First Impressions

[February, 1995] After having been in the Philippines for about a month, Thailand seemed very similar. The same wide variety of fruits are available in both countries, but they have different names; there are less palm trees in Northern Thailand which is further north than any point in the Philippines; the cages for fighting cocks are constructed of some sort of vegetable material in Thailand not metal, but their existence alone belies a similarity; the roads are infinitely superior in Thailand; Buddhism rather than Catholicism is practiced in Thailand, though its importance in the daily lives of the two peoples seemed similar; and scooters were the principal mode of transportation in the important Northern Thailand city of Chiang Mai for both men and women, women would ride side-sadle if they rode on the back. Thailand is a mixture of tradition and modern society. A woman dressed in a traditional sarong with long, straight hair passes another dressed in a short mini-skirt with permed hair. A vendor stops his three-wheeled bicycle (the front two wheels support his mobile kitchen) at a curb to sell some dried squid to a small boy while another vendor a couple of blocks away rides his bicycle carrying three levels of fruits displayed from a plastic case in the front of his bicycle. Other vendors walk down the streets of Chiang Mai carrying baskets of produce or brooms from a pole slung over their shoulder. Samlors (pedicabs) line a section in front of the main market of Chiang Mai. Tuk-tuks (three-wheeled motorcycles with a seat for two located behind the driver) and silors (a truck with two benches of seats running parallel to eachother) taxi people throughout the city and to nearby locations outside the city. Silors run both as busses with specific routes for an inexpensive fee, and as taxis for a much higher, though negotiable rate.

International politics is a more serious concern in Thailand, a country bordering four countries rather than water, and an "urgent appeal" in English posted on a restaurant door solicits Western aid from tourists whose pounds, d-marks, francs, and dollars accord them special status in Thailand and the international community. The small note tells of the plight of Karen refugees who have suffered attacks by the "SLORC army of Burma" along the Burma-Thai border.

Thai Buddhism, A Tourist's Perspective

It is easy to tell that Buddhism is an important part of Thai society in Chiang Mai. There are several wats (monastery compounds) throughout the city that are several hundreds of years old, small spirit houses (we mistook them for altars) that look something like little Thai homes on top of a pole can be found in front of police stations, restaurants, schools, gas stations, hotels, and other businesses. Women wearing shorts, short skirts, or sleeveless shirts are not allowed into the temples or bots (main prayer halls) unless they put on sarong-type wraps offered to them to cover up. Some bots ban women altogether. The Buddhist monks seen at the wats and around the city are often young, teenage boys. These boys seemed like any other teenage boys except they are a bit more well mannered. Their shaved heads and eyebrows, and safron robes distinguish them from everyone else, but it is common for Thai boys to spend part of their life in the Buddhist monkhood before leading a life in the non-secular world.

Prostitution

Many people that we approached in stores or restaurants thought my wife, Karen, was Thai and began speaking to her in Thai until one of us informed them that she is Filipino-American. A couple of local college girls approached us as we were walking, and said they wanted to interview us about prostitution. I got defensive because I was a white man with a woman that many had mistaken for a Thai woman, and immediately said, "This is my wife. She's not a prostitute. We met in school in the United States." Yes, I had been practicing this explanation for much of the time we were in Thailand because many people had looked at us together in a strange way. One time, we were at a dinner-show and some Thai women in a group who appeared to be visiting from somewhere else in Thailand kept looking at us and whispering to eachother. That same night an American who was seated in front of us in a van looked down at my hand as I rested it on Karen's thigh as if her were about to see some lurid show. After telling us they didn't think Karen was a prostitute and that they were just interviewing foreigners, the college students asked us "what comes into your mind when you think of Thai women?" I lied saying I didn't really have a specific generalization that I could make about Thai women because I had taken a college course that dealt extensively with Thailand and had some understanding of the complexity of Thai women. If I were honest I would have said "prostitution" despite what I had learned in the course because the international image of Thai women is that of prostitutes. Had we been living in Thailand for a few months I could have more honestly what I had, but the fact was that I had been in Thailand for less than a week and this was not enough time for my academic experience to mesh with my tourist experience in a country where I couldn't speak the language of the people who lived there.

While in Chiang Mai, I didn't seek out prostitution nor did it seek me out in the way you may hear it does in the form of the young girls standing next to doorways in Bangkok stories. It does exist though and we saw glimpses of it. One afternoon we walked by a small bar in the more touristy area near the "Night Bazaar" and saw two young Thai women and one western man. We suspected that both the women worked there because of the familiarity of their speech to each other (though no to the man), and because one of them was carrying a drink tray. The other woman was laying down on a cushioned bench next to the man as if she were his personal hostess.

