Thailand Confidential

Talking Thai, Understanding Englit

I’d tried to learn Thai. I really did. I spent more than a hundred dollars on a set of tapes and a manual the size of a small American city’s telephone book. I still have a shelf of how-to books and the pocket-sized Thai-English dictionary I carry around with me is so worn a rubber band is all that holds it together. I even enrolled in a class to learn the language.

In many ways, Thai is far simpler than English, once you learn that the adjectives follow the subject and a couple of other easy rules. There are no prefixes or suffixes, no tenses or plurals, nor any articles. The verbs do not conjugate and there are no genders, as in, say, Spanish and French. And there is no punctuation or capitalization.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that there are forty-four consonants, twenty-four vowels (each with a long and short form), and five tones. Because it, like some other Asian languages, is constructed of monosyllabic words, thus limiting the number of combination possibilities, how you say and hear the words determines if you can speak or comprehend it. For example, the syllable mai can mean “new,” “burn,” “wood,” “not” or “not?,” depending on how it’s pronounced. Thus you can say “Mai mai mai mai mai?” and mean, “New wood doesn’t burn, does it?” If your tonal use is correct.

I’d lived in Thailand for about three years when I started classes and I was the star pupil. I knew many of the rules, was familiar with the sound of the language, and had a small vocabulary of common words and phrases. But the class quickly passed me by. The first problem was my hearing loss. I was born tone deaf and that made it impossible for me to hear the words precisely and when I spoke, people often didn’t understand, wrinkling their brows and, in some instances, suppressing (or not suppressing) laughter. Suay with a rising tone, for instance, meant “beautiful,” and with a falling tone “bad fortune.” Intellectually, I knew this, but I had trouble making it clear what the hell I was saying.

I also had a more general impairment that required mechanical devices to hear speech of any kind, a loss so great I was growing dependent not only on my battery-operated hearing aids but also on a relatively quiet environment and lip-reading to get by. Bangkok is not known for its relative quiet. And reading lips doesn’t help much, either, when the language spoken is other than your own, or English is spoken in a manner that changes the pronunciation and thus the movement of the lips. Tones don’t show on the lips, either.

My age was another factor. It was generally agreed that picking up a foreign language was a snap when you were young; children living in multi-lingual households learned two and three tongues simultaneously. But apparently the part of the brain that absorbed and sorted language went on holiday more frequently as age advanced and by the time I arrived in Thailand at fifty-eight, my language learning potential could be described as semi-retired. After two months in class, my instructor said she would welcome my presence for as long as I wished to attend, but… graciously, she left it at that.

It’s no surprise that this made communication between my wife Lamyai and me difficult, or that a sort of “pidgin” was invented, comprising English used in truncated and imaginative ways, colored by Thai words and rules. Because many Thais spoke English following Thai structure, the adjective frequently followed the subject, thus I had a friend who referred to my landlady as my “lady land.” So it was also in describing familial relationships. When Lamyai said “Papa Mayura,” she was talking about her cousin Mayura’s father, and when she said “young sister husband Lampong,” she was referring to her sister Lampong’s husband’s younger sister. After a while, such “backwards” construction was no problem for me.

Another verbal characteristic was the linking of words in the way Thais ran all their words together in a written sentence. Where in the West someone might greet another saying, “Hot enough for you?” Lamyai exclaimed “Hottoomuch-PapaIwantdie!” A limited vocabularly similarly led to pasting two or three words together to convey a longer message; thus, when she bought school supplies and uniforms for the children, the news was described as “buybookshirt.” Sometimes the words strung together were so creative I didn’t want to correct her. For instance, she didn’t know the word for the “balcony” that fronted the second level of our home, so she said, “papasitdowndrinkbeer,” a word/phrase crafted to describe what I was known to do there somewhat more than occasionally.

Further, there was a kindness that gentled some of her messages. I remember Lamyai asking, “Papa, take shower?” and my replying, “No.” Lamyai then said, “Maybe Papa not happy not take shower.” Someone in the West might have conveyed the same message by saying, “You stink! Take a bath!”

I wasn’t alone with pronunciation problems. Thais had them, too. The letter “s” actually presented multiple challenges. Appearing at the start of a word, as in Sukhumvit, the name of the main street in my neighborhood, it began with the sibilance familiar to all. But when the “s” came at the end of the word, inasmuch as Thais don’t have any words that end with that sound, it disappeared—my last name was, therefore, pronounced Hopkin—or it was turned into a “t” or “k.” Thus, I understood “but” meant “bus,” “Jonat” and “Kritee” were the names of two popular farang singers of Thai songs named Jonas and Kristy, and when Lamyai said “kit” and “sek,” she was saying “kiss” and “sex.” As in: “LamyaiwantsekPapatoomuch!” Finally, when an “l” appeared at the end of the word, it became an “n,” as in Orienten Hoten, and an “r” sometimes became an “l,” for example, “loom,” or disappeared altogether, as when the Central Department Store became “Centen.”

Add the charming tendency to put vocal emphasis on a word’s last syllable, thus my surname actually was pronounced Hop-KIN, tennis became “ten-NIT,” banana became “ba-na-NAH,” and my first name was “Jer-EE.” Further, an “a” was added to some words, so that steak was voiced “sa-TEAK”, small became “sa-MALL, sweet was mouthed “sa-WEET,” and the Land of Smiles was shortened and lengthened simultaneously, becoming “Land of Sa-MILE.”

Teachers of English in Thailand called all this “Thai-glish” or “Tinglish.”

Initially, I figured that for Lamyai, as for myself, that while there was far more to language than stringing words together, vocabulary was more important than pronunciation and tone. Thus, I carried my dictionary around with me and was always asking, “What’s the Thai word?” as Lamyai asked me, “How say Eng-LIT?” At the same time, I hoped that the situational context of what I was saying would make up for the way I mangled the ups and downs of the way Thai words were correctly vocalized.

