By Richard Oyama
 
This burning season the haze drapes over the wall of mountains like a scrim. The steaming weather would make a Graham Greene protagonist start to feel the fear and renew his pledge to the bottle. Alcoholism is a problem in Thailand. As my friend Dan, an Iowa Writers Workshop grad said, some blind-eyed expats are surprised to carry their addictions with them. They end up on Loy Kroh Road, the city’s block-long red-light district of go-go bars and massage parlors, from morning to night, blowing thousands of baht, maybe not even having sex, then drag themselves back to their home countries, ponytails between legs, when the pension peters out. The cool season lasted a day this year.
 
So far I’ve escaped this fate. After a criminal for-profit college in Albuquerque laid me off three years ago, I sold a house whose mortgage was underwater. I had two choices. With a modest Social Security stipend, I could either rent a tiny studio apartment in a sketchy neighborhood in Anytown, USA. Or I could leave. For a year, my roommate Greta and I rented a faux-adobe house near the Sunport. In that year there were two drive-by shootings, the street littered with bullet casings. When I researched inexpensive destinations with sizable, English-speaking expat/retirement communities to cushion culture shock, Chiang Mai came up often. An acquaintance from Berkeley days who had worked as an editor in Tokyo was based there. He became my main contact.
 
My life at the guesthouse has settled into patterns that are not dull, since Thailand is a fever-dream. I head downstairs at 9 or 11 a.m.—it doesn’t matter much, time is an elastic thing—for a breakfast of fresh papaya, banana, homemade muesli and yogurt. I may run into Philip, a big, genial kiwi who lives on the fourth floor. We discuss the riot at the cancelled Trump rally in Chicago.
 
Thais forbid alienation, moodiness or depression with the all-day greeting, “Sawaat di ka,” a prayerful wâi and a smile. The nature of expat life is transience and collision, so it’s easy to meet people—Europeans, mainland Chinese, latinoamericanos—and the babel of voices is like a foreign music. I’ve taken a basic conversational phasaa Thai course, but cannot construct an elementary sentence, stopped by five different tones.
 
After breakfast I venture out into the steamy morning to an open-air, frond-shaded shop  where a family member roasts coffee beans in a rotating metal canister, sifting and cooling the beans in large, bamboo-woven pans. Patrons are having actual conversations; some are scribbling in paper journals. A line of ants troops along the corrugated iron bar of a spiky fence.
 
Thais are industrious and have a genius for hospitality. Moths flutter around the fluorescent tubing of a soy milk stand in a grainy violet twilight like a storm, the baroque vegetation cannot be contained, and soi dogs appear mangy but well-fed in the walled-off Old City, roaming of their own free will. Saffron-robed monks leave out food offerings for them just as people give alms to the monks, chanting sutras as day breaks. All are enmeshed in Theravada Buddhism’s great chain of being, making merit and doing good, adding to the invisible storehouse of karma, laying down bets for an auspicious rebirth.
 
It’s worth noting hatred and everpresent aggression need not be the cultural norm. Thailand is currently under the thumb of a military junta, yet another populist billionaire waiting in the wings. Yet in truth I feel safer, freer and healthier here than in the U.S.’s name-only democracy. But Chiang Mai is changing fast. Guesthouses and boutique hotels multiply to accommodate the mobs of nouveaux-riche Chinese tourists—floppy sunhats, parasols, selfie sticks and all.
 
At the coffeeshop, I finish writing in my journal. As Miles Davis said, I wait to see what the day recommends. It could be the compulsory nap in the tropics, kao soi gai, a peppery, curry-ish yellow noodle dish with a  drumstick for dinner at a food stand on Moonmuang, then maybe a stroll down to Back Street Books, the best bookstore in Chiang Mai owned by a tall, mordant Irishman who said the store’s true proprietor is Death.
 
With migrants fleeing war, persecution and poverty, there are the new, rootless cosmopolitans and economic refugees; backpackers, expats and retirees who I would call transnational. They feel less affiliation with the “homeland” than with the existential experience of displacement and impermanence. They are migratory and seasonal as birds. Such a person is less defined by citizenship or nationality than by what they do, whether trekking, cycling, massage, meditation or writing. In the main, I’ve found them to be serious, articulate, thoughtful people, the unacknowledged legislators of Salman Rushdie’s imaginary homeland. My Uruguayan friend Patricia has been practicing yoga in Ko Phangan for months; maybe she’ll obtain a work visa to teach. To a one, they think Trump is an embarrassment and a joke.
 
Some of us are economic refugees. And some of us are migrants who left our accidental birth countries to escape a soul-killing purgatory in booboisieland. Our ancestors are named Hemingway, Kay Boyle and Fitzgerald; but Baldwin, Josephine Baker and Dexter Gordon, too.