#9 Dollars and Sense

Love this kid, name's Knight. I thought he'd look good in my shades. Am I a cool teacher or what?

Sometimes, as the company van takes me away from Bangkok I'm left with a familiar feeling. The faceless skyscrapers holding up the sky, our generations roman columns. Giving a caricatured context to the freeway overpasses that emote sameness, no matter in Bangkok or San Francisco these buildings feel homely to me despite their cold ever wearying stare. Is that home? Am I in the eye of a hurricane or is it really all over?

Walking down the street I see an armless beggar sitting head bowed and legs crossed, a plastic cup in front of him with miniscule amounts of currency in it. How did the cup get there? Just down the way there is another beggar, this one is faceless, scarred from left to right, burns maybe, possibly a disfigurement that was intentionally inflicted but perhaps not, gruesome certainly. At the steps of the sky train there's a legless man in a wheelchair shouting. Another memory from home, the crazies out on the streets of San Francisco, blameless pitied souls for whom there is no relief. This is the first screamer I've seen in Thailand, it's contradictory to their culture to be so loud in public, much less to allow someone who's mentally ill to roam unhindered. There's a definite line between those physically disfigured beggars and this one, the castaway captains of cup currency are almost seen as having jobs, begging is full time work here. A friend swore that they saw the same limbless individual begging in Bangkok and then two days later in a small town about an hour and a half away. I hate to think it but I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually was organizing and employing these people to beg.

A teacher threatened students with employment as a river cleaner if they didn't start paying attention in class. It's not an idle threat either. Without some amount of English or at least a good education in Thai the students we teach will quite possibly end up living in the shacks on the filthy polluted rivers around Bangkok, getting paid to fish pieces of trash out of the water as they float by. In Thailand a credential is immeasurably more valuable than any know how or actual ability. One of the Thai's at work has three masters degrees including one in education and another in linguistics. Despite this, any time she's been given a course to write for the company we've had to rewrite it in its entirety. She'll never be fired though, her credentials are paraded around in front of every new school we pick up and teach at. Her level of knowledge and certainly her manner with her co-workers warrant an entirely different job. There are people who walk up and down the streets of Bangkok with straw brooms sweeping the streets, they are literally street sweepers. I can't imagine the massive discomfort of the job, nor the miniscule pay that certainly comes with it, but I suppose someone has to do it, and I wouldn't mind if it was our resident multi-masters degree holder.

That's not the only thing that seems a bit backwards around these parts. No one in Thailand wears their seat belt except for the people in the front seat, and even they don't really want to. The people in the back seat are not required to wear their seat belt, or if they are (no one here knows the laws) then it is simply ignored. When one tries to explain to them that the force of their body smashing into my seat from behind would kill me and THAT'S WHY YOU WEAR YOUR SEAT BELT. They look at you and laugh, they really do think it's funny that we don't realize the seat will protect us. Then I ask them if they think the seat will protect them when they slam into it and they nod, that's when I start laughing. All this concern about safety is a little silly though, I ride motor scooters every day, yes that's meant to be plural, more than one. I also play with random stray dogs most of the time, really, what are the chances they'll bite? This last weekend when I was in Ang Thong, a town where I have only a dozen foreigners to blend in with, the stray dogs came running up to me and began trying to play. In Bangkok I wouldn't trust them, but out in the country they seem pretty harmless.

Also in Ang Thong we smashed three people on a motor scooter and rode it to the pool where us and our lily white skin was the talk of the town. I got into a splash fight with the local kids and then we all slid down the water slide. Ang Thong really was my first properly rural experience in Thailand, every where I went the locals waved and said hello, sometimes they'd ask us how we were doing. The three girls I went to visit, who teach there, they all said that it never changes. In the three months they've been there it's stayed exactly the same. Anytime there's a new foreigner everyone wants to know what they're doing there, foreigners don't come to Ang Thong for a vacation, they are either stranded or know someone.

We've planned my house mate Olly's birthday. It's at the end of the month. We're going to stay out all night Friday night, sleep into the evening on Saturday then take a taxi to Pattaya, probably cost about thirty dollars for the two hour ride, then we're going to party all night in Pattaya, sleep into the evening again and come home to rest before work on Monday. I'm a bit tentative to go to Pattaya with the boys, perhaps some girls will come along but I'd be surprised. The reputation of Pattaya is a rather mixed one. Notorious for its prostitution, Pattaya was first logged into the annals of tourism history when it was turned into an R&R camp for GI's during the Vietnam war. It has since boomed into a beach town that offers every kind of sin one can find. Massive transvestite shows play in the gay district, brothels of every kind dot the corners, and yet despite this there is also a large amount of family style vacation outings one could take. Somehow I don't think the boys will want to take the submarine down to see the choral reef or have a nice stroll through the zoo. With any luck though, I'll get a few good stories out of it.

To conclude I would like to give a small lesson on naming children. Thai children are almost universally given a western name upon delivery at the hospital, or wherever Thai babies come from. If you were to name your child Anfield, after your favorite football stadium in England, you might think you were being rather original. In fact you are only contributing to the massive number of children named after that very same stadium you so dearly love. I personally have three Anfields in my classes. Another thing you might want to avoid is naming your child Beer, that unfortunate little one is going to wake up one morning and realize his father is an alcoholic and now he bears the brunt of that by his namesake. Perhaps it wouldn't be wise to name your child Hor either. We have also had in the past three brothers, all one year apart and named rather smartly, Com, Pu, and Ter. I wonder what would happen if the middle brother dies, then the other two would feel even more incomplete. Another lovely thing about the western names is that the parents will often times spell the names horribly wrong. Ama is actually Emma, Aum, and Aom are said exactly the same, and despite what you might think, Oh and Oh are not said the same way, one is more like Oooooh and the other is Oy. I have a Garfield which I think is quite a nice name for a little boy provided he is a boy and isn't fat, both of which are the case for this little chubby girl. The number of boys named First is astounding, I bet that you can guess where they fall in the childbirth order, what I'm waiting to see is if the next boy is actually going to be called Second. There are a few Mints and a healthy number of Ploys and I.Q.'s though they always spell it wrong. I have one girl named Kiwi which I loved during the lesson on New Zealand. So far the best name I've had so far is a kid called Foc, pronounced fuck!

Adios amigos, and every time you see a name think of my lovely little boy who I always call on by name, “Fuck! Get up here and hold this flash card while I laugh at myself hysterically.”

This is regular traffic.
Victory Monument, commemorating Thailand's involvement in World War II, I didn't even know they were there.

This is light traffic in Bangkok.

Some kids in uniforms, aren't they adorable.