So, in relation to the first post, here is a conclusion…. of sorts.

1) people definitely questioned me about my background.  For the first two months, it happened nearly every time I bought something or took a songtaew.

2) I got corrected pretty often, but I never learned to speak like a teenager.  Honestly, with the kinds of subjects they’re interested in chatting about, I can live without it.

3) I’m sure I was wrong.  If I didn’t know what something stood for for sure, I didn’t presume to know.  I learned a lot about meanings of shrines, holidays and things.

Goals.

1)  I can read Thai!!  Some of the time, haha. Aj Jenjit was super patient with me.  Spelling is super hard, esp. with Pali/Sanskrit words.

2)  Still speaking with English syntax, is slowly getting fixed when my aunts and uncles correct me.  But I speak more precisely now!

So.  Sitting in a relative’s restaurant.  I have to climatize to BKK’s warmer climate. Ugh.   I’m going to be an icicle when I get back to Oregon.  I miss nearly everyone from the program, and hope they get back uneventfully…!  And the same for you, wherever you may be.

The past week has been slow. I finished the amazing “Breakfast of Champions” by Kurt Vonnegut. I stumbled through all of my classes this week, which seemed to pass by so quickly, and my free time pass so blessedly slowly. But it was strange, because for most of the week it was hot and now today and yesterday are cold. Global climate change, yay! Not. I think that the slow feeling was from the realization that I had to pick a time to sign out of the dorms, so my time in Chiang Mai was dwindling fast. The airports closing from the protests scare me though; what do they want? what alternatives are they offering? who is funding all of these people?

On wednesday, I fell asleep on the lawn behind the library. It was really nice, and for the first time I felt oddly comfortable on this campus, though I wasn’t dress in the uniform and I was sleeping in public so I stuck out like a sore thumb. But I miss it, the open comfort of feeling safe from judgement. Such a thing does not exist here.

Yes, I did just spend the last half-hour trying to figure out how to make the links on the sidebar happen.  And yes, I did go through a lot of Cute Overload! pictures to cheer myself up a bit.  Currently, my ears are clogged with pressure, my nose is runny, my throat is sore (and breathing is uncomfortable) but at least I don’t have a fever–yet!  I blame traveling and the semester schedule.  I’m not one of the students who has been traveling every weekend since the last four or so weeks, but sitting in a van and bouncing on roads isn’t fun.  Car rides in Thailand make me feel like a bug that’s put in a jar, and then the jar is shaken.

—Okay, that was definitely three days ago.  The weekend before this one though, the

13th-17th of November, we all went on a trip to the Upland Holisitc Development Project.

In this place, I thought we were in for grueling field work, but it was more of a pondering kind of day.  Friday, we started by watching a big pig get killed for lunch and dinner.  I thought of it as a way of really witnessing the suffering that things, material goes through to become a meal, that it was a kind of duty to know what kind of work, knowledge and expertise goes to this kind of task.  The pig was more than sizable.  I thought, hey, millions have gone through this process before, I should be able to do it too.  And I was; except for the tortuous squealing of the pig as one of the butchers bashed it on the head with an enormous club.  There was no way in the world that I could have stopped the tears from coming as I clung to Joy during that one minute.  During the knocking out of the pig, there was a man filming all of us city kids, with a strangely smug expression that irritated me.

The rest of the day, we didn’t do anything.  Most of us were left with the burden of our thoughts.

The Lisu village, while gorgeous, hospitable and with gracious people, was so drastically different from Western conception of time that I found it difficult to enjoy myself there.  It didn’t help that Marcus did not give us a schedule as was done on previous trips (and at Mae Chaem) so every one was lost about what was supposed to happen next.  The feeling is similar to forgetting something essential: a watch, a hair-tie, socks, underwear, whatever, you feel lost and or even naked.  Hah.

Scheduling was only a part of my discomfort; though many things are what a Westerner might call ‘traditional’ and ‘indigenous’, many familiar things are in the village.  Roads.  Plastic banners serving as tarp.  Wire fences.  Thai pop songs.  In this dusty village in the mountains, the weather shook my immune system and the cognitive dissonance of things I saw in the village were piercing.

We came to this village at such a pivotal time.  You can literally see globalization happening with the huge presence of elderly, the very few youth about, the plastic garbage lining the tucked away corners of the roads, cellular phones– all this after traveling a rural road that has weeds overflowing the already thin shoulder, in this very hilly and forested area surrounded by crop land.

