Leaving Thailand - A Memoir

Not good, not bad. Just thus. That’s how Steve himself may expect one to evaluate Leaving Thailand, through a lens of tathata. But, alas, I have my own five senses, and am making sense of the world based on my own experiences and much obstructed vista. And to this half blind-man who has been a place or two, Leaving Thailand is pretty great.I likely lived through a very particular set of circumstances to come to that conclusion. Unfortunately for Steve, that is among the smallest of demographics. But as a failing (or failed writer, you can pick the over-under on the proper tense for that participle before the gods weigh in), I hope one day, my work in this world will mean as much to someone as Steve’s has meant to me.Now, in honor of Steve, I’m going to talk about myself. A lot. More than anyone wants. Except for me.Roughly 25 months and 9 days ago, I left Thailand, after I and the woman I loved decided to give Washington D.C. a go. I’d taken on a well-enough paying job at a Bangkok based start-up in December 2019. What timing. Covid came. The job went. I was back at the Bangkok Post, a job I’d worked at for 3 years earning beer tokens, without a work permit.Those early covid times were strange, strange and beautiful. I lived in a shoebox over Phra Khanong. I'd lived there before, a couple years prior. I'm the sort who was never very good at letting anything go.This time I got to take to the rooftop and watch the emptying of the streets after curfew. Too many beers, Chet Baker mournful in my ears, finally watching the Big Mango put to sleep.Me and my lady had our own sort of bliss, and put up fairly lights around the room where the curfew hours pinned us in. We made love in a chill-wave frame — just another blinking box in the boxed in covid night screaming life.All of that passing happiness made her agree -- let’s go to America baby. It all felt like forever so strongly I can almost remember it. I sure as hell cannot forget it. So I went. And she was to follow. I never made it to D.C. I never saw her again.Covid allowed for telework so I moved back home to the side of a nowhere road in Tennessee to make bank. At first I thought I was saving up for us. Two years later, I saved something for me. And lost just about everything else. We went from talking every day to every weekend to never again — the natural long distance progression. I don’t know what gave her cold feet about America, be it a colder calculus of what living a good life really means or the immediacy of a warm body that popped up after the 1,000 swipe right. But she never came (with to me anyways). And I aged 10 years in the span of two. And the world around us kept falling apart. I figure it's rebuilding itself too. But only arrogance leads folks to believe they have a right to a front row view on reconstitution. Not in this lifetime, always...In those two years of coming home, two years of exile and counting, I published a book that flopped, and lost a lifetime of hopes with that. It was natural. That was my last great delusion. And while nursing what was left of hope, I sometimes posted anonymously to the Thailand Expat Writers list.I used to think Steve was [redacted]. The Automated Amazon reviewer of reviews didn't like my original joke. My view of Steve changed one he started putting out his Turtle Beach videos. Then, all of the warmth began to shine in on once cold, seemingly blunt words.I picked up so many books on Steve’s account, while ignoring his own writing. For some reason I could never get past a line or two of his occasionally posted vignettes. Through him, I built a bridge to a vision of Thailand I’d never even seen being“ waylaid by the bimbos” and soaking up the nostalgia of a Thailand long gone.I myself feel in love with and wrote the obituary for Check Inn 99, my own corner of Bangkok that screamed yesterday and hoped for forever. Ever since it shut, I’ve been trying to go back. There is no going back. There is no leaving. That's why I spent too much money buying a Chris Coles painting to hang neon over my nothing Tennessee wall.Steve spent 22 years or so living where he was not meant to me, like me, an American broken for American life, but breaking himself to make it there all the same.He’s only given himself a one-year window for his Thailand dream, health permitting.And I wish him more years. I wish myself more years where us broken sort of folks belong.Thailand was the gold in my kintsugi rendering.And in Leaving Thailand, I found the words of another man who found his own Lady of Bangkok to build a dream on.Something about Steve is, he runs marathons with people, in places, he hates. Yet cannot help but sprint with lovier people in paradise.There’s some message about life in there.Steve lived through his own flood and clung to the splinters from driftwood for decades. Time and time again, happiness was shattered on the alter of ego, compulsion or circumstance. I wish I didn't relate as much as I do. Some leave “Thailand”. Some return. Some never went anywhere at all. But we all end up in the same sort of place, trying to make sense of it all.And Steve found his own sense in Leaving Thailand. And on Turtle Beach, may he find some peace in the denouement of return.

