Thailand Confidential

by Jerry Hopkins

  Behind the Smiles

  Talking Thai,

  Understanding Englit

  I’d tried to learn Thai. I really did. I spent more than a hundred dollars on a set of tapes and a manual the size of a small American city’s telephone book. I still have a shelf of how-to books and the pocket-sized Thai-English dictionary I carry around with me is so worn a rubber band is all that holds it together. I even enrolled in a class to learn the language.

  In many ways, Thai is far simpler than English, once you learn that the adjectives follow the subject and a couple of other easy rules. There are no prefixes or suffixes, no tenses or plurals, nor any articles. The verbs do not conjugate and there are no genders, as in, say, Spanish and French. And there is no punctuation or capitalization.

  That’s the good news. The bad news is that there are forty-four consonants, twenty-four vowels (each with a long and short form), and five tones. Because it, like some other Asian languages, is constructed of monosyllabic words, thus limiting the number of combination possibilities, how you say and hear the words determines if you can speak or comprehend it. For example, the syllable mai can mean “new,” “burn,” “wood,” “not” or “not?,” depending on how it’s pronounced. Thus you can say “Mai mai mai mai mai?” and mean, “New wood doesn’t burn, does it?” If your tonal use is correct.

  I’d lived in Thailand for about three years when I started classes and I was the star pupil. I knew many of the rules, was familiar with the sound of the language, and had a small vocabulary of common words and phrases. But the class quickly passed me by. The first problem was my hearing loss. I was born tone deaf and that made it impossible for me to hear the words precisely and when I spoke, people often didn’t understand, wrinkling their brows and, in some instances, suppressing (or not suppressing) laughter. Suay with a rising tone, for instance, meant “beautiful,” and with a falling tone “bad fortune.” Intellectually, I knew this, but I had trouble making it clear what the hell I was saying.

  I also had a more general impairment that required mechanical devices to hear speech of any kind, a loss so great I was growing dependent not only on my battery-operated hearing aids but also on a relatively quiet environment and lip-reading to get by. Bangkok is not known for its relative quiet. And reading lips doesn’t help much, either, when the language spoken is other than your own, or English is spoken in a manner that changes the pronunciation and thus the movement of the lips. Tones don’t show on the lips, either.

  My age was another factor. It was generally agreed that picking up a foreign language was a snap when you were young; children living in multi-lingual households learned two and three tongues simultaneously. But apparently the part of the brain that absorbed and sorted language went on holiday more frequently as age advanced and by the time I arrived in Thailand at fifty-eight, my language learning potential could be described as semi-retired. After two months in class, my instructor said she would welcome my presence for as long as I wished to attend, but...graciously, she left it at that.

  It’s no surprise that this made communication between my wife Lamyai and me difficult, or that a sort of “pidgin” was invented, comprising English used in truncated and imaginative ways, colored by Thai words and rules. Because many Thais spoke English following Thai structure, the adjective frequently followed the subject, thus I had a friend who referred to my landlady as my “lady land.” So it was also in describing familial relationships. When Lamyai said “Papa Mayura,” she was talking about her cousin Mayura’s father, and when she said “young sister husband Lampong,” she was referring to her sister Lampong’s husband’s younger sister. After a while, such “backwards” construction was no problem for me.

  Another verbal characteristic was the linking of words in the way Thais ran all their words together in a written sentence. Where in the West someone might greet another saying, “Hot enough for you?” Lamyai exclaimed “Hottoomuch-PapaIwantdie!” A limited vocabularly similarly led to pasting two or three words together to convey a longer message; thus, when she bought school supplies and uniforms for the children, the news was described as “buybookshirt.” Sometimes the words strung together were so creative I didn’t want to correct her. For instance, she didn’t know the word for the “balcony” that fronted the second level of our home, so she said, “papasitdowndrinkbeer,” a word/phrase crafted to describe what I was known to do there somewhat more than occasionally.

  Further, there was a kindness that gentled some of her messages. I remember Lamyai asking, “Papa, take shower?” and my replying, “No.” Lamyai then said, “Maybe Papa not happy not take shower.” Someone in the West might have conveyed the same message by saying, “You stink! Take a bath!”

