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Text and photography by Nadia Beard

I’m alone as I ride the taxi from the airport to Ratchathewi, a district in central Bangkok named after the royal consort to a past Thai king. It is dark outside, and as we glide past billboards and corrugated roofs, all brightened by the streetlights, I realise I could be anywhere. It’s been 22 years since I was last in this city, and in the intervening years it has been transformed by the breakneck modernisation of the 1990s and 2000s. I recognise nothing.

 Krung Thep Thawarawadi Si Ayutthaya, Krung Thep Maha Nakhon Si Ayutthaya, Sia-Yut’hia, Krung Thep – Bangkok has been known by many names across the centuries, but through them all, its importance in controlling southern Asia has been known to all who have attempted invasion. My mother, Helen (her birth name, Peingrudee, remains long unused), was 18 when she arrived in 1980s Bangkok. Born in Thailand’s north-eastern province of Nong Khai, named after an unremarkable provincial town bordering Laos that’s split by Asia’s mighty Mekong River, her childhood was spent in the protective clutches of a Catholic boarding school in nearby Udon Thani. It was during her years as a Bangkok University humanities student that the influx of foreign investment began to reshape the city: businessmen from Japan became common fixtures in the nightclubs and the introduction of escalators into the city’s newly completed high-rises foreshadowed the business boom that was to come.

My experience of Thai culture has mostly been pieced together from the fragments my mother carried with her when she left Bangkok and the Thais who have visited our home in Britain. In 1984, nearly a century after my great-grandmother had made the gamble of leaving her native China and moving south to Bangkok, my mother decided to pin her hopes on the promises of globalisation and came to the UK.

Being back in Bangkok after so long feels at once like a blessed homecoming and a stark reminder of what I’ve lost. “You’re better where you are in London, trust me,” my 21-year-old cousin, Ohm Piyawatpipittana, tells me as we dodge teenagers in crop tops rushing towards a stage outside Siam Center mall, a low-slung archetype of global shopping glinting behind the thin jets of a fountain. Ohm and I began talking over Messenger and Instagram a few years ago, and I was glad to finally meet him for the first time. It’s immediately clear, however, that where I’ve returned hoping to restore some of my Thai heritage, Ohm is trying to leave his behind; next year, he’s hoping to emigrate to Europe.

So much has changed. It’s a refrain my mother repeats to my sister, Tania, and I a lot during this trip. Though she’s visited more recently than the two of us, my mother is the one most surprised by what she sees. “Modern,” she keeps saying, smiling.

Bangkok is a city with a thirsty, high-wire energy. Modernisation happened quickly in the 1980s and 1990s; international investment, first from Asia and later the rest of the world, created a metropolis that could hold its own as a reliable centre for global finance and development interests. Glass-clad skyscrapers are not restricted to one area; they are spread unevenly and relentlessly throughout all of the city’s central neighbourhoods. I’m happy to be here. I know I’m a tourist, but walking with Ohm makes me feel less foreign. Down on street level, as he and I walk sandwiched between malls and noisy traffic towards Siam Square where we’ll have dinner, traces of the previous week’s protests are still visible: dozens of Thai students are crammed together as they curl up the staircase that connects the street with the entrance to the mall and the SkyTrain looming above them both. Just days before I arrived, Bangkok had seen its largest protests since 2014, when a military-backed coup removed the government, installed army chief and coup leader General Prayuth Chan-ocha as prime minister, a move swiftly endorsed by the king. It was Thailand’s 12th military coup in the past 88 years. Here on the stairs, Thai students were continuing the previous week’s rally in defence of opposition party Future Forward, which the ruling junta has threatened to ban from running in the next elections. It was a brave act, given that protesting can lead to a life in jail. I ask Ohm what they’re saying. “That democracy should live on,” he shouts back to me over his shoulder. “And that dictatorship should get the fuck out.”

Ohm works as an assistant manager in a Chinese company that imports car parts, but it’s his side import-export business in machinery that feeds the savings he’s hoping will support a new life abroad. Staying in Bangkok or Thailand is not an option, he tells me. His parents are nearing retirement and, he says, “there has hardly been any change in their lives since they were my age. It’s embarrassing that we live somewhere where this is seen as normal”.

When I look at Ohm, with his closely cropped hair and round face, I don’t see much of a resemblance between him and my mother. Ohm looks like his father, my uncle John, and I can see a lot of my mother in John. I’ve inherited Afro hair from my father’s Yemeni lineage, but people say I look like my mother. This is how I connect us all together. When my mother left Thailand, John stayed put, eventually having Ohm who would later become a companion to Khun-Yai, our grandmother, caring for her in the final years of her life in a Bangkok suburb. I have only a few memories of Khun-Yai, and it’s hard to distinguish what I actually remember and scenes I’ve seen in photographs of us together in her small, two-storey Bangkok house 22 years ago. When I ask Ohm about her, he gets emotional. I share a feeling of loss, but it’s less for Khun-Yai herself than for the relationship with her I never had. I’m glad she had other grandchildren who were able to care for her.