In time, I came to understand Lamyai most of the time fairly easily, as her sometimes imaginative set phrases became a part of my own vocabulary. When she’d had one too many gin-and-tonics and pointed to her head with a finger and said, “Litten bit woo-woo-woo,” the meaning was not lost on me. Later, this was replaced with “litten bit dlunk,” but I didn’t consider that an improvement.

When I dropped my own conversational patterns and vocabulary down to her level, I wasn’t doing her any favors, however much it contributed to uninterrupted conversational flow. I even mispronounced some of the words as she did, saying “hab” for “have” and using the words “upstairs” and “downstairs” for “up” and “down,” etc. When I returned from a two-week trip to Burma with a friend and he’d given her a report, she told me, “Greg say talk about Lamyai toomuchtoomuch. TalkaboutLamyai. TalkaboutPhaithoon. Talk-aboutPok. TalkaboutMamaLamyai. Talkabouthou(se). Toomuchtoomuch. Greg say.” The error was that in letting this go uncorrected, I may have been aiding communication in the short term—whereas constant corrections to her speech or proper usage on my part would have slowed it—in the long run, it was a mistake.

One more factor contributing to our conversational success was that unlike many Thais with limited English, Lamyai was not shy about using what facility she had. If she knew, say, five-hundred English words, as soon as we were within conversational range (or on the phone) following any separation, she’d use at least four hundred of them four or five times apiece within the first five minutes. Many Thais, even when they actually spoke English well, were too insecure to speak at all to a farang. Lamyai, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to communicate all her news in my language and didn’t want to stop, the words tumbling forth in the manner of someone running downhill, moving faster and faster, until finally she stumbled and fell silent, ending many such raps with a pause followed by the phrase, “Don’t know Eng-LIT.” Together we then attempted to discover the word or phrase she wanted to vocalize, me searching (usually in vain) in my Thai-English dictionary, while Lamyai remained silent, frustrated.

We also depended on sign and body language and I sometimes found myself drawing pictures in my pocket notebook. Following my son’s visit, he told family and friends back in the States that Lamyai spoke English about as well as a second grader and he told me that he thought that was one of the reasons we got on so well: we tried harder to communicate and for so long as the motivation to do so remained, we’d probably do okay.

Kreng Jai

My mother always said that a week was incomplete until you’d worked in the garden and got dirt under your fingernails, so when I fell in love with a rice farmer’s daughter and, later on as we planned to marry and built a house on the family farm, I looked forward to getting my hands into the soil, just as my mama advised.

Soon after we moved into the house, Lamyai decided to put in some fruit and vegetable gardens, to thin some old banana patches on the property and move a hundred of the young trees to another piece of land nearby. (She would then add two hundred pineapple plants between the trees and five hundred potato plants.) As Lamyai, her mother, her siblings, her two children and youngest brother all pitched in to dig up and move the bananas, I figured I’d just join in.

Boy, was I wrong! Not only did I not know what I was doing, my assistance was rebuffed. As I took up a machete to trim the leaves of the trees before replanting, I used the wrong (dull) side of the blade, causing several of those present to hide their laughter behind their hands. I knew they weren’t laughing at me, but embarrassed by my mistake; I had learned that the Thai response to embarrassment was laughter.

What I didn’t realize, until Lamyai took me aside later, was that no matter how much I wanted to help, my “status” in the family dictated that I stand aside. It was, she said, kreng jai. And what, I asked, was that? She explained, saying that I was older, a foreigner, wealthier, better educated and et cetera and as such I was entitled to a kind and level of respect that, ironically, “kept me in my place.”

Kreng jai may be one of the slipperiest and stickiest aspects of Thai culture for a westerner to grasp, and one of the most difficult aspects of Thai character for him or her to accept. It is, as Chrisopher G. Moore explains in his book Heart Talk (1992), “a mingling of reverence, respect, deference, homage and fear—which every Thai person feels toward someone who is their senior, their boss, their teacher, mother and father, a police officer or towards those who are perceived to be a member of a higher class.”

Mont Redmond, another foreign author, writing in Wondering into Thai Culture (1998), saw it the same way, saying “this fear/consideration has produced some of the most adept and elegant manners on the face of this Earth. It is the disappearance of this restraint, and not its somewhat suffocating presence, which is bringing about the ruin of Thailand we see all around us today. Remove the consideration, and you have coups d’etat, corruption, and exploitation. Remove the fear, and you have profligacy, crime, and cultural collapse. Offense is everywhere, but fewer and fewer can gain leverage for redress with their feelings alone. As Thais lose the art of making small sacrifices to achieve long-term advantages—the essence of kwam kreng chai and diplomacy alike—the clumsy Western machinery of legislation, litigation and demonstration will occupy by default a place reserved in Thai hearts for the subtlest forms of blame, shame, and well-deserved fame.”

In time, I learned that that was, unsurprisingly, a foreign point of view, and as a foreigner I still haven’t totally discarded it. The way I saw it, kreng jai was a hangover from the feudal system that still influences so much modern Thai behavior— resembling in unsettling ways the class system that clings to English life and the caste system that still rules India, and in a less severe way, the kowtowing of China. Because kreng jai determined, or at least colored, virtually all relationships, I saw it as a way to open wide the doors to frequent and easy abuse.

Kreng jai is learned from childhood. Within the family, the order of birth is important. There are separate words for older and younger siblings, and the older is the most respected, regardless of whether he or she has earned that respect. Thus, if you are the third born child, you are “superior” to any children born after you and you defer to Numbers One and Two. Similarly, of course, parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts also are automatic beneficiaries of kreng jai.

It additionally affects relationships between the sexes. Thailand is, like too many countries in the world, sexist, and it is the male who is valued more than the female, and therefore given more “respect.” Along with more choices, higher salaries, and so on.

