Culture Shock

 

As you may know, if I’ve been honest with you (though I haven’t been honest with too many people) I’m getting pretty sick of my role here. The white, young girl role. It’s difficult. It’s straining. The constant coddling, having to play along with it. I used to think it was funny. Now I think it’s too much.  

“Mary, aren’t you afraid? I wouldn’t let my daughter live alone like you. Why did your parents let you do this?” Only the most upfront of my friends ask me that. But the rest think it. Thais just aren’t direct.   

My role is the young girl American. The other three volunteers in my province, who my coworkers know, fit the mold better. Two men and one woman who is thirty. The twenty-four year old girl is confusing to the villagers. As it should be. If you think you about it, where the West is in terms of women’s rights, (and I’m not suggesting the West’s struggle for equal rights is finished by any means) how we have only been there for the last three decades or so, it’s such a sliver of time. It’s nothing. What I take for granted as being a girl born in America in the eighties—rights I assumed were normal, were a given—it’s all so very, very rare. Compared to all the other women in the world, past and present, my life has been extraordinary. I understand that now.  

In four days I will travel to Bangkok and then to Chantiburi to train the next group of Peace Corps Volunteers who are currently going through their three months of Training, which I remember well. When you get off that plane, when you get here, you are so idealistic and excited. It’s happening and you’re doing it. Only you’re not completely certain what “It” is but you have faith that the “It” will surface and define itself soon enough. During those long hours of training sessions days in and days out you strain your ears trying to get it. The one thing someone will say that will better define what you’re doing here. You’re optimistic you’ll hear it. So you wait and you listen and you wait.  

I remember when I was a Trainee and Volunteers who, like me now, had been in the field for over a year, would come in and do a presentation. I was in such awe. I was so curious how they had done it for that long. At that point a year seemed like a long time to me. How had they lived in the middle of nowhere? I kept waiting for the secret. Only it began to feel like they were holding something back. You’d get it in pieces. Like when you are younger and you begin to collect the bits you overhear that suggests that maybe Santa Claus doesn’t actually exist. Maybe that was all some comfortable lie our parents and our society had been telling us—for our own good. It was like that. 

I remember one Volunteer, who only had three months of service left, telling me, almost in a whisper, and it was his tone that horrified me, “Peace Corps tells you nothing about culture shock.”  

I remember another, a woman Volunteer, saying again in this sort of hushed tone, “You have no idea what being a second class citizen will do to you.”  

I sort of dismissed all this. Filed it away in my brain and forgot about it. Until of course, months and months went by of me living here, in this place in the south of Thailand, being the white, young girl. Months of being the Other. Months of taking it. Smiling and nodding and taking it and taking it. Months of forgetting my own culture, months of absorbing Thai culture, and finally coming out of it all and realizing all of culture is actually this pretty arbitrary thing. Realizing that what I believed was a given—was actually culture—realizing how much culture has to do with things like the environment—that it has nothing to do with fate, it wasn’t predetermined. Culture is an accident. Who I am is an accident, is random. Then I got it. What the other volunteers had been holding back. The thing they couldn’t explain. The thing you have to experience to really understand. The thing that bothers me so, that today I can barely, if at all, explain.  

Anyway, so I’m going to Chantiburi to do a training session on gender differences. What you experience here compared to America. In the end I’m going to gloss over it. I mean you can’t explain it. We’ll break apart case scenarios. Do that sort of thing. But I won’t even begin to suggest what happens to you when you are constantly reminded that you are NOT a man. When you are constantly told that you need help. That you can’t do things by yourself. When you realize how women over the course of time just submitted to it, because for some strange reason, you tend to believe what you are told. If you are told enough times.  

I remember during my Peace Corps interview at Cornell, the woman asked me, “What would you do if you were in a culture that suppressed women and there was nothing you could do about it?” The question got me. I hadn’t seriously thought about it before—I hadn’t seriously thought about a lot of the elements I’d face if I became a Peace Corps Volunteer—I was more applying because I didn’t have a clue what else I was supposed to do after college. I paused and then said, “Well, it would be interesting for me to observe.” She smiled, it seemed to be as right of an answer as their could be. 

It’s difficult. It’s difficult for me to accept that I just happened to be born in America. There is a guilt that plagues me with that, now. That I didn’t have before. It’s difficult to accept that I just happened to be born into the family I was born into. The comfort. The security. I guess it would all be easier if I had some strong religion to guide me here, but I don’t. It’s difficult to sit on the beach here, with all these tourists. It’s difficult to watch the Burmese four year olds sell you beer on the beach. It’s difficult to watch yourself become numb to it. Numb to the anger that used to rage through you, children born into poverty, children completely exploited. It’s difficult to remember how much you used to care. How much you used to think maybe, somehow, maybe a little bit, you could help. It’s difficult how you have to remember it, remember it the same way which you recall a dream, or a nice memory from the distant past. Something that is no longer present, that only remains in photographs or journal entries.  