Andrea and I lucked out by landing a household that had a brick and concrete house.  Their kitchen and eating area was in a separate bamboo settlement.  We weren’t sure of the relations in the house: there was a pair of grandparents and a boy our age, and then a small child.  He was probably a couple years old at most.  His parents apparently are no longer around and his mother is in jail on meth charges.  We were, of course awkward around the boy our age, who just drove us students around the village.

The second night, our grandmother came in and asked if we were going to spend a third night there.  She had water around her eyes.

The afternoon of the next day, the day we were supposed to leave, she told me, stay, stay here and marry our boy.  When we got to Otome’s house, when we were about to leave, she came around to our van with tears in her eyes and squeezed our hands, saying something soothing, a farewell, in Lisu.

19 November 2008, 5pm-6pm in the dorms of the Kaew Nawarat Campus with Kelsey Schopp.

Originally, we were supposed to teach the following week, but it was moved up a week early suddenly.

Kelsey and I decided to discuss contemporary American music, but much more in the sense of actual musicians than what is currently popular.  At first we planned this entire playlist of songs, but ended up having to focus on No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” for it’s culmination of ideas about in/dependence, women’s place in society, and power distance between adults and teenagers.  We knew that the gut of the meaning could never be properly expressed to them, but we tried.

First of all, there was a lot of confusion about where we were supposed to be, so we were late.  There were only two students who showed up, whose names I no longer remember.  Kelsey first played a bunch of samples of genres (after explaining the meaning of the word) and then we moved onto “Just a Girl.”  We played the song, resisted singing along, and went over the lyrics.  As most inexperienced teachers, we had trouble conveying the meaning of lyrics with other English words.  Kelsey, however came up with a few good examples.  The best example Kelsey came up with was for “the world is forcing me to hold your hand”: Say that Annie wants to go to the mall, but I don’t want to.  But Annie says, come one, it’s not like you have anything else to do, and then other people are also going to the mall, so I end up going; it’s not that I want to go to the mall or they’re physically forcing me, but in the end I end up giving in to pressure.

The one part we had a really hard time converying was the sense of confusion but also sarcastic tone the principle figure in the song has about adult attitudes, rules and expectations.  It was really frustrating to listen to them chat it out in Thai and for me to not be able to have the Thai words to explain it to them.

After going through the songs, we tried to talk about music with them, but they mostly listened to Thai music or popular music that we’re out of touch with.  Haha!  They did know what ‘indie’ means, which is awesome.

I went with a load of friends to Kad Luang/Wororot Market last night, which was the night of the full moon and it seemed that positively everyone was outside, lighting as many fireworks and making as much noise as possible.  The air was full of smoke and lights; fireworks, lanters and candles.  I made a little float for the Ping river, but it fell in upside down–total fail.  The floats are supposed to be a thank-you and apology to the river, and hoping that the river Goddess will continue to nourish your people.  The huge lanterns are made of paper and a thing of burning cloth in the middle, which heats the entire thing to float up in the air; to expell all our sins from us.  I set off a lantern earlier this year as a part of a scavenger hunt, and during the day it just turns into this ugly, black mass of paper.  At night, the flame makes the lantern look white, like an incandescent jellyfish, despite the black smoke.

Our little group didn’t get any intentional fireworks set off at our feet, didn’t get any lanterns torn.  It sounded like many things like M-80s were going off every ten minutes somewhere.  Fireworks were constantly going off and surprising us so we never got desensitized.  Though there was no such thing as fire safety the way there is back in the States, we didn’t see any one hurt or getting seriously offended.  Thailand is too laid back for me sometimes, haha.

This website.  IT IS AMAZING.  I told my little story.  I am overwhelmed by how fast this came up and how seamless the site is.  I don’t really know what to do with myself!  We’ve got a looooot of work to do.

I went to the library showing of the live election coverage, and as my class ended at noon, I arrived just in time to listen to Obama’s acceptance speech.  And it was good.  I could believe it, but I was numb.  Over here, there were mumbles and smiles of congratulations, but I’m imagining my campus exploding with joy, the peoples I know back home probably jolted with ecstatic energy AHHHHHHHH Yeah, anyway.  A bunch of us went to the UN Irish Pub, but that was pretty much it.

Wow, engaging government.  I wish I could go to the inauguration!