Similarly, when two Thai strangers meet, where they fit into Thailand’s complex social scheme may be the first order of business. Sometimes appearance tells all, as it would if one is obviously older than the other. Wardrobe may do it, too, as will accent; the dialects characteristically found in the northeastern and southern parts of the country may establish social place as quickly as Cockney would in Oxford, or one of the Cantonese variations likely will in Mandarin Beijing. A person’s home town or school can do the same. Similar biases exist around the world.

Having a powerful father or a strong political connection in Thailand is another sure path to entitlement, and for some a kind of immunity. Consider the case of a former police captain and onetime Cabinet Minister whose two sons had a reputation for beating up people in pubs and were charged with forging documents to evade military service. When one of them was accused of shooting a cop dead in a pub, despite the prosecution’s claim to have more than sixty eye-witnesses, the young man went free as earlier testimony was reversed and witnesses suffered loss of memory. Nor was anyone surprised when the sons of one of Thailand’s godfathers of crime were elected to Parliament.

Possessions and personal extravagances are another means of acquiring kreng jai. Thus, Thailand during the boom years became one of the world’s top markets for Mercedes-Benz auto-mobiles (with BMWs and Volvos not far behind) and the single best market on the planet for Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch. A prominent politician openly bragged to a newspaper reporter that he only felt comfortable when wearing suits designed by Armani, shirts by Versace, neckties by Lanvin and Valentino, shoes by Tettoni, and belts by Louis Vuitton. Nor was it unknown for the newly rich to have surrounding trees removed after building a showcase house because they blocked others from viewing the magnificent edifice.

It’s pointless to try to explain that all men and women are created equal, as I repeatedly do with Lamyai, with no success whatsoever—because in Thailand, as in George Orwell’s novel, Animal Farm, “All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.” It is as ingrained and automatic in social situations as the deferential hands-held-together wai helps define everyday greetings.

Sometimes this is carried to what westerners might call extremes. Kriengsak Niratpattanasai, an executive at DBS Thai Danu Bank, writes a weekly column in the Bangkok Post and in 2004 published a book, Bridging the Gap: Managing the Cross-Cultural Workplace in Thailand. In it, he told a story from his weekly column in the Bangkok Post, “Bridging the Gap” (Mar. 1, 2002) about a businessman who “loved to drive his car on provincial business trips. Aware that his health was weak, he always brought his driver as a contingency plan. On one trip the car crashed, the businessman died and his driver was seriously injured. Questioned by police after he recovered, the driver said that his boss often drove too fast and on that day visibility was poor. The driver confessed that he was too kreng jai to advise his boss to slow down.”

A similar story is known to all in Thailand. When a princess fell out of a boat and drowned, dozens stood by and did nothing. The taboo about physically touching anyone from the royal family was so ingrained in the population at that time, no one felt it permissible to try to help because it would’ve meant making contact. This same deference paid to the royal family still causes servants and many others to fall to their hands and knees and crawl when in their presence today, although this practice was forbidden by an earlier monarch nearly a hundred years ago.

It’s easy for a foreigner to criticize, yet many who have lived here longer than I praise kreng jai. In Heart Talk, Christopher Moore credits it with helping create “the incredible degree of politeness and civility found in exchanges between Thai people.” William Klausner, author of Reflections on Thai Culture (1991), said, “There is no English word for kreng jai because the farang don’t kreng jai.” And in his book, Bridging the Gap, Kriengsak Niratpattanasai insists that whatever abuses may result, the phrase means “being aware of another person’s feelings, helping others save face, and showing respect and consideration. More than behavior, it is a core Thai value.” And, he said, when “applied wisely, it can bring success in daily life.”

Not long ago, how the pendulum swings both ways was shown within my extended Thai family. My wife’s youngest sister, her husband, and their three-year-old son shared a room in Bangkok, where they worked in the garment industry. They worked different hours, so someone was at home with the boy at all times. As my wife, Lamyai, told the story, a number of her sister’s husband’s relatives started visiting the room on a daily basis, drinking and talking noisily and filling the small space with cigarette smoke. They weren’t, said Lamyai, showing her sister kreng jai, were not giving her time alone with her son and were creating an annoying, unhealthy environment.

Why didn’t Lamyai’s sister tell the boors to leave? Kreng jai. They were her husband’s relatives. Why, I asked, didn’t she say something to her husband? Kreng jai again. A good wife didn’t complain.

I will add this, however. After Lamyai and I married, and I’d been around for a couple of years, I was welcomed in the garden.

May the Force Be with You

Not long after I moved to Thailand, I witnessed a fender bender involving a taxi and a car. The drivers, both male, emerged from their vehicles like angry animals. It was clear they were going to settle the matter of responsibility on the spot.

Then something happened that I didn’t understand. The cab driver quickly removed his shirt and just stood there, his torso bared to the mid-day Bangkok sun, shimmering with elaborate tattoos, his back covered in Thai script. The other driver ran to his car and drove away. What I had witnessed, a friend later explained, was the magic of Thai tattoos. The driver who ran knew he couldn’t win a fistfight with a man with that much supernatural protection.

When my wife Lamyai and I spent a long weekend in Hua Hin, staying in a bungalow near the beach, before we went to bed that night she put a one-baht coin under each pillow and when we left a few days later she said, “Good-bye, house. Thank you for sleep. See you next time.” She told me that both actions, unheard of in the part of the world I came from (the United States), were to appease the spirits in the house and the land on which it sat.

To the outsider, Thailand may look like a modern country, with cable television available in all seventy-six provinces, internet cafes virtually everywhere you look, and what surely might be Asia’s greatest saturation of mobile phones. The vast majority of Thais also are Buddhist, or say they are, yet over centuries, the national religion has been thrown into a spiritual blender with a much older belief in supernatural forces. Thus, there are tens of thousands of men and women who make their living as astrologers, numerologists, fortune-tellers, shamans, feng shui experts, and other types of spiritualists, and tens of millions of people with computers and cell phones who follow them.