  I wasn’t alone with pronunciation problems. Thais had them, too. The letter “s” actually presented multiple challenges. Appearing at the start of a word, as in Sukhumvit, the name of the main street in my neighborhood, it began with the sibilance familiar to all. But when the “s” came at the end of the word, inasmuch as Thais don’t have any words that end with that sound, it disappeared—my last name was, therefore, pronounced Hopkin—or it was turned into a “t” or “k.” Thus, I understood “but” meant “bus,” “Jonat” and “Kritee” were the names of two popular farang singers of Thai songs named Jonas and Kristy, and when Lamyai said “kit” and “sek,” she was saying “kiss” and “sex.” As in: “LamyaiwantsekPapatoomuch!” Finally, when an “l” appeared at the end of the word, it became an “n,” as in Orienten Hoten, and an “r” sometimes became an “l,” for example, “loom,” or disappeared altogether, as when the Central Department Store became “Centen.”

  Add the charming tendency to put vocal emphasis on a word’s last syllable, thus my surname actually was pronounced Hop-KIN, tennis became “ten-NIT,” banana became “ba-na-NAH,” and my first name was “Jer-EE.” Further, an “a” was added to some words, so that steak was voiced “sa-TEAK”, small became “sa-MALL, sweet was mouthed “sa-WEET,” and the Land of Smiles was shortened and lengthened simultaneously, becoming “Land of Sa-MILE.”

  Teachers of English in Thailand called all this “Thai-glish” or “Tinglish.”

  Initially, I figured that for Lamyai, as for myself, that while there was far more to language than stringing words together, vocabulary was more important than pronunciation and tone. Thus, I carried my dictionary around with me and was always asking, “What’s the Thai word?” as Lamyai asked me, “How say Eng-LIT?” At the same time, I hoped that the situational context of what I was saying would make up for the way I mangled the ups and downs of the way Thai words were correctly vocalized.

  In time, I came to understand Lamyai most of the time fairly easily, as her sometimes imaginative set phrases became a part of my own vocabulary. When she’d had one too many gin-and-tonics and pointed to her head with a finger and said, “Litten bit woo-woo-woo,” the meaning was not lost on me. Later, this was replaced with “litten bit dlunk,” but I didn’t consider that an improvement.

  When I dropped my own conversational patterns and vocabulary down to her level, I wasn’t doing her any favors, however much it contributed to uninterrupted conversational flow. I even mispronounced some of the words as she did, saying “hab” for “have” and using the words “upstairs” and “downstairs” for “up” and “down,” etc. When I returned from a two-week trip to Burma with a friend and he’d given her a report, she told me, “Greg say talk about Lamyai toomuchtoomuch. TalkaboutLamyai. TalkaboutPhaithoon. Talk-aboutPok. TalkaboutMamaLamyai. Talkabouthou(se). Toomuchtoomuch. Greg say.” The error was that in letting this go uncorrected, I may have been aiding communication in the short term—whereas constant corrections to her speech or proper usage on my part would have slowed it—in the long run, it was a mistake.

  One more factor contributing to our conversational success was that unlike many Thais with limited English, Lamyai was not shy about using what facility she had. If she knew, say, five-hundred English words,
as soon as we were within conversational range (or on the phone) following any separation, she’d use at least four hundred of them four or five times apiece within the first five minutes. Many Thais, even when they actually spoke English well, were too insecure to speak at all to a farang . Lamyai, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to communicate all her news in my language and didn’t want to stop, the words tumbling forth in the manner of someone running downhill, moving faster and faster, until finally she stumbled and fell silent, ending many such raps with a pause followed by the phrase, “Don’t know Eng-LIT.” Together we then attempted to discover the word or phrase she wanted to vocalize, me searching (usually in vain) in my Thai-English dictionary, while Lamyai remained silent, frustrated.

  We also depended on sign and body language and I sometimes found myself drawing pictures in my pocket notebook. Following my son’s visit, he told family and friends back in the States that Lamyai spoke English about as well as a second grader and he told me that he thought that was one of the reasons we got on so well: we tried harder to communicate and for so long as the motivation to do so remained, we’d probably do okay.

  Kreng Jai

  My mother always said that a week was incomplete until you’d worked in the garden and got dirt under your fingernails, so when I fell in love with a rice farmer’s daughter and, later on as we planned to marry and built a house on the family farm, I looked forward to getting my hands into the soil, just as my mama advised.

  Soon after we moved into the house, Lamyai decided to put in some fruit and vegetable gardens, to thin some old banana patches on the property and move a hundred of the young trees to another piece of land nearby. (She would then add two hundred pineapple plants between the trees and five hundred potato plants.) As Lamyai, her mother, her siblings, her two children and youngest brother all pitched in to dig up and move the bananas, I figured I’d just join in.

  Boy, was I wrong! Not only did I not know what I was doing, my assistance was rebuffed. As I took up a machete to trim the leaves of the trees before replanting, I used the wrong (dull) side of the blade, causing several of those present to hide their laughter behind their hands. I knew they weren’t laughing at me, but embarrassed by my mistake; I had learned that the Thai response to embarrassment was laughter.

  What I didn’t realize, until Lamyai took me aside later, was that no matter how much I wanted to help, my “status” in the family dictated that I stand aside. It was, she said, kreng jai . And what, I asked, was that? She explained, saying that I was older, a foreigner, wealthier, better educated and et cetera and as such I was entitled to a kind and level of respect that, ironically, “kept me in my place.”

  Kreng jai may be one of the slipperiest and stickiest aspects of Thai culture for a westerner to grasp, and one of the most difficult aspects of Thai character for him or her to accept. It is, as Chrisopher G. Moore explains in his book Heart Talk (1992), “a mingling of reverence, respect, deference, homage and fear—which every Thai person feels toward someone who is their senior, their boss, their teacher, mother and father, a police officer or towards those who are perceived to be a member of a higher class.”

  Mont Redmond, another foreign author, writing in Wondering into Thai Culture (1998), saw it the same way, saying “this fear/consideration has produced some of the most adept and elegant manners on the face of this Earth. It is the disappearance of this restraint, and not its somewhat suffocating presence, which is bringing about the ruin of Thailand we see all around us today. Remove the consideration, and you have coups d’etat, corruption, and exploitation. Remove the fear, and you have profligacy, crime, and cultural collapse. Offense is everywhere, but fewer and fewer can gain leverage for redress with their feelings alone. As Thais lose the art of making small sacrifices to achieve long-term advantages—the essence of kwam kreng chai and diplomacy alike—the clumsy Western machinery of legislation, litigation and demonstration will occupy by default a place reserved in Thai hearts for the subtlest forms of blame, shame, and well-deserved fame.”

  In time, I learned that that was, unsurprisingly, a foreign point of view, and as a foreigner I still haven’t totally discarded it. The way I saw it, kreng jai was a hangover from the feudal system that still influences so much modern Thai behavior— resembling in unsettling ways the class system that clings to English life and the caste system that still rules India, and in a less severe way, the kowtowing of China. Because kreng jai determined, or at least colored, virtually all relationships, I saw it as a way to open wide the doors to frequent and easy abuse.

  Kreng jai is learned from childhood. Within the family, the order of birth is important. There are separate words for older and younger siblings, and the older is the most respected, regardless of whether he or she has earned that respect. Thus, if you are the third born child, you are “superior” to any children born after you and you defer to Numbers One and Two. Similarly, of course, parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts also are automatic beneficiaries of kreng jai .

  It additionally affects relationships between the sexes. Thailand is, like too many countries in the world, sexist, and it is the male who is valued more than the female, and therefore given more “respect.” Along with more choices, higher salaries, and so on.

