Today makes twenty-five years since I arrived in Southeast Asia.
I arrived in Bangkok late one humid afternoon, checked into a budget hotel in Sukhumvit Road, quickly fell asleep, and later woke up hungry, seeking a new spot to enjoy the city’s famous street food while avoiding familiar touristy restaurants.
As I walked up and down arguably the Thai capital’s most famous street, all the TVs in the bars, the restaurants and the food courts were showing the same movie: planes crashing into skyscrapers. The chyrons were in Thai. I thought of Steven Spielberg because most Thai people were just chatting or eating, ignoring the screens. The tourists were more interested in the beer or the bar girls. After dinner, I went back to my hotel room for an early sleep. It wasn’t until the next morning that I read the Bangkok Post.
My personal September 11, 2001 was the start of a new chapter in my life. Just how major it would turn out to be, I never imagined. Taking a long break from a business that was sapping me in India, I arrived in Bangkok to do a TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course. Months later, after receiving my certification, I decided to stay on for a few more weeks and get some practical experience. Despite all the assurances when I had registered for the course that jobs were plentiful, the reality turned out to be quite different. I suspected that there was a reluctance to hire me. How could a non-white teacher be a native speaker of English? I registered on a volunteer program at the city’s main Catholic cathedral and after a week, got a call from one of Thailand’s leading hospitals. Would I be free to meet the dean of the faculty of nursing at their nursing college? My work would entail improving the English skills of student nurses and other staff with limited English language skills. I enjoyed working at the college. Though I was just an ordinary language teacher, I was treated like a respected member of the medical faculty. I met some terrific people and till today we remain close friends. Many of them keep an open house for me and I rarely book a hotel when passing through the Thai capital.
Life in Bangkok was hectic. By chance – and chance was to play a large part in the coming years – I made friends with a Thai businessman, a real gourmet. Two or three times a week we would try a new eating place; from fancy high-end restaurants to streetside stalls. In the latter, Bangkok’s famed street food was often flavored by the fumes of Bangkok’s famed traffic jams. My friend invited me to a few private parties, where I could smell money. I was always the lone foreigner there.
One amusing incident comes always to mind. An American friend had been invited to tea by a Thai senator. He took me along and we entered a huge hall with heavy wooden chairs ringed all around the room. All over the walls were framed photographs of people that the politician had met: King Hussein of Jordan, President Bush, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, Arab royalty and various Asian politicians. For some reason, the senator asked me to sit next to him on a podium. We chatted about various things and he told me how much he appreciated the Indian custom of touching the feet of people they respected. And he bent down and touched my feet to demonstrate how it was done. When we left, his hangers bowed and pushed people out of my way. But a few days later, I received a request for a loan of fifty million baht!
Work permits and visa renewals were always a hassle and after six months, I applied for a job at an Australian language school in Laos. The owner/director replied saying that there were no vacancies but would still like to meet me one day. We did so about one month later when he came to Bangkok on some work. He offered me a job on the spot.
I arrived in Vientiane, the capital of Laos (officially the Lao PDR) on April Fool’s Day 2002.
My intended three-month sojourn has stretched on for a quarter of a century. This means that I’ve spent fully one-third of my life, living, working, and travelling in Southeast Asia. True, there have been numerous trips back to India, Australia and countries beyond. But this is the region where my heart rests.
When I moved to Laos, the nursing college faculty and students gave me a farewell party. Faux humility didn’t allow me to believe some of the over-the-top speeches. One of the students started crying and wanted to marry me. Months later, seven of the staff turned up in Vientiane to force me to go back. For a couple of days, I had seven women, the dean included, occupying the bedrooms upstairs, while I slept on the sofa downstairs.