In the West, many disparage such beliefs, calling them groundless superstition and irrational bunk. Yet, it is helpful to remember that while it is true that the wife of Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, a prime minister in the 1990s, worshipped Rahu, the god of darkness who is said to swallow the moon during eclipses, it also is true that the wife of American President Ronald Reagan consulted an astrologer and then advised her husband accordingly, and that 60 percent of all Americans say they read their horoscope regularly.

John Hoskin explained in his book The Supernatural in Thai Life (1993) that Buddhism “is concerned primarily with man’s ultimate release from suffering, from the cycle of death and rebirth. As such, it does not address mundane problems. At the same time, it is a tolerant faith, not necessarily negating additional beliefs that may be deemed relevant and beneficial to daily well-being. Accordingly, the Thais have inherited from their animistic ancestors a host of beliefs in supernatural powers that interact with ordinary life. Rather than contradict Buddhism, these convictions are held in such a close and complex relationship with the national religion that an outsider can scarcely differentiate the dual elements.” In other words, the Thais aren’t taking any chances, and for the man with all the tattoos, they certainly protected him the day I watched him take off his shirt. Nor did any unpleasant incidents occur during our stay in Hua Hin.

It’s probably accurate to say that a majority of Thais believe strongly in the protective power of tattoos, amulets and blessings given by monks. Lottery tickets are purchased on the basis of numbers remembered from dreams or divined while visiting a “magical” tree or shrine. Family members and village elders tie white and gold thread around others’ wrists to bring good luck. Caged birds are released for the same reason.

The omnipresence of spirit houses in Thailand—you’ll even see them outside modern skyscrapers—stems from the belief that prior to human occupation, spirits inhabited the site and lest they become angry and bring misfortune to the new arrivals, they must be given a home of their own and daily recognition in the form of incense, food, and drink. (Often a bottle of pop with a straw in it, which always makes me smile. As does the occasional hog’s head or kilogram of bacon, two other frequent offerings.)

Every year when new vehicle license plates are issued, fiercely competitive auctions are held for those with “auspicious” numbers. A plate with “9999” has been sold for as much as US$100,000, the cash from these sales going to the Land Transport Department’s road safety fund. Ordinary, everyday currency with “lucky” numbers is sold in shops for hundreds of times the face value.

A shrine outside a Bangkok department store is visited by teenagers every day from nine to ten in the morning so that the “god” residing there may bless and help the lovesick. Those seeking good luck in school or in the office or any other endeavor including winning the lottery go to the Erawan Shrine, lighting candles, offering flowers, burning incense, and paying women in traditional costume to dance… then perhaps buy a lottery ticket from one of the many vendors outside the gates. Others on Tuesday nights visit a bronze stature of Rama V, the beloved King Chulalongkorn who ruled as absolute monarch from 1868 to 1910; many believe he will return to rule Thailand again, saving it from its many sins and weaknesses.

Ghosts are a constant, a staple in magazines, books, movies and television soap operas as well as in daily life. When Lamyai’s brother Pairuen died in a motorcycle accident, an elaborate ceremony was performed at the time of his cremation to reunite his body with his spirit, which was believed to have been jarred from his body by the violence of this death. This was followed by a seven-day-long “ghost watch,” with some twenty or so relatives and neighbors spending the nights in our house; several reported sightings and the next week the house in which he died was dismantled and sold as scrap lumber.

I remember going to a bar one night to find the movie Ghost on TV. When this film, starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, was released in Thailand, it became the most popular foreign motion picture of the year. Now I watched all the Thai women in the bar, frozen in place, mesmerized, ignoring customers as they sat staring at the box over the disc jockey’s booth, or stood nearly motionless on the stage; business practically halted until the movie ended. Another time I took an ailing computer to be examined and after half an hour the repair man said he couldn’t find anything to fix, thus my problem must be a phee, or ghost. (We in the West fear viruses; Thais fear ghosts.) Some other examples:

It all sounded to my “rational” Western mind like something you encountered in a novel by Stephen King and I thought a good argument could be made for the benefits that would come if superstition were somehow to vanish from the earth. I also acknowledged the possibility that the world might be thrown into chaos if these belief systems disappeared overnight… and that it would be a much less colorful place. I further knew that one of the quickest ways to get into trouble in Thailand was to examine things logically.

As reported in the Bangkok Post (Sep. 27, 2004), some people believed that delays in construction of Bangkok’s new international airport stemmed “not from man-made errors but supernatural phenomena.” Srisook Chandrangsu, the transport permanent secretary and chairman of the New Bangkok International Airport was quoted as saying he thought the absence of a proper shrine might have caused many of the problems. When a shrine was constructed to house all the deities in the area and troubles continued, experts recommended a larger shrine.

“A Thai-style pavilion was also built to house a foundation stone laid at the site by His Majesty the King,” the Post continued. “Before, the foundation stone was stored in a poorly illuminated place, which some believed was unbefitting, and might also have caused troubles. It has now been placed in a brightly lit place.

“Mr. Srisook said he was confronted with countless problems when he was asked to supervise the project. But after he placed a Buddha image in a meeting room… many of the problems and arguments were peacefully resolved. ‘We have to believe that supernatural powers are real,’ said Mr. Srisook.”

However mismatched these notions and practices may be to mine, I do not scoff. The Thai friend who explained the incident involving the tattooed taxi driver also gave me some good advice. “Not your country,” she said. “Don’t want to see you falling down.” Her English may have been somewhat quirky, but her message made good sense.

Almost as much as my crossing my fingers, knocking on wood, throwing salt over my shoulder, worrying about broken mirrors and black cats, walking under ladders, and numbering the floors in high-rise buildings so they skipped “13.”

Thai Time

Nittaya Phanthachat, a friend who stayed with me from time to time when she was visiting Bangkok (she had a home in Chon Buri), told me one morning as she left my flat that she’d be back in time for us to have dinner together.

She called at four o’clock and said she was running late, but promised to be back at eight. We still had time for dinner. No problem.

