Chan puud pasaa Thai nidnoy, or, playing with language

Thai class is still plugging away, and apart from the whole “get up early and drive to the other end of the city” thing, I’m actually quite enjoying it.  We’re down to a good core group now:  a ridiculously friendly Aussie couple (I keep hearing my friend Moray’s voice in my head, saying despairingly of Australians, “They’re so nice, they’re just so nice…” :)), a globe-trotting Swiss techie, a fun British guy who’s been here for about ten years and has a Thai wife (just as a disclaimer, there are times when foreigner-Thai relationships can have some pretty squicky power dynamics, and times when they don’t, and this seems like the latter as far as I know), and a British (him)/American (her) couple who remind me of my two best friends.

The lessons are cool, too, even if I’m struggling with the alphabet (Y HALO THUR, 32 vowels!).  I think my favourites are the days when we focus on food and terms used in restaurants.  Last week, we spent three hours on different ways to order noodles.

Thailand has a LOT of noodles.

Today, our teacher, who is energetic and completely adorable and looks about twelve, even though she’s an accomplished scholar of English and Japanese, told us, “Every Thai person prefers farang (foreigners) who puud pasaa Thai mai chat (don’t speak Thai clearly).”

After a pause, one of the class asked, “Why?” 

“It’s cute,” she said.

So, in that spirit, here are a few stories about language.

***
I was here for almost four months before I started taking Thai classes, so for a while, I was getting by on scraps I picked up and what my friends were kind enough to teach me over dinner.  Plus miming.  A lot of miming.  One of my friends here, T., sat me down over ice cream and took me through some of the basics of the language in a more structured way.  After half an hour or so, I had a few notebook pages full of useful phrases, and I asked her to help me practice them.

She got as far as she could before she burst out laughing.

Apparently, I was confusing the words “chan” (the feminine form of “I”) and “chang” (elephant).  So, basically, I was bellowing, “The elephant is hungry!  The elephant would like some pad thai!”

I’m glad she corrected me, but I kind of love the image of myself barrelling around Chiang Mai, confusing and terrifying people by obliviously demanding food and amenities for my invisible elephant.  Thai people would totally accommodate me.  You know they would.  “O-okay… um… would the elephant like chillies in that?”

I’d be a legend. :)

***

The other day, we were going through some basic letter combinations in class.  This is a good way, not just to learn how the consonants and vowels affect each other (the combination determines tone and so on), but also to pick up obscure vocabulary, as our teacher explains whether the combinations are actual words and what those words mean.  This particular day, she announced, “‘Bpoon’ is mean ‘semen’.”

The entire class gaped at her.  “What?”

“You know.  Semen.”

She looked out in confusion at our horrified faces, and mimed plastering the nearest wall.
We all simultaneously sat back in relief.  “Oh!  Cement!”

… at least, I hope to God she meant “cement”. :)

***

Speaking of my Thai teacher, she thinks that one of the funniest things about foreigners is the way we eat fruit.

Thais never just pick up an apple and bite into it.  They’ll peel it, slice it up, and eat it with a spoon.  So to Thai eyes, Westerners eating fruit whole with our hands looks barbaric.  Or as my teacher put it, “You look like students who have been stealing off fruit trees, and now you need to eat it all before someone catches you!”

(Btw, if you really want to crack Thai people up, walk down the street eating a guava.  It’s a visual pun – the word for guava is farang, as well, so you’re a farang with a farang.  Thais love this stuff.)

***

When it comes to studying Thai, I just can’t get away from elephants.

One of our exercises in class was to answer the question, “What do you like to do?” by listing a few different things.  Now, my memory for vocabulary in other languages is pretty lousy, and so the list of things I like that I could actually say in Thai was disappointingly short.  (My neighbours probably think I’m the most boring person imaginable, since whenever they ask where I’m going, I always tell them either that I’m going to work or that I’m going to eat – those are the only two answers that I can reliably remember!)  So I threw in, “I like to drink tea,” because, well, I do, and I could even remember the words for it.

Kind of.

The teacher’s eyes widened.  “What?” she asked.

“Duum chaa,” I said hesitantly.  “Drink tea?”

She started giggling like mad.  “I thought you said ‘duu chang’ – look at elephant!”

“I like looking at elephants, too!” I protested, over the class’s laughter.  “It just doesn’t come up very much!”

(Of course, I don’t get to look at my hungry, pad-thai-loving elephant.  Because he’s invisible. :))

***

Naturally, some words are more difficult to translate than others, whether from Thai to English or vice versa.  Either they’re difficult to define in simple terms (today, the whole class got in on the effort to explain to our teacher what ‘niche’ meant, without success), or they’re so culturally rooted that even a basic definition has to start by explaining the cultural differences.

But sometimes, those are the words that stick with you, and that you find yourself using even in conversations in English.  Because they’re not directly translatable, it often means that they describe something that English doesn’t quite have a word for – whether that’s something universal that Thai just puts very well, or something specific to that culture that you need to be able to discuss if you’re living here.

In Thai, a lot of the phrases that I end up occasionally adopting have to do with the word “jai”, or “heart”.  Thais describe an awful lot of feelings and character traits as some kind of heart.  There are the ones that are easy to explain:  “jai dee”, for example, is literally “heart good”, and means exactly the same as in English – good-hearted, or kind.  “Mii naam jai” sounds a little weirder to English speakers – it literally translates as “to have a water heart”.  It means generous, which actually makes sense if you think of having an overflowing heart.

And then there are the “jai” phrases that really are tough to explain, like “kray jai”.  There’s no direct translation for that in English, although I imagine quite a few southeast/east Asian languages have an equivalent.  “Polite” is probably the closest we could get, but that doesn’t even begin to cover it.  “Kray jai” basically means that you’re afraid of offending people, so you act deferentially and do everything you can to avoid showing anyone up – although it can get to the point of being so deferential and self-effacing that you’re showing people up by default.  If you offer to buy me dinner, you mii naam jai.  If I spend the whole time at dinner patting your hand and listening sympathetically to your troubles, I’m being jai dee.  If, when the bill comes, we spend an hour going oh-but-you-MUST-let-me-pay-I-simply-COULDN’T-allow-you-to-put-yourself-out, we’re both being kray jai.  And probably annoying the hell out of the waiter.

(Incidentally, the same concept exists in the indigenous language many of my Burmese colleagues speak – the word there is “anna”.  Occasionally, when my boss takes the staff to eat family-style and no one is willing to finish off a dish on the table in case someone else might want some, my boss will tell us, “Don’t be anna!”  It’s kind of like, “Don’t be shy!” or “Don’t stand on ceremony!” – but the difference is that, unlike those phrases, “Don’t be anna!” is one-time permission.  It implies that, of course, you’ll be anna at all other times.  Why wouldn’t you be?)

The two “jai” phrases that probably come up the most are deceptively straightforward:  “jai ron”, or “hot heart”, and “jai yen”, or “cool heart”.  Pretty easy, right?  I bet that if I asked you to guess at the definitions, you’d assume that someone who’s jai ron is hot-headed or emotional, while someone who’s jai yen is even-tempered or undemonstrative – and you’d be right.  But what foreigners won’t immediately realise about these phrases is that you’re always supposed to be jai yen.  Jai ron is absolutely, unequivocally BAD – probably the worst social sin in Thai culture.  It’s not like in Western culture, where to be passionate, even angry, for a good cause is often considered a virtue, and a lot of our favourite fictional heroes are hot-headed young things.

Obviously, both cultural frameworks have their ups and downs – even as an adult, I still don’t do very well with raised voices and blatant anger, so I find the emphasis on jai yen here soothing.  On the other hand, I’ve heard male colleagues tell female colleagues, “Jai yen!  Jai yen!” in the same tone that a British guy might use to say, “Oh, calm down, dear,” and that makes me bristle.

(Incidentally, a depressing example of language reflecting culture – our Thai teacher told us this morning, “This is not a good country for women,” and pointed out that it says a lot about Thai attitudes that the language has an incredible variety of words for “bitch”.)
It’s just interesting that, once you get used to these concepts, you end up using the phrases because nothing else really fits (at least when you’re talking about life here).  I remember going out to dinner with T. and a few of the women from the office, and we ended up talking about a dispute one of them was having with a male colleague.  T. – who’s from Canada, and was addressing a group of Burmese women, in English – asked, “Why’s he being so jai ron about this?”  Because that was the real question – not, “Why is he angry?” but, “Why is he being so unwarrantedly pissy about this that he’s willing to go against cultural norms and expectations?”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to drink tea.  Or possibly look at elephants.