At first, I didn’t like Vientiane. After Bangkok, a city that never slept, the Lao capital was positively soporific. In Bangkok, I usually got back to my apartment after midnight. In Vientiane, the city was almost in total darkness by 9.00 pm. The rural feel of the place was half a century behind the English-language school where I taught. I decided to leave at the end of that semester. At my interview in Bangkok, the larger-than-life owner had told me that nobody ever left his school unless they were returning to their home countries. Over the years it turned out to be absolutely true. Vientiane grew on me.
Standards in the school were high and no expense was spared to give the students value for money. But if the school philosophy was to work hard, it was also to play hard. There were parties galore and invitations to the year-end Christmas ball were much sought after.
My teaching hours were only in the evenings. This left my days free, though the director would often offer me morning or afternoon projects. He called me his trouble shooter. I did off-site work with many ministries sponsored mainly by the Australian government. Then I became lead writer to the Lao Business Forum, an International Finance Corporation project where I was appointed to the World Bank’s Panel of Editors. I also worked with different branches of the UN and other international organizations. A senior French IMF official on deputation to the Ministry of Finance paid me top dollar so that he could practice his conversation skills with me, debating his country’s politics, football and literature. It helped that Albert Camus and Arsène Wenger were two of my favourite French people.
One contact led to another and I became friends with a French epidemiologist. I learned that he was unable to get his papers published in English journals despite doing some cutting edge research. I did the Writing in the Sciences online course from Stanford School of Medicine and later his papers were published in some prestigious British and American journals. The Institut Francophonie de Médecine Tropical accepting realities introduced English into its curriculum and I was offered a job preparing its students for their masters in France and Canada. I was given free rein to teach what I wanted and since I had no clinical experience, I did another online course and then taught bio ethics. The UN even hired me to give private lessons to a minister and I ended up also writing his international speeches.
When the publisher of the Lao Airlines inflight magazine offered me the editor’s job, I accepted it with no journalistic experience whatsoever. Later, I became the editor and one of the founders of Oh! Magazine, a Southeast Asia-centric general interest magazine. I can confidently state that this publication was one of the best journals coming out of the region.
As much as I enjoyed all this work, the most satisfying assignment was with a 75-year-old Catholic nun. I had volunteered to teach her English but found hers very good. Instead, she helped me with French, Lao, Vietnamese and Thai. She tried teaching me cooking, gardening, sewing, drawing, origami, music and half-a-dozen other skills. She was twenty-five years older than me but I couldn’t keep up with her energy levels. I was supposed to visit her once a week but ended up going there two or three times instead. Her face lit up every time she saw me and she told me that I was her cup of caffeine. My feelings were reciprocated a hundred times over. Early one morning she invited me to breakfast. I asked what the matter was but she sort of ordered me to be there by 7.30 am. Her wish was always my command. That morning I had breakfast with four high-level Vatican diplomats and the papal nuncio in Bangkok. Pope John Paul II had sent them to discuss religious freedom with the government. Once in mock anger, the French ambassador banged on a table demanding that I use my contacts with the Vietnamese government (I had none) to get a visa for the nun, who wanted to visit a sick relative in Hué. The director of my school once teased me that when his teachers were absent, it was because they were sick. I was the only one taking off to attend diplomatic parties.
I missed my dear friend the nun, when in her mid-80s she was sent to a retirement home in another province. Then one day as she lay dying, she asked for me. I rushed to see her in Thakhek, 336 km away. The nuns praying at her bedside said she smiled when they whispered that I had arrived. She passed away later that night at the age of 94. I lost a part of me too.
Over the last twenty-five years I broke a few hearts and vice versa. Then I found gold.
Over the years, some of my closest friends have moved on, either back to their home countries or to the next world. I still miss them tremendously.
I struggle to think of unpleasant experiences I’ve had in Southeast Asia. Honestly, none come to mind. On the contrary, I’ve often felt that I’ve received privileged treatment. Though I’ve been a big fish in a small pond in Laos, discretion demands that I don’t mention many of my experiences.
The last twenty-five years have been good to me. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the next twenty-five years will be more of the same!
©Percy Aaron September 2026