The Office

Now that I work in an office, I can understand why they made a TV show parodying such a situation. We deserve to be laughed at, I think to myself, as we shuffle around in our suits and ties, making copies and chattering over our cubicles. At face value, it all seems very western, each person at their desk working scrupulously on the task at hand. A closer look, however, reveals that things are not always as they seem…

While I cannot presume to speak for all Thai offices, I can vouch for the majority of those in my building, which is an administration building for the medical school. As I stroll down the halls running errands and stretching my legs, I notice so many computer screens tuned into youtube, booking airline tickets, perusing photographs of family and friends and reading recipes online that I begin to wonder how much work is actually done in a day. One man told me with some disdain in his voice that he has to come in to work every day. Spending time in the office with him however, I noticed much of the same that I noticed elsewhere. Picture viewing, playing online, having long, relaxed conversations with the secretary. I began to wonder whether he couldn’t shave his work week down to five days if he just focused a little. Much of the office life around me is like this, feeling more like a living room at times, with frequent offerings of food from the office ladies and soft radio a la Celine Dion. Guests often pop in and spend great amounts of time chatting and enjoying the fruit. The mood is anything but urgent, and everyone seems to prefer it that way. It doesn’t matter if you have enough to do, just be there from 9 to 5 and enjoy the view.

Sometimes Gaibi will visit the office with Isaiah, and this will slowly, magnetically draw all of the staff on my floor out of their offices to spend significant amounts of time either playing with him or adoring him from the sidelines. Eventually, all offices have emptied out and are enjoying the foreign baby show, while the unhurried workload waits in the wings. This is the gist of the Thai culture it seems, and in it one feels almost a sense of pride.

Geographically, Thailand is surrounded by areas that have all been colonized. Vietnam, Burma, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore. I have heard that in the Phillipines, all things western are fundamentally valued more than the native culture. It is as though they have been inseminated with the culture and it is flowering from underneath. Meanwhile, in Thailand, the original impulse still remains, unbroken, untamed. While modernity comes smashing it an a hundred miles-an-hour, the people carry on in their own time. It is a rare and beautiful thing that such a culture can remain in touch with its origins in this world, and I am called to remember this fact when I am sitting behind a car that has parked in the middle of the road, blocking the entire lane, to go buy some fried chicken.

I watched as a trio of confused-looking Thai women tried to make sense of the soup selection at the ‘Sizzler’ salad bar here in Hat Yai. All of the names of the soups were written in English, and things like ‘tuna cream with parsley’ are not taught in the schools. After they left, another woman gingerly stirred around in the hot and sour chicken soup, carefully looking for any remaining bits of chicken in a mostly exhausted pot with the patience of a country fisherwoman. It’s as if you can almost feel the haste with which modernity has slammed into this culture, and its inhabitants still seem to be reeling a bit from the impact.

Today I came downstairs in my boxer shorts while preparing to go out for dinner, only to find a 5 ft. Taiwanese lady standing in my living room. How did she get there? Well, the story requires a little background.

Some weeks ago while Isaiah and I were taking a walk, a short, elderly woman beckoned us into her house a few doors down. Having nothing better to do, we obliged. She lives alone in a town house, the same size as ours (too big for 3 people let alone 1). Inside it was easy to observe that she is elderly and without much help or company; there are open packets of medicine, half-used tissues and old fruits scattered about the place. Also present are odd clues that suggest family, such as video-game posters along the walls and odd photos of her with some younger looking people. It would be sensible to assume (as appears to be the case) that she is an old grandma set up in a furnished apartment by some generous family members, who she seldom sees. In addition, the woman seems to speak very little Thai, yet will consistently speak to us in long, rambling sentences in a language that we as of yet cannot identify, but take for some dialect of Chinese or Taiwanese. An old Taiwanese lady somehow dropped into a row of rather modern Thai row-homes. Now as we pass her house on walks she always invites us in and will not hear anything of our occasional declinations.

The other night as we sat eating tacos on our little dining table pushed way over into one corner of the room to prevent Isaiah from throwing food off of it, we heard a rustling at the front gate. We called out, “Helloooo?”
A little giggle. Female. Hard to discern her age.

“hello?”