*NB:  The Thai part of this post title means, "I speak a little Thai."  It does NOT mean, "The elephant speaks a little Thai."  I think.

One Day in a Border Town

Warning - long post is long.

The strange thing about living in Thailand (apart, obviously, from their tendency to put ham in doughnuts) is that loving the differences and resenting them; feeling like I could take on the world and feeling drained and in need of some goddamned Western-style bread; in other words, coping and not coping, come in waves.  Actually, maybe that isn’t strange at all.  Maybe that describes the process of getting used to living anywhere, especially after the first few months, when your focus shifts from adjusting to settling in and building a life.

So I have rough patches, sometimes.  (Not always bread-related, I should add. :))  There are days when I feel like I’ve already tried every dish from every vendor in our little local market about five times, or when I waste whole evenings idly websurfing – surrounded by dorm-style furniture, under a fluorescent light, in a room that could be anywhere in the world – and can barely remember, afterwards, what I even read.  Or when I finish checking over the spelling and grammar of the thousandth English translation for my organisation, and wonder what good I’m even doing here.

But there are also a lot of good days.  More good days now, I think, than over the past month or two.  VSO warned us going in that for most volunteers, there’s a rocky period about three to five months in:  you’re homesick, the things that used to be thrilling and exotic are now irritating or inconvenient or just not the way you want them to be, and you still haven’t fully adjusted.  It’s like you’ve scuffed up your new life, but you haven’t quite broken it in.  (And you’re getting sick of putting metaphorical bandaids on your rhetorical toes every morning.)  One of my brother’s friends, back when he was living in Nepal, put it even more simply:  “After six months, there will come a point where you’ll hate it.”

I never hated it here.  I doubt I ever will.  But I know what that adjustment period feels like – and now, I think I’m coming out the other side. 

I’m starting to feel really at home in my neighbourhood.  The stallholders and the neighbours know me; we seem to have progressed past the point where they were all insatiably curious about the farang, and kept trying to pepper me with questions, and then past the point where we all more or less ignored each other on the street (probably my fault – city girl instincts), and to a stage where we can exchange a smile or a few words without it feeling like we’re staging an elaborate pantomime of a cultural encounter.  Even my neighbour’s cats put up with ear skritches now.

I’m also starting to be more comfortable with the rhythms of the work.  There can be a definite sense of hurry-up-and-wait about it; sometimes, they don’t give me anything new for days, while at other times, they ring me up at night or on a Saturday morning to come in and check over a funding submission.  But I understand enough about the workings of the organisation now that I don’t have to wait for assignments all the time; I can pitch in, or work up proposals for new projects (provided that I present them as a range of possibilities, to avoid my boss just automatically saying yes to all of them to please me). 

So I want to talk about one of the good days.  This was last Tuesday.  Pretty much an ordinary day – nothing earth-shattering happened… but that’s kind of the point.

Let me tell you a story.

Night of the Living Bread (a.k.a. My Lunch Has Eyes)

On Thursday, I showed up to our weekly pub quiz looking like a drowned rat.  The storm had started when I was only about ten minutes from the pub, but man, it’s pretty astonishing how much water Thailand can dump on you in the space of ten minutes.  By the time I crossed the moat, the road was swamped, with the water practically up to my pedals.

And then I got this text from Pam:

Trying to get to quiz but there’s been a powercut and I’m trapped in the elevator!

So yeah, my night could have started out worse!

To Pam’s credit, she not only stayed completely calm while trapped in a completely dark box with the temperature rising (no more fan), which probably would have had me leaving bloody claw marks on the sealed door, but when they finally located her by knocking on the walls (no emergency call button, either – someone didn’t think through the whole “emergency call button linked to the same circuit as the elevators” thing!) and got her loose, she hopped on her motorcycle in the still-pouring rain and drove down anyway, only missing the first round of the quiz.  That woman is hardcore.  We walked away with third place. :)

Given the horror-movie slant of the evening, though, I thought this would be an appropriate time to share something utterly and indescribably Thai:  the Body Bakery in Ratchaburi.

