I always looked forward to my weekends away from Bangkok with its gridlocked thoroughfares and ubiquitous construction sites towering above gouged and pummeled earth. In my mind it wasn’t the opium that I missed—it wasn’t the high that I craved. What I longed for was sanctuary from the modern world. Life outside the Chamber seemed increasingly cruel. Out there were the twenty-first century, war, and terror. A relentless feed of information made far-off events difficult to ignore, but even if I could turn my back on the larger world, the situation around me was just as disturbing.
The Southeast Asia that Willi and I had both gravitated to in our respective youths had grown modern and materialistic. We both watched in dismay as many of the quaint traditions and customs that had attracted us to the region in the first place vanished before our eyes. Westernization is the bugbear most often cited as causing the demise of old Southeast Asia, but, in fact, the majority of changes we saw were brought about by the relentless rise of new China.
The behemoth’s influence could be seen everywhere, but most noticeably in the region’s largest cities. During the 1990s, Southeast Asia began giving up its traditional architecture of teak and brick and stucco for modern Chinese-inspired concrete boxes clad in glazed tiles and tinted glass. Local craftsmen were squeezed out by a flood of impossibly cheap Chinese goods. Most affected were the ethnic Chinese themselves, descendants of a nineteenth-century exodus from the country’s turbulent past. Generations of living in Southeast Asia had bestowed upon the great-grandchildren of that first wave the easy habits common to people who live in tropical lands of plenty. They were no match for these new Chinese—famished after decades of austere Maoism and accustomed to using sharp elbows to push to the head of the line. When in 1992 Deng Xiaoping declared “To get rich is glorious,” his mantra soon carried his countrymen on a renewed push for China’s traditional southward expansion. As the century turned, the pace of modernization quickened as China became richer, and billions were invested in Southeast Asia. The swiftness of change was astonishing.
If Willi and I had allowed outsiders into the Chamber to gaze upon our meticulously re-created surroundings and to witness our cryptic rituals, most would have concluded that we were a couple of eccentric Sinophiles. But such assumptions would have missed the point. Willi and I were fans of the old, inscrutable China, its mysteries and idiosyncrasies an essential part of its charm. Opium was our time travel back to that simpler era before China—and the whole of East Asia—became known for karaoke-caterwauling and crassness.
While under the narcotic’s optimistic influence, Willi and I strove to re-create that romantic period in Chinese history when a poet might spend the day flying a kite while drinking rice wine spiced with chrysanthemum petals. New China, as well as the rest of the modern world, was a horror to us, and we went to great lengths to ensure that it ceased to exist the moment we entered the Chamber of Fragrant Mists. There were no telephones or other ways of communicating with the outside world allowed in the Chamber, and while there ensconced we never discussed current events.
Instead, we might try to identify the calls of wild birds that inhabited the thickets of bamboo on the far side of the lotus pond. We might discuss the merits of a Tibetan rug—shaped and patterned like a tiger skin—that Willi had bought from the estate of a long-dead British civil servant who had once maintained a bungalow near Mandalay. Willi and I might take turns reading aloud passages from some of our favorite books (David Kidd’s Peking Story and John Blofeld’s City of Lingering Splendour were always at hand), and at least once during each session Willi’s wife would come down to the Chamber to say hello and recline for a pipe or two.
Willi and I spent hours in each other’s company, but flagging conversation is never a problem with opium smokers. As the hours passed and the number of pipes smoked increased, we found ourselves in the Land of the Gentle Nod, a state somewhere between slumber and wakefulness, like that last second of consciousness before one drifts off to sleep. Here the clock would slow to such a crawl that lifetimes seemed to pass during the pauses in our conversation. Opium is its own timekeeper, as every smoker soon learns. At that time, when I was but a novice to smoking and enjoyed a nightlong session perhaps once a month, a single night on opium left me feeling that I knew the true meaning behind the title of Gabriel García Márquez’s first novel. Years later, after I had begun rolling my own pipes and smoking alone, hours could pass in three nods of my poppy-fogged head. I would light the lamp just before midnight and then, seemingly within minutes, an unwelcome dawn was worrying the curtains.