From the lamps in the house we can make out her tiny frame and puffy hair. She is twinkling in her old black eyes as she proceeds to step up onto our porch and enter the house through our front door. She is holding a little bag of prawn-flavored, potato crispy snacks. As we stand she motions for us to sit, and pads cutely up to the table in her walking sandals, slacks and patterned, button-up shirt. She peruses the table, covered in strange foods. Tortillas, chopped veggies, salsa, beans. “Where is the rice?” she asks in the sparse Thai that she has.
“We don’t have any rice.” I reply.
Bursting into a hearty laugh, she slaps me on the back and says something like, “oh its in the kitchen isn’t it? ‘No rice,’ ha ha.”

She speaks at length to us in her foreign tongue, and we nod in alternating directions, trying to eke out the right responses from her. Its funny how a totally foreign language can sound like a total of four different syllables to you.
“Sher Jeen,” she says as she walks through the door. “sher jeen how fung?” she inquires about Isaiah. “Jeen jeen how cheurng ah?”
“Yes.”
I bring a spoonful of broccoli toward Isaiah’s mouth, and she stops me short. “He can eat it,” I assure her. “Jeen sher cheurng ah.”
“yeah.”

After hanging around for a bit, she pads out, refusing our attempts to stand and let her out the door. Fifteen minutes later, she appears again at the door with a little bag containing a sports drink and a straw.

“ Fung how ah?” she asks.
“yes, yes, come in,” we reply.

Her mission this time is merely to deliver the sports drink. No matter where we happen to meet her, she insists on showering us with gifts. In such cases, accepting them is what matters and not whether you happen to need them or not.

Back to our living room. Earlier that afternoon, she stopped by the house looking rather downtrodden. Her shoe was broken and she had a cut finger. It seems that whoever looks after her only does so occasionally. She came to the door where she collected Isaiah and took him off to play on our parked motorcycle. Though lately Isaiah has been going through a period of clinginess, rejecting most offers to be held by non-parental units, he never refuses grandma. After a nice visit, she left and we began to get ready to go out with some friends. While we were upstairs changing, I remembered my pair of pants downstairs on the couch and came down to find grandma standing in the living room, holding a packet of prawn crispies.
“Jeen sher ah?”
“yeah”

Looking Forward, Looking Back

Outside it is war. There are multi-colored flashes and flares throbbing against the night sky. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess that the pot had finally boiled over in Thailand and the battle horns had been sounded. Down the street an explosive firework set off a nearby car alarm – three times. Semi-automatic crackling fills the air, accented by more dominant, extravagant bursts in literally every direction visible from our porch balcony.

It was there that Gaibi and I stood barefoot on the concrete, slimy from humidity and mildew, sharing a tall beer and watching what appeared to be southern Thailand going up in flames. It was now 2009 and Isaiah was screaming something ferocious in the next room. Cheers, my darling, a quick kiss and then Isaiah needs to go back to sleep for sweet God’s sake.

We went downtown this evening to witness how the biggest city in the south celebrates the New year. What we found in this particular town was, interestingly, what can be found in most celebratory environments: vendors. Another ‘must’ is music, played at a tremendous volume through high-powered, (though not necessarily high defintion,) speakers. As you meander, shoulder to shoulder with bustling strangers, down the endless aisles of little plastic trinkets, pushcart ice-cream, pirated movies and fashionable outfits, you can’t help but wonder what it might be that compels humans to acquire so many little things in their short lives. What is it that drives us to fill our houses with keychain animals and Spiderman alarm clocks and chopstick sleeves and sequin handbags? It would seem that nothing is further from happiness than the little piles of junk that crowd our lives and the tabletops of our homes, I think to myself.

Three minutes later I am crouched down at a booth, examining some nice crocheted light-switch covers. I’m trying to decide between the Thai flag and the one that looks like Bob Marley. Five for only two dollars US? ‘These will make great gifts,’ I think.

A funny thing about using foreign money is that when you spend this new, colorful, monopoly-esque stuff in your wallet, it still goes away. When I was young in video-game arcades we used to exchange our quarters for tokens, and because we weren’t used to spending tokens we would pump them thoughtlessly into the machines until all of our dollars-turned-quarters-turned-tokens had been exhausted. I would have been more scrupulous with my quarters, and I find myself at times on the same slippery slope in this country.

