January 17, 1989. The edition of the Polish Film Chronicle prepared that day may be surprising. Although the leading role of the Polish United Workers’ Party is still the binding doctrine, the speaker does not praise socialism. The photos are a review of construction sites in the capital, and the comments are full of irony and mockery of the slow and illogical Polish modernization. One of Kronika’s curiosities is a group of 80 workers from Thailand who are working inside a skyscraper being built near the Central Railway Station. They are plastering the walls and climbing ladders to the top. The construction is well underway, and the narrator praises that it is thanks to the Asians who are making rapid progress and the hotel will be opened in a few months.
1988. Wiroon, 22, has recently returned home after a three-year contract in Saudi Arabia. The Poles have recently resumed construction of a high-rise hotel in the centre of Warsaw. It was started in 1977. It was supposed to be an office building for LOT, but the economic collapse meant that construction was suspended four years later. After six years, it was restarted thanks to the formation of the consortium of LOT, ILBAU and Marriott. The first letters of the names form the abbreviation LIM, which is still the name of the building, although it is generally known as “Marriott”. This intermediary company is an Austrian construction company and it is this company that will bring workers from abroad to Poland: from Austria, Yugoslavia and Thailand.
– When I came back from Saudi Arabia, it was still difficult to find a job in Thailand. My father suggested another emigration, but this time to Europe. He took me to Bangkok, 500 kilometers from home. We found an employment agency offering a trip to Moscow or Warsaw. Dad said: “Moscow? I don’t know anything about it, I don’t know anyone. And from Poland, Lech Walesa, John Paul II. Come on, it’s definitely a good country!” And that’s how my adventure began, recalls Wiroon Niamtrakoon.
A handyman in his underwear
09/17/2020. Wiroon, 54, needs to go to room 3319 in a moment. He has some minor repairs to do there. But before he gets on his cart with hand tools, he reminisces a little about his first days in an exotic Eastern European country. – We disembarked in Okęcie. Dark. They took us to a bus and took us to a workers’ hotel in Piaseczno. We saw snow through the windows. Everyone was shocked, because it was the first time in their lives, before that we only knew it from movies. We arrived there, got off in front of the hotel and immediately put our hands in the snowdrifts falling on the street. A great impression that I remember to this day – he recalls.
– Are you cold?
– Of course! The day before we left, my father told my mother to go to the store and buy me the thickest jacket possible, because I was going to a cold country. She did just that. She brought the warmest jacket she could find. I was freezing in it for several months. It was only when I met my current wife that I realized I could afford something thicker, because this coat of mine here is at best suitable for the coldest summer days – Niamtrakoon answers laughing.
I can’t believe it, so I have to hear the story of what it was like to work on a contract at that time. 12 hours, 6 days a week. The Thais were only transported in the morning and evening between Piaseczno and the construction site in the center. They didn’t even have time to go to the store. On Sundays off, they tried to buy something in Piaseczno, but all the stores were closed. “Only the girl took care of me. She went to the market in Skra and bought me warm clothes. She told me what long johns were. I stopped freezing,” says Wiroon Niamtrakoon. He estimates that he shivered from the cold for about 3-4 months, because it was after that time in Poland that he met his future wife. “The people who lived around our workers’ hotel were very curious about the newcomers from Thailand and at the same time very friendly. They invited us to their homes for coffee. That’s how I met a friend who took me to his friend’s house because he knew he had a nice sister. And I met my wife, says Mr. Wiroon.
But not every place was so good.
Winter, or maybe spring, 1989. Ostrołęka, bus station. A young couple gets off the bus from Warsaw. She is ordinary, from here. He is exotic. She leaves him on a bench in the middle of the bus station and goes to buy a ticket for a city bus that will take him to her family home, where she plans to introduce her new boyfriend to her parents. He feels a strange atmosphere. He notices that everyone in the station is looking at the same dot. That dot is him. He is starting to get small, tiny. He is sweating a lot, so he probably misses Thailand now, where he is like everyone else. In a dozen years or so, people will be sweating the same way in Asia. And I miss Poland, where it is not so hot.
Polish delays
The work during those 12-hour days was nothing like the contract Niamtrakoon signed in Bangkok. He was hired as a carpet specialist. But when he arrived, it turned out that not all the rooms were ready for finishing. There were no windows on the upper floors of the skyscraper. “So they told us to do things differently. We plastered the walls and put up wallpaper. Only then did I tackle the carpets,” says Mr. Wiroon. As he says, the contract was for a year, so after 12 months I was given a return ticket. “I broke down because I already knew I didn’t want to leave the girl. I went to my boss and told him I had fallen in love here. And he took me by the arm, took me to the head of ILBAU in Poland and said: ‘Wiroon can’t come back, I still need him here too much.’ They debated a lot, but in the end they extended my stay for a month. To this day I am grateful to this Austrian,” he recalls.