As we walk together along the streets of Bangkok, the nerve centre of the Asian country that has seen more political coups than any other, there is little to see that gives this fact away. There are no memorials on street corners commemorating societal struggle, no statues to political leaders; even graffiti is rare to see. “Bloodless” is the word often used when Thailand’s coups are written about. “My generation asks the question: why has it been like this?” Ohm says. “We don’t want history to repeat itself. We want change. I want to know why our country is only going backwards.” A few days later, I see a photo Ohm posts to Instagram from another protest. I’m worried for him.

In the morning, I’m awake before anyone else, so I take a taxi to Old Bangkok. I’m relieved the SkyTrain doesn’t reach down there. In the city centre’s urbanised neighbourhoods, the smog-covered highways are impossible to avoid; walk around the backstreets and you will eventually cross them again, the concrete channels of the train line looming above. It’s nice to have nothing between the sky and me here.

To find Old Bangkok on a map, you need to look for one of the bulges in the Chao Phraya River as it wends southward to the Gulf of Thailand. From the river’s banks heading east, a great stretch of land is covered by the Grand Palace where the Kings of Siam lived and governed in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s still the official residence, but neither King Maha Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun nor the royal family still live on the grounds. I ask the taxi driver to let me out further away in Old Town, a web of streets that acts as a bulwark between the palace and the din of the city centre. Clinging to the edges of awnings on the two- and three-storey buildings are the predecessors to the slick mall advertising that flashes day and night from the modern malls. Jostling for your attention are oblong boards, some lit kitschly from the inside, others handwritten, which make it clear what the main clientele in this part of town is looking for: Burger King open 24 hours, money exchange, tattoos. None of these boards is written in Thai.

I don’t remember my mother cooking Thai food for us as children, which I now see as another expression of her desire to assimilate. Later, when we were teenagers, she returned to the flavours she loved, although to me they were sometimes too strong or too unfamiliar. Congee, a hot soupy rice dish, is always served with marinated minced pork in our house, and I see it being eaten here at a cafe, which makes me glad that some authenticity in Old Town still remains. Only to me, congee is a dinner dish as its most overpowering ingredient – fish sauce – is too acrid to stomach so early. (“Fish sauce is the key ingredient,” is a trope used by my mother so often I’ve suggested it becomes our family motto.) And yet here are people eating it before 11am. I carry on walking, unsure if I can face it so early in the day. Next time, I tell myself.

As I walk around the Grand Palace I sweat underneath the thick, shapeless T-shirt I’ve been made to buy at the entrance to cover my exposed shoulders. Groups of tourists are everywhere, taking selfies in front of the glinting, jewelled walls of old temples, or sheltering out of the sun on marble steps. I know from childhood photographs that I’ve been here before, but I don’t remember it. These gilded temples, with roofs that cascade downwards to that recognisable upward curl at the edges, were built in the 18th century, after the defeat of the mighty Ayutthaya Kingdom that had ruled southeast Asia from here for over 400 years. Twenty years after the destruction of Ayutthaya by a Burmese invasion, a coup succeeded in putting its leader Rama I on the throne, and in 1782 he established the royal Chakri dynasty that rules Thailand to this day. The more fatalistic among Thais will often put today’s political weakness for coups down to the founding story of Thailand’s royal family. This elaborate complex of temples and the wide, low buildings of the palace itself was Rama’s expression of Siam’s new leadership. The former palace in Thonburi – now a hipster restaurant district rightly considered Bangkok’s best for food-lovers – would be no longer. The dynasty would start its life here, on the banks of the Chao Phraya River.

There are cities where the vestiges of history plainly pock the city for all to see: in archaeological remains, bullet holes, plaques marking where an important something or someone came to an end. In Bangkok, encountering the past feels less natural, as though it’s somehow incompatible with the city’s modern identity. It’s either bulldozed over or cordoned off and preserved to maintain Bangkok’s global identity and its attendant focus on tourism. When I later comment on how complete Bangkok’s urban regeneration has been since I was last here, Ohm demurs: “It would be even better if we had a 21st-century society to match.”

