It is raining (it is always raining) and a stream of mud slides down the road to my gate from the mountain that is melting at the foot of my street. There is a strong stench of cat urine in the air.I have just come home from the hospital. But I’m not there yet. Friday I was supposed to teach the government officials. I bicycled to the Government Building in the center of the city and no one showed up, I was sort of expecting that, I never made clear when I would be returning from my conference in Cha’am. I went to a coffee shop after that with a book and sat around and people eventually found me (sitting around coffee shops and knowing someone I know probably will come in and that I will then most likely have a nice conversation with them is something, I think, I need more than a home. I am thinking here of the orange cafÈ in Aix-en-Provence, the first time I lived by myself—didn’t know the language, of course, and would often walk down the cobblestone street to that cafÈ, sit in the sun (there was a time I radiated towards the sun and not the other way around) and most certainly Alayna, Amber, Billy, Josh, someone, would walk through that warm plaza squared with hanging green tree branches and centered by the fountain, they’d sit down and the conversation could last hours, half of days. And I never felt like I was wasting time. And obviously Juna’s or Gimmee. Obviously.)
My supervisor, Pi Jarue, finds me at this particular coffee shop on my corner (no enclosed walls, plastic stools for seats and a blaring, giant TV in the corner, dogs asleep on the floor, dirty cats twist around your ankles and you feel their course fur and ribs, Chinese tea in metal pots at every table, coffee and sweet rice with jackfruit wrapped in banana leaf…) Pi Jarue introduces me to Cheryl, an English woman in her mid-50’s who has been in Thailand for two years and has funding to stay for the next seven. She came with the tsunami and volunteered in Kol Lok with all those volunteer/vacationer kids, whom in my last group email I began to express a little bit of mounting rage towards. Cheryl was disgusted with the programs, how after the tsunami they would throw these Westerners who were mainly in Thailand to vacation and say they volunteered (they had good intentions. Good intentions means nothing.) into the school systems with no background check, no experience, no cultural training, and they were supposed to teach English. They’d stay there for a couple of weeks hung over and dressed in flimsy beach wear, smoke cigarettes outside, play with the kids hair, and assume because Thai students can parrot words back like none other that they were actually teaching them something.
In the end all they really were bringing, flighty and flirty and crispy tan bacon skin, was more instability to children who were wrecked– severely.
All the while millions and millions of dollars are being poured into my province, Phang Nga, you have no idea. There is so much money here. (Why do I only have a chalkboard when I teach 250 students for a whole day?) So many dusty computers and giant SUVS and plasma screen TVs. And I know I overuse this word, but really, it’s just all a bunch of shit. If someone spent a little bit of time here they’d realize there is no need for that. There is need here… Thailand doesn’t need what America does, or England, or Germany.
Christy’s school, Ban Mueng, the school who lost the most students in the tsunami (over fifty out of three hundred) are still recovering from the Westerners who came in after the tsunami. Christy said they were grossly indecent. Years later it is still a vulnerable issue. That is the same school that still doesn’t have one physiatrist to talk to those broken, lost children. Pi Tim, Christy’s counterpart tells her, “you have no idea how much these students have changed.” She is worried. She doesn’t know what to do. “They are empty now, they don’t care. About anything, anything.”
(Christy tries as she can to work with those students but says how difficult it is. They don’t care about anything. They’ll sniff glue in the back. Just get up and leave.) One of the most disturbing things I have witnessed in all of this is that in the mass amounts of charity and good will that has been targeted to tsunami effected regions of Thailand there is still no physiatrists in that school, in the vast majority of the schools. Why did no one think of this?
Intentions have no value. They don’t. And giving away your money is the easy part. Charity isn’t easy. Creating something, in someone else’s culture, that is even a little valuable, that can sustain itself, is difficult.
I tell Cheryl that I’ll help train the certified teachers, with language and culture, who are coming here to teach for at least a year, who will be older, responsible, take this seriously, will understand the implications, she says. I’m happy to help her, I give her my number. (She asks if there is much to do in my town, wants to give the new teachers a head’s up. I say, uh, sort of. She says, well what are you doing tonight? I tell her going with Pi Nee to aerobics in the town’s center. Imagine about 200 Asian women done up in makeup with sprayed out hair in spandex doing the most bizarre aerobic moves you have ever seen. It’s hysterical. It’s my favorite part of the day. A lot of my co teachers are there. They tell me it’s good that I come but I shouldn’t eat dinner because then I’ll get fat, I say but I’m hungry! They just smile at me like I don’t know anything, BUT that’s another story.)