Over time, a single night in the Chamber seemed inadequate and my one-night trips to visit Willi became long weekends. These two- and three-day sessions, when we could manage them, were sublime. Willi had a talent for Old World hospitality and he often spent a whole week preparing for one of my visits, ensuring that arrangements were perfect in every detail.
Food may not seem to be compatible with opium smoking, but in fact the high-quality blend, when used in moderation, produces in the smoker both the desire and the ability to enjoy food. Our fabulously rare chandu heightened all senses of perception, including taste. Once we had discovered this, Willi and I added an aspect of culinary adventure to the opium equation.
Like everything else in the cosmos, Chinese foods can be divided into two groups, depending on whether they possess cooling yin or heating yang properties. Since opium is female—or yin—smokers favored masculine yang foods to keep things in balance. During its nineteenth-century heyday, opium smoking gave rise to a complementary cuisine. But, like just about everything else pertaining to opium culture, the knowledge, if not altogether lost, had been hidden away and forgotten. It wouldn’t be a matter of searching Amazon for a cookbook.
Instead, I was in charge of poring through my books in hopes of running across a reference to some opium smoker’s favorite recipe that we might resurrect. Willi might then drive his pickup truck to northern Thailand just to buy smoked boar’s meat sausages from a butcher at some Kuomintang village that he had passed through and noted years before. Back in Vientiane, Willi would seek out elderly members of the Chinese community and then, with uncommon ingredients in hand, talk them into preparing morsels that hadn’t been attempted since mid-century revolutions and migrations had made them unthinkable luxuries.
The result of all these preparations were halcyon days spent gently padding back and forth between the incense-scented coolness of the Chamber and the warmth of the sun-soothed pavilion over the lotus pond. In the shade provided by the pavilion’s roof, its thick wooden shingles covered with feathery moss, sat a low teakwood table. By mid-morning Willi’s servant was busy arranging the tabletop with rows of porcelain bowls, each containing some delicacy that Willi had spent the previous days procuring. There was pickled ginger dyed a lurid pink that seemed to match its spicy tang; flaky Chinese pastries whose waxy red and yellow markings codified sweet and savory fillings; spongy buns from which escaped a sigh of steam when torn in half—and all of it washed down with countless thimble-sized cups of slightly bitter, palate-cleansing tea. Willi directed that our banquets be served in leisurely, unhurried courses that punctuated our smoking sessions and lasted well into the night. Once the old servant had cleared away the crumbs and dregs, applause for Willi’s efforts took the form of creaking wicker as our satiated bodies sank deep into rattan chairs.
When the echoing calls of night birds became more urgent, and the fireflies’ luminous signals began to wane, we took them as signs to leave the rapidly cooling outside air for the warmth indoors. We might continue to smoke until midnight, and Willi would then roll us a nightcap—a last pipe or two—before blowing out the lamp and retiring to his room upstairs, leaving me to lounge away the sweetened night alone in the Chamber.
Opium puts one on the verge of sleep, but if smoked to excess the threshold of sleep cannot be passed. I always smoked too much and could never fall asleep. Yet far from feeling the frustration of insomnia, I savored thes
e hours of drifting in limbo. I would pass the night lying on my back with my fingers laced upon my chest, my eyes closed so their inner membranes could serve as screens upon which deeply buried memories were projected. The clarity of these visions delighted me, and the rush of love that I felt upon seeing a family member or a childhood friend sometimes brought me to tears.
These might be termed “opium dreams” by some, but they were really no more than memories that opium had made more vivid—fragile images that vanished as readily as dust blown from the cover of an old book. As long as I focused on the memories they were there, but opium in excess works against concentration, and the encounters were fleeting. Between these images were playbacks of conversations that Willi and I had had earlier that day. One exchange in particular came back to me. It was based on a nagging question that of late had made even my most rapturous moments bittersweet: Must this end?