I take a boat back to Ratchathewi and we pass several temple sites that border the river. When the driver calls out “IconSiam”, it’s mostly the petite young women, ageless under their dark sunglasses, who get off. At the end of the pier is the largest mall I’ve seen here. Entirely made of glass, the floors are all curves and angles and recede the higher they get. Recognisable names of Italian couture beam out from above shop doors. Atop it all is a striking symbol of how even Thailand’s most treasured heritage has been appropriated in service to shopping: on the roof, in silver and glass, the unmistakable gable of the traditional Thai temple glints under the sun.

Ratchaburi, a coconut-producing province west of Bangkok that shoulders Myanmar, is a vision of the pre-industrial Bangkok of 50 years ago. Its clutch of lean riverways unfurl into the fast flowing Mae Klong River that is eventually swallowed by the Gulf of Thailand. Walking around Bangkok, my mother often used its pre-industrial moniker “the Venice of the East”, as though she was worried I’d think the dry, concrete gutters we flanked while wandering the city were how Bangkok had always looked. In Ratchaburi, the canals are still numerous and essential to the region’s economy and social life. She tells me it’s a good thing that it hasn’t gone the way of the capital. Tourists flock here, but so do Thais, my mother says: “It’s a reminder to us of what life used to be like.”

Our trip to Ratchaburi isn’t a random one. We’re going to meet Sriubon Swangngam, a woman I know as Tooey and my mother’s best friend from boarding school; my sister and I haven’t seen her since our last time in the country. As we drive to her coconut farm, an excess of the season’s crop marks our journey; piles of discarded green coconuts dot the roadside like irregular mileposts. Like my mother, Tooey also left Thailand in the 1980s. She settled in America, but the most significant difference between them both was that Tooey was undocumented. For 30 years she lived in California without social security, earning cash in hand before eventually returning to Thailand, aged 58, to spend her savings on a Ratchaburi coconut farm where she lives with her brother. I think back to Ohm, desperate to leave, who pointed to the thwarted potential of his parents’ life in Bangkok as an omen of what life lived out here would be like. For all the modernisation wrought on Bangkok in the last 30 years, it’s hard to see what’s really changed here.

We get to the floating market in Damnoen Saduak district, one of Ratchaburi’s most famous sites, early the next morning. There are only a few people in the car park when we arrive. The market, says Tooey, “has been the region’s main source of business since long before we were born”. On the main waterways it’s clear from the first few stalls – covered rafts raised a few inches off the canal waters by stilts – that the stock is selected with tourists in mind. I’m disappointed. Laid out close to the raft edge are tacky embroidered bags and carved elephants. Even Old Thailand hasn’t managed to escape the tourist-driven approach it learned from Bangkok. The further in we get, the more the water becomes thick with other boats filled with coconuts in coolers, rice cookers and palm leaves folded into bowls holding sticky rice and mangoes for sale.

One thing catches my nose before my eyes: bags of yellow, rotten-smelling durian flesh are being hawked by a woman in a boat sailing towards us. My mother calls her over and we buy some of “the golden fruit”, as she calls it (although I suspect only those like her who love it call it that). Durian is a fruit with such a suffocating smell that it’s not uncommon to see signs banning the stuff from Bangkok hotels and trains. In Britain, it’s hard to get; few Asian supermarkets will stock it, and when they do it’s expensive. My mother’s recurring joke is that I can never become fully Thai because I don’t like it. In fact, the smell is so revolting I’ve been put off from ever trying it. On the way back, we finally see some quiet moments of the old life Tooey and my mother have told us about. Along the back canals, an old woman is bent over as she waters potted plants in front of her house; on another porch, a toddler stretches out on a bamboo mat. There are no cables overhead, no other boats in the water. We sail back and it’s quiet.

Back at the farm, we can see Tooey’s brother outside, churning up water onto the tree trunks with his boat’s motor as he steers up and down the water channels. Repatriation stories are relatively rare in Thailand: those who have the means to leave often don’t return. My mother says she was surprised that Tooey traded in California for Ratchaburi (“when we were in our twenties we would have both done anything to leave,” she remembers), but here, away from the relentless energy of Bangkok, I can see the peaceful, familiar appeal. Tooey is happy as we finish every last strand of pad thai and she serves us slick, fridge-cold chunks of coconut flesh for dessert. It’s a welcome antidote to the midday heat.

I have convinced my mother that she can’t take her remaining durian on the plane, that we need to finish it or throw it away. She looks at me expectantly. I try not to smell it before sliding a piece into my mouth. The texture isn’t what I expected. It’s not fleshy, but has a soft, creamy quality that’s unlike any other fruit I’ve eaten. It cloys on the roof of my mouth slightly, but its aftertaste is sweet. Mercifully, the act of eating it has somehow cancelled out its smell. It’s not so bad after all; I ask for another piece. ◉