The next day I run a day long English Camp. 150 students. I am armed with the normal set of materials. A blackboard and stump of chalk. A lot stray dogs. I think materials are overrated anyway. It’s fun. The kids have a good time.
After the Camp I book it to the bus station, catch my bus, and head to Taukah Pah to have dinner and drinks with Christy, Rueben (Peace Corps Volunteers) Sam (long-term private foundation volunteer), Rusty and Laura (also long-term, another foundation, volunteers). As I am walking down Christy’s road, a road I’ve walked down about a million times before, the giant dogs come running at me barking and jumping, this is normal. Dogs always chase you, but normally I think of it as a false charge, as long as I don’t run I’m fine. Well I wasn’t and a German Shepard mix bites into my leg.
You know, I’m extremely awkward with these things so I don’t even cry out. In fact, when the owner comes out, Christy’s old neighbor, I formally bow and wai her as my leg is bleeding.
I turn into Christy’s gate, they are all mingling around the front porch and I laugh, “I was just bit by a dog.” This was a big to-do. Who knew? I thought I was fine because I had that five shot series rabies vacinaction. Nope. You need a booster shot immediately, then another. You need to have it cleaned at the hospital. (That could have been my most painful experience to date. Far, far beyond the pain of the actual bite.)
Had to hitch hike to the bus station. Rueben, Sam, Christy all agreed to come to Phuket (party island of Thailand) with me to go to the hospital and spend the night. We catch the 9:30 pm bus, get to the dead, bright emergency room at 1am and then after an hour of awful cleaning procedures I wish on no one, go to Patong, get a hotel room and go to a bar. It must have been three am at this point. Patong is like an international Jersey shore scene with the addition of painful human trafficking and more prostitutes than you can imagine. No one was up for the scene. We retreated back to the room.
Rueben was saying how he is applying for the AIDS Committee because there are high-risk students at his school. He said how in the school brochure for his school he had to translate into English what his counterpart was telling him, which was explaining the kids who are from hookers and the male tourists who then, of course, go home. Rueben said something like, “students who were salvaged from the sex industry.” Sam said, you should just say “Made in Patong.”
We laughed hard like we always do at this whole giant mess.
The next morning it’s raining and Sam, Christy and I sit on the balcony, drinking coffee and overlooking the prostitutes walking home and a steady rain. “This rain will last for weeks,” someone notes. We nod. It will. Sam goes, “Buddhism, how they work it here, just holds people down. I’m getting so sick of it. The merit system. You are born with good karma or you are born with bad karma. By accepting your fate because of your sins from a bad, former life, well it’s really easy to manipulate a whole society that way. Those rice farmers saying, I have no money because I was bad in a former life. I mean yeah, Thailand wasn’t colonized, but it was in a way. There is a rich Bangkok elite dictating this. These people are trapped, completely, and brainwashed. And they are bred to religiously believe they deserve whatever they get. Good or bad, they deserve it. They deserved the tsunami. They deserve their poverty. Well you can do anything you want to those sorts of people. Screw them over again and again and again. And all they’re working on is doing good to build their merit, boost their karma, and get them to the Nirvana when they die.”
Christy and I nod. I sip my coffee. I am here, in Thailand, in the south, my whole body is here. But it’s all temporary. It’s all an act. None of this really applies to me. I’m an American. I can try on lives like coats. This is just a phase of my life. Two years. This is a joke– these people. It’s awful. It’s liberating. It’s awful—I don’t know what it is.
The next day we hang out a bit, I have to go back to the hospital (and again on Tuesday), I get back home, walk up my hill, it’s dark and cool and the mountain is illuminated by the moon like it always is on good nights. The scratchy Muslim prayer calls are crying out from the mosque speakers in town. The chants bouncing off the mountains, I think there is nothing as beautiful as this sound right now.
A Note On Authority
July 16, 2006
With tall glasses of beer and ice, hot piles of rice and egg and peppers, Julia goes, “Ok, I heard something about Him.” She whispers this and we all lean our heads in because we know she is about to talk about the King and it’s illegal to talk about the King the way we, Westerners, sometimes do. It’s not that we’d get arrested there in that dingy restaurant if someone overheard our conversation, it’s that they would get very, very mad at us. They would kick us out, or push the men, they would be hostile. It just isn’t tolerated.