She finally showed up two days later.

Was I angry? No, not really. I was concerned about her safety and health, as anyone might be, but the worry, if that’s the correct word, was tempered by the knowledge that Thais don’t have the same concept of time that westerners do. In fact, not only is it different, to many of us raised in the West, it makes no sense at all, as if we’d suddenly awoken on a planet that moved around the Sun at an unfamiliar speed, with, literally, a different sense of gravity.

Consider being on Mercury. Mercury moves with great dispatch in its journey around the Sun, averaging approximately thirty miles per second and completing its circuit in about eighty-eight Earth days. Yet, this tiniest planet and the closest in the solar system to the Sun, rotates upon its axis so slowly, the time from one sunrise to the next is equal to about 176 days on Earth. Try setting your Swatch or Rolex to that. And think about how long Happy Hour might be.

Compared to Mercury’s, Nittaya’s sense of time was easy to grasp. I’d moved to Thailand after living for many years in Hawaii, where there was something called “Hawaiian time,” a complex system of measuring the duration of all existence, past, present, and future, that was defined by a single word: late. So, “Thai time” was just another excuse. Yes?

That’s the farang point of view, of course. Hawaiians are never late, according to “Hawaiian time.” Identically, Thais are never late. They’ve merely been delayed, or perhaps distracted. The ancient Greeks, in whom farangs perhaps put too much faith, advised us to be “ruled by time, the wisest counselor of all” and while that may have worked in ancient Greece and back home in the twenty-first-century United States, as any fool knows, Greek thought is not included in the Thai primary school curriculum. End of discussion.

A little harder to grasp is the Thai’s understanding of “time” as a concept. For this part of my tale, you need some patience, and perhaps a beer or a nice cuppa tea, so put this book down and get the drink of your choice—take your time!—and then take a deep breath and for just a minute, no longer, I promise, let me turn you over to William J. Klausner, a farang who came to Thailand in 1955, lived for a year in a village in Isan, was an editor of the annual publication of the Buddhist Association of Thailand, and taught at both Thammasat and Chulalongkorn Universities. A wise man.

“One of the central concepts of Buddhist philosophy is anicang: the transitory nature of the material world in which we live; the uncertainty and impermanence of all,” he wrote in Reflections on Thai Culture (1981). “The Thai version of mañana, the tried and true answer to failed appointments and the lack of successful and timely task completion, is mai pen rai, or ‘it is nothing,’ ‘never mind,’” he continued. “Sociologists have referred to the present-oriented aspect of Thai behavior and personality. Certainly, the Thai find more psychological fulfillment in the chase than in the attainment. It is the voyage, the journey that is fun; the end result is less important. Thus, one shouldn’t be too concerned if one is some minutes or some hours late.”

Did everybody follow that? Mai pen rai.

It all has to do with Oriental thought, and most specifically the Buddhist vision of constant and cosmic flow. That thing about the wheel that keeps turning without any real beginning and end. I don’t know for sure, but this may be one of the reasons the Thai language doesn’t have any tenses, and for that alone I’m grateful. While English speakers have the audacity to include such things as “past perfect” and “future perfect” but no “present perfect” in the way they speak. If you ask me, it’s not a matter of Thai time making no sense, it’s the other way around.

As for my friend Nittaya, she’d just run into some friends with whom she caught a bus to Bang Saen for a day at the beach. So her return to my flat two days late merely meant we had dinner on Tuesday instead of Sunday. No problem.

Where a Dildo Means Good Luck

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!

It’s nine o’clock at night at the Hog’s Breath Saloon when suddenly there’s a horrific pounding, as if a carpenter has been sent to remodel the place just as the first of the leggy darlings are climbing onto the stage to dance.

No. It’s only the nightly phlad kikh ceremony, which begins the evening’s fun. In Thailand, the phlad kikh (translation: “honorable surrogate penis”) is a phallic symbol usually carved from wood that is believed to bring the owner—or even someone who touches it—luck. It may be small enough to hide in a pocket or wear on a chain around the neck, as big around as a man’s arm or leg, or even several meters in length.

The one in play at the Hog’s Breath is about thirty centimeters/twelve-inches long and eight centimeters/three inches in diameter, and it’s being banged against the bar’s open front door frame, top, bottom, and sides. The scantily clad young lady holding the object now dunks the head into a glass of Thai whisky, draws a series of circles on the floor, then bangs the floor and door frame again.

As she does this, a dozen other dancers line up behind her, extending into the bar, their legs spread wide. Now the lead bar girl bends forward at the waist, removes the glass, and slides the big wooden dick along the floor between all the high heels behind her. All the girls scream in mock ecstacy.

The phlad kikh is returned to the young woman in charge of the ceremony, and she now makes a circuit of the bar, touching its rounded head to the loins of each girl in the bar, an act that brings more squeals. And from the male customers in attendance laughter and encouragement.

This is no joke, or at least not entirely. In Thailand, the phallic symbol and its worship is regarded seriously, by bar girls and millions more. However it may seem to an outsider, especially in the Christian world, the phlad kikh’s origins are as legitimate as they are worldwide, going back to cave drawings of Paleolithic times, embracing the cult of Priapus in classical times, through witchcraft and paganism in early Europe, to the sensual religions of the East, as epitomized today by the Shiva lingam in India, found in every Hindu temple and in many city squares—most often as a symbol of fertility. Though Christian moralism almost totally banished phallic worship, Joshua and Solomon paid homage to a stone in the Bible (1 Kings, 3,4) and there is a similar report of Jacob’s prayers to a pillar in Genesis 28. Not everyone would agree, but the architecture of Islamic mosques bears more than a passing resemblance to phalluses.

For a long time it was thought that it was from India that Thailand got its phallic worship, but archeologists have since discovered similar images painted on pots dating from about 1000 BC, long before Indian influence had any real impact on Southeast Asia. Again as a symbol of fertility.

