Too Thai for TV

Today's Thoughts...

Roughly six weeks ago, shortly after my return from holidays at home, I wrote the following:

“How I have thus far spent my return to the land of sunshine and smiles:
1) Adopting a hairstyle during the apparent re-start of cold raining season that inflates to twelve times the size of your average Chia pet when wet
2) Giggling at everything and anything and nothing in particular
3) Receiving a lengthy diatribe at peak volume from an incensed French woman who was professedly enraged at my neurotic manner of story-telling
4) Trying to convince myself that the oversized dung-colored meatballs a friend and I spent two hours making were actually delectable chocolate treats
5) Losing face in a heated discussion over whether a student was “of woman born”
6) Deliberating on the appropriateness of “oohs,” “aahs,” and suggestive feline moans for a play my students and I are working on
7) Contemplating rapidly approaching unemployment and a most pained departure from the kingdom I have come to call home.”

As that pained departure creeps ever close with the tearful farewells and “see you soon’s” of the end of semester, term, and year, woefully I look around and wonder what exactly could drive me to such insanity to deliberate devising an egress from the joyride of life in Chiang Mai. As I said to my colleagues, struggling to swallow the tears that clogged my trachea as I gave heartfelt thanks for the past two years: “It is Halloween parties and English Days and every day with each of you that makes me feel like leaving would make me crazier than coming ever did.”

Yes, it is true that when I threw my cap and gown over my shoulder and tossed tank tops and skirts into bags in a frenzy after graduation, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I was excited. I was terrified. But mostly I was utterly ignorant. I had no clue what to expect— not of my job, not of the culture, not of my new home half the world away. Now I look at the person I’ve become and wonder— how could I have ever not come? With each passing day my land becomes Thailand in ever alarming ways. So I can read and write Thai (admittedly at the level of a rather advanced third grader). I can chug a bowl of blood chunk soup and throw down Ma Ma noodles like it’s my job. I wake each morning to His Majesty’s eye, a royal portrait poised above my door frame. But what scares me the most is not my scribbles in a child’s notebook nor gulping floating cubes of mulch-colored goo. It is the sudden disappearance of terminus consonants— ligh, fi, computa, projec. The steady mutation of words like “people” and “lovable” into something resembling seeing cremated remains (peep-urn) and relishing third degree wounds (love-a-burn).

And it’s not only my language that has, in the words of Moliere, been “Thai-thai-ified.” This weekend I caught myself driving in the blazing heat… with a jacket on. Likewise, I shook my head as I trotted the streets with an umbrella held high. Not because I was afraid of catching a chill or pondering the freak chance of showers. Rather because in either instance I was leery of the crispening burn of the midday heat and refused to succumb to detestable UV beams. So instead I boiled and baked beneath the light sheath of a jacket and processed down the sidewalk like a mourner caught mid funeral dirge. In so many ways, without looking, I have absorbed this place into every part of me. Perhaps what clicked most for me was walking into a favorite restaurant and having the waitress (FINALLY) bring me the Thai menu with a smile. Or maybe it was walking into the mall, a bright-colored bow tied on my head, and noticing the approving nods and clucks as I passed by. Whatever the differences, whatever I’ve become, however terrified or tantalizing, undeniably, indubitably I have changed. I have become more “Thai” perhaps, in so much as being Thai is measured in counting the layers of ruffles you can pull off before you look like an overzealous tea cozy or how many charms you can dangle on your phone before you contemplate purchasing a larger mobile device to accommodate them. But my conversion is not solely superficial either. I remember to lower my head slightly and give a curt bow whenever I thank an elder. I end most sentences (in English or Thai) with a chirping sweet “kha!” for niceness sake. Stroking wooden desks and glass cubicle panes as I wandered through a deserted office this week, salt rivers poured freely: I am going to miss this place.


Through it all, my well-intentioned and wonderful parents cheer and pat me on the back, lauding a job well done overseas. Supportive though they are and encouraging though they try to be, some days I cannot ignore the subtle hints that they are eager for me to “get a real job.” I’m sure they are ready for me to grow-up, fearing that lingering here somehow throws me in post-graduate limbo. But that is the beauty and mystery of it all. Because somewhere and somehow when no one, not even I, was looking, growing up is exactly what I came to Thailand to do and have done. Not that there is not a lot more ahead. There certainly is. But there is no need, no rush to “grow up” because as far as I can tell I am growing-- up, out, around, and every which way in between. Growth is relative to where you’ve been and where you are. And in both miles and maturity, truthfully, I have gone far, na.