You Don't Mess Around With Jim

Getting through Bangkok immigration was pretty easy.  I did not sleep well on the flights, but I did manage to view three movies across the latter two flights – Blade Runner (yes, I’d never seen it before, and no, I didn’t think it was great), The Camino (a wonderful Danish movie about an estranged father-daughter hiking the Camino to fulfill the wife/mother’s dying wish), and Christmas Vacation (had only seen bits of it in the past).  

I pretty much slept through our transfer from the airport to the hotel.  We each took badly needed showers and headed downstairs for lunch.

Our hotel is in the Chinatown section of Bangkok.  The first floor restaurant is open to the street, and provided quite the show as we wolfed down a good Thai lunch.  

Neil and Mary Newhouse, who we’ve traveled with to Machu Picchu/Galapagos and also Egypt/Jordan, were unable to come on the trip.  They were pivot for the other couple coming on the tour with us, Pat and Terri Allen.  We had met them on a Zoom back in December.  As they came through the hotel lobby, they recognized us.  So we had a good initial visit with them before our evening plans.

Friends of the Allens had recommended we go to the Jim Thompson House.  He was an American who helped revitalize the Thai silk industry in the 1950s and ‘60s.  He died at age 61 (gulp!) when he disappeared trekking in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia.  I suppose that's when Big Jim hit the floor, as Jim Croce would say.

Thompson was an operative in the OSS (forerunner to the CIA) during World War II in North Africa.  After Victory in Europe, he worked with Free Thai Movement, arriving in Thailand as the Japanese surrendered and the war ended.  After several fits and starts, a long affair with a friend’s wife, and a divorce, he co-founded the Thai Silk Exchange.  The business took off in 1951 when a designer used Thai silk fabrics for the Broadway smash, “The King and I.”

He is credited with lifting thousands of Thais out of poverty, hiring them to work from home.  

Anyhow, his story is more interesting than his house on the Klong River.  He reassembled six Thai dwellings on an estate.  Being on the Klong, he had the house elevated one full story to survive the rampant flooding.

According to Trip Advisor, in 2022 it earned a top five spot in the “must-visit” places in Bangkok.  To Carol and I, it was modestly interesting, but we were not wowed.  Thompson’s story is certainly more interesting than his house.

(Much of this post was plagiarized from the Wikipedia entry on Jim Thompson and his house.  If you are into silk or to design, it’s worth reading on your own.  My admission of guilt for plagarizing means that my scholarship is more rigorous than, oh, a recent president of Harvard.)