Another time we noticed a Thai women, possibly in her late 30's (probably prematurely aged from experience) wearing a short black skirt that nearly showed her ass, walking down the street looking for a man, any man. She noticed a couple of elderly gentlemen in a bar patio. Then she sat down with them and began talking to them though it was apparent that they were strangers. The next day, we went to a bank in a completely different part of town where tourists were hard to find and into the bank came the woman wearing the same outfit she had on the day before, but looking much happier than she did before.

On our plane trip back to the Philippines, we saw another Thai woman that we suspected was a prostitute. She had boarded the plane with a white man in Bangkok, and was a very pretty woman but looked out of place amongst the passengers. It wasn't that she was Thai, it was because her clothes gave her away as a woman who could not be happy with just the beauty of her face.

Trek to the Golden Triangle

Conversation with an Englishman

One day, we took a tourist trek to see the Golden Triangle, Chiang Rai, and several hilltribe villages. Together with our driver, a Thai tourist guide, a young couple from Hungary, a single young Japanese man, and an older couple from Yorkshire, England we set out early in the morning in a van. The Hungarian couple, who could speak fluent English, were on a three-week trip to Thailand and look as if they were on their honeymoon. The Japanese man spoke little English and was constantly referring to a guidebook that was written in Japanese. The Yorkshire couple was retired and had traveled rather extensively. I spoke briefly with the man from Yorkshire about Northern Ireland, and British and American international history. He made a distinction between the British people and British imperialism by saying that it was the landed aristocracy of old who were responsible for the Imperialist Age. He added that the lessening of class distinctions in England was the most significant change taking place in contemporary Britain. Then he tried to justify British imperialism by saying that "at least Britain built up the infrastructure in places like India." Even his wife, who up to this point seemed to be in agreement with his general line of argument, interrupted to question this weak justification. When I persisted in my criticisms, he tried to divert the topic to American history and the injustices done to the American Indian. When he found out that I agreed with his criticisms in this area, he decided to talk about racism in America and center on African Americans. Again I said that racism was a serious problem, but that America had to be the most ethnically and racially diverse nation on Earth. I added that the politics of power and ethnicity-racism-sexism was another issue that was far from being effectively dealt with in America. He was defensive of British imperialism in Africa as well, but it seemed that despite his keen intellect, his defense was colored more by his brief experience as an unwanted white tourist in Kenya than any objective analysis of the historical problems germinated during the British Imperial period there. He and his wife had lived in Northern Ireland and he said he was partly of Irish extraction. He defended the British position there stating that the British didn't want to be there, but felt a moral responsibility to avoid letting a conflict escalate to the level of the contemporary Yugoslavian conflict. He said the British treatment of the Catholics in Northern Ireland was not particularly wrong considering the level of lawlessness that existed in the state.

We stopped in a village where women and young girls sold small baskets of quail eggs to visitors after the eggs were lowered into a geothermal vent by a pole. Walking along the river that borders the village, in the direct of an animist shrine, I saw two dead, large owls tied to some poles with a string around their necks, and their wings spread apart as if to be dried. Further on, I saw a woman washing her dishes on a deck (which was supported by stilts) in the back of her home which stood about ten feet above the river where she dumped her dirty water. The shrine seemed to center around a large, rounded boulder in a field which had yellow and blue clothe (about a foot in width) tied around it. There were three smaller boulders to the side of the larger one, but they were unadorned. At the shrine, there was an umbrella; four poles stuck into the ground to make four corners enclosing the shrine area with some clothe hanging from them; poles stuck into the ground with a cross pole attached to the top of them from which flowers hung, and tables with offerings of food and drinks.

Hilltribe Villages of Northern Thailand

We visited villages of the Akha, Hmong, and Lu Mien hilltribes where tourism was being promoted by the government to partially supplant the income previously gained through opium production. According to our guide, opium poppies were the only plant that was banned in Thailand. He maintained that the men which were absent from the villages we visited were not off tending to hidden opium fields, but were working on other cash crops such as corn. It was difficult for us to accept this explanation though after we had learned that raw opium could be sold for 300,000baht ($12,000) a kilo, and hilltribe peoples in Thailand were now forced to go to Burma to purchase the outlawed product. He had also explained that opium was an integral part of some hilltribe societies. It was used as a narcotic during ceremonies, as a medicine, and even considered a necessity for a woman's sexual fulfillment (it was placed on the male's penis during coitus).

Chiang Rai and the Burmese (Myanmar) Border

The Thai border with Burma was quite busy. Our guide explained to us that Burmese men were quite distinctive because their skin was darker than a Thai man's and they wore longhis (sarongs). I was taking a couple of pictures of a Burmese family on the bridge that separates the border checkpoints of the two countries when I saw a Thai border guard walk up to them and kick them as if they were trash on the sidewalk merely because they were loitering. The Burmese were allowed to go into Thailand but were not allowed to go beyond five kilometers past the border. The average Burmese salary at the time was said to be equivalent to about 400baht ($16) a month.

Some Thai Vocabulary and City Names: