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Years ago, I was in Kuala Lumpur for a conference when I was struck so horribly ill with some consciousness-attacking disease (it felt as though it must be a disease) that I rang down to the manager of the hotel. I was phoning from a supine position, as I was too weak to sit up. The manager was Malaysian, of course. I begged him to find an English-speaking doctor who might be persuaded to come examine me. During his long pause, I thought I could hear him thinking: Hmmm, I suppose I must do so, for if this big nose dies in 401, I shall have to lower the rate.

Eventually a South Asian doctor arrived wearing a lab coat and stethoscope and carrying his gladstone bag. He was followed by his nurse, also in a lab coat, pushing a large trolley with many crowded shelves of vials and bottles of assorted pills, powders, and liquids. Ah, I remember thinking to myself — proud that I could still think at all — this must be one of those places where physicians enjoy a monopoly on pharmacy. Rather than vice versa, as in some other countries in what was then still called the Third World (a term coined by a French anthropologist, Alfred Sauvy, in 1952).

In my state, I was having difficulty understanding what the doctor was saying, but mention was made of brain fever. Researching the matter some days later, after an injection of stuff into one buttock and a quite difficult flight back to Canada, I learned that this ailment primarily afflicts people in nineteenth-century English novels. I concluded that I must have had a brush with something well short of the mildest form of encephalitis. That’s far too powerful a word to be using, but the episode was enough to leave me with a lingering dislike of KL. So it was that I was now in Penang instead. I left my Chinese hotel in George Town, took a short detour through Little India, and tracked down a European breakfast (how much easier adult life would be if I had acquired a tolerance for congee as a child). Then I boarded the ferry across the channel to Butterworth on the mainland.

Naturally enough, few English names have survived in Malaysia, and those that have continue only as alternatives that are used rarely. Butterworth, for example, is the seat of the province of Wellesley, which nobody calls anything other than Seberang Perai. George Town is one exception. To complicate matters, Butterworth (for William John Butterworth, governor of the Straits Settlements, 1843−55), is also known as, simply, Bagan, a Malay word for “pier” or “breakwater.” It is an undemonstrative place of about a hundred thousand people. I made my way to the railway station where there is a taxi rank, for I was going to take a cab to Thailand. The plan was not nearly so ridiculous as it sounds, as the border is only about three hours to the north via the first-class motorway and the fare is quite inexpensive, varying a bit according to size of the car more than to length of the journey. I paid only 30 ringgit, which was about ten dollars at the time.

English is a mandatory subject in Malaysian schools. How successful the policy is I couldn’t judge, but one will sometimes hear English being used as a lingua franca when members of different ethnic minorities attempt to converse with one another. I knew the driver had English for he demonstrated as much when he asked if I wished my bag put in the boot. Once we got underway, however, his mouth slammed shut and remained closed despite my repeated attempts to lure him into conversation. He was a young fellow, expressionless except in the eyes. I mentally ran through a list of Malaysian sensitivities, wondering if I had stepped on one or more of them inadvertently. On my previous visit (before I took sick) I heard a Kuala Lumpur yuppie upbraid her paying audience of foreign professionals, saying “You people come over here and expect to see jungle and rubber plantations!” She snorted contemptuously. I remembered this incident because the countryside we were driving through now didn’t seem to be advancing headlong toward development. So perhaps I was simply being cast in the familiar unwanted role of despised Westerner, or maybe I was seen merely as an infidel.

Malaysia is one of those countries that doesn’t like to see an Israeli stamp in your passport, but levels of Islamic strictness vary widely according to locale. Based on nothing more than how women are dressed, there are luxury shopping streets in KL that you would almost swear were in the West — precisely as one would expect in a city of 10 million. And religious tolerance is naturally highest in areas where there are so many non-Muslims to be tolerated — mostly Buddhists, Hindus, and Daoists, of course, but also the usual mixture of bizarre little Christian sects that American missionaries usually command. Way down in Sarawak and Sabah, on the Malaysian side of what otherwise is the Indonesian state of Borneo, there are plenty of groups that practise animism and various shamanistic rituals.

The popular understanding is that fundamentalist Islam is most common along the northeastern coast of Malaysia, certainly not in the northwest where we were driving. After three hours, we pulled up to the Thai border, where I got out and crossed on foot, as required, while the driver made his own peace with the authorities and met me on the other side of the imaginary dotted line. Suddenly, as we started up again, heading toward Hat Yai, about forty minutes farther north, the driver became comparatively loquacious.

