Terror in America: A Letter From Thailand

Travel Stories: By Jim Benning

09.13.01 | 1:01 AM ET

The news from Thailand, Sept. 12

This isn’t the way you’re supposed to feel when you travel abroad. You’re supposed to be immersed in the exotic, pleasantly buzzed, delightfully lost, happily, if temporarily, in exile. You’re supposed to shuck off your old self, lose track of the news back home and try on an utterly foreign way of life.

That is how Leslie and I have felt here in Southeast Asia for the last six weeks, two Californians sleeping in beach bungalows in Malaysia, studying Buddhism with Thai monks, exchanging smiles with playful Muslim school kids in Singapore.

But that was before yesterday, before terrorists hijacked four American planes, toppled the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon. Now, here in southern Thailand, we search for Internet cafes and international phones. We share the horrifying news with fellow travelers. And, more than anything, we long for home.

It’s late now, nearly midnight, on the island of Koh Samui, a sun-kissed speck of land off Thailand’s east coast with coconut palms, turquoise waters and cascading waterfalls. Paradise, some people say. But this isn’t feeling much like paradise. I’m sitting on the bed of our hotel room as Leslie drifts in and out of sleep, writing this as the TV flickers with images of burning buildings and terrified New Yorkers. We forked over 1,500 baht for a fancy room on the beach. Not because we want to work on our tans. Because we desperately wanted English-language news. Whatever you may think about globalization and modernization, CNN can still be hard to find in places like Thailand. Where is Jeff Greenfield when I need him? We’re settling, oddly, for German news in English.

We’ve got to have news, some way to connect with home.

The feeling of helplessness that so many Americans are complaining about now, that urge to help without a means, is only amplified here on Koh Samui. What should we do? Fly home? That won’t help. So instead we watch the surreal images, unable to shut them off, even when they just repeat themselves. We sit at the edge of the bed and hold each other silently, fearing that the world has changed in some irrevocable way we cannot yet articulate. And I write, hoping to exorcise some frustration.

I’ve been frustrated for another reason, too. Hours after the attack, we sat in an Internet cafe as images of the airliner crashing into the World Trade Center and Thai-language news filled the room. I watched, horrified, shocked. The dozen locals in the cafe—men and women in their twenties and thirties—appeared to have little interest. They buried their heads in e-mail and video games, glancing up at the reports only occasionally. Make-believe explosions held more interest than real ones. I wanted to scream at them: How can you ignore this?

As time wore on, it dawned on me that, to them, America is an impossibly faraway place, a place where crazy things happen all the time, a place so far removed from daily life that, at least for now, they can’t begin to appreciate the enormity of the events.

I realize, watching this from their perspective, how many times I have viewed news reports of terrorist attacks in Israel or Northern Ireland or Africa and shaken my head in disgust but felt, in some way, emotionally disconnected. The world, it seemed, was just too big to wrap my mind around. What is life-changing to one person is, to another, just another headline. Besides, these things always happen somewhere else.

This time, for us, somewhere else is home.

The world is shrinking in so many ways. Yet at times like this, in the face of such horrible news, when friends and family are so distant and we’re surrounded by people who can’t begin to imagine how we feel, the world can feel agonizingly, painfully huge.

Tags: Buddhism, Travel and Security, War, Asia, Thailand, Bangkok


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