And maybe that was the secret I was straining so hard to hear when I was a Trainee. The “It” that no one would just come out and say. The thing I wouldn’t dare explain during my training session next week; that something will happen to you here, through this experience. In your loss there will ultimately be a gain, and that gain will be wisdom—a deep understanding. John Updike said, “Growth is loss.” Ignorance is bliss. And I have grown more than I ever, ever wanted to here.

When the Bombs Went Off

(This entry appeared in The Westfield Leader on January 25, 2007)

When the bombs went off in Bangkok on New Year’s Eve my friend was getting her nails done in the Siam Mall, which is in the center of Bangkok. She said she got the call from Peace Corps that bombs were being detonated around the city and that she had to go back to her hotel immediately. She said she left thirty minutes later, after they finished her other hand. “It was my first manicure in a year!” she yelled after I raised my eyebrow.

The other day I was taken to talk with the Governor of the province I live in. He was busy that morning and I ended up waiting for about an hour. I teach the Governor English a couple times a week so I have become casual acquaintances with most of his staff. I was sitting with one of his assistants we were both quietly drinking our coffee when out of nowhere he told me another teacher had been murdered in the south. The southern most provinces have been riddled with violence for years. Violence I was completely unaware of until I moved three hours north of it.

In addition to putting small bombs in random noodle shops, the terrorists have begun murdering teachers. Over nine hundred schools have been shut down because of concerns. That’s leaving hundreds of thousands of children with nothing to do. “Why teachers?” I asked the assistant. “I don’t know, maybe to scare people,” he said.

“People don’t understand each other,” the assistant continued. “That’s what the King has said. He said we need to do two things to bring peace to the south. He said we need to understand one another, really make an effort to learn about each other and to understand and then,” he brought both his hands and cupped them in front of his heart, “we must love.” I looked at him. Up until this point our conversations were pretty much limited to the weather. He went on, “We must let go of our selves and our egos and just love.” A buzzer went off in the room, which signals that the Governor is ready. The assistant got up and shooed me in and that was that.People say the bombs in Bangkok were unrelated to the terrorism in the south and that it probably had to do with political tension involving the coup. Thailand’s government is still being lead by military leaders. There have been no elections and there are no plans for them any time soon.Over Christmas a friend of mine went on a meditation retreat, which are pretty common in Thailand. He meditated in silence for eleven days. I was eager to hear about his experience. I saw him for the first time at a beach near his house yesterday. It was an area devastated by the tsunami. You can see where the wave came from the gaps in the trees.“So are you enlightened now?” I teased. We sat on the beach and watched the water. “You know I had this experience that was pretty crazy,” he began. “I was on my mat on the floor and I was trying to do a lying meditation before I fell asleep. I was really getting into it when all of sudden I started convulsing and my body rose off the floor.”

I was astonished. I was thrilled. “Then what happened?” I asked eagerly.

“Well, I thought I had reached something really great. I thought I had experienced what I was supposed to experience in all that silence, you know, something outside of myself,” he paused. “The next morning they told me there had been an earthquake.”

I laughed out loud and then we went back to watching the waves.

Leaping Out the Window, Which I Held Open

 

Well, I think this is difficult.

I brought nearly twenty books back from America to Thailand. I kept shoveling through things, pulling out more and more from this beat up black duffle bag. I felt like I was pulling out the intestines of a dead person’s gut.

“What were you thinking?” My roommate asked me as I sat there looking at the pile. It was late and dark and there was one light on in my bedroom coming through the open door.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Writing has been the constancy through which I have reinvented myself after every uprooting.”

Sometimes I like to think back and wonder when I first started going away.

I asked my roommate how Christmas was, she’s from California, the only other American in my town. There are also a few people from England. All teachers. She said they went to a friend’s restaurant. That they had a Secret Santa. There are about five of them, my roommate, my age, the rest in their mid-30s or 40s. “Basically,” she said, “the only thing we could agree on is that we’d never have a Christmas away and alone like this ever again.”When I was younger I began going away because I felt more, my senses were heightened, and because people missed me. And I wanted those two things because I thought it would help my writing. Because it intensified everything. For a very long time that was it. Writing. It was like a very simple path I was humbly following. Then something happened. A car came barreling down through the trees. Ran me over. Pieces of myself went flying. Now I’m scattered and apart and twenty-four years old. And there’s no path.

Everything smells different now, in Thailand. It smells like it used to smell when I lived in the north with my host parents. I miss my host parents. And their farm. And the road their small wooden house was on. The way you biked down the incline and then pedaled through the maze of flowers and chickens. And drinking coffee in the mornings, right after sunrise. My host mother would stir my coffee every day. And my host father would come in from his work. I miss them. Their house flooded, I heard from a neighbor, a few months ago, during the floods that devastated that area in October and November. I never called them.

“Often we lose a part of life because of what we choose to retain…”

There is such a delicate balance to things. And there are parts of me that are good and parts that are a horrifying mess and they both swing back and forth like children.

The people who admire me the most admire me, love me, because of my independence. Because I leave. Because I can leave. What if I stopped leaving? Would they still like me? It used to be all I had was my writing and now it’s become all I have is the romanticism, the idea, that I’m never there. All I have is that I’m someplace else. How and when did this change occur?

I’ve started to take people’s advice very seriously. That’s another thing that has changed. It used to feel, when someone gave me advice, it would tick off in my mind and I’d think, well that’s right and no, they’re off there and so forth. I used to know the right answers. Now I grab and grope at what they say, what they could have meant exactly when they said that and if they believe I should do that, well, how can I? You tell me what I ought to do and I’ll plot out the logistics. I can do that. I can plan a route. I just can’t, for the life of me, imagine a destination. So what should I do?

One regret is that I never got my tarot cards read when I was in America. There was a shop with red lamps in the windows in Manhattan. It was too warm of a night, no one knew why the weather was like that. The shop was pulling me in but I shoved it off, it was too late. That’s another thing. Things that used to be jokes, like astrology, have become real. And worse yet, horrible and disgusting and how did I let this happen? what was once real, true to me, I have let slip into jokes.

I hear myself talking out loud. Trying to explain myself and my situation to people and it is all a stream of jokes and cynicism. Of things I don’t mean to be saying, but am. I have become so very inarticulate in my speaking it’s hard for me to recognize myself. Much of what we say, I’m beginning to see, isn’t worth saying at all. Much of what I know about another person I have learned through their actions. How are you expected to say the right word when words have to come out of your mouth so quickly? It doesn’t make any sense.

Right now, in this waking moment, my house is filling with the smells of somebody else’s cooking. It is wafting through the back window, in my kitchen, that is only a couple feet from another window. All the houses are jammed together like that. There is a little space between the back of my house and the back of the other person’s house. Too small to stretch your arms out. But it’s in that space that offers the best view from the house. You have to stand out there to see it. The mountains. Pure and uncut from ugly things, wires or satellite dishes or something else that you don’t often mention in prose. When I’m sweeping away the ants in the kitchen, I open the door, step into that small space and look out.

Does everyone else just deal with their lives as it comes to them? Lives involuntarily changing and merging and blurring? Cars spilling out of the trees. Selves going flying. Paths forking. Losing things you never thought, could never imagine, you could live without? Do people just deal with this?

There is so much I don’t understand. And I can barely imagine how every one of us is living this life for the first time. Because it feels like some people just get it more than others, more than me, and that they can just go with it and not get bogged down by it, by the absolute, total, utter bewilderment towards this great thing before them. Their one life: changing and transforming and turning back again constantly, always.

Sometimes it is so distracting I feel like it swallows up everything else. Sometimes I feel like I’m constantly searching for something. Sometimes I think that’s why I read, that’s why I write, to get down one line, to find the one sentence, paragraph, poem, that will sum it all up. Allow me to understand what I’m doing and then will, finally, free me to move on.

“The forging of a sense of identity is never finished. Instead, it feels like catching one’s image reflected in a mirror next to a carousel—‘Here I am again.’”

Are we ever supposed to comprehend our identities? Know ourselves completely? Because if we are, how then does it allow room for change and growth? Don’t we have to keep changing? So isn’t it impossible to actually, really, catch up with ourselves?

I’m still jetlagged. I’ve been jetlagged, in one side of the world or the other, for weeks on end. I don’t care. Someone once told me jetlag is simply a result from dehydration on the airplane. “Well, what about the problem of going back and forth in time?” I asked her. I don’t remember what she said.

*All quotes are from Mary Catherine Bateson’s book, “Composing A Life.”

The Veil and Diversity

(This entry appeared in The Westfield Leader in December 2006) 

Though Europe is rapidly going through a transformation, uniting dozens of countries through the EU, Europeans seem to be getting themselves into quite the tizzy over, what is in my opinion, the most unlikely, trivial and discoloring of issues.

What the United States of America has over any other country in the world is diversity. The American Dream, that anyone can pull themselves up from their bootstraps, no matter who you are or where you started, embraces this diversity. American students are taught from an early age to accept diversity. Imagine that rainbow poster of children from around the world holding hands, which you find in so many kindergarten classrooms across the country.

Though there are of course exceptions, I believe many students who go through the public American education system come out ahead because of their tolerance and acceptance of diversity. Whether it is a diversity of class, race, religion, or ethnicity, the typical American student can see the strengths and power a diverse body can bring to the table.