Yup.  That is bread in the shape of dismembered human body parts.

It’s completely edible, and also accurate enough to be extremely disturbing (seriously, look at that top photo and tell me that isn’t exactly the way a pair of real, shrink-wrapped human heads would look).  My favourite part, though, is the fact that the baker believes the message of his art is, “Don’t judge by outward appearances.”  Right, because I thought that was a severed head, but it’s actually lovely, lovely bread!  I think we’ve got the closing couplet of a Dr. Seuss book here.

(Why did I say this was utterly Thai?  It’s that mix of gore and innocence – it seems very fitting for a society that considers watching the cleanup from a fatal road accident to be a spectator sport, and then turns around and invents motorcycle helmets with kitty ears in a variety of soft pastel colours.  Also, Thais love baked goods, so there we go.)

But what if snacking on a bread head gives you a craving for the real thing?  Well, you may get your wish soon enough, considering that the zombie apocalypse has started in Florida.

Clearly, it’s time to bone up on the mechanics of the zombie takeover of the world, and the most statistically effective strategies for stopping ravening hordes of the undead.

And if any of you haven’t heard this yet, consider it the soundtrack to the apocalypse...

Of Luxuries and Language

SATURDAY FTW.

I stayed up insanely late last night, because I was determined to finish this article for work before the end of the week (and decided that 5 am on Saturday constituted “before the end of the week” :)).  It’s not due until Thursday, but it’s pretty important (we’ve been asked by a pan-Asian newspaper based in Nepal to do a 2,000-word piece on what’s likely to happen to Burma’s rainforests when the country opens up to Western investment), and I wanted to have the rough draft done so that next week I can refine it/run it past people.

So, needless to say, after that, I slept like the dead (well, actually, I woke up at 10.30 in the morning to email the draft article to my colleague, then I slept like the dead!), and decided that, with the article done, I could kick back today.  So I drove down to the Ping River and explored the neighbourhood between the riverside Warrorot Market and the old city.  It was very relaxing.  That area of town feels more urban, in a way, than the old city itself:  the buildings are taller and more likely to be grey, nondescript concrete, but there are also some great hole-in-the-wall shops and cookhouses, and on a nice afternoon, most of the neighbourhood seems to sit out on the street (especially in front of the bike shops – it’s actually kind of cool to stop and watch a bunch of guys spread a disassembled motorcycle engine over half the sidewalk to tinker with it).  It feels very much like an area where people live and work, whereas the old city can sometimes seem like an artificial tourist paradise.

I poked around a small wat (Wat Ou Sai Khan, where the main shrine houses a jade Buddha; I was there too late in the day to see it, but I got some nice pictures of the temple and the murals) and got a bag of hot shrimp dumplings, covered in sweet and sour sauce, from the market.  I also stopped by one of the bars at the edge of the old city for a frozen margarita, and to read through one of my old guidebooks to see what else I want to see around the city (and what I’d like to show my guests in July!), then had dinner at a Mexican place called Loco Elvis, which I’d always wondered about.  (Good quesadillas, although my favourite place remains El Diablo, right across from it.)  I took a stroll through Backpacker’s Alley.  I discovered a Thai manga library, where you can rent a wide range of Japanese manga translated into Thai (and some Thai series, as well, I assume) – it’s a fantastic idea, given that most young Thais probably can’t afford to follow several series at a time (hell, many Western comic readers can only afford to follow a few series).  And at the end of the night, I walked back through Warrorot, which is packed with a young, mostly Thai crowd on Saturday nights, and stopped to buy ALL THE LYCHEE.  EVER.