Steve Rosse’s Leaving Thailand is a chronicle of a Yankee expat’s seven years in the Land of Smiles, and bleeds over into the author’s subsequent life in the United States. Bleeding is an apt word, as the author’s days in North America are haunted by his life and loves of years past. His characters and stories make for a compelling read. Rosse’s an author well-regarded in the Thai expat literary community for his poignant tales of memorable people, many of whom occupy the demi-monde of Thai society. The characters in Leaving Thailand have carved lasting scars in the deepest crevasses of the author’s heart and subtly inch their way into our own as well. They stayed with me days after reading their tales to the extent that I wanted to visit them again, and I read the book cover-to-cover again a few days later. And I’ll probably read it again.Rosse’s writing is punctuated by his self-deprecating persona, woven into his stories as a means of calculating his impact on others. He always could have done something better, chosen more mature ways to communicate, been more generous with his emotions, and somehow found a way to turn back the clock to fix everything. We meet memorable friends and lovers here. We marvel at Pui, a young Burmese maid driven out of Rosse’s home by his savagely demanding wife; fall in love with Gop, a brothel girl with massive physical scars and a huge heart; and wistfully remember Nu, a bar girl with whom the author spent five months and ten days, tattooing her name into the chambers of his heart so inexorably that he dreams of her incessantly, decades after he last saw her.There are side trips, including Rosse’s tenuous time as a set dresser on Oliver Stone’s film Heaven and Earth, his tenure as a columnist for Bangkok’s The Nation newspaper (his face graced a billboard on Sukhumvit Road), and the glory days as the public relations director for a high-end Phuket resort.It’s the women, though, that shine through this book. Rosse was smart enough not to marry a bar girl, but not sharp enough to avoid hooking up with a Thai professional woman who he didn’t love, married her as a result of the slip of his tongue, and ended up disliking intensely, all due to a failure to heed his own advice (“You want to argue at least once with a woman before you ask her to marry you, just to see how she argues”). The author discusses a list he compiled of the women with whom he’d had sex, and his wife is the only one who warranted his eternal enmity: “I had a lot to distract me from the fact that I hated my wife, which is saying something because I really hated that woman” is a redundancy that mirrors a stylistic technique that Rosse effectively utilizes throughout the book.Rosse doesn’t see himself as a knight in shining armor. “I’m not handsome. I’ve always been overweight, and since I was fifteen I’ve smoked two packs of Marlboro reds a day, so I suppose kissing me is like licking an ashtray... I’ve been told that I’m not all that easy to live with, and as the person who has the most experience living with me, I’d be the first to agree to that.” Fair enough; with that caveat comes a certain verisimilitude regarding his characterization of others.At the end of the book, we find Rosse wandering aimlessly in the Chihuahuan desert of the southeast United States, desperately seeking the oasis of Thailand, chasing the mirage of seashores paved with pearl-white kernels of sand, bordered by fortresses of palm trees fanned by tropical breezes, and populated by a decades-younger Rosse, women who will never grow old, and friends who will live eternally.Leaving Thailand is a tremendously compelling book that leaves the reader with stunning images of the people that populate Rosse’s haunting and enchanting tales. Steve Rosse’s always in the conversation when expat writers of Thai subjects are discussed, amazing considering he left after seven years, some 20 years ago. He ended up with bushels full of stories that are timeless in their observations and poignant in their outcomes. This is a book that will steal its way into the mind of the reader and will stay long after the final page has been turned.

This is a collection of vignettes by Steve Rosse, covering both his time in and out of Thailand. The quality of the writing is, as always, top notch. The tales are at times insightful, funny, and moving, but they are always brutally honest, as good memoir should be.The standout piece, for me, is Between Then and Now, and I was absolutely delighted it made it into the book. Other superb examples include the nostalgic and heart-wrenching A Note to the Man Who Saved Her. The wistful Not Anymore. Left of field comes the novelty piece Warning in the Style of Jenny Joseph, which is an amusing short verse. The book concludes, brilliantly, with The Same River Twice which sees Steve back in Thailand after a twenty-two year hiatus, and musing on the Thailand of past and present, his own past and mortality - this piece represents some of Steve's best writing to date.It's important to stress that this book is not a sequential blow-by-blow of experiences of the form that many Thailand memoirs take, and while I personally might have preferred a more narrative approach, as well as more completely new material, that does not detract from the overall excellent quality of the collection, which is a rare gem in the genre.

This memoir is made up of over 2 dozen individual short stories that collectively form the narrative of one man’s relationship with Thailand.Among the tales of sex n drugs and somtam, lay the universal themes that affect all of us. This is not however, a simple single person sex n drug fueled journey in Thailand but rather an examination of the consequences and fallout, the joy and the damage. Delivered with an emotional depth that is both moving and sharply observed, it will leave you reaching for flight schedules to Thailand or thanking your lucky stars that you’ve never visited.Rosse is not afraid to bare his soul (and bum hole), this memoir is written with a level of courage, honesty and wisdom that is rarely seen within this genre, a brilliant book that begs a sequel – Returning to Thailand?

What can I say?Easily rivals Jack Reynold's 'A Woman of Bangkok' in many ways but more pertinent to me as I spent decades (1980-present) living in similar places and experiencing some of the same emotions.A real blessing that had me close tears many times but also uplifting and soul searching content from Mr 'Sa-teef'Brilliant work!

I still live in Thailand, and I knew Steve when he lived in Thailand. I found his book to be so funny in places, but so sad in others, but the over riding theme about this book is that he "hits the nail right on the head" about being a male expat in Thailand. I am female married to a Thai male, (still) so my experience is a bit different from his, but I can sure appreciate his point of view, because he actually lived through all these stories first hand. He is clear and honest about some very touchy subjects, but then he always was, that's one thing I always liked about Steve. It took me down memory lane, for a time that is past, but oh...... what a time it was!

Incredible story and all of us who ever visited or lived in the Kingdom will relate. Sad and Happy, funny and very human. Love this book!