Living in Thailand's age of impunity

There's no place like Thailand.

- Kong Rithdee

A child and his minder look at the wreckage of a passenger train that crashed when a construction crane collapsed on it in Nakhon Ratchasima province on Wednesday, killing 32 people and injuring dozens more.

(AFP)

Joyscrolling TikTok and Reels reveals dozens of clips made by international visitors lamenting having to leave our lovely country and return to dreary Europe or joyless America.“Nobody talks about how hard it is to go from this” — insert a cut of a wonderful beach in Krabi — “to this”—cut to a drab, damp suburban street somewhere in the West. Add a crying-face emoji. “I want to move here!” the traveller announces. True, everybody loves Thailand.

Our hearts swell, and we almost cry too, out of pride and gratitude, even though we know deep down that visiting a place and living there are not the same — that holiday-making and making a good life in a place fate assigned us to are as dissimilar as a Hollywood movie is from reality.

For tourists, Thailand is full of life, a land of tropical joie de vivre. For us, life is fragile — so breathlessly fragile that one can be killed simply by choosing the wrong seat on the wrong train carriage, travelling beneath an elevated construction site of a new rail system meant to make life better, but instead ended up crushing it. Thirty-two lives, gone under the concrete hell in Korat on Wednesday.