Actually, that’s not even remotely true.  Yes, I have a giant shopping bag full of lychee, but that’s like a grain of sand next to the beach that was Warrorot Market.  It’s that time of year – they can barely give the stuff away.  And since mango season is ending, I figured I’d move onto a new Exotic Fruit To Make Myself Completely Sick On. :)

In one of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, he tells the woman he’s in love with that he’s not going to kiss her when they jointly make a breakthrough in an investigation, because the first time they kiss shouldn’t be a footnote to something else; it should be unforgettable, “like when you taste lychee for the first time”.  That was me today.  Well, technically – I’ve had lychee-flavoured things, but I’d never actually had it fresh before.  The woman who sold me the lychee peeled me one to eat as she was weighing the rest (which is a common, nice little touch in fruit markets:  they’ll often give you a free taste of whatever’s in season or whatever they happen to be cutting up at the time, regardless of whether it’s what you’re buying or not).  I can see what Peter meant, actually.  Lychee’s not the strongest or most exotic taste (of course, the amount of imported fruit available in 1930s London was probably pretty limited), but it’s bright and sweet and kind of complex, so that you notice different flavours emerging as you eat it.  It’s one of those things, like jackfruit and durian, where I’m not likely to forget the first time I had it.  (Granted, in the case of durian, it was more like, “Dear God, I need to immediately forget ever eating this abomination, WHY DOES MY HOUSE SMELL LIKE IT,”, but you win some, you lose some. :))

But the best part of today:  I got a massage.  An hour-long head, back, and neck massage.  Oh, God.  It was about twice the price of a Thai (leg and hip) massage (apparently because it requires more advanced training, according to my friend who took a massage class here), but it was so, so worth it.  I went to a tiny place down the same street as the wat, and I’m not going to lie, I did pick it mostly because of the painfully adorable, big-eared grey kitten asleep on a bench outside. :)  The masseuse was an older woman with a sweet face, pretty strapping for a Thai, who basically spent an hour pounding my muscles into submission.  At one point, she bent my spine backwards until it cracked gloriously in about twelve places.  The whole thing felt very luxurious:  there was a facial massage with a hot towel, and the ceremonial cup of tea afterwards.  I gotta say, though, there was also a fair amount of hair-pulling involved.  And at one point, she just up and flicked me in the forehead.  Sometimes, I wonder whether masseuses do things because those things are therapeutic, or just because they can. :)

Seriously, though, I can recommend the hell out of getting a massage in Chiang Mai (or anywhere in Thailand, really).  Which brings me to something I’ve been meaning to post:

Catherine’s Dodgy Fell-Off-The-Back-Of-A-Van Thai Lessons #1:  Thai for Getting a Massage!

(Note:  At the end of all of these phrases, say “kha” if you’re a woman, or “khrap” if you’re a dude.)

Jep mai? – Does it hurt?

Jep. – Yes, it hurts.

Mai jep. – No, it doesn’t hurt.                     

Mai pen rai – no problem/okay

Bao bao noi. – Gently, please.

Chakatee! – That tickles!

Ron – hot (they’ll usually warn you this way before using a hot towel)

Dee – good

Dee maak maak – very good

Kop khun. – Thank you.

Now go forth and have people rub you!  Um… hang on, that came out wrong…

Sooooo many tentacles...

Another reader asked, “Tentacles next?”

You got it!

This story is actually from waaaaay back in January.  It’s appropriate, though, because this is the story of Chiang Mai’s Chinese New Year celebrations, and right now, there happens to be another festival going on – the Inthakin festival, which is in honour of the city’s 200-year-old sacred pillar.  It takes place over seven days at Wat Chedi Luang in the old city, and I was just planning to drive down there tonight to check it out, when two things hit at once:

a)      Rain!, and

b)      The realisation that Sunday night is Walking Street Market night, and the market is on the same road as Wat Chedi Luang, making driving insane and parking pretty much impossible.

So instead, I decided to get dinner locally.  I pulled on my astonishingly crappy 29-baht-in-your-choice-of-embarrassing-pastel-colours poncho from 7-11, parked Arcee, and – after lamenting the fact that most of the stalls on my street close really early on a Sunday – found myself stumbling into a sukiyaki place that I pass every day on my way to work.