After all, there was never a forest with only one species. Diversity is a natural, healthy part of life.

What this prepares the American student for is the future, which is going to be a world made up of people who are first and foremost world citizens and later down the identity list, separate themselves into particular nationalities. I do believe we are moving into a place in time where people will identify themselves as “world citizens” due to an array of factors like the internet, global warming and environmental disasters, a united response against the threat of nuclear weapons, and globalization.

Now is not a good time to remain introverted. This brings me back to Europe and homogeneity.

“The Dutch Government just announced that it’s seeking to ban the Muslim veil in public places. The Vatican has declared that veiling shows disrespect for local cultures and sensibilities. German officials in North Rhine-Westphalia say they will discipline Muslim teachers who wear headscarves in defiance of a ban imposed in May. In Britain, Jack Straw recently threw fuel on the fire by suggesting that this bit of traditional Muslim garb “separates people” and hinders integration. “Communication requires that both sides see each other’s face,” said Britain’s former foreign minister,” International Newsweek, November 2007.

I don’t see a difference between banning the veil and banning abortions. Both are an infringement of a woman’s right to choose.

I live in a town that is made up of forty percent Muslims, sixty percent Buddhists with a sprinkling of Christian Missionaries. The Muslim’s wailing prayers are broadcasted through speakers around my village—I hear them if I’m in my front yard– five times a day. The best place to eat breakfast is a Muslim run shop where you can get fried dough and curry, I dress more conservatively when I go out of respect, that and I’ll get my food faster. I stand in line with women dressed in veils with elaborate embroidery at the 7-11. I walk through Patong, in Phuket, and see a conservative Muslim couple, the man in jeans and a black t-shirt, the woman in full, black veil, all I can see are her two eyes. (And then I see a Thai prostitute more or less naked. It’s an interesting contradiction.)

I believe many people in the West downplay the role of tradition in people’s lives. There are people in my town who have been rooted here for as many generations as they know. Their lives are based around tradition. If a woman chooses to wear a veil, may it be because her mother wore one and her grandmother and her great grandmother, that should be the end of discussion. Transforming the veil into a negative symbol against women’s rights is neither educated nor accurate.

If you cringe at veils because you think most of the time it is forced upon a woman from her husband, that a woman under a veil represents a silent, docile slave, lets take a look at teenage girl’s outfits in America. There, girls are dressing provocatively at younger and younger ages because the media tells them if they do they’ll get boyfriends, which the media goes on to illustrate, will grant them fulfillment. All around the world women don’t have a choice what they wear. I don’t have a choice what I wear here and at first I hated it. I couldn’t stand it. But as time went by in my conservative, ironed out clothes, in this hot, hot climate, it became freeing, not to have to present myself in any which way. Not to have to “wear” my identity.

The factors I listed involved in pushing us into “world citizens” are just going to grow into greater and greater shadows. It’s inevitable. It’s going to get exciting. Dress accordingly.

My Spirit, Your Spirit

 

 “You ought to understand how far life can be developed, to what highest degree, and be especially interested in that development.”

-Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, “Mindfulness of Breathing: Unveiling the Secrets of Life”

A few months ago I was running to the river and passed a large tree. I had a quick and sudden suspicion then that went through my mind exactly like this: If that tree wasn’t there I wouldn’t be here.

I wasn’t sure what it meant exactly, I just had a feeling it was important.

My friend wrote to me and said his uncle, who is wealthy and has just retired, is lost. I said in response that maybe being lost is a good thing. Maybe it shouldn’t have such a negative wrap. At least that implies you are still active, that you are searching for something. My friend said he saw my point, and he agrees to a degree, that being lost and therefore searching implies learning and then growing, further evolving. “Only,” he said, “he is just constantly buying and selling.” That is where his uncle is trying to find the anchor, trying to find his whole, in buying large things and then selling other large things. It seems like an empty cycle. With no anchor in sight. It’s only a distraction. I wrote back and said, Yes, I had forgotten about that point. Materialism. Being lost and turning to mass consumerism. Or overeating. It’s the same thing really. I forgot about that, uglier, side of it.

