A Farang in Paradise

Bangkok's Farang magazine—a snarky and useful monthly aimed at backpacking kids—and Cameron Cooper, the swashbuckling expat publisher who created it.

It may be the desk-jockey journalist's most popular fantasy: pack a suitcase in the dead of night, call a cab to the airport at the break of dawn, and upon arrival in a previously fantasized about exotic locale, commence romantic reinvention from bored newspaper hack to swashbuckling foreign correspondent.

Admittedly, Cameron Cooper's own transformation from daily scribe to editor-in-chief of Bangkok's Farang magazine—a monthly travel title aimed at the thousands of world-wizened backpackers who pass through Southeast Asia on gap years or round-the-world treks—didn't happen quite like that. The story of his introduction to the world of expatriate publishing, in fact, is even more colorful, and filled with over-the-top anecdotes and a string of traveler's tall tales that he was all too happy to share with me over cups of instant coffee and an endless stream of cigarettes when I recently visited Farang headquarters, a tidy, three-story office overlooking a sweatshop on an almost hidden side street in Bangkok's sensory-overloaded Banglampoo district.

It's late afternoon as I attempt to make my way to the magazine's office with a scrap of paper in my pants pocket listing Farang's cryptic-looking Thai address. "If you can't find it," Cooper had written in an email the day before, "give me a call and I'll come down and look for you." As I weave through the maze of sidewalk vendors hawking everything from toy M-16s to packets of L&M cigarettes and cartons of pink eggs, a drizzling rain begins to fall. Finally, I spot a telltale Farang bumper sticker on an otherwise anonymous sliding glass door, and I step inside to introduce myself. Cooper—who appears about a decade younger than his 41 years—is stretched out on the office couch, and clutching his stomach in pain.

"Sorry," he says, by way of explanation, extending his hand for a shake. "We just had a ton of bread."

With that I'm introduced to Daniel Cooper, no relation to Cameron, who is Farang's 29-year-old associate editor. He's an Australian who worked in information technology for a Malaysian stock-exchange company before coming to Bangkok. The office looks surprisingly professional—many expat publications are little more than fly-by-night 'zines put together in someone's living room—and I can't help commenting on the relatively plush surroundings, which include a wall of nicely framed covers. After our interview, Cooper will point out the January 2003 issue, which he claims gave Farang the unique distinction of being the first magazine in Thailand to feature a naked woman on the cover.

Farang seems to revel in the cynical and the ironic, and most back issues, in fact, feature similarly effective art. Popping off the cover of the premiere issue, for instance, which was published mere weeks after September 11, 2001, is a scruffy backpacker with dreadlocks and an unruly beard, accompanied by the caption "Hey Hippie! Get a Wash!" Biting the hand that feeds seems to be an almost constant M.O. for Farang's team of writers; recent features have poked fun at backpacker novels like Alex Garland's The Beach and William Sutcliffe's Are You Experienced?, and the hordes of travelers who descend on Ko Pha-Ngan for its monthly Full Moon Party seem to be skewered in nearly issue.

Centered around such cheeky features, the book itself is an uneven but ultimately entertaining and satisfying mélange of Thailand guidebook, Southeast Asian travel reportage, and whatever else the three-person editorial team decides to toss in that month. A powerful photo essay or an interview with a local NGO worker, for instance, might sit next to a piece in which a cynical expat offers tips on picking up drunken backpackers. Some stories are touching, like the first-person essay about a traveler doing hard time in a Thai prison, and others, like the how-to guide explaining the ins and outs of landing an English-teaching job in Bangkok, are nearly worth the price of admission (100 baht, about $2.50) all by themselves. Even mainstream travel publications seem to be taken with Farang's mix of mockery and serious reportage; a recent issue of National Geographic Traveler called Farang "an irreverent, reliable look at travel in Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos."

"Starting the magazine," Cooper says, with a flick of his fourth or fifth cigarette of the interview, "was really just a matter of saying, 'Oh fuck, I've got to do something with my life.'"