I was late to class because I needed coffee or I would have drifted off, but at the beginning of class our speaker, Kannaporn Amoraseth Akarapisan, gave us three articles.  One of the articles is this one: Personal faith in Islam more powerful than global borders.  Maybe I can find the other two later.  She also brought a Qur’an with her, which has the original Arabic along side an English translation.  And then she sat in front of the classroom after a short bio on herself and basically said ‘ask away!’

The most important things she told us about her culture and religion is that the ‘hijab’ is not, in most ways a form of oppression.  It is a way to be rid of our own human distractions with physicality .  For example, when one talks to other people, we are identified by our ideas rather than physical aspects.  She of course does not meant to dismiss that the hijab is sometimes used as a form of oppression, because it can be.  “Islam” means peace, and imbedded in the greetings of Muslim culture are well-wishing to one another.  Jews, Christians and Muslims all really do belive in the same thing, they just get off at different bus-stops; Jews at Moses, Christians at Jesus, and Muslims at Muhammad.  It made me giggle.  Non-Muslims can go into mosques, which makes me happy and I hope to visit a mosque while I’m here in Chiang Mai with her sometime. 

Duuuuuudes, afterward I really felt that I should research more about our big, old religions.  They’ve been around for a long time.

22-25 October

Last weekend: Sukhothai. Yes, I know I’m skipping art field trips and the Golden Triangle, but this trip trumps those because we actually got to hang out with real Thai students. On Friday night, after arriving to Pitsanulok, my entire program went to a banquet hall party with students of Naresuan University. Everyone was spread out evenly to all tables and we got a chance to chat with them; their English skills are as good as that of the Thai buddies. Or humiliation of singing and dancing went without a hitch and in-fact, when the pop songs and karaoke came on, everyone was embarrassing themselves without a care through strange, modern-like dance. There was one point when I was dancing on a chair. It was fun.

The best part, though, was afterwards a load of us went out to a bar-like setting and a club and chatted some more with the Thai students. We were all pretty alike to one another; we talked about families, drunkenness, the election, languages and probably more. Most everyone was in cute clothes and I (and a few others) were still in our school uniforms but I’m sure we couldn’t care less.

Anyway, before that, we were in Sukhothai. I told my aunt about this, and she taught me the word ‘ancestor’ in Thai coz my maternal grandfather is from Sukhothai. The spelling of the word ‘Sukhothai’ is also strangely different yet literal from the ‘Thai’ in ‘Thailand.’ The weather there was nearly unbearably hot and my mosquitos bites actually swelled up. The old city though, is totally touristy (we all sat on this two-car carriage and had a tour guide who would explain and give us strange spellings of the features he was talking about) and very stunning. I have been to old sites before, but for whatever reason this time I was really absorbed by the setting; the curving canopy of the old trees, the solidly delicate-green surface of some of the ponds, the persevering laterite of the structures.

As Aj. Ram explained the histories of these sites, I was imagining people of the past making real use of these places, of them being normal. When I was at the Temple of the Rock Bridge, I walked around the premises, trying to imagine the old building and what the grounds were like when Ramkamhaeng would ascend the hill atop a white elephant to pray to Buddha at the temple. Really though, I was staring at the horizon that still managed to be eye-level and a few boys hurrying up the hill with exaggerated drama, both to much of my amusement.  I had stopped sweating profusely by then and even with only a slight breeze I was very comfortable.

Anyway.  Every normal Payap student has vacated the premesis.   Students from my program are the only ones left.  I’m okay with it, but it certainly is more lonely here.  One of the girls, Popeye, who I am supposed to move in with next month, gave me a hug before she left.  Well, it was a pretty loose hug for her, but it was nice to hug someone else too.  She was probably thinking, why is she squeezing the life outta me….

Some other international students who are on the normal schedule moved to a more apartment-like arrangement.  They even have something that slightly resembles a kitchen!  Not that you’d even need to go a block to find food.  (Well, unless you live in the international dorm, where we are.)

We are pretty far out from the city center.  Taking a song-taew is at the very least 20 baht, but usually 30 baht.  The more the better, but also more exhaust from the truck.  Cough!

But a few days ago Hannah found out there’s an actual bus that goes to town!  For 15baht.  Hella awesome, we’re gonna take that.