I’d never tried Thai sukiyaki before.  It’s kind of like Chinese hotpot (and actually pretty different from Japanese sukiyaki, which has more in common with Thai barbecue, or mookata):  with Thai sukiyaki, you’re given a pot of broth over an open flame, and a whole array of raw meat and vegetables to play with.  I got some seafood, bacon, and (surprisingly good) beef, and by the end of the meal, the last of the soup tasted amazing with all the different juices mixed together.  The woman who ran the restaurant was terribly nice, as well, talking me through the menu in a mix of Thai and English, and bringing things out of the kitchen to show me when we couldn’t arrive at a decent translation together.  Awesome owner + spicy soup + an absolute mandate to play with your food in a leisurely way while watching the rain outside = perfect place for a wet evening. :)

At any rate, weather permitting, I’m going to go check out Inthakin tomorrow night instead, but let me tell you about Chinese New Year.

I’d heard a lot about Chiang Mai’s Chinese New Year celebrations, which take place in the city’s miniscule Chinatown, squeezed into the small maze of streets between the old city and Warrorot day market on the Ping River.  (It’s not really an advertised or defined “Chinatown” in the sense that many Western cities have one.  It’s a majority-Chinese neighbourhood, with a Chinese temple, and many of the actual shops are Chinese-run – but the people running the stalls at Warrorot and the neighbouring Night Bazaar are generally Thais and/or selling Thai crafts, which means it doesn’t feel very different from the rest of the city.  Although there is a big red gate.)

For two days, though, the entire neighbourhood was transformed:  all the shops were decked out in gleaming red lanterns, and a huge red-draped stage dominated Warrorot market, with smaller stages set up down the market’s side streets.  

On the evening I went, the crowd in Warrorot itself was so dense that it was almost impossible to move, but once I was able to break away, it was a lot of fun to wander through the smaller streets behind the market.

I don't know why I like this photo so much; I think it just captures the feeling of this neighbourhood really well.  That, and the Thai students entering warp speed in the foreground. :)

The usually sedate Chinese temple was lit up and full of worshippers, in a way that, for some reason, reminded me of a church during the Christmas Vigil:

(This kid playing with his new present probably cemented that impression.)

There was traditional Chinese music on the main stage, as well as piped in over speakers between performances, while the small stages hosted a variety of other performances.  I ended up catching part of a beauty pageant, with contestants in traditional dress (ranging from little girls up through young teenagers) doing classical dance numbers or parading around with fans, while gorgeous twentysomethings in slightly skimpier versions of traditional costumes interviewed them.  It was… somewhere between charming and indefinably skeezy, for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on.  Something about the way the contestants were presented as perfect, demure-yet-romanticised miniature women rather than girls, although I suppose that’s true of any child pageant.

For the occasion, the usual stalls in Warrorot market were replaced by stalls with red awnings and gold decorations, selling all kinds of food…

… all kinds of Thai food, that is.

Yeah, that came as kind of a surprise to me, too.  I know there’s a lot of mutual influence among different Asian cuisines, but there’s, “Oh, there are some Chinese dishes that are similar to Thai dishes,” and then there’s, “Dude, this is a plate of raad naa.  Not only that, it’s a plate of the same raad naa that you serve here every day, only this time you’re charging, like, 60 baht for it instead of 30 because you stuck some red streamers on your stall.”  There was even a stall dedicated to the many wonderful variations on the classic Northern Thai sausage.

None of this, obviously, stopped me from eating my own weight in dumplings.  Hey, it’s still a street fair, and certain things are expected. :)

My favourite food stall, though, was this one:

Grilled squid is a bit rarer than most kinds of street food (in Chiang Mai, at least – that’s one of the things I loved about being down in Bang Saen for my in-country training).  It’s also a little more expensive, but totally worth it.  I paid 120 baht for a whole squid, and proudly told the stallholder (a sceptical-looking young guy) that I wanted the hottest sauce he had.

What I hadn’t really bargained on is that 120 baht gets you a LOT of squid.  A huge bag of these giant, glorious chunks of squid, swimming in scorching green chilli sauce, that you somehow have to spear and eat with a big toothpick.  I spent the next half hour leaning casually against a building and smiling at passersby while I tried to discreetly choke down these enormous tentacles. :)

What I remember most vividly about that night, though, is feeling the first pang of real, uncomplicated homesickness for London as I crossed the bridge over the Ping on my way back home.  The lights reflecting in the water made me think of the view from Hungerford Bridge, and I suddenly missed the city that’s been my home for longer than any other.