Cooper, the other Cooper, and I are now on the office's second floor, where during business hours the Thai ad-sales staff work their magic. ("Profit or loss is kind of moot," Cooper will explain later, when I ask him how much money the magazine makes. "It's a matter of meeting your projections, which we are.") A quick flip through any recent issue (there have been 16 so far) proves that Farang has at least gotten off to a healthy start; the ad/editorial spilt seems to be about 25/75, with companies like Red Bull, Bangkok Airways, and Singha Beer buying full-page cover ads. Farang's primary raison d'etre, however, appears to be passing along priceless information to the shoestring travelers who pick it up in Bangkok bookshops or at newsstands across the country. (The Bangkok Post, a daily English-language newspaper, handles Farang's printing and national distribution.) The magazine has an extensive network of freelancers who live throughout the region and are paid to file regular updates, including well-known travel writer Joe Cummings, who wrote the original Thailand guidebook for Lonely Planet and continues to update it semi-annually.

Currently, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos are the only countries Farang covers. ("Farang" is Thai for "foreigner" or, literally translated, "Frenchman," and it's used much like the Spanish "gringo.") Malaysian and Vietnamese coverage, Cooper says, is coming soon. Laos, as it turns out, is one of the many far Asian countries in which Cooper has lived; during his two and a half years in the capital city, Vientiane, he taught English and claims to have been paid upward of $100 a page editing and rewriting budget reports for the U.N. "A friend of mine was running an NGO in Laos," he says, suppressing a smile and lighting another cigarette, "and he needed a bass player for his band." Cooper rose to the occasion and was duly rewarded with free housing. "Our maid had a master's degree in nuclear physics from a university in Moscow," he continues, barely containing a full-out guffaw. "The beer was practically free, and I only worked two, three hours a day."

But he owes his introduction to the expat-publishing world to a six-month backpacking stint in India, during which he nearly ran out of money and decided to spend his last few rupees on a ticket to Bangkok, where he figured he could find a job teaching English. Eventually, he stumbled into a position writing for the short-lived, English-language Thailand Times newspaper. "It was absolute shit," he insists. "But it was a fun experience—we were totally cut loose." After the Thailand Times folded, he managed to land a job as a copy editor at the more prestigious Nation—also an English-language daily—a position that became his most lucrative ever, due to a cultural glitch in the payroll department. As Cooper explains it, first names are the correct form of address in Thailand (John Doe, for instance, would be referred to as Mr. John), and so he ended up receiving two identical paychecks each week, one made out to his legal first name, Robert, and another made out to his legal middle name, Cameron. "I would have a friend distract the admin guy while I signed for both checks," he says, leaning back and proudly resting one booted foot on the desk in front of him.

Next up was the 1997 Asian economic crash, but due to strict Thai labor laws, Cooper was given four months severance pay after being laid off. He promptly took the money to Japan and went to work as a journalist for the English-language Daily Yomiuri, whose Japanese version—the Yomiuri Shimbun—claims to be the largest-circulation newspaper in the world. "They had Yakuza selling subscriptions for them," Cooper explains. "Can you imagine a gangster knocking on your door and asking you to buy his newspaper?"

But after suffering endless frustration at the lack of creative control afforded journalists in Japan, he came back to Bangkok to become the associate editor of Gemkey, a gem and jewelry trade magazine, and it was during that stint that the idea for Farang began to germinate. "It was a barroom conversation for years," he says of launching Farang. "We're in a niche market here. In the West, everything's been done."

The actual launch of the magazine, though, from the barroom to the newsstand, took another year. Cooper's sole partner at the time was managing editor Jim Algie, who had also spent much of the past decade working at English-language newspapers throughout Southeast Asia. Algie agreed to donate thousands of dollars of his own money to print the first issue while Cooper busied himself with corporate fundraising. "No one in Thailand wants to hear that you have a great idea for a new business," Cooper says. Eventually, though, an investor signed on, and then another, and today there are nearly a dozen, including a well-known Thai businessman and even Joe Cummings, the Lonely Planet author.

Two years later, the magazine's circulation has nearly doubled, the list of contributing writers has stretched to nearly 20, and Cooper, who now has a Thai wife, doesn't see himself returning to his native Canada anytime soon. How much longer will he remain an independent publisher? "Until about eleven o'clock tonight," he deadpans, with a slight wink. "I'm tired, man. It never ends. But it's nice when you get to your sixteenth issue and it looks like the New York phone book when you line them all up together. I'm still having fun."

Dan Eldridge is a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer.