Sangchan's English

**This is a creative piece I wrote for a travel writing class I took this last spring. It has been nearly a year since I traveled to Thailand, but even so it seemed appropriate to include this reflection on my blog from last summer. I hope it proves as illuminating as writing it was.


    Late afternoon in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and the visible humidity that came two months ago with the summer monsoons seems to part in front of me and Nuna, who is driving us through the city on the back of her motorbike. We’ve waited out a steady hour of rain at the local coffee shop, and Nuna is now running late for her English class at the nearby university.
    “I could have walked back, Nuna,” I tell her, “especially since you’re running late.”
    “No, sabai sabai,” she insists, don’t worry. “Besides, you know the way back from here?”
    “Of course—just past the meadow with the skinny cows, then past the second Seven-Eleven gas station, then past that block closed off by those chain-link fences with the green privacy screens, and I’m back. Nai makk,” I joke. So easy.
    We pass an enormous new supermarket chain and a complex of modern high-rise apartments complete with the parking garages and automatic gates that signal the country’s rise into modernity. The next block is a strip mall of traditional Thai massage parlors, running toilets, flowing fountains, and an air-conditioned coffee shop—a place, in other words, for tourists and well-to-do Thais. Nuna and I often go there, too, escaping the sweaty Thai summer with an iced frappuccino, which the English-speaking barista makes from coffee that comes straight from the mountains surrounding the city. The mountains, behind which the lazy monsoon sun sets each night, stretch all the way from Chiang Mai to the Himalayas. Only the neighboring Burma stands in between.
    “Julie, you know who lives inside those fences?” Nuna asks, turning around on the bike to face me instead of the road. In the last two months since I came to Chiang Mai to teach informal English lessons to interested students from the nearby Payap University, I had simplified my name to two syllables, easier for speakers of a predominantly monosyllabic language to say and remember. I had reduced other things as well: my wardrobe had shrunk to the few t-shirts that breathed enough to make the humid heat bearable, and my days had gone from university work in the U.S. to the eat-some-pad-thai-and-drink-some-iced-tea-and-then-do-work attitude of most of the country. No one seemed to think me lazy, either. I loved it. The only thing I hadn’t become lax with was wearing a helmet on a motorbike—I’d seen how the Thais drive their motorbikes and refused to compromise, even when Nuna joked about my farong, white-person, ways. I may have smiled as excessively as the Thais, but beyond that I wasn’t fooling anyone.
    “I don’t know who lives there,” I tell Nuna. The fraying, green mesh privacy screens across the chain-link fences offer only a transparent privacy for the inhabitants, and through them I’ve seen wrinkled laundry drying outside of houses built with warped plywood and rusted, corrugated metal roofs. Sometimes, the shape of a half-clothed child runs between the houses, or the form of a woman, child on hip, stands up from her cooking fire to talk with another figure. Compared to most parts of the country I’ve seen, this world inside the fences is as misplaced as I am with my light skin and bike helmet. I can feel my hair curling in the humidity and sticking to my forehead, imagining the frizzed curls that will spill out when I take the helmet off. In front of me is Nuna’s long, shining black hair, so straight it doesn’t tangle in the wind from the road.
    “Have you seen the tall apartments next to the fences?” she asks me, intent on finishing this conversation.
    “Yes, why?”
    “Burmese workers who build the apartments live inside those fences,” she explains. “They come across the Thai border, and then the building owners who hire the Burmese to work on their projects build camps where the Burmese can live until the projects are finished.”
    “Migrant workers, then?” I clarify. I know about the more than one million Burmese immigrants pouring into Thailand because of an unstable Burmese government, and I know that Thailand has spent the last sixty years under the reign of a beloved King Bhumibol (“Phumipohn”), who has led the country to industrialization. Nuna and her friends would have been entirely unable to pursue jobs as flight attendants and tour guides without the forces of the king and the recent past. Still, the situation with the workers sounds familiar, American even.
    “When the project finishes,” Nuna continues, “the building owners tear down the camps, and the Burmese must leave to find other work.”
    “And are they usually able to?”
    “Sometimes, yes. If they get work permits, then they stay,” Nuna explains over her shoulder, only half watching the road. “But they can only receive work permits if they learn to speak Thai.” She tells me she visits the housing camp every week to teach Thai and English lessons to the migrant workers—usually the women, since the men are out welding or balancing on the steel beams of a developing high-rise.
    “Do you want to come next week to teach with me?” she asks.
    “Would they mind a farong coming in to the camps?” Even though the Thais are the only Southeast Asian people group to have never been colonized, which many use to explain the Thais’ hospitality and congeniality toward foreigners, I have still wondered if farongs occasionally outstay their welcome or take advantage of the Thai’s friendliness. Even an insult toward the beloved king, coming from a farong, rarely incites a response; the foreigner is too respected, and the culture is too fundamentally non-confrontational. The in-flight magazines in the seat pockets of the Thai Airways plane I flew between Bangkok and Chiang Mai all called Thailand “The Land of Smiles.” Tourists love it. And, as I had seen during our frequent trips to the street markets, they often take advantage of the hospitality. With their over-sized Nikon cameras around their necks and their shopping bags hanging from their forearms, tourists barter with the street vendors to reduce the price of souvenirs by 60 baht—roughly $2. I found it almost laughable, and in fact the Thais often would laugh with the foreigners to prove themselves a worthy vendor to buy from. To justify it, many farongs explained to me that these merchants set the price high to capitalize on the foreigners who didn’t know to barter. I had no way of knowing, but haggling over $2 seemed like enough to make me resent someone. And the people Nuna and I would be going to teach wouldn’t necessarily even be as friendly as the Thais, I realize.