I heard an interesting theory about the culture of Thailand and its exceedingly laid-back, unhurried manner. Living on what amounts to a great big peninsula whose weather is essentially an oscillating mix of stifling heat and rain, abundant with native fruits and vegetables, the first settlers of this land were none-too pressured to sow the grain and reap the harvest for there was no harsh cold ahead. Work was done when the rain let up, and the meantime was filled with great stretches of indulgent inactivity and finding creative ways to enjoy this time. Unlike the American pioneers, constantly waging battle against the fierce and unruly elements in the New England region where it all began, the Thais merely sat back and waited for the rain to stop. If you’ve ever been to New York or Boston, you can feel the spirit of this struggle living on in its people: work, survival, urgency. In Thailand, sometimes I find myself wishing that they had at least a little winter in their climate.

We were set to go to Malaysia two weeks ago, where I would have to re-apply for a visa in lieu of changing job locations in Thailand, a beauracratic necessity that I have yet to understand. I was told by my boss that he would arrange a van to take us on the 5 hr. ride to Penang, and island off the west coast of the country. The afternoon before leaving I walk into the office where he casually asks me, ‘What time will you leave tomorrow morning?’
I remind him that he has offered to arrange this, to which he responds, “So do you know where the bus station is?”
I reiterate my previous answer, and this time he says, “yes, ok…” He then calls to reserve seats for us on the 9:30 mini-bus and, still very casual, informs me that my whole family needs to have passport photos taken and that I will need photo copies of my marriage license, Isaiah’s birth certificate and an armful of other paperwork that had somehow escaped mention in the many weeks since I had been informed of this trip. It is in moments such as these that I am thankful that the frigid snows of Massachusetts taught our settlers the value of a little forethought.

I have learned that in when undertaking any kind of official duty in Thailand, it pays to relentlessly cross-examine the people involved, making every effort to insure that you can get a jump start on the extensive preparations. Thai culture has the strange tendency to tell you what you want to hear rather than the whole uncomfortable truth, and when it comes to preparing the documents that will insure my legal residence in a foreign country, I’m more the type who would like to hear all the gory details right up front.

Somehow, despite our earnest efforts, we end up on the wrong bus the next morning at 9:30 from the proscribed bus stop and we are spat from it onto the border of Thailand and Malaysia where we walk across, only to be swindled by motorbike taxis, short-changed by money changers and overcharged for a 4-hour cab ride through the Malaysian countryside to our destination, stopping here and there to drop off a clock radio at a friend’s restaurant and pick up the driver’s wife from the side of the road where she waited with amongst stray chickens and water buffalo. Malaysia will never get a second chance to make a first impression.

Penang however, was a very interesting little island. A one-time British colony and spice island now owned by Malaysia and populated predominantly by Malay, Chinese and Indian people, it was an incredible intersection of cultures, all living very peacefully side-by-side and within eachother. On one street you would see women in ornate saris on the sidewalk, Chinese rickshaw drivers in the street and crowds of Arab men gathered in tiny coffee stalls and shops, fervently discussing the matters of the day. Ornate mosques, elaborate Chinese and Hindu temples as well as Buddhist monasteries sat amidst the din of endless commerce. A major business center, its rich cultural heritage was still visible through the cracks of its modern veneer. We strolled its busy streets, ate dinner in ‘Little India’ and slept in a quaint guest house for about 16 bucks while waiting for my visa to process. Haggard backpackers ambled along the streets next to groups of Muslim women in ‘hijab’ headscarves, a Chinese noodle cart, and us with Isaiah feeling even further from all things remotely familiar.

It is an experience which is at once refreshing and disorienting. You gain your footing in life a little more when you are forced to temporarily lose it. Malaysia is just different enough from Thailand so as to feel weird. In a strange way, its easy to relax and be a little more yourself when you realize you have virtually no control over what is going on around you. In certain foreign situations, such as travel, you merely have to surrender your fate to whatever gods may be around in that particular country and trust that there is a system in place that will effectively transport you from A to B without any significant physical or fiscal injury. This plan, and a lot of walking, worked out just fine for us in Penang. Good news is, we escaped unscathed with a new visa for me and lots of new friends for Isaiah.