Word: thailander
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...after China announced a major offensive to combat online pornography, Thailand publicized another Internet crackdown, in which local authorities had blocked 2,300 websites. Their alleged offenses? No, not images of skimpily clad women of the kind that can be found in any one of Bangkok's ubiquitous entertainment districts. Instead, these websites were banned because of material that was deemed insulting to the country's beloved royal family...
...possible for a foreign male to visit Thailand without getting a) waylaid in a girlie bar, or b) arrested? This question struck me recently in Phuket, where the best-selling titles at the airport bookshop included a self-published novel about a murdered Thai prostitute, an exposé of the country's sex industry and two memoirs by foreigners who had served time in Thai jails - a genre already as overcrowded as the prisons themselves. That Singapore publisher Monsoon Books feels there is room for one more - Nightmare in Bangkok by Andy Botts - begs two more questions...
...Answering the first is easy: there's a lot of trouble to get into. With Thailand bordering the opium-rich Golden Triangle, there will always be men like Botts who are fooled by the country's freewheeling reputation and corrupt police force into thinking that smuggling out heroin in cans of shaving foam is a sensible way to earn a living. The second question is tougher. But apart from Alex Garland's classic novel The Beach, the books I see most tourists reading in Thailand are the his-and-hers prison memoirs The Damage Done (convicted Australian heroin trafficker Warren...
...Compared to its rivals, Nightmare in Bangkok is, to lift a phrase from the classic backpacker T shirt, "same same but different." In Thailand, Botts gets jailed for heroin smuggling, but not before being incarcerated in his native Hawaii, several times, for stealing things from cars. "You could write a book on this," says a police officer, studying his lengthy rap sheet. "Please don't," is the reader's quietly muttered invocation - but Botts does...
...reputation as one of the world's most productive writer-in-residence programs looks set to flourish. One current inmate said to be writing his story is suspected arms dealer Viktor Bout. One that I hope will do the same is Harry Nicolaides, an Australian arrested for supposedly insulting Thailand's crown prince in a self-published novel called Verisimilitude that sold only seven copies. Already famous for turning criminals into writers, is Thailand now turning writers into criminals? Now that's worth writing a book about...