“Willi, you know, every time I think to myself that this simply cannot get any better, I also can’t help but wonder how long we can keep it up.”
Willi had raised himself up from the bamboo mat in order to best use a wooden back scratcher to dig at the small of his back. He looked at me with bliss-heavy eyes and then turned to address the Den God in its little cove of drippy candles. “I don’t see any reason we can’t keep this up forever as long as we’re disciplined about it,” he said. “Obviously the dangers of becoming addicted have been exaggerated. Look how long we’ve been doing this.” Willi paused and then asked, “After you’ve gone back to Bangkok do you find your cravings for opium unbearable?”
“Mondays I usually sleep most of the day. Tuesdays I often have a yen,” I said, purposely using some vintage slang to amuse Willi.
Willi chuckled and rose to the occasion—the Chamber library included an old book with an extensive list of dated American underworld slang. Slipping examples into conversations was one of our favorite Chamber pastimes. “You’re just a joy-popper with an ice cream habit,” Willi quipped. He then said with some seriousness: “As long as we keep to once a month or so, we can’t get hooked.”
“Well, as long as kicking the gong is a train ride away, I guess I don’t have to worry. I don’t know how you do it, though. If the Chamber were as close to me as it is to you, I’d be on the mat every day.”
Willi shrugged. “I have other poisons. I drink a bottle of Prosecco nearly every day. Of course, alcohol is a crude substitute for chandu, but I can’t afford to become hooked. This stuff costs more per ounce than gold. If somehow things got out of hand, it would bankrupt me.”
“So how do people maintain habits?”
“Do you mean those dross-smoking skeletons puffing away down at Kay’s?” Willi winced. “Where’s the joy in that?”
Then Willi broke into a smile as a thought came into his head. “There is someone who maintains an old-fashioned habit. I’ve never told you about her, but it’s her patronage that makes it possible for me to keep the Chamber stocked with chandu. She’s a real old hand—an American left over from the war in Indochina. And as it happens, she’s due for her annual visit next month. Would you like to meet her?”
Once a woman has started on the trail of the poppy, the sledding is very easy and downgrade all the way.
—Judge Emily F. Murphy, The Black Candle (1922)
I’m not a Christian by anybody’s measure. My father’s family was supposedly Episcopalian; my mother’s Baptist. I once asked why we as a family never went to church, and my father replied that he’d be damned if he was going to waste his only day off listening to a sermon. On the rare occasion that I set foot inside a church while growing up, it was always with some churchgoing neighbor family who had coached their children to invite me along to a Sunday service. The only aspect of these outings that impressed me were the pastry feasts that followed the services of certain Protestant denominations. The Catholic masses that I attended were interesting for their rituals, but the after-service refreshments were stingy affairs. In the end, neither the colorful rites of the Catholics nor the sugar highs of the Protestants were able to inspire any spiritual yearnings in me.
From 1990 until 1995, I lived in Chiang Mai, and this brought Christians to my attention once again. Northern Thailand’s principal city has long been a base for Christian missionaries. The first one, a Presbyterian from North Carolina, arrived in 1867 when Chiang Mai was still a separate kingdom from Siam (which has officially been known as Thailand since 1949), and made his first convert two years later by using astronomical tables to predict an eclipse of the sun.
As the missionaries’ “vision” for pursuing converts spread beyond Chiang Mai, the Presbyterians began to clash with American Baptists who were competing to harvest the region’s souls. An agreement between the two denominations eventually kept the Baptists within the borders of neighboring Burma and the Presbyterians in what is now northern Thailand.
Living in Chiang Mai in the early 1990s, I at first found the city’s missionaries a curiosity, but the better I got to know them, the less I was able to smile through my encounters with them. Their inflexible ways and blinkered outlook on life were astounding. These were people who had traveled far from home and settled in the most exotic surroundings they could find, and then devoted their lives to making the locals dress, act, and believe exactly as they did. In Chiang Mai I met a middle-aged couple from America’s Midwest, overdressed in the tropical heat, who chirpily told of how they were able to convince whole villages in Burma to give up their traditional clothing and festivals. Being oblivious to their own arrogance was a trait that they all seemed to share.
