‘Opium Dream’ – An Asian Adventure by Jason Schoonover

Jason Schoonover is a Canadian writer who is also an avid collector of primitive art and antiquities. He moved to Bangkok in 1982 and, ever since, has split his time between Canada and Thailand, selling ethnological collections to museums and private collectors. Opium Dream was published in 2002 by Asia Books and is still available at bookstores in Thailand, but it is not Schoonover’s only book.

The novel follows the (mis)adventures of Lee Rivers, a Bangkok-based anthropologist and member of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand, who takes on a job unearthing ancient artifacts in Afghanistan only to find himself hunted, and accidentally a threat to the future of Western civilization.

“We share a passion for several ‘ologies’ – anthropology, archeology, especially gynecology,” writes Schoonover about his main character Rivers who, just like the author himself, has been selling anthropological and archeological collections to museums worldwide. It is easy to identify Rivers with Schoonover’s alter ego and their interest in the Bangkok bar scene comes with the fact that, apparently, no book written by a foreigner can leave out the juicy details of the Thai ‘nightlife.’

Upon returning from a trip to the hill tribes in the jungles of Vietnam, where he was commissioned to buy a textile collection for the Smithsonian Institution, Rivers’s life is already under threat. Before he meets his Russian friend Boris Anklovitch, a former journalist who covered the Afghan-Russian War, and before he even accepts his friend’s offer of joining him on an archeological dig in Afghanistan, several hitmen want him dead.

It goes without saying that Lee Rivers takes on the job immediately, especially when the find in Afghanistan is suspected to be the burial site of Kublai Khan, the 13^th century Mongol ruler who conquered China. Chinese ideograms incised at the base of each statue at the burial site apparently attest to the fact that, just like Qin’s Terracotta Army, Kublai Khan has been buried with a large collection of statues.

The market value of such a find is in the tens of millions of dollars and, for Lee Rivers, unearthing such a site would put him on the same pedestals in the annals of archeological history as Howard Carter who discovered the tomb of the Egyptian King Tuthankamun. It is a job he cannot refuse.

Too bad the attempt on his life in Saigon was repeated in Bangkok and thus Rivers realizes he needs a bodyguard. Lee’s ex-CIA friend, now a bar owner in Bangkok, recommends him Meaw Ly, a beautiful Lao Hmong, who emigrated with her parents to American when she was just a little girl. She now works as a bodyguard for Hollywood superstars and “just happened” to be in Bangkok…

Once in Afghanistan, Lee, Boris and Meaw are led to Kublai Khan’s burial site where they raise twenty-four statues to the surface, each one representing an individual person from the Mongol’s harem and entourage. This basically becomes the greatest archeological find of the millennium. But, obviously, someone wants them dead and thus a cat-and-mouse race begins. We follow the protagonists across Afghanistan into Pakistan via the Desert-of-Death and their flight to Egypt where the mystery of who wants them dead and why unfolds. To complicate things even more, the party of adventurers also get tangled up in an opium smuggling operation, are arrested by the Pakistani army, then by the Egyptian one, only to be interviewed, in the end, by CNN’s most recognizable anchor.

At the same time, a background story unfolds which involves Hasheem, an enigmatic Afghan, head of a new group called the Seed of the New Genesis which prophesies a future Armageddon; the Arab states which separate into two new coalitions, the Extremist and the Moderates; and Russian politicians who plan a coup d’état and a new world order.

Schoonover’s Opium Dream is an action-packed adventure novel that makes use of true archeological, anthropological, historic, and geographic facts. Think about Indiana Jones, James Bond, and the National Treasure films and you can have a fairly good guess at what to expect from this book.

In a 2003 interview for Contemporary Authors Online, Schoonover confessed: “I’m a traveler. I was born with a pack in one hand and a typewriter in the other though I hammer away on a laptop now. I stumbled across the Far East in the midst of an around-the-world trip in 1978 and was delightfully stunned by the experience–the most exotic chunk of real estate on the planet. The tremendous variety of cultural and sensory experiences made it impossible to be bored there. Since one has only one life to live, I decided to live it in paradise and moved to Bangkok, the hub, in the most exotic country of them all, Thailand, in 1982.”

He is also the author of The Bangkok Collection (Bantam, 1988) an adventure novel which was later republished in subsequent editions as Thai Gold (Bantam, 1989; Asia Books, 2002) and Nepal Gold (Pilgrim Books, 2003); Westward from New Amsterdam – The Schoonover Epic (Rolling Thunder, 2001, DVD), a non-fiction book about the writer’s family; The Manila Galleon (Rolling Thunder, 2006), a volume containing two action-adventure thrillers; and Adventurous Dream, Adventurous Lives – Today’s Adventurers Recall the Youthful Dreams Launching their Remarkable Lives (Rocky Mountain Books, 2007), a Who’s Who of 120 living explorers. He has also written two screenplays and has contributed with numerous articles to magazines and newspapers.

In 2005, Jason Schoonover was featured Jerry Hopkins’ Bangkok Babylon: The Real-Life Exploits of Bangkok’s Legendary Expatriates are often Stranger than Fiction, a collection of 25 portraits of expatriates living in Thailand. The interview with the author of Opium Dream, entitled “The Collector: Jason Schoonover” can be read on Schoonover’s website.

Nature photography by Regin Reyno

An edited version was initially published in
“Bangkok Trader” (Vol.7, No.5, April 2013)