The dorm we live in is nice, of course, being funded by the USAID and all.  So yes, it is very western styled.  I kind of feel like we’re little creatures each in our little niche.  And no one here leaves their door open.  Sad!  No opportunities to say, hey, i like that stupid song you’re playing.  Really?  cool.  I’m so-and-so.  Oh, this-is-my-name, how do you feel about their sophomore effort?

(As Mer once told me about dorm life in the States, hee.)

But there’s lots of bugs.  There are video monitors.  No roaches as of yet, but we have a rat on the third floor’s common room!  And one on the second floor, but I suspect they might be the same rat, or an entire family scuttling about in the walls.  Ahhh.

Other than little niggling things, it’s pretty laid back here.  But for the next week, our eating times are going to be changed for a Christian conference.  The biggest cultural difference?  No visitors in the dorms.  It’s kind of funny, considering back in my frosh yr my roommate would always be sleeping with her boyfriend.  Annoying, but whatever.

Oh, we are such weird creatures.

Right now I’m on Hannah’s computer, looking through her huge collection of music. (Scrolling so much has brought back my carpal tunnel). It makes me miss the RBN.

This coming Monday we have the midterm for Thai Studies due. I’ve been skipping on writing about Mae Chaem.

I was pretty irritable for most of the first two days I was in Mae Chaem because of the ride, but also precariously trying to be humble and communicate as best as I could with my central Thai. I could make good guesses on what they were saying but the parties on both ends would still somehow feel the need to repeat things at least a few times. Time to eat! Eat, come to eat! Go shower, shower to get refreshed, yes shower. I’ll be going to the temple, going to class at the temple! Etc.

Ban YangLuang is one of the villages of the ‘town’ Mae Chaem itself. When we weren’t going somewhere or taking language, we were free to wander up and down the one main road and between the houses. Joy and I stayed in a household that had the rice fields right behind their house and a gurgling stream that ran between the two.

Ajan Kai asked me about what I like most there: the greenery, I said. The lively, vivid green of young rice is always the most refreshing color to me, with a bright blue, cloudy sky following closely behind. This lowland countryside had both. And the occasional sudden rainfall.

Though I feel like I didn’t get as much enjoyment out of the trip as others may have, I eventually felt a disconnect. By the third, fourth day I had forgotten there was an election, forgotten such a thing as deadlines and cellphones. (There was cellphone service there, but I had my phone off for almost the entire time.)

When I had a chance to talk to my host family and my big sister (who went to Mae Jo University), I really felt how Americanized I really am. I asked them about the seasons and their crops, they asked me about my family and background. I felt like in some ways they were a kind of country folk spectacle for us while I was a foreign, mixed-up exhibit for them. I don’t mind; it’s essentially a cultural exchange.

On the last day, I was feeling a bit uneasy about our ride being late. Typical of me to worry when off schedule, no. I also didn’t want the locals to wait on us. In the lucky extra while we got to hang out more in the village, I had the chance to chat with a couple of the host mothers. They were the first ever for me to insist that I had good (not just decent) Thai. The subject of my family and background naturally came up. Schooling. Reasons for coming to the North (opposed to BKK).

One of the mothers was continually impressed with the Thai I knew and asked me if I had a significant other. I paused and only said “For a little while, yes, but lots of things didn’t work out so not anymore,” because I didn’t want to get into lengthy explanations that would surely involve lots of stuttering because of my goldfish memory for Thai. “Was he Thai or White?” was her next question. “White,” I answered, never knowing which direction that subject can go. I was about to launch into an explanation about the very few Thai people I know, and how I know no males remotely even in my age range, but she said, “That’s good. I think, considering all the choices and flexibility between a Westerner and a rigidly old-fashioned Thai man, I would choose a Westerner too.”

She’s a lovely lady, and I felt a sense of wonder from her as we conversed. The way she put this issue is the way many women here see the West; choice and a sense of autonomy is good. It’s one thing to dream of leaving a small town, another to be content in one’s ‘lot’ and something completely different to want to be away from so-called civilization. They’re all the same on one point: we all want what we don’t, and or cannot have. Try as you might to refuse this, but the mechanisms inside you inherited from two other human beings will continually shape you and never leave you.

When I am in Thailand, I definitely feel more loud, taking up too much room, etc. When I am back in the States, I do feel more passive and feel the need to not look distinguished. I always feel the need for some sort of company, and to chat a lot with my family. I love chatting in person. Or just chatting. It’s the best thing to do here on this planet. Except for listening to and or playing instruments.