Unknown to most of its guests, on the grounds of the Nai Lert Park Hotel (formerly the Bangkok Hilton) there is a small shrine dedicated to phallic offerings, at the north end of the property beside the Saen Saep Canal behind the parking structure. Here, about a hundred phlad kikh crafted from various materials are displayed, ranging up to three meters in length and arranged around a spirit house built by millionaire businessman Nai Lert to honor Jao Mae Thapthim, a female deity thought to reside in the old banyan tree nearby. It’s believed that a woman who made an offering soon got pregnant, thus the shrine is mainly visited by childless women who offer incense, flowers, food and cigarettes.

Of course, pregnancy is not what the girls at the Hog’s Breath want. (May all the animist gods forbid!) There, if you’re pregnant, you’re out of work.

Nor do they want the protection from evil and snake bites that the amulet was thought to bring small boys who, once upon a time, carried the amulets in their pockets before setting off for school, or worn on a waist string under their clothing, off-center from the real penis in the belief they would attract and absorb any injury directed toward the generative organs.

Early styles of phlad kikh bear inscribed invocations, entreaties and praises to Shiva; later ones combine these with appeals and prayers to Buddha; modern ones bear uniformly Buddhist inscriptions written in an ancient script that cannot be read by contemporary Thais. Amulets carved from wood, bone and horn once were made by monks who specialized in their manufacture and the respect given an amulet was connected to the charisma and reputation of its creator.

Today, the greatest number are mass produced for the tourist trade, in wood, bronze, pewter and plastic. Some depict Hanuman, the Monkey God of the Hindus, crouched upon an erect penis, his tail arched over his back. Tigers are given human shafts double the length of the animal. Demons that look like something from a horror movie from Hollywood threaten to commit fellatio with pointy teeth. On others, women straddle an out-sized penis, wearing a smile and a polka-dotted bikini.

Amulet markets in Bangkok and elsewhere still offer the real thing, but at most street stalls the charms are now as laughable as they are divorced from authenticity, and the titillation factor has led to most being hugely overpriced.

For the bar girls and for most Thais today, the phlad kikh is used to summon good luck and, in places of business, a rich and generous customer. Today all over Thailand, they may be seen in places of commerce, next to the cash register in a mom and pop store or nestled in a pile of knockoff designer gear at a street vendor’s stall, in the still unswerving belief that its presence will be good for business, or at the very least cannot hurt. I once saw one the size of a grown man’s thigh mounted between the front seats of a Bangkok taxi.

“How’s business?” I asked. He said it was terrible.

A Cool Heart in a Hot Climate

I was walking along Sukhumvit Road to my bank when a motorcycle gave me a bump as it passed. I was on the sidewalk when this happened and I wasn’t pleased, and inasmuch as it was the second time in a week that a motorcyclist had run into me on what Thais call a “footpath,” I decided to take action. Motor-cylists had been using the sidewalks as if they were another lane in the road for a while and I figured it was time to do something about it.

I ran behind the bike, catching up in about half a block when the driver parked next to the bank. I reached him just as he placed his helmet on one of his handle grips. He saw me and looked somewhat chagrined.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said.

“Not good enough!” I yelled, and I grabbed his helmet and threw it into the street just as a bus passed, running over it. Then, realizing what a stupid mistake I’d made, I turned about and ran, anxious to get away before he beat the hell out of me or pulled a gun and shot me dead. If that had happened—and, happily, it didn’t—a dozen witnesses would’ve told police, “This farang came out of nowhere and attacked him…”

I can’t remember, and wouldn’t want to tell you if I could, how many times I’ve lost my temper since moving to Thailand. But let me recall, as an exercise in humility, one other incident. This occurred when my computer was giving me fits and I took it to a repair shop, where the owner called the Apple distributor and before I knew it I was yelling at someone at the other end of the phone line, and he hung up on me. I told (not asked) the shop owner to call the man back, which he politely did. The man told the shop owner that he didn’t want to talk to me, I was jai rawn, I had a hot heart.

I grabbed the phone and said, “What do you mean you won’t talk to me? I need help.”

There was a silence at the other end of the line.

After a moment, I apologized. “Look, I’m really sorry,” I said. “And I do need your help.” There was another long pause and he told me to bring the computer to him. When I did, he said it would take a couple of weeks to fix my computer and in the meantime, he said, he’d give me an old one, which he then spent nearly an hour programming for my use. It doesn’t need saying that I felt well and appropriately demoted in the karmic food chain.

Sadly, this is a typical farang way of reacting to the many frustrations encountered on a daily basis and as is true nearly everywhere, it seldom gets you anywhere. Certainly, it makes no friends, least of all in the Land of Smiles, where an open display of emotion is considered extremely poor form.

It is okay to laugh, but even then it’s best if you hide your laughter behind your hand. Even wailing with grief is acceptable, under very specific circumstances. A smile, of course, is even encouraged. And now that Thailand has joined the league of football nations, when the Thai team—or Manchester United, the country’s favorite, for reasons I don’t comprehend—scores a point, it is definitely alright to cheer and pound on the bar top and fall off the stool slobbering drunk. But an open loss of temper is not acceptable. Ever.

We’re talking about jai yen, which literally means a “cool heart.” A heart that isn’t hot. Jai yen has been, and continues to be, the hardest lesson for me to learn, and I recognize the possibility, maybe the likelihood, that I may never completely embrace the concept—that, instead, I’ll always be one of those unpredictable, explosive assholes that the Thais reluctantly but graciously put up with.

Actually, they don’t have to put up with us, and that they do is a sign of their own jai yen.

This doesn’t mean that Thais don’t lose their temper. They do. Getting mad and shooting someone is an efficient and popular way to handle business and personal conflicts. (You just don’t show your anger and you hire someone else to do the shooting, usually from the back of a motorbike.) Thailand also has a growing incidence of road rage and a high rate of rape, wife-beating and child abuse, so it’s clear that jai rawn is not exclusively a farang experience. Yet when it comes to in-your-face, public shouting matches, there is nothing in the Kingdom to compare to life back home in the West, where epithets, curses and tantrums seem an essential part of every day.