If you ask any Thai person anything about the King, no matter who, no matter how educated that person is, how long they have studied in the France or whatever, they will always, always say, “We love the King, we love him,” with this giant, sincere smile. He is God like. He is above everything.
This total, unwavering love for him confused me at first but after spending some time in the Thai school systems it began to make more sense. Respecting authority is the number one priority here. That is what they continually instill. Over and over again, pounding it in. They cultivate a society that respects their elders. (Have I mentioned how when I walk down the hallways my students part to the sides and deeply bow me?) And the King is the highest on the chain.
Where we, Americans, are basically taught the exact opposite, to question authority. Our classic literary protagonists who we grow up with would just not fly here. Holden Caulfield, Huckleberry Finn, Scout from “To Kill A Mockingbird,” kids who see through the crazy adults, the crazy system around them, that is not something that would ever be celebrated in
Thailand, in the east.
So when we get together, other Volunteers, we tend to swap stories we’ve heard in secret about the King or the Royal family, because we just don’t get it, how one person can be so perfect. Because we know that one person has to have flaws, something. People aren’t Gods. I think it makes us nervous.
The closest figures I can compare to the King, in terms of how the people view him, is how Americans view our forefathers who wrote up that weighty Constitution. What they wrote goes. Maybe we all need something, a doctrine, a voice that we can trust wholly in this otherwise grey, blurry world. We crave a black and white, a right and wrong. It gets exceedingly confusing when the borders blur. When you realize that maybe that suicide bomber who killed that baby at the market isn’t really the one to blame, wasn’t the one who was completely wrong, because after all his family was murdered by the military, which is what left him hopeless and jaded. Maybe the military is to blame. But they were just following orders. And it goes deeper and deeper and the list grows longer and longer. Until you realize it goes through people, generations, borders, personal histories.
Thailand’s government is a mess. Thaskin, the former Prime Minster, sort of stepped down because of mass protests that have been going on for about a year. Thaskin is often compared to President Bush. A money guy. A guy who will do things that not everyone agrees with because he says, you don’t really know what’s good for you anyway. I’m your bullying father so shut up son.
Thaskin encouraged Thais to take out loans, to get into business, to compete. He said that you can be more than you think. You don’t have to work in the rice paddies your whole life just because your father did. You aren’t chained to that existence. Compete. Make money. At first the Thais liked this. And to Americans the idea makes sense. Yeah, you aren’t chained to your ancestors. We squirm at the idea of caste systems. We are individuals. You can be whatever you want to be!
But the King didn’t really like this. Though he wouldn’t come out and say it because the King has to appear like he above politics. He is in this holy plain that doesn’t get down in the nitty gritty. But a few opinions started to slip from his mouth that made people see that the King, though he never directly admitted it, wasn’t down with Thaskin.
The King said that the stress in life should not be in competition. Competing isn’t good. You should respect your family. Yourself. The people around you. You should work on being self reliant, being healthy. Being happy. Being whole.
Thais, Buddhists especially, believe that life’s a balance. A person can have too little money (Americans agree with that) but in the same way, a person can also have too much money. If you have too much money it is just as bad as having too little. It’s a collective, sharing society. This is pretty Buddhist. Nothing is really yours. Your body isn’t yours. Nothing. It’s your soul and your spirit and you’re just waiting for the Nirvana. The idea of ownership doesn’t exist like it does in America. So throwing in this Western idea of competing to earn a lot of money doesn’t make that much sense. Why would you do that? Why do you need a lot of money?
So when the mass protests were taking place in January and February people were not saying kick out Thaskin because he is screwing us over, or whatever. They were saying kick out Thaskin because he is disrespecting the King.
And that’s where it stands now. Hazy and confused. It’s more than just bringing in Western values into an Eastern society. It’s more than just blindly following authority figures.
That night at dinner we told everything we had heard that was bad about the King. That made us believe he was more of a person and less of a God. Because the idea that there is one man who is perfect and floating above the rest of us makes all of us Americans very, very nervous.
When I am teaching everything I say to those kids is right. If none of those kids understands what I’m talking about it’s their fault—the entire class is wrong and stupid— and they deeply know it, they deeply believe it. It cannot be my fault because I am a teacher and I am older. It never occurs to them that maybe, maybe this person talking down to them, from the front of that old, rundown classroom, doesn’t really know what she’s talking about after all.