I read a good and inspiring article about a French scientist, David Servan-Schreiber, who has been studying alternative methods of curing depression and anxiety. He is receiving backlash now, from scientists who are driven by mammoth pharmaceutical corporations. “The problem is that doctors nearly all get their information from the same scientific sources, which are closely linked to the pharmaceutical industry.” Recently (or not so recently as my access to these sources are notably delayed), The New York Times ran an editorial highlighting the fact that two articles recently published in The American Journal of Science were written by authors tightly connected to the pharmaceutical industry. They went on to list the very large sums of money, both authors received, from the corporations to publish the articles, even though the facts were not properly researched. Servan-Schreiber notes, as many have before, “It’s crazy that there is copious and convincing research indicating that physical exercise has the same or better effect on stress and anxiety as medication- with out the side effects- and that virtually no doctor prescribes it.” (It’s true, I think, my bicycle has saved my life here about a hundred different times.) But that’s not the crust of his studies. A large part of what he stresses is the connection between the mind and the heart. “One of his most interesting discoveries was that the emotional brain—where our instinctive and emotional reactions come from—is directly influenced by the heart. Servan-Schreiber says, “There is a constant exchange between the heart and the brain. Research shows that a coherent heart rhythm is able to bring the emotional brain to rest. When your heart is beating in a healthy way, you can heal stress, depression, tension and other mental afflictions.”Ultimately, what he is saying is an old argument that I’m not completely sure why we dismiss as often as we do—but we do often dismiss this. “The most easily available remedy may be the most powerful of all. And Servan-Schreiber ends his book with it. Love. Studies show that nothing is as vital to our sense of well-being as a feeling of connection, of being loved and loving, of feeling we are a part of a greater whole.”

Kevin told me how he wants to explore a different area in his painting, based loosely on his friend’s Emilie’s idea that everything that happens in the world also happens inside of ourselves. (Like in Siddhartha, “Your soul is the whole world.”)

There is another scientist, Elisabet Sahtouris, the author of, among other things, “EarthDance: Living Systems in Evolution.” Sahtouris gave up her lab work at the Natural History Museum because the accepted Darwinian view of evolution had become too restrictive for her. So she left and bought a boat in a small fishing village in Greece. She says, “Darwin described a battleground among species that fought to survive at the expense of one another. As a result, domination and competition have become a part of the modern world view- a view that feeds a great deal of misery on our planet because of our inability to see the bigger picture due to an emphasis on the separation between living things rather than the connection.”

Sort of like Emilie’s idea, Sahtouris goes on to explain what is happening in the world to what could and couldn’t be happening in our bodies. “Global economics is a hierarchical system where one level survives at the expense of another level. This top-down approach is never seen in healthy biological systems. In mature natural systems there are no authororitarian governments. What species is in charge in a rainforest? What part is in charge of your body? Imagine doing world politics in our bodies. Imagine the brain deciding not to allocate resources to certain organs, but keeping them to itself. You can’t do world economics in your body. You can’t have some organs exploiting others. You would die.” She goes on to write, “This runs contrary to the laws of sustainable living systems, which hold that poverty ultimately spells disaster for the entire system.”

Both very different scientists are stressing here the necessity of being part of a whole. Whether the point is to cure depression or to stop exploiting poor countries, the solution, they both have found, is exactly the same. To acknowledge that we are part of a whole. Which to me, also translates to having true compassion. To announce firmly to everyone and everything around you, I need you. To say, if you weren’t here, well I don’t think I’d be here either. And to say thank you.

Meanwhile, in the middle of the East and the West and spilling all over the edges are those holy wars. All that dust and chard skin and twisted metal, fire and blood. Those people reading the Koran so closely, so literally. Those people reading the Bible so closely, so literally. Other people find the passage, that those suicide bombers were using as justification for blowing up a bus, and they say, look here, if you read this passage like I’m reading this passage it doesn’t say to do that at all!

Well, isn’t it nearly the exact same with science. Reading the earth. Rereading the earth. Different people see it different ways, argue it different ways, and in the end point to either the line in the holy book or to the single-celled bacteria in the holy ground and say look here, it says to do it this way if you only look at it like this.

In the end it feels like we all need something to justify our inklings. A bible or a rain forest, a dead civilization or a solar system, a doctor or a pill or a talk show, something. This winding path now leads me to spirituality.

I’m frying raw meat on a grill and I’m not exactly sure how long it takes to cook. I’m with Vicky, a woman from England. “So,” I say, trying to turn over the meat with a chop stick, “then you were here, for the tsunami.”

“Yeah,” she goes, “I lost my house, I lost my bar, I lost a lot of my friends.” I put the chopstick down. I wasn’t expecting that.

“You know, after it happened, when all the bodies were being shipped back into town from Phi Phi Island, I mean there were bodies everywhere. The Thai bodies were just being thrown into the burners but the white bodies all had to be identified, you know. They were just everywhere. And there were these psychiatrists who were shipped in. I still had to teach, at least I thought I did so I was doing that, just going to school—but no one was really there. I didn’t know what to do. I thought I should be helping but what could I do? I barely even knew the language then. I’d just be in the way.

“So this physiatrist comes up to me and just taps my shoulder and says, ‘Are you okay?’ That’s all he asked and I was like, you know, no I’m not okay. He said, ‘look at both of your hands. One hand represents getting stuck in this. Letting these feelings go into you completely and hardening you and making you feel guilty and angry and resentful. And the other hand represents you acknowledging what has happened, you stepping back and seeing it happen, but not to step INTO it. Don’t ignore it, see it, but don’t BE it. And get on with your life.”

