Thanks Russ, I find your writings interesting. You have the makings of a great novelist. I now understand why your main focus in photography is on street scenes, to capture that emotional reaction between people.
I lived in Thailand for about 14 months from 1963 to 1964. I had my 21st birthday there. I taught English for a living. It was the best time of my life.
When I've returned to Thailand in recent years, I've been dismayed at the masses of tourists, mostly Chinese. I feel it's a paradise lost.
What initially impressed me about Thailand was the fact that desperately poor people, by English standards, appeared to be so happy; in fact much happier than the much wealthier people in England.
In those days I had one of the first Pentax Spotmatics. Here's a shot of a lovely lady drenched in mud, 1963 or maybe 1964.
Hi Ray,
The girl in that picture is a living illustration of
sanouk. (I see it written as "sanuk," but the only proper way to write it is "สนก.") I can't read or write Thai, though I did learn enough of the spoken language to get around town. I once used some of my up-country Thai on a Bangkok cab driver who laughed and said, "You speak hillbilly Thai." Of course the fact that almost all Thai kids are taught some English helped. If you taught there, I'd assume you're fluent in Thai. On my second Thai tour in 73 and 74 I had a captain working for me who'd been through the Air Force language school and was fluent. I envied him. He also was both young and single. Wow! You can imagine the result.
It's interesting that you shot that picture in 63 or 64. I got to Ubon in December, 64, and six months later I was off to Can Tho, Vietnam. I came back to Thailand, this time to Udon Thani, in 73. Things already had started changing. From what you're telling me I don't think I'd want to go back. I'd like to remember it the way it was then -- especially the way it was in 64. See the last paragraph in
http://www.russ-lewis.com/Poetry/Preface.html. If you're interested, you can read about my two SEA tours at
http://www.russ-lewis.com/history/index.html, which is a memoir I wrote for my grandkids.
To this day I'm sorry I didn't make it down to Angkor Wat when I was at Ubon. I could have taken a week's leave and gone down, but I got busy and put off the trip. Suddenly one night I got hauled out of bed to go downtown and pick up a top secret frag order. The next morning Rolling Thunder started. That was the end of any plans for Angkor Wat.
Love the picture of the Cambodian kids, probably on their way to school. I look at a picture like that, of beautiful, easy-going people, and think of what happened to them later with Pol Pot, and it breaks my heart.