I have been in Thailand now for two and a half weeks, which is plenty of time to adjust to the time change (I am fourteen hours in the future), not quite enough time to adjust to the food (stomach cramps and their accompanying pleasures), and barely enough time to learn a few awkward and mispronounced Thai phrases (I say “no pork!” when they’ve asked me “should we add shrimp?” or I smile, shrug, and shake my head when someone asks me a question in Thai that goes beyond “how are you?” and “what is your name?”).
Thai class is fun. Our teacher lived in Austria for thirty years before she returned to Thailand where she teaches English to Thais and Thai to us at Mahidol. She speaks impeccable German, incredible English, perfect Thai (of course), Italian, and probably eighteen other languages that she has not told us about. She is patient. I’ve learned (though not yet been able to memorize) questions, prepositions, passive voice, helping verbs, and other things that I can barely name in English. I can say “I am surprised by the dinosaur on the boat” and “are you excited to eat ice cream and iron your blouses?” and other useful phrases such as these.
I’ve written about the food a little bit, but I think it deserves more attention. In the U.S., when we go to Thai restaurants we get the basics, right? Pad Thai; red, green, yellow, and panaeng curry; Pad Si-Iu (if we’re feeling adventurous); and for dessert mango with sticky rice. Easy, tasty. We love it. We love it so much it makes us want to go Thailand where we can eat Tofu Green Curry to our hearts’ delight, right? And if you stay on a Euro-Australian-American trail of Bangkok’s Kao San road to Ko Phangan, and maybe stop in Chiang Mai or in a charming little meta-authentic long-neck village up north, you can probably eat all the Tofu Green Curry you could ever want. But you should know: this is not what Thais eat.
I cannot name any of the dishes I’ve been served here on campus. They are good, yes, but much meatier than anything I’ve ever eaten. Today, for example.
Breakfast: grilled pork atop white rice served with a little bowl of sweet, salty, star-anise flavored porky juice to be spooned over meat. One glass of cold water.
Lunch: very spicy fish that had been deep-fried to a crispy/chewy texture that one must rip at with the teeth. Big bowl of soup with oyster mushrooms, a green vegetable, and huge pork bones with lots of fat on them. Pork bones were covertly served to three dogs drooling under the table: Dzem-Sai, Pet (means spicy in Thai), and Bo. Pork Larb (pronounced like Lob with an umlaut), which is ground pork and spices. For dessert papaya, big green things that taste sort of like grapefruit, and watermelon. You’ve heard already about the blood cubes in previous blogs, so I won’t describe any other meals. I just wanted to show you what Thai food is ordinarily, and that curry plays a small role, and when it does play a role it is never tofu, and never simply curry.
Despite my focus on the gastronomical, there is much more to talk about: where I live, for example. I live in the dorm block about 2km from campus, designed for the monks who come to study at Mahidol. There are seven or eight buildings and Kelly, Luke, and I have our own building, building 5. Or, in Thai, Rong Haa. When I step out of my room and look over the railing, to my left is an enormous, new Tesco Lotus (
http://www.tescolotus.net/) a British superstore comparable to a Super Target or Walmart, with a level dedicated to computers, scooters, a movie theater, a food court, and several restaurants, coffee shops, bakeries, and ice cream parlors (I think there are three ice cream parlors, including a Dairy Queen). When I face the fore I see a pretty pond, lined by well-groomed bushes and flowers, with fish, turtles, and frogs croaking, splashing, and flopping against the water. Beyond the pond, past the two guards’ stations, there is a highway. It is loud, fast, and disconcerting. But I do not hear it from my room. To my right and behind me there are yellow-green rice fields, lined with coconut palms and mango, banana, and papaya trees. Rice fields are beautiful. The color, the texture, the moisture. I want to walk the perimeter of the fields and watch the lizards scurry around, fearful for their lives. I want to stare at the enormous centipedes as they gently wobble by. I want to wade through the streams and forget about the Tesco Lotus and the highway, pretending that there is somewhere in the world where people slowly wait for their rice to ripen rather than rushing from place to place to buy buy buy buy buy. Alas, that place is not Thailand. At least not central Thailand.
Every morning at 4:30am the bell behind my back window begins to ring, waking the monks for suad-son (chanting and prayers), then their alms-rounds. For those of you who may not know, in Theravada Buddhism the monks will not eat after noon, and their breakfast meal is obtained at 6:00 by walking door-to-door asking for food. They are not seen as beggars; rather, to give a monk food is incredibly meritorious and may help you secure a better rebirth in a future life. A monk is the highest person in Thai society. For every Thai word I learn, there is a more formal word to use when speaking with monks. To say hello to everyone but monks, you say “Sawadii Ka”— Ssawadii krab if you’re a man—but to say hello to monks you say “Namasakan” (derivative of the Sanskrit/Pali Namaste or Namaskan). The word for dog is maa, but there’s a different word for dog when you’re speaking with monks. Luckily they are all very young and forgiving, and politely correct me when I dare to speak in Thai. Mostly they practice their rough English, and I help correct their pronunciation and word use.
Every evening at 5:30pm the bell rings again. At 6:00pm the monks assemble together again for evening suad-son, which I have joined twice now. For about thirty minutes we sit on our knees and chant in Pali. It’s beautiful. Not one voice sings off-key. Throughout the chants there are times when we all bow down to the ground, and the monks chant into the ground. This makes a deliciously muffled sound of the chants in various rhythms and meters vibrating against the floor. For fifteen minutes we do sitting concentration meditation. Samatha, I think it’s called. My mind wanders to every agitated and anxious place it knows, untamed by my years of neglecting it. When I practiced meditation more often I could reach a state of calmness. Now, however, my mind feels fixed and rebellious. I must remind it how to sit still.
Which reminds me—I don’t talk much. I have begun to try to do things more on my own, to give Luke and Kelly space and try to speak Thai on my own (Kelly is virtually fluent because she spent all of last year here). So this weekend when they went to sleep in Bangkok, I stayed behind and tried my hand at communicating, and when that was a flop, at silence. The brain can chatter on forever about anything. It can find worthless anxiety to cling to, it retells itself horror stories, it insults and compliments, it writes poetry then smashes it to pieces, it remembers movie lines and criticizes culture. The brain is critic and beloved. And it refuses to shut up. But the more I let it work inside me, the more it exhausts itself it lets me enjoy the moment from time to time.
There have been a few times of awareness that feel almost blissful. Last night I was reading in my room, when I heard fireworks outside. I felt giddy by the sound, so I ran as fast as I could to the other side of the second floor, and looked out in the direction of the sounds. Nothing. So I leaped up the stairs, two at a time, and ran to the other end of the third floor, chasing skittish lizards who believed me to be a predator, until I saw the tiny bursts of color in the distance. The sky here at night is a reddish-gray, and the blue, red, green, yellow, and white fireworks were modest, but exciting none the less. When the show ended, just moments later, I began to hear splashing sounds from the pond. So I ran back over to my side of the building and squinted over the railing to see if a dog was taking a swim. The fish were flinging their bodies out of the water, then smacking their scales, fins, and gills against the water as they fell back in. Over and over. Sometimes several would throw themselves into the air at once, sometimes they’d do it one by one. The Tesco Lotus’ parking lot lights reflected off the pond, while its fans, air-conditioners, and traffic hummed. The scene was beautiful and sad. I want the rice paddies and the ponds, but they are accompanied by glowing signs and corporate jingles.
More to come.
