“I’m sorry. We not have record of you arrival in Thailand,” said the Bangkok immigration officer from behind her glass window. “You must go here day after tomorrow,” she ordered as she handed me a tiny scrap of paper, “See my boss at this address.”
My heart sank. We’d already ran up a massive taxi fare to get here, stood for hours in enormous queues, and filled in so many forms my feeble twenty-first century wrists throbbed for hours. Kyeonghwa, my girlfriend and who’d been furnished with a new passport earlier that day after it had been stolen minutes into our arrival in the capital a week before, quietly began to cry.