Lists

​New Year is traditionally a time for list-making.  My lists are about living cross-culturally.  I have lived in Thailand for 33 of the last 51 years.  I no longer belong anywhere else.  Pramote and I got married in Iowa in 2009 and built our home in a village close to his family in Chiang Mai.  That is the context for my reflections this New Year’s Eve.
 
3 things that are persistently remarked upon:
 

• “O, you speak Thai!”  That never fails to confuse new Thai acquaintances.
• “Where do you live?” they ask.  “Sanpatong District,” I answer.  “NO, where is your home?”  Surely I am more firmly attached somewhere else.
• “You can eat sticky rice!”  I have invaded culinary territory where life can be treacherous.

 
3 things about my behavior that are hard for Thai acquaintances to accept:
 

• When I show a substantial level of reverence for the Lord Buddha.  Christians are skeptical, but won’t talk about it.  Buddhists are confused, but don’t know what to say.
• When it becomes obvious Pramote and I are more than friends.  It takes time to move beyond initial doubts that this can be legitimate.  Meanwhile, it is not something people will talk to me about.
• When I comment knowledgeably about Thai culture.  This sort of comment tends to make me appear arrogant rather than simply well informed.  

 
3 things that I still find difficult:
 

• Being excluded from full acceptance.  I am always relegated to a separate category that cannot include anyone else from the village or clan.
• Being less fluent in any Thai dialect than I am in English.  I shall never be fully bi-lingual, alas.
• Being unable to do things I thought I would have done by now.  My list of unaccomplished objectives is long.

 
OK, to be fair, what have I heard about how Americans respond to Thai persons in the USA?
 

• “I couldn’t understand a word he said,” an older woman told her friend about a conversation with a Thai professor standing right next to them. 
• “When are you going back where you came from?” a Thai-American born in Los Angeles was asked.
• “In America we eat with knives and forks,” a waiter in a Thai restaurant was told when he handed chop sticks with a bowl of noodles to a customer.

 
I have been out of the USA for a while.  Are these sorts of insults disappearing?  
 
I have come to terms with most of these aggravations here.  I cannot impact how Thai people first perceive me except by remembering to smile benignly and dress appropriately.  They cannot diminish what I know and what I think, by underestimating it.  At this stage in life it is time to shed regrets about what was not to be … and to dispose of books I have hoarded and clothes I have outgrown.
 
I’m on my way to a party down the lane where they will have ice cubes in the beer and bits of animal innards on the grill. Happy New Year, in this the best of all possible worlds.