Dreaming in Thailand

Travel Stories: Jim Benning assumed he had put his cultural travels on hold when he visited an American chain restaurant in Hat Yai. He was wrong.

A waiter smiled and handed me an English-language menu, and I studied my options: steaks, fried shrimp, salads. One item in particular, the Malibu Chicken Supreme, caught my eye. The menu lovingly described the dish’s features, raving that it was “a favorite of the stars.” A favorite of the stars? The message to these Thai diners was clear: Thousands of miles away, in the shadow of the real Hollywood sign, Tom Cruise himself probably stopped by the local Sizzler for a bite of Malibu Chicken after a long day at the studio lot. Even more seductively, the description seemed to imply that anyone, anywhere in the world, even in a small town in southern Thailand, could enjoy the sweet taste of Hollywood stardom, or at least a glimmer of celebrity glamour, by ordering the Malibu Chicken.

As I devoured a plateful of salad (I passed on the celebrity chicken), I looked at the diners around me, sitting in booths, sipping Cokes and munching burgers, surrounded by California scenes. They were devouring a vision of the American dream. Did they know that their chances of spotting Tom Cruise at a Hollywood Sizzler were about the same as mine were meeting the Buddha in a Bangkok nightclub? Did they care? I suspected not.

I could relate to them. Back home, I hadn’t eaten at a Sizzler in at least a decade. But I drove right by one each week to eat at my favorite Thai restaurant, a delicious hole-in-the-wall in the middle of a Thai immigrant neighborhood. How often I had sat inside, filling myself with pa nang curry and coconut soup, studying the black-and-white photographs of wild-looking Buddhist temples and Thai markets hung on the walls, nursing my dream of one day sampling my favorite dishes in their Thai homeland. Now, here I was, in just that place, surrounded by Thais eating my native food, surrounded by images of California, perhaps dreaming the same dream I had been, only in reverse.

What drives us to jet off to a foreign country where we know not a soul and can’t begin to speak the language?  At least in my case, it can be something as simple as a photograph in a magazine, an exotic song whose lyrics I can’t begin to understand, or a savory dish served up at a local ethnic restaurant. These images and sounds and flavors, however innocuous they may at first appear, plant seeds in our imaginations. Sometimes, days or months or even years later, those seeds take root in our dreams. When they do, we find ourselves on wide-bodied jets, crossing oceans or continents, eating peanuts, burning to explore the world on the other side.

But the best part of the adventure is that when we finally arrive in that other place, we rarely find just what we had expected. The world is far more complex, and people are far more complicated, than most of our imaginations can accommodate. Never would I have imagined, sitting back home in my favorite Thai café, that I’d spend my first night in Thailand searching in vain for pa nang curry but settling for a Sizzler. My dream never would have tolerated that. And I never would have guessed that I’d actually enjoy it.

After dinner, I walked back onto the steamy streets of Hat Yai, and I saw the traditional Thailand I had dreamed of back in Los Angeles. It was visible in the ancient buildings plastered with squiggly Thai writing, in a dark, musty shop selling bee products, and in that same wrinkled elephant still making its way silently down the road. Yet I also saw a distinctly more modern Thailand, one that I hadn’t fully envisioned at home. It was embodied on a nearby street corner, not far from the 7-Eleven. There, a band of young, longhaired Thai musicians plugged a guitar, bass and microphone into an amplifier. Counting off a few beats, they launched into the Eagles’ rock classic, “Hotel California.” It was an anthem from another place and another time, resurrected here for a new generation of dreamers nurturing their own visions of a faraway land.


Tags: Food, Global Village, Restaurants, Asia, Thailand


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