“That’s all he said and I know it sounds silly, but it helped. To see it, things that occur in my life, from a distance. To be here, in the now, that’s where I let myself be, while the past and the future I process but also recognize that I am only witnessing these thoughts. I don’t let myself become tangled in it.”

Someone said this giant, sweeping, stupid generalization that Peace Corps Volunteers in South America become political, that PCVs in Africa become alcoholics and that PCVs in Asia become spiritual. I dismissed this quickly when I heard it but now as my time here lengthens and grows deeper I have to recognize that what I see developing the most here is in fact my spirituality. My search for it, at least. Trying my hardest to feel what is right for me. Trying my hardest to listen.

I have spent the vast majority of my life without having a conscious spiritual center. And when I talk about things that have to do with the nourishment of my spirit I always giggle. Even though I’m serious. Why do I have natural inclination to present it as a joke? It’s not a joke.

To me, it’s just becoming clearer and clearer that we can free ourselves from depression, from consumerism and from hatred by letting go of ourselves. By emptying ourselves of our “self.” Of being completely aware of what is around us and of respecting those things as we would respect ourselves. To free ourselves, to heal ourselves, we just have to let go of ourselves.

I was on a sailboat in the sea and a 16-year-old girl had an asthma attack and then an anxiety attack. (I gave her seven pills a day, for various reasons from anxiety to depression to chronic headaches.) I was the only one with her, below in the cabin. Her eyes were wild and horrified. Between gasps of air she managed to say, “I… can’t… breath,” and then, “I… can’t… stop… thinking… awful… awful… things.” She was freaking out and it was obvious oxygen wasn’t getting to her brain and I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to do. “Sit down,” I said. We both fell down Indian style on the slanted floor squeezed between two walls. I held both her hands. Breathe with me, I said. “Breathe in,” and we did. “Breathe out,” and we did. And we kept doing this until I could see her come back to me. Her eyes focused on me.

It’s amazing how much we forgot to just stop and breathe. It’s amazing how the simplest things have become so foreign.

“In a world of lifelong learning, whatever the task or role to be played at a particular moment, participant observation can become a way of living. More- because it calls for a stance of humility and wonder, learning can be pursued as a form of spirituality.”

- Mary Catherine Bateson, “Full Circles, Overlapping Lives: Culture and Generation in Transition”

A Journal Entry: I’m Sick of Charity, Dogs Bite and Prostitutes (Again)

 

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

 

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.

You Could Almost Imagine Her Saying: “Just Get Me Out And I’ll Never Do This Again”

I feel. The movers fill your body with empty boxes.

The girl on my block, the Volunteer with the Christian organization, that works at the orphanage, also on my block, she’s dead

Yesterday that kitten that keeps getting stuck in places got stuck near the transmission of a running car. I was on my stomach, after seeing the horrible, awful pictures all over the newspapers, I was on my stomach on the hot pavement yelling, “Turn off engine, it’s stuck. The kitten’s stuck.”

“Can see? Can see?” the grandmothers slapped with baby powder kept asking, more and more grandmothers coming out of different houses in their flowered sarongs and rolling skin.

It was afternoon. I was late. I was supposed to be evacuating my site. Meeting people at a big hotel five hours away. It was pretend. The evacuation. A test.

“I don’t care,” my friend who is getting a divorce tells me in that cement box with red plastic chairs. The back of her dingy restaurant. Now that she doesn’t have a house anymore we eat there, she sleeps there on a mat. We eat rice with an egg. On a card table. One hole in the ground to clean the dishes and a black cauldron to slow boil the pigs for the market.

I don’t care.

“Can’t see. Can’t see,” I kept telling the grandmothers. I thought: You cannot cry now. You can’t have them see you cry. And that kitten I couldn’t see, but could hear the awful cries, the same kitten who got stuck under my laundry washing bin, the bin was against the wall and the kitten must have bumped into it in the middle of the night, getting trapped under, I found her the next afternoon and screamed because she startled me so. The same kitten now stuck under that hot big car just crying and crying and crying. You could almost imagine her saying, “Just get me out and I’ll never do this again. I swear, I swear.”

And I kept saying, “I can’t see. I can’t see.”

Anna’s dead. They were the ones who gave me all my clothes. The clothes that I wear are their old clothes. What can I do? Do I get rid of them? What do I do?

It was a boating accident in Phuket. Details are sketchy. On the broadcast news they said a Peace Corps Volunteer from Phang Nga died. So everyone was so worried, that it was me, who died. But I didn’t die. I told my friends that, when they called. Dressed in their clothes.

In their clothes, I said, “I didn’t die. That wasn’t me. It was a mistake.”