    Nuna, however, is reassuring. “No, no,” she says, “you speak English much better than me. You’re a good teacher, too.”
    I think of the street vendors I had bartered with at the beginning of our stay in Thailand, about my red-brown hair curling beneath my motorbike helmet. “All right, then,” I tell Nuna as we arrive at the street leading back to where I’ve been living all summer. I return Nuna’s helmet, which she hangs casually on the back of her bike. “See you Thursday then?”
    “Chai,” she agrees. Yes.
***
    I came to Thailand wishing I hadn’t. It was a place that existed in world maps and tourism advertisements and my father’s stories about fixing Air Force bombers in Bangkok during the Viet Nam War. I grew up hearing tales of what he called the “plagues” of insects that descended on the country—a different insect each month—of the cheap Chinese food restaurant on the Air Force base where he and the service men used to eat, of sleeping under mosquito nets to avoid waking up with his face dotted like a child with chicken pox. My father had hated Thailand. Somehow, though, I had always been intrigued. Then there was my mother, who had her own stories from traveling South America and spending her summers in Europe (where I learned later, from my aunt, she met an Italian man whom she almost married). By the time I was the age my father was when he left for his drafted four-year service to the military, I felt I was already getting a late start on my world travels.
    One day during the fall of my junior year in college, I noticed posters in our campus center for a program that sent students to cities all over the world for summer-long internships with groups of missionaries in those cities. My school was a private Christian college in Texas, so the invitation on the posters didn’t seem foreign. Most of my friends had already gone on mission trips at some point during high school or college, so that the “mission trip” seemed almost a rite of passage, and at least a mark of social success. There was also that itching bite of the travel bug I had either inherited or picked up from my parents.
    The information packet I perused that week outlined all the possible locations—Kiev, Ukraine; Buenos Aires, Brazil; Arequipa, Peru; Chiang Mai, Thailand. That final city screamed at me from the page: “Teach English in Thailand!” The description explained that the missionaries there taught English lessons to university students at the local universities while working to grow the campus ministries they had established a decade earlier. As an English major unsure how to use my liberal arts degree after college, I ignored the second half of the description and focused on the promise that I could teach English and travel. Within two weeks, I had applied, been accepted, and was booking a round-trip ticket to Bangkok. I would be going with three other students, and because it was missionary work, we would be fundraising all the expenses for our trip. All my friends agreed that it would be “cool” to spend a summer in Asia.
    By the time my junior year ended and my trip was three weeks away, I had raised all the money I needed, applied for a short-term Thai visa, learned three essential Thai phrases—”hello,” “thank you,” and “where is the restroom?”—and become convinced that I probably should never go to Thailand. Whatever had caused me to think I could avoid the ecclesiastical matters of the church and teach secular English lessons had lasted only long enough for me to buy the non-refundable plane ticket and raise the necessary funds. In the way that many of my friends with religious backgrounds grew skeptical of that background after coming to college—even a private Christian one—I knew I had gradually grown too reluctant about my beliefs to spend an entire summer with missionaries who had made their life’s work advancing their faith. To make matters worse, I had also learned that we would be teaching English by reading through a simplified translation of the Bible, and I was horrified to be involved with a program that capitalized on people’s economic and social incentives for learning English to make them read a holy text. But I had the money, and I had the expectations of my family and friends, and I had enough pride to make admitting any of this to them unthinkable. So one day at the end of May, I boarded an enormous 777 and settled into the window seat for a long flight watching the smooth, hazy curve of the Pacific. I imagined God, whoever he was, watching me watch the ocean, which, by the time the cabin lights were off and the sun had set in front of us, was as black as the sky. I was an apostate flying between a god and an ocean. I didn’t sleep the entire length of our Pacific-crossing.
    On my first afternoon in Thailand, I was told to stand on a street corner and hand out flyers to passers-by, inviting them to English-activities at the local church. The flyers, I thought cynically, may as well have read, “Want to study free English lessons? Okay, but only if you practice by reading the Bible.” While the other American interns gregariously distributed the flyers, I stood under an awning and, for every flyer I handed out, stuffed ten more into my shorts pockets.
    In the following weeks, I isolated myself to teaching informal English classes to any interested students hoping to practice their English skills. While the others in my group sat students down with the Bible and explained what incarnation and virgin birth and resurrection meant, I taught verb conjugations and syntax and vocabulary. Even two months after arriving, very few of the other missionaries recognized my refusal to use English to get people reading the Bible. By acting carefree and teaching English lessons at coffee shops instead of at the church, I managed to make few people suspect me of anything.