Jiggy-Jiggy?

Okay, so one of my readers messaged me:  "I'm not going to be puerile and ask for jiggy jiggy, so 5 on the menu please."

I should stick a disclaimer in here - despite the title, this is actually one of the most serious, thinky posts on the list.  Although it does include the words "jiggy-jiggy" in it, so there's that. :)

A few days ago, as I was walking home from work, something happened that threw me for a loop.
As I was making my way along the highway, I saw a guy get of a truck.  He looked Thai, not farang, but he definitely wasn’t built or dressed like your average Thai bloke.  He must have been at least six foot, with muscles that wouldn’t look out of place on a U.S. Marine (yes, I’ve met Thai soldiers, and no, they don’t look like THAT).  Just to add to the effect, he was in a wifebeater and camouflage trousers – again, pretty unusual (most Thai men I’ve seen either wear short sleeves or, if they’re working, go shirtless).  The most striking thing, though, was that he didn’t move like a Thai.  He had a full-on, aggressive strut, and (disconcertingly, once you’ve lived here for a few months) not a hint of a smile.

Now, I want to make clear that this guy didn’t say or do anything, or even seem to notice me.  What threw me off was my own reaction.  Something about him made me feel the way I’ve almost never felt while living here, but used to feel in London a lot (and all the time while I was living in Leyton, where street harassment is a weekly occurrence):  I felt exposed, incredibly self-conscious about the way I was moving.  And my body reacted automatically.  Head down, eyes straight ahead, don’t step too close to him, don’t make him feel as though you’re challenging him.  Move smoothly, move quickly, and stay off his radar.

First time I’ve done that in a while.  Visiting London for my birthday reminded me that I really do love that city, but sometimes, I also realise just how much easier it is here.  It’s also a lot easier than travelling around some other places in Asia.  Thais might stare, but generally, you won’t get harassed – unlike my experiences in, say, Tamil Nadu state in India, where guys would follow me down the street yelling at me.  (“Hey, you like go out?  Drink beer?  Jiggy-jiggy?  Fucking?  Kama Sutra?  Come on!”)*  It seems to be a question of rules for public behaviour, separate from the issue of gender roles and women’s rights:  both Thai and Burmese society can often feel very restrictive in that regard, and the status boost I get from being a Westerner is tempered by the fact that I’m still “just” a chick.  But when I walk down the street, I don’t tend to feel more vulnerable because of my gender, and that’s new for me.

Here, Have Some Democracy! (If Only It Were That Easy for Burma.)

So, in looking over my (growing) list of future blog posts, there are some longer ones (like telling you all about the workshop I did, or about my trip back to the UK), but there are also a bunch of shorter stories and reflections.  That means it’s AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION TIME!


Pick one of the anecdotes below, and I’ll post that one next.  (No, I’m not giving you any advance information beyond the title :)):

1. Mullet adventures!
2. Good and bad dog days
3. The questions Thais ask… and the one they won’t
4. Soooo many tentacles (not what you think)
5. Jiggy-jiggy?
6. BUG PLAGUE

There is also at least one more post that’s going to have to wait until I figure out HOW THE HELL to transfer photos from my Thai phone to my computer.  I think there was a cord?  Somewhere along the way?


At any rate, today I spent the morning in Thai class – I’m finding it really tough, especially given that a) I missed several weeks, between work and travel and in-country training, and b) our class is pretty dominated by two of the students – one a retired language teacher and the other a resident of Thailand for ten years, married to a Thai woman – who can have extended conversations with the teacher that leave the rest of us in the dust.  But we’re starting to learn to write now, and even though I’m struggling, I had that one moment that makes it all worth it the other night.  I was waiting for my dinner at one of the half-dozen noodle stalls along my street, and I idly glanced at the menu – and realised, “Hey, I know that letter!  And that letter!  Fuck, I actually know that whole word:  ‘pad’!  I can read this menu!”  Which I totally, totally couldn’t, by the way; I could read the first word of each item listed, which, by a remarkable coincidence, was always pad.  (Pad means stir-fried.)  But still, it can feel isolating to live in a country where you can’t read signs, or menus, or newspaper headlines.  The first crack in that barrier is ridiculously exciting.