Beautiful Sunday: getting a bus to Chinatown to buy a new Chinese calendar.

3 days ago

I was looking at my wall calendar to plan for some train tickets in December and January. Then, I realised that it’s almost the end of the year. There’s only two pages left on my Chinese calendar. I was quite shocked that time slipped by so fast that I had to plan for January once again. So, I had to buy a new Chinese calendar as I couldn’t plan anything without physical representation of time in tangible calendar. I could never used digital planner as I was so used to scribble on paper calendar and seeing all the numbers in orderly formats.

Also, I couldn’t trust digital notes as I could easily forget about them and delete them by mistake. It’s much more reassuring to have my paper weekly diary and Chinese calendar to remind me of the structure of my life. The priority was to go to Chinatown to get a few Chinese calendars. I took the local hot bus (without air conditioning so it’s hot bus) which took me to Chinatown in less than fifteen minutes if there was no traffic jam.

The ‘hot’ bus gave me the opportunity to take photos of the sceneries along New Road which was a very long road leading towards Yaowarad Road (or Chinatown). Most of the buildings along this old road were two level shophouses with the exception of some modern houses with new reconstruction by adding more layers. I often wondered why the reconstruction was allowed as these were listed buildings of more than 100 years’ old. It could be that the owners had the renovation and reconstruction done before the specific law was enacted. However, I thought there was something irregular which involved lots of ‘tea money’ to some officials.

Our old house was also modified and my father had to pay a ‘fine’ to the officials. Sometimes old Chinese people just didn’t know about the new regulations which were too complicated and ‘far away’ thing for them to comprehend. Several Buildings in Chinatown often made me wondering how the owners could acquire permits for reconstruction. As a child, our school bus had to go through Chinatown everyday. I couldn’t recall seeing y’all buildings in the old days. But the traffic jam was a routine feature since my school days. I often got bad headache from the bus journey in the evening. Chinatown wasn’t my favourite place as a child.

Nowadays, I kept coming back to this road to walk around and enjoy the sight of crowds and vendors. I tried to recapture the good old days when my Chinese grandmother took me to Chinatown to do some shopping and to see Chinese opera with her. I remembered very busy footpaths with Chinese people shouting about cheap prices of their goods. There was no space so we had to move with the crowds. I was so afraid I could lost my grandmother who walked quite fast and was in a hurry to get to the theatre for her Chinese opera.

The theater wasn’t air conditioned and people were very noisy as these Chinese aunties and grandmothers greeted their friends. I couldn’t believe that my grandmother would take me to such a place full of old people, I couldn’t find anyone my age to play with. The worst thing was that my grandmother asked me to guard her seat as she wanted to buy something to eat during the play. I was left there all by myself for ages among noisy strangers. I loved my grandmother too much to make any protest. The Chinese opera was very colourful but I didn’t understand the story. Those actors and actress wore fantastic costumes as if they came out of a fairy tale.

I was glad my grandmother took me to the Chinese opera with her. That impression was the intrinsic meaning of Chinatown to me. My grandmother wouldn’t recognise modern day Chinatown. The buildings became too big and overwhelming. The old style Chinese restaurants had disappeared and replaced by modern coffee shops and air-conditioned restaurants. The small stalls of Chinese snacks and sweets were gone too. I could find two Chinese stalls selling Chinese sweets. Coffee shops and cakes have become more popular.

As soon as I got off the bus, I searched for my Chinese sweet stall selling bean curd in ginger water with or without brown sugar. I would have it with very strong ginger water without any brush sugar. I often had a combination of bean curd and black sesame dumplings in ginger water. I could have two bowls by myself but the sweets in Chinatown was more expensive than those in non-tourism areas. Then I had the energy to walk around searching for a small stall selling Chinese calendar. I walked up and down the road but I couldn’t find the elderly lady with a small stall, I used to buy my calendars from her every year. Perhaps she was getting too old and her family didn’t allow her to work any more.

So, I had to buy my Chinese calendars from a nice big stall with many choices. The young assistant gave me a new price for this year. I asked for the old price for three calendars. The young man didn’t want to give me any reduction. But the old lady looked at me and agreed to give me the old price. The man was very surprised and asked the lady whether she was selling at a loss. I was very surprised that the situation was quite serious; he was trying to protect the lady’s interests. I looked at her again and she nodded her head.

I felt quite bad as I didn’t know whether I had taken advantage of her kindness. The younger lady at the next stall complained to her in Chinese. The elderly lady responded in Chinese that “Yes. No people, no customers”. This made me very sad for all these vendors who had to keep a large stock of goods without being able to sell them as easily as usual.

I had noticed that there were less local tourists and younger people at several shopping centers and markets. The traffic in Bangkok became very light during the night. The roads became quite empty as if there was a long holiday so people just traveled outside the city. Fortunately, there were still tourists in famous sightseeing places. But the lack of local Thai shoppers and tourists became quite obvious.

I had realised that the numbers of ‘excess deaths’ after the vaxx have remained quite high, with the average of about 1,000 people per month. What’s more, many people had become too sick to be able to work (there was a big recruitment of new nurses of up to 2000 new positions.) These have certainly affected the level of disposable income and level of spending on the whole country. Over 300 schools had been closed due to lack of sufficient numbers of students to operate without a loss. At least four major chains of well known restaurants had already closed. I wished I could have a way to warn working class shop keepers and merchants about unexpected shifts in our population in the next few years. I hoped and prayed that there would be mitigating factors which would inadvertently alleviate the dire situations in the near future. There’s a new trend of rich people wanting to migrate to the country so there might be a new class of spenders with huge disposable income soon.