    Instead, I made friends with students like Nuna—a devout Buddhist studying for the TOEFL in hopes of becoming a flight attendant. Like her friends, Nuna was part of a rapidly modernizing Thailand whose tourist industry attracts thousands of visitors every year from Europe, the U.S., and Australia, making English a necessary skill in many of the lucrative industries. Her boisterous—and thus uncharacteristically Thai—friends also hoped for jobs as tour guides, hotel receptionists, and business people in foreign countries. They idealized Western-style careers as much as I did foreign travel, and none of us seemed concerned with how we would achieve those goals. I was happy, then, to spend afternoons practicing religious-free conversations and giving lessons from an ideology-free Pearson English textbook. I often asked them to translate English words into Thai for me, as my attempt to balance the cultural exchange and demonstrate my respect for their language and their country. It was perhaps a flimsy attempt, but the overwhelming sense of guilt that surged up sometimes, like the swelling rivers after the rains, drove me to attempt whatever amends I could think of.
    Some days, I wanted to hide in my small and poorly air-conditioned bedroom in the upstairs of the church and talk only to the friendly cockroaches. It was for fear of making my students perceive English as something it wasn’t, for worry that even the weakest affiliation with the church made me complicit in giving religion the economic and social power it shouldn’t have, for the lingering guilt of having come, uninvited except by the farong missionaries, to live in Thailand. I felt a strong need to protect the Thai people from something I could never articulate, perhaps from myself. I spoke seldom and made friends only cautiously.
    Although seeing some of my students become more fluent in English and growing closer friendships with many of them was encouraging to me, I still tried increasingly to be careful. Too often, I listened as my students spoke idealistically about a wonderful land they called America, where they could successfully finish school and find good jobs if they could only learn English now. Oftentimes, I even sensed they idealized me, the white-skinned farong with curly hair who came from America and patiently taught English. To many of them, it seemed I could do no wrong. They planned according to my schedule even though they were in school, they met me at whatever restaurant I suggested. One young man even spent on a single cup of coffee the equivalent of three meals in order to meet me for an English lesson at the local coffee shop. I realized this only the next time we met and he remarked, half-jokingly, “That coffee is paang makk.” Very expensive.
    Most days, however, I was able pull myself out of my room and venture out into the sticky world—a world ten thousand shades of green after the rains, where the wild plumeria trees bloomed everywhere they grew, where the rivers swelled nearly to the front steps of the houses built precariously along their banks, where the buzzing cicadas hummed in the forest trees and charged the air like a thunderstorm. The world, at least, seemed forgiving, or perhaps only indifferent.
***
    Balancing on the back of Nuna’s motorbike and wiping the sweat from where it collects at my helmet strap, I arrive with her at the entrance to the camp. She secures her bike to the leaning rack in the sidewalk and, without hesitating, pushes aside the chain-link gate and walks in. I follow Nuna onto the muddy clay-red ground supporting rows and rows of plywood houses. In these two blocks in the center of the city, with high-rise apartments on every side of us and the enormous shopping center visible above the fences, we may as well be in another country.
    To the left of the entrance, a large concrete cistern is leaking a slow stream of water through the varicose veins of cracks, and a group of women tries to bathe as modestly as square, fraying towels will allow. I look away, but not before they notice me stepping aside for a group of children running past. They are frail-boned and barefoot, and most of them wear ill-fitting, mismatched clothes. Like wind-blown palm trees, the rows of shelters lean just slightly, sharing patchwork walls made of reconstituted wood boards and protected from the rain with fogged plastic tarps. In one of the shacks, a mother is braiding her daughter’s hair by the overcast light coming through the low doorway. “The girl is asking her mother to make her look like a princess,” Nuna translates for me. I nod to the mother, who returns gently to her daughter’s braids. I wonder if I’m correct in noting a hint of sadness from the mother as she runs her fingers through the fine black hair, or if I’m only assuming she would have cause for sadness.
    At the other end of the camp, the older men who cannot work, or who perhaps cannot find work, bathe at their own cistern. Wrapped in a sari that must have once been bright orange, a grandmother sits with her back turned respectfully to them, while she leans over a small fire and cooks a pot of sticky rice. She looks at the ground; the bathing men, like the mother and her princess daughter, stare in our direction.
    Nuna approaches a group of women seated on the raised platform of a porch outside one of the houses, chatting while they fight to keep black-haired babies on their laps and yell sporadically at the older children to stay away from the red mud puddling under the stilts of the houses. Speaking to the women in the limited Chan language of south Burma that she knows, Nuna greets them, inviting them to learn a few Thai and English phrases. Some hesitate behind the plastic tarp of a door, others wring out their laundry to dry and seem reluctant to leave the rest still floating, twisted, in the buckets. Although Nuna has told me she comes frequently to the camp, none of these women acts comfortable with her. I blame this on my presence, attempting to smile at the women with a too-straight, too-white set of teeth.
    We follow three of the women to a stilted platform outside one of the crooked houses and wait while they pull their babies onto their laps and invite us onto the palm-leaf mat covering the platform. A little girl, her hair chopped short and uneven like the little boys, moves aside for us. We slip off our shoes, sit cross-legged, and smile at each other because there is nothing else to do. There are dried grains of rice stuck between the woven palm leaves, and my fingers move unconsciously to pick at the rice grains, rubbing them against the fibers of the dried leaves.
    “Sawadee ka,” Nuna begins. Hello. It’s the most basic Thai greeting, so I decide Nuna must have never met these women before and probably invites whoever she happens upon to study with her. Motioning them to repeat the phrase, Nuna smiles in encouragement before signaling me to give the English.            