My friend Chris Moore, who wrote a book exploring the language use of jai or heart, Heart Talk (1992), includes jai yen in a chapter devoted to self-control. “In Thai culture,” he wrote, “considerable virtue is attached to the ability of a person to exercise restraint over feelings of rage, anger or upset. The idea is not to be drawn into an emotional reaction when provoked. There is an attempt to avoid confrontations and the heated exchange.”

The ideal is to aspire to calmness, concentration and self-control. Thus there are, referring again to Chris’s book, phrases (concepts) such as hak jai (restrain heart), yap yang chang jai (stop heart), khom jai (control heart), sangop jai and rangap jai (calm heart). The goal is to show jai yen, what Chris calls “the Thai equivalent of an English metaphor, a stiff upper lip.” For example, he says, when a woman is told by a friend that her husband was seen with another woman, the woman doesn’t show any emotion. (What happens later between the woman and her husband is of no concern of ours, though it may defy the concept of jai yen.)

Farangs not only find this difficult, they may say it’s hypocritical. If you feel something, show it and say it, is the farang way. Excessive politeness, especially when it doesn’t reflect true feeling, is false and is a disservice to all.

Maybe so, but probably not. Still, the next time a motorcyclist slams into me on a sidewalk, I think I may have a hard time telling him to have a nice day.

Fun & Games in the Slum

Father Joe Maier was telling a story about the children in the Bangkok slums where he’s lived and worked for more than thirty years. It was an inspirational story, the sort Catholic priests like to tell. Father Joe runs an organization with thirty-four kindergartens, more than a hundred soccer teams, five shelters for street kids, a medical clinic, Bangkok’s only AIDS hospice and a para-legal team that represents two hundred kids in courts and police stations a month, so he has many such stories. Many are distressing—no surprise there—but this is a story about sanuk, the Thai word for “fun.”

Near Father Joe’s house was a large open space where ten-wheel trucks parked between long hauls, close to where pigs were butchered for Bangkok’s markets. There was no drainage system and rain and diesel oil and other waste collected in puddles. Yet it was here that the neighborhood children played, because there were no parks or playgrounds, nor any space adjacent to the tired wood shacks knocked up against one another and connected by dodgy pathways just wide enough for two people or one motorcycle to pass.

Near where we stood, three girls were jumping rope—two holding a “rope” made of rubber bands strung together, the third jumping. “Notice that they’re in the puddles of oil and filth,” said the sixty-year-old American priest, “and that they’ve taken off their shoes. Do you know why? They say they can jump higher without anything on their feet. Which is the object of the game: to jump higher.” The death squeals of the hogs rang through the slum in the night. During the day, it was the laughter of the kids.

One writer about Thai culture described sanuk as “the fizz in the soft drink of life. Bottled up by the pressures of face and social calculation,” he went on, “it surges to the surface whenever it has a chance.” In other words, remaining faithful to this wise man’s analogy, it is what an optimist does when life gives him a lemon: he makes lemonade. And so it is in the slums of Bangkok where games can serve as an otherwise grim life’s lemonade stand.

Thailand is remarkable in this. If there were an Olympic event called playfulness, Thailand would win gold, silver and bronze every time. And it’s not just the children. Is it possible for a day to pass without seeing young men hunkered down on a city sidewalk playing a variation of checkers with bottle caps, or kicking a woven rattan ball called a takraw around during a work break that others elsewhere would use to smoke cigarettes? It is as if the Thai sense of play were genetic.

Father Joe, a kind of, well, father figure to more than four thousand Bangkok school children, believes it is in the playgrounds—and truck parking lots—where much of this creative frittering away of leisure time begins. So where better to look for evidence than on Father Joe’s turf in Klong Toey, one of Asia’s largest and bleakest slums.

Here you can see a game played in many countries, the contest using a fist, an open hand, and two moving fingers to signify stone, paper, and scissors. Two children throw hand signs at each other simultaneously—a fist representing a rock, a flat hand paper, the first two fingers extended and opening and closing like scissors. If both throw the same sign, they try again until they are different. The rule is: stone breaks scissors, but scissors cut paper, and paper covers stone. It is the child’s way of deciding who goes first, of tossing a coin when there are no coins.

The form of many games played in Thailand is defined by such economy. When a child’s pockets are empty of cash, he or she doesn’t pitch one baht coins, instead rubber bands are placed on a flat surface and blown with the breath to move them toward a designated line or wall. Thus a game is improvised with something found without cost wherever rubber bands are used to tie off bags of food sold on the street.

In another game, coconut shells are cut in half with a hole drilled in the middle. A piece of string connects the shells together with knots inside each one. Players stand on the shells holding the string with their toes and hands as they move toward a finish line. If your feet touch the ground, you’re disqualified and the first two to cross the line race again.

Sticks and stones play a leading role in traditional games. In another race, wooden stakes are driven into the ground an agreed distance apart (usually eight to ten meters) and players form two teams, lining up behind the two stakes. A smaller stick, or baton, is given to each team and when a signal is given, the first player of each team runs around the opposite stake, returning to his team and passing it to the next in line.

In another, players place a small rock on the back of the hand, toss it into the air, then catch it, then do the same with two, catching each rock separately as they fall. Then three, then four, then five if they can, until the players are unable to catch all of the stones before one hits the ground. Miss one and you are out of the game. This continues until a single player remains.

Still other games involve no more effort than drawing a line in the dirt. To play one, it must be a sunny day when a circle is drawn on the ground large enough to hold all the players. One child is selected to be the “giant” and he or she chases the others, trying to step on their shadows. When the giant treads on someone’s shadow, that player becomes the new giant and play resumes until everyone decides to play a different game. As is the case in many traditional Thai games, there are no losers and winners. The play is for the sake of play.

