a general indifference to engage with the very community they had so unapologetically planted themselves around and among — never through or within.
This indifference doesn’t necessarily come from a pernicious place, nor is it exclusive to foreigners, and it may be much more underwhelming than it is revealing. Remember that Thai people are living in an environment in which they are much less able to distance themselves from the quotidian familiarities and frustrations that accompany one’s home turf. They simply may not have the time or interest to engage intentionally with foreigners, at least not face-to-face.
One of the peculiarities with both groups is their oblique fascination with the others’ cultural relics; many foreigners come to Thailand to expand their spirituality or simply learn yoga or Thai cuisine. Go to many Thai MFA grads’ thesis shows, and they are basically a shrine for how to create abstract avant garde sculptures straight from Duchamp’s playbook. We are drawn to the objects of a culture, though unable to or uninterested to connect with the makers themselves.
At once I was obsessed with the interpersonal dynamics of these communities, and yet I spent much of my time disengaged from one or both. So in a sense I am as blind to the inner workings of the communities — particularly as they function now — as I would be if I were genuinely engulfed in them, swept away by living in their moment, too engaged to step back and observe. I’m like the clock on the wall, but I’ve got only hour hands and haven’t been rewound in ages.
It is no wonder then that, if I had to be honest, the creation of this map was a grueling process. Turns out that twenty-four-hour submissions are called challenges for a very good reason. Beyond the constraints of time and isolation, only in the four months since the challenge have I come to realize that this process was seduced by my familiar foe of ambition, attempting to pack so much into something so brief. This time, instead of concerning myself with statistical validity, a layer of emotional baggage weighed itself upon the narrative of years of relationships, both bonded and frayed, long-lasting and fleeting. From quarantine, this made the ability to connect with these experiences detached, yet the need to connect so strong. In fact, when the theme for the atlas was announced, I knew instantly that I would make a map about Chiang Mai’s communities.
“Atlas-in-a-Day” challenge or no, the impact these people — all of them — is profound, humbling, long-lasting. The pandemic has shattered the membrane of cynicism I used to hold, yet has also laid bare the stifling differences and alienation among and between different communities all over the world. I like to think that now is an apt time for us to look at our own shadows and confront our demons directly. But I worry that Chiang Mai remains a place where the air is so saturated with spiritual bypassing and disassociation with the immediate existential crises of the world at large that the prevailing tone on discourse will remain sedated.
But guarded optimism remains a virtue. Both communities remain as committed as ever to their craft, and that they are comprised of compassionate individuals intent on changing the world for the better. I have witnessed astounding examples of the abilities of both communities to make efforts to bridge gaps — all the while miraculously keeping together in a country run by a military regime that could easily disband them at any time. All that I can claim without a doubt are my notebooks, glimpses of the past, “bits of the mind’s string too short to use,” as Joan Didion put it so eloquently. They are mummified documents of moments once alive, captured and stored for a rainy day. Or a global pandemic. Or as companions on a quest to imagine what the word “community” looks like when plotted on a map.
* Sustainable Cities in Chiang Mai: A Case of a City in a Valley, D.A. Charoenmuang, 2007, ISBN: 978-974-672-293-3)