    “Hello,” I say slowly, unintentionally enunciating the l-sound and the long o-sound in a way that to any native speaker would sound condescending. I wave casually. The women watch my mouth move and my hand wave, but none attempts the English herself. Nuna says something in Chan and repeats my “hello,” and finally one of women murmurs “hello,” smiles quickly, and returns to bouncing the child on her knee. We both smile back at the women, but everyone’s eyes soon choose to watch the children. It’s easier.
    Awkwardly, Nuna begins to teach the women another Thai phrase, and as I try to focus my attention on the lesson and continue smiling in encouragement, I realize that the little girl with uneven hair has crawled into my lap. Her mother reaches to stop her, to keep her from bothering the farongs, but the girl pushes her mother’s hand away and settles comfortably on my knee. Surprised, I smile reassuringly at her mother. “Sabai, sabai,” I tell her, don’t worry. When she remains uncertain, I tell Nuna to translate for me. Even then, the mother looks uneasy.
    I look down at the head of deep black hair, smelling of palm oil and shining even in the low afternoon sun. Unsure what to do, I hand the girl a pen and notebook that I pull from my bag, and she leans forward excitedly to begin a black-and-white drawing of a flower. She pauses after carefully sketching out several petals and introduces herself, in Thai. “Chan cheu Sangchan,” she tells me. My name is Sangchan.
    Nuna, who has been watching us, pulls a box of colored pens from her own bag, hands them to Sangchan, and leans over to me to whisper, “Her name means light of the moon.” One of the mothers is peeling back the tough skin of a lychee fruit, twisting her thumb to pop the seed out of the transparent, grape-like meat. The juice drips down her brown hands and seeps between the palm leaves in the mat as she hands it to her son, whose face is soon shining with the sticky lychee juice. The other woman looks over her shoulder at the laundry still twisted in the bucket. Sangchan’s mother continues watching her daughter sit contentedly in my lap.
    Within minutes, Nuna has returned to her lessons and is teaching the women to say thank you—kohp khun ka—and how are you?—sabai dee mai ka? Sangchan has outlined one wide-petaled flower in black ink and begun to fill in the lines with Nuna’s pink and purple pens, adding a green, leafy stem. As she colors in the yellow center of the flower, she looks up at me and asks in near perfect Thai, “Khun cheu arai ka?”—What is your name? I wonder where she has learned to speak the language, how she and the other children could have any access to a Thai education when the government does little to support their assimilation and volunteers like Nuna are few. “Julie,” I tell the girl quietly, not wanting to interrupt Nuna’s lesson, but she repeats my name, almost squealing, “Julieeeee!” as if to make up for the inaudible mothers.
    “Julie,” she says again after a pause, lightly drawing out the final e-sound, “chohp mai ka?” Do you like my drawing? Yes, I assure her, it is a very good drawing. She giggles. Her mother has not been listening to Nuna, watching us intently this whole time instead. She smiles, finally, and I wonder if perhaps she has understood something from our conversation. We both nod and go back to watching Sangchan meticulously choose her pen colors and the placement of the growing number of black flower outlines on the page, seeming to care nothing for the droning Thai-English lesson. She smiles up at me occasionally, content in the way children are when they have made a new friend and don’t bother questioning the motivation or sincerity of the relationship. Even when she reaches up to twist her fingers in the curls of my hair, I sense only a playfulness that, with her mother acting still undecided about me and the lessons moving painstakingly slow, is reassuring, welcoming.
    The sun begins to sink into the clouds surrounding the tops of the mountains, and we have only touched on phrases like, “How much does this cost?” When Nuna tries to review the phrases with the women, their voices are slightly stronger, their English consonants arguably more precise and their Thai vowels perhaps more intoned.
    “Sabai dee ka,” Nuna reviews with the women, determined to leave having taught them something.
    “I am doing well,” I translate for the women in English, but this phrase has too many sounds to remember, and the words become jumbled in their mouths, like Thai words do in mine. The children are beginning to cry in what I assume is dinnertime hunger, the laundry drying in the buckets has surely begun to wrinkle, and the men gradually returning will be wanting their dinner along with the children. But the women are sitting with a Thai university student and a farong who have come to teach them, and because these foreigners think they’re doing good and make the women think so, too, the women stay while their lives go on without them. All my discomforts and reservations come trickling back to me, like the steady stream of tired men entering the camp in their sweat-stained work clothes.
    Sangchan pokes at my knee, drawing my attention away from the lengthening shadows filling the camp to my spiral notebook. She has drawn a garden. Across the blue lines of the page are large, pink flowers set against a background of all-green foliage, beneath the blue sky where a big, inky butterfly has its wings spread out as if to land on the flowers. In her childlike way, Sangchan has made the colors dark and the lines striking. “Suuay makk,” I tell her. So beautiful. I try imagining where she might have seen a garden like this—there are no gardens inside the green-screened fences, and she is perhaps too young to remember whatever lush landscape might exist in Burma. Outside in the city streets of Chiang Mai are neglected planters lining the sidewalks and the occasional plumeria tree growing wild. The mountains—where during my stay in Thailand I have seen the most beautiful waterfalls and flowering trees and dense tropical forests—are miles away from the camp. Sangchan continues smiling her big smile, telling me something in Thai that I’m unable to make out.
    “Pah sah anglit?” I ask her. In English?
    Instead of bothering to repeat herself, Sangchan lovingly tears the picture out from the spiral notebook and hands it to me.
    “Kohp khun ka,” I whisper to Sangchan, thank you, but she has already started on another drawing. The picture is, for Sangchan, an ordinary gift. Unprompted, unassuming, separate from any kind of meaning I might try assigning it.  Nuna continues reviewing the Thai words with the women, who can remember and attempt a pronunciation only of every third phrase. Sangchan, who apparently has been listening attentively throughout the whole afternoon, begins quietly repeating the words back to me. “Nice to meet you,” she tells me when her mother can’t. “How old you are?” she asks, not waiting to tell me how old she is—five.
    “Nuna,” I whisper finally, smiling again at the women in deference and acknowledging Sangchan when she looks at me for approval of her new drawing. “Do you think we should leave? I mean, it’s getting dark, the kids are getting hungry, the women look tired. I’m even getting tired.”
    “Hmm,” she hesitates, glancing back at the women. Several more children and even a few of the men have wandered over to the platform where we’ve been sitting, intrigued, I imagine, by what a Thai and a farong might be doing in the camp.
    “Sawadee ka,” we greet them, cordially and respectfully. Although less timid than the women, even the men seem unsure how to respond to us. Finally, one of them says something to the women in Chan, good-naturedly, and the women begin to laugh. Having lived in Thailand for two months and committed innumerable cultural and language mishaps, I’m used to being kindly laughed at and have even begun to appreciate it. Laughter, as Nuna told me once, means I’ve merely entertained with my farong ways and haven’t necessarily offended. The response from this group of Burmese appears to serve the same purpose, and when Nuna begins laughing too, I feel more at ease.
    But the laugh is short-lived, and we return to the awkwardness of staring at one another and smiling at the children’s antics. As the sun has nearly set and I’ve tucked Sangchan’s drawing safely into my bag where it won’t crease, I wonder if we’ve really done the harm I’ve thought all along we have. Perhaps, I wonder, I’ve been too critical and too self-conscious the whole time and should accept the nature of human interaction for the complicated mess it often is and do my best, as Nuna seems to do. Or perhaps I’ve been right, and the laughter is like the street vendors’ bantering with tourists—light-hearted and yet aware at the same time of how these interactions are supposed to work, leaving the farong to feel innocent and respected. The women haven’t learned enough Thai or English today to be of any benefit, and their dinner remains uncooked and their clothes untended to because Nuna and I imagined teaching Thai and English was a much needed service. But maybe the strong need I’ve felt to protect people from me, and from what I’ve imagined I stand for, is just as unproductive and will leave something else undone and untended to.
    “All right, let’s leave now,” Nuna says finally. She speaks to the group surrounding the platform in Chan, and they all nod in agreement. Someone has switched on a lantern hanging above our heads, and our faces take on a harsh glow in the fluorescent light.
    “Julieeeee!” Sangchan says quickly, articulately, as we slip on our sandals and barely avoid the puddle that’s visible only at a certain angle in the lantern-light. “Bpai tawnee?” she asks. Are you leaving now?
    “Chai, chai,” I tell her, yes, wishing I didn’t have to agree. I would tell her that Nuna and I will come back, but Nuna would have to translate my English, and my flight is leaving for America within the week. I pat Sangchan’s head—the Thai blessing given to children—and she returns the blessing with a enthusiastic high-five. I must not be the first farong to have visited the camp, I decide, unless she’s seen the gesture somehow on a television somewhere. Whatever the source, my culture has clearly preceded me in these two square blocks of migrant housing hidden within the city. Sangchan high-fives me again. 
    Her mother watches us, readying herself to nurse her baby after we leave, and greeting her husband in Chan as he stoops into the doorway behind her. The grandmother has finished her sticky rice and is spooning it out onto tin plates for the men, who stop first at the cistern to splash water along their necks and rub their hands clean of the day’s work. Nuna and I nod to the people now bent over their dinners, spooning rice into their mouths with cupped hands, and they smile back—that same smile I no longer know how to interpret. We have intruded onto this patch of red ground, and I imagine they all suppose that, like most farongs who don’t return to Thailand, we won’t come back again. Nuna and I make the last turn before reaching the gate, sidestepping a pile of discarded wooden planks, and I know suddenly that I would hesitate to return even if I were to stay longer in Thailand. My English lessons have helped Nuna, but what we’ve done this afternoon seems different. The women will still have cooking and laundry to do in the morning, if not tonight, and the skeletons of the high-rises will be waiting for the men. I’ll never know, I realize, what we achieved on the palm-leaf mat while the sun went down behind the green mountains, and whether it was for good or bad.
    As we climb onto Nuna’s motorbike and I strap her helmet against my neck, Sangchan runs to the gate, shouting. “Julieeee! La gohn!” Goodbye! The humid air seems to part for Sangchan as she leans out the gate, waving at us. I imagine she’s considering whether to step out of the gate and onto the sidewalk near where Nuna and I are waiting on the bike, before remembering like children do the warnings she has received from her parents. For now, Sangchan will stay inside the green privacy screens, but eventually her family will move to another construction project, or perhaps she will go to school one day, or she will decide to chase after a departing motorbike.
    “Goodbye, Sangchan!” I tell her. I have done to her some of what I have done to Thailand, and she is standing at the gate, wishing us well as we leave.
    Nuna and I drive off, passing the shops that have closed, and the completed apartments where some of the residents have turned on their lights for the evening. We head south toward the university, away from the city, away from the mountains in the distance, away from Burma in the even greater distance. I think about Sangchan’s picture in my bag, imagining on what section of wall in my tiny upstairs room I might hang it when I get back.

A Last Night in Bangkok

Sawadee ka!

Almost ten weeks ago I wrote a post called one night in Bangkok. Last Saturday, I spent my second night there this summer, waiting for my 6:00 A.M. flight in the morning. Out of curiosity I read back through that first post. Coincidentally, maybe, I was sitting once again on my tiny balcony listening to the crickets and breathing the heavy evening air, even more humid after the afternoon rainstorm.

I’d just gotten back from wandering the streets near the hotel for a few hours, seeking out my final bag of saparote (pineapple) and moo satay (grilled pork in peanut sauce) and rotee (a crepe-like dessert from India). These all came from local streetside vendors, which I love more than any fancy—or as the Thais say, “high-so”—restaurant. It felt like the only way to conclude the summer here; any visit to a tourist site or other location would have seemed too un-Thai. And having left Chiang Mai and said many goodbyes (to all the people at right, plus twenty), I was already missing it enough to want to cling to whatever moments of Thailand I had left.

Quite a lot was going on in the last couple weeks of our summer, and every time I would sit down to write a blog post I either had to leave soon or couldn’t decide what to focus on. So to summarize as a sort of farewell post:

Major Events and Memorable Happenings

- Taught English and Thai to some women and children at a camp for migrant Myanmar workers and their families, located just down the road from the Zone. We mostly played with some of the little girls, who were shy but beautiful just like the women. And it was an eye-opening experience for all of us to a reality of life for many people in the world that we usually only hear about.

- Spent several afternoons at coffee shops with some of our friends (at left) as they were preparing for midterms at Payap; I learned everything I never knew about linguistics and the English language in the process of trying to help them.

- Attended the 50th Asian Mission Forum and met nearly two hundred wonderful people from all around Southeast Asia. We spent four days at a hotel downtown, going to classes (including one taught by ACU’s very own Dr. John Willis), enjoying a traditional Thai dinner and cultural show (where we learned some Thai dances; at right), and hearing some amazing stories about things going on all across SE Asia.

- Consumed large amounts of guay teoh (noodles) and saparote (pineapple) in anticipation of the lack thereof back in the U.S.

- Took hundreds of pictures as part of saying goodbye to everyone, a long and emotional process that lasted a couple days.

- Ended our summer appropriately just as we started it: with major flooding, this time even more substantial.

- Watched a stunning sunset over the Pacific from the window seat of an airplane while flying out of Tokyo (at left).



Important Lessons and Interesting or Otherwise Significant Observations

-Remember all that delicious Thai food I spoke of so fondly all summer? Well, my midsection remembers it just as fondly and has a five-pound souvenir to prove it.

- Having now flown across the Pacific yet again, 10 hours is an eternity when you can't sleep and the best movie option is Beastly.

- Thailand is beautiful, suuay makk. The Thai people are even more so, all incredibly hospitable, friendly, and jai dee (in Thai, literally “good hearts”).

- The things I'll miss most aren't all the tourist sites or elephant rides; rather, my friend Pii Oi the fruit vendor (at right), playing games at the Zone and sitting with friends at the restaurant next door, eating together before Cell Group, talking with my English students about life and such when we’re supposed to be studying idioms; the list goes on.

- Welcome and inclusion are highly undervalued but incredibly powerful. Even taking 30 seconds to translate a piece of a conversation for a foreigner can mean a great deal.

- English is still a difficult language to learn, and we should be careful about how it's exported. Granted, a common language is necessary, but we should be aware of the fact that we happen to have landed in the language of power—and be critical about and responsible in how we use that power. Going anywhere with English often gives you the upper hand without you even trying to take it, and we should try to occupy that position with understanding and equality in mind.

- Treat the foreigner as you want to be treated. Better yet, as the Thais would treat her. Hospitality and friendship are profound.

- When in another culture the best position is an open, vulnerable one. You'll learn more that way. And you'll realize how much more you have to learn too.

- Realizing how much there is to learn and recognizing the potential in the relationships that you’ve created, ten weeks feels so insufficient a time to spend in another place. We felt on the brink of forming even stronger bonds with many of the students and the church members—and then we had to leave. Saying goodbye at our last Cell Group (above) was difficult. Especially after they gave me, Mark, and Fish as a farewell gift our favorite dish, sticky rice with mango (right).

- That being said, let’s of course not avoid short-term missions entirely, but let’s be wary about their implications. They can very easily verge on colonial—we go in, have an experience that benefits us, and then leave. Part of a mission trip will and should be about the missionaries. In Thailand, I believe far more was ultimately done for us than we did for anyone there; it was incredible and I think made us want to do even more for other people. So while there’s nothing wrong with that at all, I only say all this to suggest we carefully consider our motivations and our impact in going somewhere to “serve.”

- And finally: when taken seriously, the way of Christ spurs people to love and create community that I just haven't run into often. If you want to convince a questioning, logical skeptic like myself, then don’t necessarily answer her questions. Invite her into love and community like we were this summer, and while questions will still be important to consider, they will no longer take precedence. Though far from perfect, the lives and the relationships that can result from living inspired by the gospels are profound. I can offer few explanations for the church here and what we've experienced this summer except that the faith purported to stand behind them is real.

Korp kun makk ka for all for your love, support, and prayers. Should you ever get a chance, I’d highly recommend a visit to Thailand. And please take me with you if you go!

Bizarre Food of this Week

In keeping with the spirit of this blog, which has described my encounters with everything from boiled pig's blood and fermented bean paste to chicken feet and crickets, this week's featured cuisine is:

McDonald's hamburger and fries.