  Similarly, when two Thai strangers meet, where they fit into Thailand’s complex social scheme may be the first order of business. Sometimes appearance tells all, as it would if one is obviously older than the other. Wardrobe may do it, too, as will accent; the dialects characteristically found in the northeastern and southern parts of the country may establish social place as quickly as Cockney would in Oxford, or one of the Cantonese variations likely will in Mandarin Beijing. A person’s home town or school can do the same. Similar biases exist around the world.

  Having a powerful father or a strong political connection in Thailand is another sure path to entitlement, and for some a kind of immunity. Consider the case of a former police captain and onetime Cabinet Minister whose two sons had a reputation for beating up people in pubs and were charged with forging documents to evade military service. When one of them was accused of shooting a cop dead in a pub, despite the prosecution’s claim to have more than sixty eye-witnesses, the young man went free as earlier testimony was reversed and witnesses suffered loss of memory. Nor was anyone surprised when the sons of one of Thailand’s godfathers of crime were elected to Parliament.

  Possessions and personal extravagances are another means of acquiring kreng jai . Thus, Thailand during the boom years became one of the world’s top markets for Mercedes-Benz auto-mobiles (with BMWs and Volvos not far behind) and the single best market on the planet for Johnny Walker Black Label Scotch. A prominent politician openly bragged to a newspaper reporter that he only felt comfortable when wearing suits designed by Armani, shirts by Versace, neckties by Lanvin and Valentino, shoes by Tettoni, and belts by Louis Vuitton. Nor was it unknown for the newly rich to have surrounding trees removed after building a showcase house because they blocked others from viewing the magnificent edifice.

  It’s pointless to try to explain that all men and women are created equal, as I repeatedly do with Lamyai, with no success whatsoever—because in Thailand, as in George Orwell’s novel, Animal Farm, “All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.” It is as ingrained and automatic in social situations as the deferential hands-held-together wai helps define everyday greetings.

  Sometimes this is carried to what westerners might call extremes. Kriengsak Niratpattanasai, an executive at DBS Thai Danu Bank, writes a weekly column in the Bangkok Post and in 2004 published a book, Bridging the Gap: Managing the Cross-Cultural Workplace in Thailand . In it, he told a story from his weekly column in the Bangkok Post, “Bridging the Gap” (Mar. 1, 2002) about a businessman who “loved to drive his car on provincial business trips. Aware that his health was weak, he always brought his driver as a contingency plan. On one trip the car crashed, the businessman died and his driver was ser
iously injured. Questioned by police after he recovered, the driver said that his boss often drove too fast and on that day visibility was poor. The driver confessed that he was too kreng jai to advise his boss to slow down.”

  A similar story is known to all in Thailand. When a princess fell out of a boat and drowned, dozens stood by and did nothing. The taboo about physically touching anyone from the royal family was so ingrained in the population at that time, no one felt it permissible to try to help because it would’ve meant making contact. This same deference paid to the royal family still causes servants and many others to fall to their hands and knees and crawl when in their presence today, although this practice was forbidden by an earlier monarch nearly a hundred years ago.

  It’s easy for a foreigner to criticize, yet many who have lived here longer than I praise kreng jai . In Heart Talk, Christopher Moore credits it with helping create “the incredible degree of politeness and civility found in exchanges between Thai people.” William Klausner, author of Reflections on Thai Culture (1991), said, “There is no English word for kreng jai because the farang don’t kreng jai .” And in his book, Bridging the Gap, Kriengsak Niratpattanasai insists that whatever abuses may result, the phrase means “being aware of another person’s feelings, helping others save face, and showing respect and consideration. More than behavior, it is a core Thai value.” And, he said, when “applied wisely, it can bring success in daily life.”

  Not long ago, how the pendulum swings both ways was shown within my extended Thai family. My wife’s youngest sister, her husband, and their three-year-old son shared a room in Bangkok, where they worked in the garment industry. They worked different hours, so someone was at home with the boy at all times. As my wife, Lamyai, told the story, a number of her sister’s husband’s relatives started visiting the room on a daily basis, drinking and talking noisily and filling the small space with cigarette smoke. They weren’t, said Lamyai, showing her sister kreng jai, were not giving her time alone with her son and were creating an annoying, unhealthy environment.