Day 2: Jim Thompson House
Jim Thompson House was just an average tourist experience. Some good parts, some unique sights but it was filled with passels of unenthusiastic tourists checking the boxes. Lonely Planet, page 654, check. Honestly I need to report that I was one of these.
Jim Thompson was an American who, after WWII, fell in love with Thailand. Left his wife and worked for the CIA née OSS. Enjoyed Thai silk so much that he became a one man trade delegation for it and helped revive the art. Interesting guy, interesting life. I love history and politics and there’s got to be a lot of juicy stuff there.
The house itself is a neat structure and I learned about spirit houses (pictured): tiny homes Thai folk tradition would have you make as a place for the ground spirits you disturb when you build a house. The man led an interesting life and it shows in his collection of old Thai artworks displayed about the place.
He was an architect bent on authenticity and it shows in the building. But the building is small. Much smaller than a typical suburban home these days despite the fact that it was amalgamated from several (three?) old Thai houses. Just outside the house, there’s a lot of upsell with the coffee house, the bookstore, the souvenirs. But it was satisfying to photograph, and then there was the tour.
The tour is on lockdown: lock up your bags on the way in. No shoes, naturally. No photographs in the main area. The origin of this mini police state came up during the tour when the guide drew attention to a missing china cabinet. Destroyed when a tourist with a pack sent it to the floor. 1M฿ — $40k. And a mean policy: guides are now responsible for damage caused by their charges. This made me feel even less sanguine about the place.
Our guide was very kind but I was most fascinated to listen to her English. The longest I’d heard a Thai not fluent in English speak it. It seemed like I could hear the bones of Thai sentences underneath. Like I could understand a bit more Thai from how it warped conventional English idioms when she spoke.
Certainly there was a lot more repetition than in English: ‘Jim Thompson was a single man. The single man Jim Thompson’. A lot of demands to ‘look towards the bedroom, please and thank you’. A lot of demurring from sensitive subjects with ignorance: “I don’t know anything about the CIA1, ha, ha”, “he left his wife to come to Thailand, I don’t know why she didn’t come”. It was captivating to really listen to the grammar, not to pick out errors in English but to guess at the proper grammar in Thai. To me, thinking about this and wondering if I’ll notice it as I become a little more familiar with the language was the best part of this tour.
So maybe it was interesting after all.