They worked at the orphanage on my block. A little one with six kids. Including Gobert, he has fetal alcohol poisoning and he’s six. His mother made him dance like a monkey on the streets and the tourists would laugh and give him money. And then one day his mother just left him there. He will still dance like that if you ask. It’s a horrible, ugly sight. Long bone arms flailing. Toothless, stupid grin. Giant head bobbing back and forth.

Anna was twenty. The other volunteer was also twenty. They were young. And that’s how I saw them. The other volunteer sitting at her house, I’d be walking up the hill, I’d pass her every day coming home from work, we’d smile. I’d think, What are you doing here?

Caitlyn said grimly, calling from the north, a twenty-four hour bus ride from here. She said, “It’s in the newspapers.” Then she said, “I’m sorry.”

And I knew what she meant—why she told me she was sorry.

And I grabbed my umbrella. And I left my door open and walked briskly through spits of rain. I was supposed to have left, I was supposed to be evacuating.

I didn’t care.

There she was. Anna. Why Caitlyn was sorry. I knew why she was sorry. The photographs, on the front page, everywhere. On every paper. Loud heavy bold Thai script and those pictures.

“Can’t see. Can’t see,” I kept saying. Squinting up at the bottom of that hot truck. That’s when the kitten stopped meowing. And it was silent.

Ten minutes before I had been standing at the newsstand. With that newspaper in my hand just staring at it. Her bangs matted against her face. The blood coming out of her mouth, a small stream, her mouth open in a dumb way, like she had just fallen asleep and the line of blood was drool. Her white bloated big thighs wide open. All crooked. Giant, grainy close up photos of her dead white face. Her dark t-shirt wet and hugging her round belly, her dead, full breasts. And those white, white grey bloated thighs. Anna.

Her friend, the other volunteer, the one I thought seemed so young. There she was, on the giant main picture, Anna on her back on the sand all bloated and wet and dead and crooked with that one line of blood, and the other volunteer, standing there, breaking, breaking, breaking. Like she just got it, she just understood, what had happened, right that second.

“What does it say? I can’t read Thai, what does it say?” The newsstand guy stuttered, I had just shoved the paper at him, I didn’t even smile.

“Girl, name Anna, 20, American, Volunteer, Phuket, boat, dead.”

“Okay, okay,” I said and left. I never bought the paper.

The kitten popped out suddenly and sprinted up the street, made a quick turn, and jumped over my gate and into my front yard. The grandmothers all smiled relieved. We all care for the dumpster cats, the grandmothers and I. It’s a thing we share. I followed the kitten. I don’t know why she went there. When I got to my house she was pawing at my front window meowing. Then she saw me. And ran away—back to the street, then up towards the mountain.

The day before any of this happened. I was washing my laundry. A bird fell from the sky suddenly. The bird gripped onto my gate, but spun upside down, and fell there. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what had just happened. A bird falling from the sky like that. It was light and flying and then it became heavy and fell. Just like that. Suddenly.

The volunteer who I thought looked so young, who I passed by everyday, who’s clothes I wear, she was photographed breaking, breaking over her newly dead friend on the front page of every newspaper in Thailand yesterday.

Long time making it home today, from the evacuation. I was dropped off from one bus on the side of the road, they said the next bus will come. It never came. I walked miles and miles in that rain forest. Across bridges stilted over the thick brown rivers. Getting rides in the back of pick up trucks, getting dropped off, and walking again.

I didn’t care.

Up the hill, to my house, walking towards that mountain I live next to. It’s dark now. There is a dim square of light on the rock face of the mountain from the moon. I am dirty and I am tired. I pass their house. All the lights are on, sharp fluorescent lights shooting out of every window. A Thai person I don’t know is packing all of their things into boxes.

The Ladyboys Know How To Get Down

 

“Mary,” a Thai woman I was working with the other day goes, “what you call it when woman trapped in man body?”

“Transvestite,” someone in the car says.

 “Right, right,” she goes. I wasn’t satisfied with that.

“Transgendered, I think transgendered.” I was surprised by how confused I was getting, not able to peg it down. After all I have a pretty solid gay history. Going to those Bigayla meetings with Baker freshmen year. Celebrating Gaypril for the entire month of April, I always brag about that in
Ithaca, how huge and loud our gay community was. 

“Because, is transvestite just dressing up like a woman? Can’t you be a transvestite one night and then go to work as a man the next? Or can’t you? If you dress in drag once are you a transvestite forever?” (If that’s the case lets take a little look at those 9^th grade pictures taken in Caroline Moore’s bedroom. Where dressing in woman’s clothes, was the thing to do on Friday afternoons for my entire group of friends, should I not have mentioned that?)

“Yeah, maybe, I don’t know, but everyone calls them transvestites,” the other Volunteer says.

