A Soi with No Name
Despite the stupidization of the species, as opposed the much more enjoyable and socially social, millennia-old practice of the alcohol-induced stupefaction of the species, the ability to stumble upon the unknown, though more and more rarified under the current technological hegemony against the individual, whose brain has, alas, been digitally pulverized into kilobyte remnants of the once-mighty gigabyte, remains intact. Thankfully, thanks to human error, human experience can still be experienced despite digitally downloaded dementia stacking the odds against us.
Take a breath. Dare to shut off your device. Be brazen: travel and forgo the local SIM card. In Southeast Asia the art of negotiating a taxi ride or motorcycle lift once involved a trying exercise for the disinclined or uninitiated Westerner: how does one negotiate a fair price to a place one has never been? The art of negotiating is no art for the home-bred, for the price has been learned through error and trial.
For the Westerner, unaccustomed to a price that is unannounced, the trial can be a trial. A lack of information, information which is necessary in the engagement of any democratic process, leads to misunderstanding and the unavoidable extra ten or twenty baht - or tens of thousands of đồng - to buoy the local economy. Tête à tête offers a chance to escape a hum-drum overplayed tune and engage the other.
Engagement with our peers, whose direct responses, directly addressing us through the art of negotiations, engage the brain and force it to collect the bits and pieces that cellular signals have been ricocheting off the cranial insides of our skulls. Trying to communicate with someone whose language we barely understand and who can barely understand ours, we move into a joyously uncomfortable space of interlanguage, which rubbing oftentimes against ridiculousness, brings newfound communicative fun and a rebirth of the love for the analog other.
Roland Barthes has written of the death of the author and championed the importance of the reader in literary criticism. The purists sighed over the modern reader who had dispatched the author’s intentions and his historical pertinence to the literary netherworld. Tsk tsk. But today, grappling within our postmodern conundrum, we realize that not only the writer, but also the reader, have both been relegated to a netherworld where 0s and 1s bounce off each other at speeds measured in Gs.
Whereas coverage is complete in Vietnam (I’ve never found myself without a few bars), speed can be cumbersome, but I was not concerned with bytes or Gs on my last foray somewhere between the still-incomplete metro and the new villa development by the sông Sài Gòn. I just wanted a motorbike taxi back to the center.
The bane of Vietnamese commuting is being stuck hugging a tipsy xe ôm somewhere in his 70s on a motorbike which would not have passed the least stringent pollution controls in Mumbai. Apparently, in the digital age, the old-timers, for whom I now have fond memories, have been replaced by the younger, tech-savvy generation who cannot negotiate a price.
In fact the young man whom I approached - evidently for his good looks - had to sign into an app to book the fare. That means, he had to pay a commission rather than negotiating a price with me and keeping his hard-earned cash. The suppression of the democratization of Vietnam, alas, can no longer be blamed on the Communist regime: rather, technology, rather than, as is widely believed, opening the flood gates of waterfalls of information, has restricted it to a trickle.
Last week, in Thailand, I asked the hotel reception desk to call a taxi, but rides are only done by apps now. So, a taxi, using his meter, followed the directions from his phone smack dab into Bangkok’s notorious traffic trickle. He asked me, I believe, if we could forsake the app’s directions, and I replied, I believed, that we could. That he knew best. But he could not disconnect from the app, and it appeared that an oncoming truck could be the only way to dislodge us from the app’s intended trek.
Luckily foregoing an accident, the taxi driver turned right into a Soi, a Soi with no name. We could have turned back, but a smell of fried chicken managed somehow to waft through the Toyota’s air conditioning. A bit of light sparkled ahead. A bit of chatter. A couple of motorbikes parked haphazardly on the left. We could turn back, or I could pay the whole fare and leave.
The latter was the only option. And I had no Thai Sim card. And I had no idea if there really was fried chicken up ahead. There was, alas, no other way to find out than… It’d only mean another ten or twenty baht infused into the local economy if worse came to worse.