He had been saving a lot during the last four weeks of work. He spent his entire salary on a ticket to Thailand. Not for himself, because the company paid for the ticket, not for his future wife, because he could not imagine the separation. Although that would have to happen a few weeks later. Mrs. Krystyna had a visa for a month and a half, after which she had to return to the country. And her boyfriend, even though he had already decided to live together in Poland, could not leave. He was held up by paperwork problems. As he recalls, it was difficult to overcome the Polish authorities’ reluctance towards foreigners, but after half a year of trying, he managed to get permission to come.
The wedding took place in Ostrołęka, without the groom’s family. Immediately afterwards, Niamtrakoon received a permanent residence card and began looking for legal work. He wanted to work at the Marriott Hotel, but there was no place for him there. So he did odd jobs in renovations and then started working part-time at the Thai embassy. “I also started applying for Polish citizenship right after the wedding. Nothing happened during Wałęsa’s entire term. When Kwaśniewski became president, we decided to ask about it again. They said that all my documents were lost and that the office had no papers. I collected and put everything together, but after three months I received citizenship,” says Mr. Wiroon. He celebrated this already as an employee of the Marriott Hotel, where he was hired again in 1993. First he worked in cleaning service, then joined the technical department. He has been dealing with minor room repairs for years and knows the hotel like no one else. As well as secrets, gossip and mysteries from the lives of famous guests. He saw Obama, he saw Trump, and he saw the presidential suite after the famous Pole hosted a birthday party there, where guests threw cakes at each other. However, it is impossible to extract the name of this Pole.
Being Polish
June 30, 1989. A young Thai worker, Wiroon, is laying carpets in the rooms of a future luxury hotel. A demonstration is taking place on Marszałkowska Street under the slogan “Jaruzelski must go”. A crowd of people gathered by KPN and Fighting Solidarity chant anti-communist slogans. They are protesting against the election of General Wojciech Jaruzelski as President of Poland by the National Assembly, scheduled for mid-July. The demonstrators move from Marszałkowska to Aleje Jerozolimskie, where the fight against ZOMO will take place – one of the last clashes between the opposition and the militia forces. Wiroon watches this from above, from the hotel window. It is a very exotic sight for him, because in Thailand no one goes out on the streets or sings. He does not understand any of this, so after a few moments he returns to his carpet.
Just a few years later, a visitor to Thailand will learn what Solidarity was, how communism was overthrown, and what he really saw from his windows in 1989. He will begin to consider himself a Pole. “I tried very hard to understand Poles, I was interested in what this country was like. Today I feel very comfortable here and people treat me very well. I think they have also changed a lot, they are more open to others than they were 30 years ago,” he says, declaring that he votes regularly in elections, although Newsweek may not like who he votes for. He is interested in Polish affairs and watches the news. His wife follows him around a lot. He also likes sports, has not missed a match of the Polish national team for years and always sits in front of the TV with a red and white scarf around his neck.
Niamtrakoon admits that it never occurred to him from the beginning that he could live with his wife in Thailand. “It was difficult to get a job there, my wife would have to learn Thai, which is a very difficult language. Not that Polish was easy, but apparently I had a good teacher,” says Mr. Wiroon, who learned the language mainly from Ms. Krystyna, because he attended Polish courses on weekends at the University of Warsaw for only half a year. He feels good on the Vistula River also because he doesn’t like the heat. “Three years ago, my family and I went to Thailand. There is no air conditioning in my mother’s house. I couldn’t sleep there. I had to go to my brother’s house, who lives next door and has air conditioning. Only then could I fall asleep. The wife said: come on, we’ll sleep here, you came to see your mother. But I couldn’t stand it, I was sweating, the fan was running all night, it would only make me catch a cold,” Taj says with a laugh, adding that when they left Poland it was -11 degrees Celsius. In Bangkok, they experienced 37 degree heat.
– I have two daughters in Poland, Ilona and Monika, and two granddaughters, Kinga and Lenka, and I live well here. This is my second home. I am proud to have obtained citizenship and to be Polish – sums up Mr Wiroon, the first Thai to live permanently in Poland and one of about 100 people living in our country today.
