I moved to Bangkok ten years ago in order to be in a place where nothing happens, where no one knew me and where nothing cost very much. A decade on, after a military coup, running street battles between protestors and soldiers, a ceaseless social life and costs reaching about the same levels as Brooklyn, I have retained at least one of my original reasons for leaving New York: radio silence relative to events in my far-off ‘career’ on the other side of the world. This month my novel about Hong Kong, On Java Road, came out, and so did the film version of an earlier novel, The Forgiven. The principal response outside of reviews has been three death threats postmarked China.
It is monsoon here, the rains coming in at 5 p.m. every day, and I have set up a desk on my balcony overlooking an improvised banana plantation in the waste lot next to my building.
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