In a second game in the same category, players of one team sit on the floor or ground in pairs, back to back and feet to feet, making a circle. Players from a second team try to jump over the first team’s legs and into the circle, while the sitters kick up their feet to try to touch the jumpers. If one of the jumpers is successful, his team wins and the two teams change places.

Sadly, such games are not played as widely as once they were, replaced by computer games in the home, video parlors in shopping malls, and other amusements involving expensive equipment. Today, many Thai children race on roller blades, or compete with a machine instead of another child.

It is in the countryside and among the urban poor where sanuk in play remains affordable.

The King Swings

When the original King of Swing, Benny Goodman, jammed with the King of Thailand in 1960 in New York and was asked to assess the monarch’s talent as a saxophone player, he said His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej apparently already had a career worth hanging on to, but added, “If he needed a job, I’d hire him as a member of my band.”

Similarly, the great jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton once said, “He is simply the coolest king in the land.” So it is no surprise that to mark his fiftieth year on the throne, a number of the world’s finest musicians traveled to Thailand to pay tribute by performing His Majesty’s musical compositions. In 1996, Bangkok hosted concerts by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Thelonius Monk Jr. and Benny Carter, saluting what the Guinness Book of Records called “The Longest Reigning Monarch in the World.” In addition, two compact discs were released featuring Hucky Eichelmann, a German-born classical guitarist who emigrated to Thailand in 1979, and the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra.

It was at age ten when the future monarch started playing the clarinet on an instrument that was purchased—according to his official history—with savings from his allowance, earned while attending school in Switzerland. At that time, his brother, older by only two years, was king, also living in Switzerland and ruling in absentia.

The young future ruler was formally trained in classical music and on his own played along with gramaphone records imported mainly from the United States. Soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, one of the Dixieland pioneers from New Orleans, and alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges of Duke Ellington’s swing era band were among his favorites.

His cousin and brother reportedly encouraged him to continue his musical studies and urged him to compose songs in addition to playing them. He wrote his first in 1946, the same year he ascended to the throne, following his brother’s death.

For many years, the King gathered some musical friends together for Friday night jam sessions in the palace, broadcasting them on the radio. Usually he performed on the saxophone, less frequently on the clarinet, piano or, rarely, guitar.

In the 1960s in New York, on a cross-country trip to America, he played not only with Goodman and Hampton, but also Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa and Jack Teagarden, and then went on to California to meet—but not play with—the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley. Many photos of that meeting, on the set of Presley’s G.I. Blues, are prominently displayed and sold as souvenirs in Bangkok today.

Later, during the war in Vietnam, when American Bob Hope played for American troops, His Majesty invited the comedian’s bandleader, Les Brown, and vocalist Patti Page, to play with him at his palace home. His music was also included in a Broadway revue in the 1950s and in 1964, following the introduction of a three-movement ballet, he was named to the Institute of Music and Arts of the City of Vienna, the first Asian composer to be so honored.

Of course, his music was best known at home. Every day at eight a.m. and six p.m., all local television stations in Thailand played the national anthem, which was composed by the King. It was also played before most concerts, movies and sporting events. Joggers in Lumpini Park, Bangkok’s largest park, halt when the anthem is broadcast and everywhere, the citizens of the Kingdom stand.

In addition, the King composed the alma maters for three of Thailand’s leading universities (Chulalongkorn, Thammasat and Kasetsart), along with love songs, rags and blues, many of which have been recorded by a number of artists. In a popular Bangkok nightclub frequented by jazz and blues fans, over the stage is a huge photograph of the King playing the saxophone, the instrument for which the club is named.

When Hucky Eichelmann moved to Bangkok in 1979 to join the music faculty at Chulalongkorn—after teaching at the University of the Philippines in Manila—his repertoire was limited to Bach, Vivaldi and other classical composers. What he discovered was that the Thai audience for classical guitar—and for classical music, for that matter—was practically nonexistent.

“Then I learned that Thailand’s King wrote music, and that the people knew and loved the music, just as they loved the King,” Hucky recalled. “So after getting permission from the palace, I recorded an album of ten of the King’s songs. A year later, the King called for a command performance and I was formally introduced.”

Hucky said 350,000 copies of the album were sold, an astonishing number for a market of Thailand’s size. His new tribute to the monarch, called His Majesty’s Blues, contains fifteen more royal compositions, spanning the range of the King’s works, including not only the blues, but also love songs and Dixieland-inspired rags.

“The King’s music is good,” Hucky said. “He has written some very lyrical things. His patriotic songs are sincere and his ragtime is fun. He is spontaneous, a part of his love for jazz. There is in his repertoire, as in his reign, a sense of balance.”

It’s been many years since His Majesty traveled abroad with his saxophone. Yet, his music still circles the earth as Hucky spends about half of each year touring Europe and the Americas, taking the royal repertoire to a growing audience. “I tell them that there’s a king out there writing and playing music,” he said. “At first, they don’t believe it. So I play a few of the songs and the people really enjoy it. I am a guest in this country and this is a way I can pay something back.”

Recent years have not been kind to royalty in much of the world. In many nations, monarchy is regarded by some people as archaic, or merely ornamental. Nothing more needs to be said about the state of royalty in England, where the crowns have been knocked askew by those wearing them, and the tabloid newspapers have left the poor dears hanging in tattered embarrassment.

Yet, in Thailand, portraits of the King and his Queen, Sirikit, were prominently displayed on the walls of virtually every home and business in the Kingdom. In Thailand, H.M. Bhumibol Adulyadej and his family were revered, in much the way royalty everywhere was, once upon a time. The King of Thailand was— and is—most insist, the embodiment of national unity, the glue that may be what holds the country together.

The glue that held the King together? Surely music played a role. He once told a group of students—who later joined him in a jam session—that “the purpose of music is to educate and relax the mind. We musicians can express our feelings and awaken reactions. Music can be used for satisfaction, for amusement, to help us persevere.”