“I think they are transgendered, but I don’t know,” I confess. And feel stupid that I don’t know.

The Thai women who is asking me this is driving Christy and I to a high school to work with her students who are working on a presentation for a group of officials who will be visiting the school in the month. The only reason we agreed to it, since it isn’t at either of our schools, is because “Bob,” will be there. Bob is 17. We worked with Bob at our English Camp in April. Bob is the make believe English name we gave him. I can never remember his real name. Bob’s the best. Everyone loved Bob because he was so damn funny and good-natured. Bob, like most of the boys at our camp, is a lady boy. Walks and talks and dresses (minus a skirt) like a girl. All the Thais are indifferent to this, it’s completely normal. Some boys are boys, some are lady boys and that’s that.

“As long as they have good heart it doesn’t matter,” my supervisor, a forty year old man, told me.

At English Camp we were going over personal autobiographies one afternoon. They would have to present them to the entire camp on stage with a microphone. Everyone was nervous.

“Why are you unique?” Christy asked the class while they were writing their speeches. No one understood. Their Thai English teacher, who was there, said, “Christy, don’t understand unique, what unique?”

“Something special about you,” she said, “something that makes you different.”

He didn’t get it. Didn’t like the sound of it. The old generation is collective, the young kids now, being bombarded with everything western, are beginning to appreciate the individual. Buying the individual through clothes and jewelry, at least. Because that’s what Western consumerism is teaching them, like it has taught us. That day Bob was wearing a front ponytail with a pink elastic that matched his pink shirt that matched his furry pink pencil case.

“See Bob,” Christy goes, walking towards him, “is unique because he has a front ponytail.”

Bob giggled. And that is what he used for his presentation. “My name is Bob. I am unique because I have a front ponytail.”

Lady boys, as they are called here, are everywhere. They are fully accepted in the society. They work at government offices, stores, restaurants, anywhere, dressed as women. Their hair grown out long and brushed straight. Giggling and laughing and often acting outlandish and eccentric which everyone likes, is amused by.

Oddly enough, though lady boys are publicly accepted, gays aren’t. Neither are lesbians.

“She’s lesbian, no good,” a friend told me pointing to a girl who was friends with her daughter. “Do you know lesbian?”

“Yeah,” I go and decide not to get into it.

 It’s cheap to change your sex here. I mean it’s startling cheap. Go to
Bangkok and you can have a sex change for 10,000 baht. That’s like less than 300 U.S. dollars. People from all around the world come to do it.

"Becoming a woman in Thailand is easier and cheaper than almost anywhere in the world.”

Yet as accepted as lady boys are they do not have any legal rights in
Thailand. “Sex change is not legally recognized, so women like Ball (the lady boy profiled) are still legally men. That means she and her husband have no legal relationship, even if they held a religious ceremony with their families. Neither does Thai law have a provision for prosecuting men who rape men. That leaves a keyhole with no legal recourse if they become a target of a sexual attack.”  Lady boys are everywhere.

“Thailand is believed to have one of the largest transsexual populations in the world. Academics estimate at least 10,000 live in Thailand, though many think it is more than ten times higher.” It is for sure higher than 10,000, in my opinion.

So it’s all interesting, you know. Thailand, for reasons I have never been able to nail down, totally accepts this one other gender. Girl, boy, ladyboy. Pick one. And with this third option many Thais squeeze into it. That’s the niche closest to who they are. But if they are gay they are out of luck. If they’re a lesbian they’re out of luck. If they are anything else that doesn’t have a name yet, they’re out of luck. Still hiding and acting and hiding.If the lady boy wasn’t accepted Bob would just be another guy trapped in his body that he doesn’t fully identify with. Trying to hold back the natural parts of himself that show so beautifully today. His laugh and his little run when he is skipping quickly up to Christy and I, as we get out of the car at his school. “Christy! Mary! Christy! Mary,” he squeals running up to us clapping. “You’re here!”

We never told him the only reason we came. Woke up early and spent the afternoon with his class was because we wanted to see him. Because his presence is so refreshing.

“Bob,” I go smiling, pointing at his school uniform. He was dressed all boys in
Thailand, brown shorts and white shirt. “What are you wearing?” He scrunches up his face as if he just smelled something bad. “I know,” he goes quietly, “I don’t like.”

I was at an AIDS conference a few months ago in the north. A group of HIV patients performed for us. The traditional Thai dance with long gold fingernails and high gold hats like the Buddha, which symbolizes reaching enlightenment. The dance moves slowly. It is a turn of the wrist and ankle. Slight moves of the body. They were all lady boys, dressed as the traditional Thai woman. “They like doing this,” the doctor whispered to me, “performing for you like this. Just as they are.”

Source:
Griffin Shear, “Life and Love As A Ladyboy”