Yes, I caved. Only because it was convenient; it was not intentionally sought out, I promise. But oh, did it taste good.

I'm so ashamed.

English in the Hills

Today is a cooler day in Chiang Mai, and I’ve spent the afternoon napping and sitting at one of the picnic tables on the Payap campus, smelling the bougainvillea and plumeria trees. We counted today and realized that we only have about 9 days left in Thailand. But whatever profound thoughts or realizations I might have gained from the summer will probably come more in retrospect—maybe on, say, a 17-hour plane ride home. So for now, here’s just more of what we’ve been up to and why we probably won’t feel ready in 9 days to get on an airplane.

On Friday we woke up at the ungodly hour of 5:00 so that we could be well-caffeined and in the cars by 6:00 to head up into the mountains to a village called Bakaew, where we spent the day teaching an English Day Camp for some of the students at the school. The drive to Bakaew was beautiful, even if it was along some unbelievably winding, steep, and half-paved roads while we sat scrunched together in the back of the car. But some of the sights along the way were fantastic--I think we happened to spend the summer in the most beautiful parts of Thailand, by the way (see above).

For nearly all of the 500 some students at the school, ranging from kindergarten to 12th grade, English will be their third language; Thai is their second already, since they all come from a variety of hill tribes surrounding Bakaew, including the Hmong. Several of the students were even dressed in their more traditional outfits.

We started the day with some big group activities, then headed to various stations for the groups of students to rotate through. Our students were mostly middle-school-aged, and all acted like middle-schoolers do when they meet adults: shy. Couple that with the fact that we were a big, loud group of farongs speaking English, and I think we all understood why they were hesitant to even look at us.

The station I taught at was with Greg and Taylor, and we’d decided to teach body parts. We went well-equipped with Simon Says, the Hokey Pokey, Mad Libs, and a pin-the-different-pieces-of-the-face-on-the-face game. The Hokey Pokey produced some good laughs—mostly at us and not with us—and Simon Says proved incredibly easy for them because, not speaking any English, all they had to listen for was whether or not we’d said “Simon Says.” So never play a non-English speaker at that game and expect to win.

Another suggestion: if you’re ever going through parts of the body, and you’re a female, and without thinking you try to teach the word “chest” to a group of middle school boys, and see them giggling, you realize just how much you can understand even without a common linguistic base. But the real success, at least in most groups, seemed to be the face game, which produced some hilarious and very “naa kleeat” (ugly) Picasso-looking faces.

The main reason for us being there was just to get them excited about and interested in learning English. Evidently, our groups have been going up every year for almost 10 years, and this school has always scored higher on tests than others in the area. Maybe it’s the day camp—likely it’s just good teachers.

Either way, it’s a day for everyone to have fun and to meet people who, at the surface, have nothing in common. But neither language nor culture stopped us from being invited to games of tag and duck-duck-goose with the children, and by the end of the day we’d made several friends who waied us and waved at us as we were leaving. The day, as far as we could tell, was a success.

Oh, and in a gesture procuring the awed applause of his friends, one little boy even blew me a kiss as we were leaving.

We Teach English Many Time Last Weeks

Well, a favorite phrase in Thailand is “sabai sabai,” which means “just take it easy and relax.” I’m afraid I’ve been a bit sabai sabai with my blog lately. Hence, another long post to compensate.

Actually, it’s more that we’ve been a lot busier than in the beginning of the summer, and the blog has sort of been subsumed in the daily life of Chiang Mai. So here is a bit of an update of what’s been going on here lately.

I would venture to say that everything is going infinitely better even than when we first arrived because we’ve really adjusted to life here and have been able to make it more like home—at least for a little while, of course. The language is still a daunting challenge for all of us, but then again English is quite the struggle for most Thais. So we’ve all figured out how to better communicate with people in a mix of broken English and the occasional Thai phrase, since we’ve picked up quite a few in our last eight weeks of semi-immersion. Also, as a warning to our friends and family back home: we’ve become more accustomed to speaking simplified English even among ourselves, so be prepared for a lack of conjugated verbs and strings of very simple sentences. Expect phrases like this: “Yesterday, I buy some pineapple from the store.” Since there are no conjugations in Thai, saying things like “I bought” or “We taught,” produces in people who are just beginning to learn English those same blank stares we give when people ask us anything in Thai.

Speaking of English, we’ve been teaching quite a bit more lately, and as an English major, I think it’s fascinating. I’ve gotten to work with a range of English levels and have probably learned as much about English as my students have. Two of the students, Shell and Nam Fon (“rain”), speak very, very basic English. Let me say that again: very basic English. Similar to my level of Thai. So we’ve conjugated the verb “to be” as a starting point, then gone through things like basic greetings and adjectives, which they can use with "to be" and actually say quite a few things. Feeling accomplished is always a good sense when learning a language. But without a Thai-English dictionary and with only my charade skills at my disposal, it’s actually quite a challenge explaining what words like “embarrassed” or “lonely" mean. Or when I said, "Fantastic job today," they thought I said "Atlantic," and an inside joke was born. We’ve all laughed a lot and been very patient, and become friends who communicate mostly by laughing and smiling.