Ah, I thought to myself, he was anxious about going through immigration and customs. He probably uses his taxi runs as a cover for low-level smuggling. As we chatted discontinuously, however, I had an additional realization: he simply didn’t like Canadians. “Canada people too fat!” he said. He became quite emphatic. “Too much food for Canada. Even good food bad for you in Canada.” Then it was my turn to be quiet.

Many Bangkok expats on a budget come to Hat Yai every three months, usually by bus, to get their visas renewed and then re-enter their temporary country after only an hour or so in Malaysia (whereas more affluent expats fly to Singapore or Hong Kong for the same purpose). Hat Yai is at least twice the size of Butterworth and vastly more urban, but that’s not to say that it is cosmopolitan. It is a border town, a little rough round the edges without being enjoyably picaresque. Mind you, I may have been catching Hat Yai at a bad moment. Certainly I was catching it at or near record high temperatures, so that my judgment may have been skewed. That being said, the city was a brownish yellow all over and seemed to be coated with a thin film of scum, like a dirty cooking pot left to soak in the sink overnight.

Although no trace of the fact appears to survive, Hat Yai was once the site of a most curious experiment in urban planning. The idea originated with Phibun Songkhram (1897−1964), who might be called the Chiang Kai-shek of Thailand. He was a military officer, trained in France, and one of the leaders of the 1932 coup that overthrew the absolute monarchy in favour of a constitutional one and foiled a subsequent counter-revolution. In 1939, the year after he became prime minister for the first time, he changed the name of Siam to Thailand — the homeland of the ethnic Thai people, but pointedly not that of the Chinese and others. Phibun was of Chinese heritage himself, but developed strongly xenophobic ideas as part and parcel of becoming a fascist dictator.

He was a Mussolini-like figure who sided with Japan during the Second World War, though some argue that letting the Japanese use Thailand was the only alternative to having them overrun and occupy it. One should also probably factor in the admiration with which he and many other Thais viewed Japan and its culture, as an Asian nation that had modernized itself without the slightly blessed burden of European colonialism. In principle, Asian influences were preferred to Western ones. For example, Thais tended to fear that France had designs on their country (just as the French themselves feared that the British in Burma were lusting for Laos). The Japanese arrived in Thailand the same day that they, by contrast, attacked Pearl Harbor (though the first occurred on December 7, 1941, and the other on December 8, owing to the International Date Line). Phibun thought they would be a good friend to have one day. But when the United States defeated Japan in 1945, he and his supporters became pro-American, showing their particularly American-style anti-communism by sending a small number of troops to fight in the Korean War. That was in 1950, the year that Phibun commanded that Thailand become modern, a word he considered a synonym for American.

Thailand was a different place in those days, with parts of its ancient culture quite intact. The famous Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, for example, still had no bathtubs or showers, only large brass jars of fresh water to pour over oneself. One day Phibun decreed that the country should be full of cinemas, and suddenly it was. This decision all but exterminated the ancient puppet shows, shadow-plays, and dance-dramas so central to Thai culture (though, in the last-named case, it spared the next generation of five-year-old girls from having their fingers bent back and elongated, a practice comparable to Chinese foot-binding). The frantic building of movie theatres brought American mass culture. Hollywood westerns were especially admired. Accordingly, Phibun came up with the idea of turning Hat Yai, of all places, into a replica of a Wild West town: in his view, the quintessence of modernity. Teams of researchers were hired to dig up archival photographs of such places as Dodge City.

In Hat Yai, many activities, such as kite-flying and betting on fighting-fish, were abolished, though whisky was still to be drunk the customary way, served warm in half-pint portions. Thai thoroughfares were pulled down and replaced with imitation Western main streets with board sidewalks and false-front wooden buildings, including ersatz saloons with bat-wing doors, and all that went with this new aesthetic. Hitching rails were much in evidence though Hat Yai had no horses. Local citizens were forced to wear Wild West costumes. Some were seconded to simulate bank robbers and the civilian posses that pursued them. All this was in 1952, three years prior to the opening of Walt Disney’s first theme park and well before Fess Parker’s appearance as Davy Crockett on American television. At the time, Hat Yai was the favourite R&R destination of Malay guerrillas from the across the border, where they were fighting their long drawn-out war for independence: a foreshadowing of the way Bangkok became such a haven for U.S. soldiers during the American War in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Perhaps because these insurgents, communists though they were, were fighting the British, they were not much interfered with in Hat Yai where, at the time, the local security forces had been issued with coonskin caps — ringed tails and all.