Thais Bemoan the End of Their Nation’s Good Times

BANGKOK, Thailand — When this carefree city is in a blue funk, as it is now, Thais by the hundreds make their way to a downtown open-air temple known as the Good Luck Shrine to ask Buddha for help.

They light incense and offer donations, and at an altar laced with garlands of orchids they fall to their knees in prayer.

“My prayers are always answered here. Always,” said Tony Suwannarak, 50, who ignored a bevy of sidewalk lottery vendors the other day to take his place at the shrine with dozens of other well-dressed Thais seeking some divine intervention.

Suwannarak, a hotel executive whose savings, job and dreams have been jeopardized by Thailand’s economic free fall, said he is desperate for a few rays of good fortune to lift the clouds of depression. But like most Thais, he knows that he is going to have to pray hard because this chaotic, teeming, traffic-clogged city of 10 million has awakened from its free-spending party with a crippling hangover.

A few blocks away, at the stock exchange, Praphatsorn Angsusinha, 63, a retired U.N. employee, sat with her husband in front of a floor-to-ceiling digital board, tracking her investment in computer and technology stocks. They were headed south, and each set of updated figures brought more bad news.

“Maybe we just had too much good luck,” she said. “Fifty years ago, Bangkok didn’t even have electricity, and now you look into the sky and there are buildings that reach up, up, up. I don’t feel optimistic, but I do know we’ve been on quite a ride.”

Chai Teparak, 39, a boatman on the Chao Phraya River, knows that too. He sat by his idle long-sterned boat, his muscular body a montage of tattoos, eating scraps of fried banana from a plastic bag. It was late afternoon, and he had been waiting since dawn to be hired out to carry cargo or passengers upriver.

“I wish I’d saved something when times were good,” he said. “But the more I made, the more I spent. I ate out more, I drank more. You thought tomorrow you were going to earn more than you did today, so you didn’t worry. We all got too luxurious in Bangkok, and we gave up a lot for that luxury.”

Indeed, in its rush to develop and join the elite fraternity of Southeast Asia’s so-called economic tigers, Bangkok ended up burying its charm. A city once cherished by Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham became another tangle of wall-to-wall high-rises and bumper-to-bumper cars, its canals filled in, its parks paved over, its sidewalk cafes demolished under builders’ shovels.

“It’s hard to imagine now what Bangkok was like when I arrived,” said Kurt Waldtvietl, who for three decades has been general manager of the 121-year-old Oriental, a hotel that is universally ranked among the world’s best.

“There were flame trees and rickshaws, and everyone rode bicycles. There wasn’t much along the riverbanks except some warehouses. The homes had red-tiled roofs, and you could walk through gardens of palms. There were canals like Venice. You lived a very relaxed, tropical life.”

What changed all that--and what fashioned the shaky foundation of Bangkok’s economic growth--was the Vietnam War. It provided an infusion of dollars, as the United States built up support bases, and an influx of tourists.

What emerged was a mega-city of monster proportions. One in six Thais lives in Bangkok, whose population is more than 20 times that of any city in the country. Not surprisingly, national development focused not on long-term rural projects; the lion’s share of investment went to sweaty Bangkok, transforming it into an air-conditioned mecca of glass-and-marble glitter.

And sweaty it is. The Guinness Book of World Records calls Bangkok the world’s hottest city, largely because of the slight variations in seasonal and day-night temperatures. Every day’s forecast is the same: 98 degrees with a chance of rain.

With foreign funds pouring into Bangkok from investors eager to park their money in booming Asia, the proud Thais--the only people in Southeast Asia never colonized--bought Mercedes-Benzes and jewelry, built conference centers, golf courses and for-profit hospitals, commissioned marketing surveys to confirm that their confidence had not been misplaced and borrowed freely to support a lavish lifestyle.

Where else on Earth but Thailand, former Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh asked, “can you get three caddies when you are golfing? One to hold your umbrella for you, one to carry your bag and another to massage your back when you finish your golf game.”

But this year, as the bills came due, the nation couldn’t pay up. Thai companies owed $90 billion to foreign creditors, and--with the currency and the stock market tumbling, 58 finance companies closing and the specter of 2 million lost jobs looming--the Thais were forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund for a $17-billion bailout package.

“We lived a fairy tale,” said Busakorn Karnchan, a professor of Asian affairs at Chulalongkorn University. “For a couple of years, I had the feeling I was watching the decline of the Roman Empire, but when I’d caution friends, they’d say: “Oh, you’re a historian. What could you know?’ ”

Since the crisis hit in July, Thailand has gotten a new constitution (its 17th since 1932) and a new government (its 23rd). Neither has seemed to do much to soothe the nerves of Thais, long distrustful of politicians. Most Thais say the problems the new government has inherited--a depressed economy, an AIDS epidemic, a capital choking in traffic and pollution, a loss in the confidence of foreign investors--defy quick-fix approaches.

As Prasert Prongtong, who bought his own cab four years ago and now can barely make ends meet, put it: “The times were good while they lasted.”