Then there are those like the three Chinese students who come to study vocabulary for the TOEFL exam. Melody, Celina, and Lohm usually come twice a week, and we go through a workbook that I’ve copied for them (see the previous post about the copy shop for more information about that). Yesterday we studied idioms. Strangely, I found that in defining idioms you often use other idioms, which produces the same blank stares and smiles. For instance: explain "that'll teach you" without using phrases like "serves you right," or "what a drag" without defining it as "that sucks." Other idioms elicited some good laughs; after all, imagine not speaking English and hearing that we say “a little birdy told me” when we know someone’s secret, and “gesundheit” when someone sneezes. And I never did figure out how to explain “knock on wood.”

As much as we're teaching English, we're also of course learning a lot more Thai and learning 1) how it feels to not be in the dominant language group, which is a good perspective; and 2) how to communicate without language. So we can go like we did last Saturday and just spend an afternoon with children at an orphanage, which was fun for everyone I think. A little girl named Nuna held my hand nearly the entire time and became my friend for the day. If I may digress on a tangent for a moment: at one point, she led me into their bedroom area and through where the children eat—the rooms were dark and stuffy, and the beds were so close together you could hardly move. Thankfully they're currently building a new facility, but I can’t imagine even one kid getting sick without all the others being sick, and with one hundred little kids and only about 15 adults, it was no wonder all the kids were just wanting to hold our hands and be close to us.

Anyway, we taught them the hokie pokie, and they (mostly the little girls) showed us some Thai dances and what we’d call “playground rhymes.” Then I pulled out my camera and all they wanted to do was take pictures with us, which was fun. But then it was time to leave, so with all the kids following us we got in the car and left--just like that, probably to never go back again. And we’re not the first to have done that, and I doubt we’ll be the last. So if you’ll allow me on a soapbox for just a minute, I think we all should be careful about how we approach things like missions and volunteering and understand that we’re creating relationships wherever we go—and be very aware and very cautious about how those interactions affect the other person, not just the rich farongs who have gone to have a new experience or whatnot.

With all that being said, everything is going very well and we're looking forward to our last couple weeks here. I want to thank all of you again who have supported our work out here and let you know that it has really been a blessing in many ways for many people. We're looking forward to getting home soon! Miss you all and love you all more.

Bizarre Food of the Week

First it was congealed pig blood. Then it was a chicken foot. Last night:

silkworms and cricket. Mai aroi. Not so delicious.



















before

after

"You're Not Tourists Here"

We’ve known that this whole time—we’re not here to be tourists. That’s what we told all our sponsors while we were fundraising, that’s what we tell our students when they ask why we’ve come to Thailand, and I think that’s what we tell ourselves even as we’re climbing up a mountain to a famous temple, going to movies and eating out with our students, or spending a day riding elephants through the mountains outside of Chiang Rai. By the way, riding an elephant might be one of the most “suhtyaaht” (awesome) experiences in the world. I can’t help throwing in a picture from our weekend of us on an elephant (which even as a two-ton animal you can't see in the photo, which makes the picture sadly anti-climactic):

So we’re here to build relationships, work with the church, teach English, organize events to involve the university students, etc., etc. So we’re told. And for the most part, I think we’ve done that as best we can all summer, though we’re always learning more and finding ways to do things more effectively. Lately, especially, having seen most of the tourist attractions here and become accustomed to life in Chiang Mai and met more and more people, it’s been a lot easier to really focus on things like teaching and encouraging relationships.

But there’s a different point I’d like to make about this tourist vs. intern conundrum, and it’s one that a church member articulated over dinner one night during our weekend away in Chiang Rai. A few of our friends from the Pepperdine group were leaving the next day to spend time on the beach in Phuket before going back to the states, and one of them said that he was really going to miss Chiang Mai. To this our friend Oi, one of the church members, said, “That’s because in Phuket you’re just tourists; here, you’re family.”

That sounds cheesy—like a low-budget advertisement for a family-style restaurant or something. But at the moment, over a bowl of traditional Northeastern Thai soup that she’d bought specifically to share with us, it wasn’t.

And it still doesn’t feel trite or cliched or oversimplified or tag-lined. If anything, I think it’s been the most compelling—and surprising—aspect of our summer here. We were given the warmest welcome both by the Thais and the church when we arrived, and since then we’ve been more and more included, more and more a part of things. More loved, even.

What I find most remarkable is that they really have no reason to befriend us: we can’t order our own food except by pointing, we can’t drive anywhere, we can’t speak Thai even to the people who try their hardest to speak English to us, we’re completely oblivious to our swelling noise levels and the positioning of our feet (which should stay on the ground pointed away from people), and I’ve spit out an entire chicken foot while sitting next to a judge at a table with ten government workers.

Part of it, I know, is that many want to learn English and create connections that will get them to America one day. There’s also a fascination with “farong culture,” which we’ve tried to avoid encouraging and inadvertently promoting over Thai culture. And we’ve also experienced a willingness among Thais to bend over backwards for farongs, which I think goes beyond even the friendliest hospitality into a misguided glorification of the “farong visitor.” I don’t, however, want to discount the sincere friendliness and genuine hospitality among the Thais. It’s certainly not just because we’re Americans.

That spirit is even more evident within the church community. They invite us to their homes for dinner, or throw a birthday party for a young Thai man whose family never celebrated with him for the last twenty-four years (the picture above and at right). I could go on and on with examples.

The point: I’ve taught English classes, we’ve tried to include and invite as many people as we can, and we’ve tried to serve in many different ways. But we’ve been served much, much more than we’ve served. We’ve learned more than we’ve taught. We have ended up being neither tourists nor interns, but something else entirely that we never would have expected.