Bangkok has been a wonderful and new adventure! I am so grateful for the opportunity to interact with our Thai peers from Kasetsart University to gain incredible insight that we would not ever experience as tourists. Not only have they been knowledgeable guides, navigators, and communicators, but gracious and kind new friends that I will remember forever. Notably, our day at the Chat u Chack market was a blast, weaving our way through the colorful, crowded stalls, laughing and cracking jokes just as we would with our American friends at home, stopping for delicious lunches and coconut ice creams. It is exciting to feel a sense of home with these students, and it is humbling to experience their kindness and caring for complete strangers and pride for Thailand. Whether it is Davis with his hilarious jokes and knowledge of American culture, or sweet B with whom small gestures, phrases and smiles are the main forms of communication, Earth with his undying love for animals, face pressed against the glass in the pet section of the market, or Gig, our faithful and instrumental guide around each region whose smile literally lights up the room, I am touched by each and every one of them. Our peers are wonderful and helpful in unique ways, and so are the people and experts we have learned from and interacted with at each destination.
As we were wandering through the interminable stalls in the sweltering heat, I couldn’t help but wonder the history of the market, the pattern with which it spread and spilled, and how such a thing might ever come to an end. After talking to Gig, I learned that the market has been around since 1942, after the prime minister during that time required each province to have its own marketplace for economic development. I think marketplaces that retain their archaic and cultural auras are really important to a sense of place, and I can also see how easily a drive for money and economic maximization and appeal to tourists or Westerners can strip a place of its specific identity and subcultures. I wonder the extent to which Chat u chack and its surroundings have succumbed to this drive relative to its original identity and what remnants of the region remain amid the pets and trinkets and Gucci purses. Marketplaces have created hubs for development and art and food and trade since the beginnings of human society, and our own communities in the US really don’t have those large cultural marketplaces aside big-brand corporate malls – what does that say about our culture (or lack thereof)? This malleable identity of the marketplace, especially Chat u chak, says a lot about the economic conditions taking priority over culture. At the end of the day, I was so glad to have our Thai colleagues there to guide us!