More interesting to me, though, than the proselytizers themselves were their own lapsed children, living as natives in lands that their parents had dedicated entire lives to Christianizing. Some missionary families had spent generations in Southeast Asia, and it was not unheard of for their offspring to leave the fold or find more adventurous callings. Bill Young was one I heard about and wanted to meet. Born in Burma to Baptist missionary parents, Young was raised in tribal villages and was said to speak fluent Hmong and Lahu, as well as Shan. As a young man in the 1960s he had been recruited by the CIA to run espionage operations into southern China from northwestern Laos. Among other activities, Young arranged for Golden Triangle opium caravans returning from Thailand to transport radios and other espionage equipment to CIA listening posts inside the Chinese border. Young’s understanding of the terrain and the people who inhabited it resulted in his being possibly the most effective CIA agent who served in the Indochina War. But when he demurred at instituting policies that he thought would adversely affect the tribal peoples under his charge, he was replaced by a ruthless operative called Tony Poe—who is said to have been the inspiration for Marlon Brando’s commander-gone-mad character in the film Apocalypse Now.
Young’s story intrigued me, but he was reclusive. As one British resident of Chiang Mai told me, Young’s CIA past had been “exposed” in a book called The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, and he had since refused all interviews. At the time I had not yet tried my hand at journalism or had anything published—I simply had a personal interest in hearing the stories of the region’s Western old-timers. Young had retired in Chiang Mai and become a member of the city’s large expatriate community, a colorful group that included a number of Vietnam vets (a few of them spectacularly unhinged) who had been discharged stateside before drifting back to Southeast Asia. There was also a commune of aging hippies who had reinvented themselves as New Age gurus; a colony of artists attired in a patchwork of tribal costumes and jewelry; a smattering of mildly pompous academics and experts on local arcana; even a group of Western monks cloistered at one of the city’s Buddhist monasteries.
Among these expats were a few genuine old Asia hands, real long-termers who had arrived in the 1950s or ’60s. They remembered when it was possible to ride a pedicab from one end of Thapae Road to the other without being passed by a single automobile. Length of stay was not the only criterion tha
t made an old Asia hand—the genuine article had a certain attitude, an air of unflappability. They were never jaded or cynical. On a continent that turns some long-term Westerners into haters, whiners, and grumblers, they remained interested and engaged. Bill Young undoubtedly epitomized the persona, but I was having difficulty tracking him down. My asking around eventually led me to Roxanna Brown.
Roxanna ran a bar not far from Chiang Mai’s famous Night Bazaar. It was an unlicensed Hard Rock Café—the sort of knockoff that raised no eyebrows in the days before any international chains had reached the city. The bar’s interior walls were lined with dusty album covers, and there were faded and threadbare concert T-shirts tightly stretched and pinned to the ceiling with thumbtacks like the skins of oversized rodents. Roxanna’s bar was not yet open for business when I rapped on the door one day, but she answered and waved me in out of the sun.
Roxanna was small in stature, friendly, and about my mother’s age—not the type you would expect to see running a bar in Thailand, where the majority of Western barkeeps seem to be male, argumentative, and British. She wore a gauzy beige outfit that appeared to be patterned after a Vietnamese ao dai, and her short, reddish hair was tight around her head as if she had been wearing a cloche hat. I also noted a pronounced limp, but other than these facile observations, I failed to see anything remarkable about her. I scribbled some names and phone numbers into my notebook as Roxanna listed people who would know how to contact Bill Young. Five minutes later I was back on the street and thinking about my next move. Soon I’d forgotten all about Roxanna Brown.
In the end I never got to meet Bill Young in person. We talked on the telephone, but he apologetically explained that he was in ill health and unable to receive visitors. It would be a decade before I would meet Roxanna again.
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