The standards for jokes around here, I’m sorry to say are altogether pretty low. On the other hand you can say something really not funny but use the structure of a joke and your Thai counterparts are going to laugh their heads off. Today one of the assistant director’s of the Education office took me out for fish noodles (oh god, they are sooo good,) after my adult class and on the way back he made a point of showing me some really exquisite bird’s nests. “Nest birds,” he said, gesturing out the car window. “Its engineering.”
“Ah,” I said, “Yes, bird engineering.”
Whoo-man that guy laughed so hard I thought he was going to go off the road and I was going to have to haul myself from the wreckage of his truck and hoof it back to the office in the noonday sun. The best part is, I could say that joke again next week and it would go over just the same, like funnel cake on the board walk- nobody can get enough. Till they puke off the ferris wheel.
Anway, carnival analogies aside, my life has been, utterly insane the last few weeks. I wrote last time about feeling like things were settling down, routine taking shape, finding my place to a degree. Well, it was as though the moment I set down those words things went crazy again.
On Monday the third-grade teacher took the time to sit and talk to me about Tuesday’s lesson. I was excited, this was the second or third time we have actually discussed a lesson and I was feeling really hopeful that it would become like a pattern. Yeah, not a chance. She didn’t show up for school the next day. Didn’t tell me she wasn’t coming while we were planning, just let me going on talking about numbers, ten to twenty, and body parts and songs.
Tuesday was actually an amazing day, a really good example of what a day in Thailand can be like. In the morning one of the teachers came to pick me up, only I didn’t know that he hadn’t told the teacher who normally picks me up that he was going to pick me up. So I guess she was sitting outside my house for twenty minutes and calling my phone– which I didn’t pick up because I was at school, you know? Well, at school I settled down at a computer and worked on uploading some photos and making a number chart for us to use. I thought my hour with the fourth grade was the second period on Tuesday, but its the first. When I showed up the second hour to teach, my co-teacher cheerfully remarked that she already taught our lesson and no need to worry about having screwed around of Facebook for an hour when I should have been teaching. (Okay, so fine, but why am I here then?)
I was a little hurt that she didn’t try to find me, though I take full responsiblity for not knowing the schedule. I was literally two rooms away from our classroom and a tiny peak around would have had me located and in class in a hot second. And then of course I had to go and teach the third grade by myself. (Actually I secretly love having them to myself, but I am not supposed to teach without her, so I am conflicted about it.)
So I spent the morning out of sorts and frustrated. Then at lunch the most amazing thing happened. Everyone sat down to eat, the eating happened and we were chatting at the table digesting, watching kids play when another lady, Pi L., a favorite of mine, asked me if in America we teach kids about “the sex.” I said that we do learn about “the sex” in school and asked if Thai kids learn “reproductive health” in school.
She said people in Thailand are afraid to talk about it, and that for a long time no one would teach kids anything. “Now,” she explained, “now, civilised.” Though as far as I can tell its the very beginning of the sex ed movement in Thailand.
I tried to explain that in America we teach sex ed so that students will understand their bodies and make healthy choices based on the education they have. “We think,” I said, “that if we don’t teach kids about it, they won’t know what is healthy and what isn’t.” Understand that with my language skills and Pi L.’s hilarious but limited English it is impossible to address the complexities of sex ed and sexuality in America. I really was just trying to make it sound like a great thing to teach and make everyone want to teach about it.
This led to one of the richest discussions I have had so far in Thailand about American dating culture (my Thai co-teachers now think I have had a million boyfriends), Thai relationships and how sexual education plays a role in the choices kids make and in the way issues are addressed by society. I was in awe that the conversation was even happening, to be honest, for how much we were told that Thai people do not discuss certain things with strangers, and I had to control my excitement so as not to make anyone clam up.
When the bell rang (its a real bell by the way, that someone has to ring,) to signal the end of lunch I felt high from the conversation. Maybe, just maybe there is a project here somewhere, that deals with life skills and empowering women and being honest with kids about life and maybe these teachers would be on board for womething like that. I hope hope hope.
The other thing I was struck by is what an amazing character Pi L. is in her own right. She brought this up with me, in broken English, with no shame or embarrassment. She is a formidable woman, hulking, huge. The kind of fat that is less chub and more stuffed into the tightest of sausage casings. She walks a little sideways because of a knee injury, which her niece summed up for me in one succint word, “Ooin.” Which means, in case you couldn’t guess, “Fat.”
Pi L.’s character has been unfolding slowly before me since my first meeting with the teachers at the little school. She carries herself with so much authority I thought she was the school director when I first met her. Indeed because of her age and seniority she is responsible for a lot of the goings on at our school. You can see what a cornerstone, pillar, I don’t know, foundation she is for the small community she has worked in for thirty years.
At school functions or community events she is quick to hobble over to a microphone determinedly and call everyone to attention. Ususally after she has everyone’s attention she breaks into song (this is common at events in Thailand) and her shrieking warble is so earnest it brings swells of pride to my chest. I am, after all, the only one in the community who gets invited to the Tesco Lotus every Sunday to eat fast food and buy jugs of water, baby toilet seats, fifty bottles of oyster sauce and the like. No one else can claim such status.
She is the kind of woman who gets things done. And whenever I hear the whirring, squealing squeaking of her near destroyed chariot whizzing down my lane (actually its a 1980 Mercury Pacer literally held together with electric tape) I know its going to be a hell of a day. For awhile I really thought the little man who puts his head down, day after day, drives her around and does her bidding was a driver or cousin or something, but now I realize it makes sense that Uncle Bert, as he is known, could be no one but her husband. Girth notwithstanding, it is easy to imagine Pi L. as the liveliest, most fun, interesting girl in their school, and her lovely face is evidence that no boy could resist her. Its no wonder, then, bully that she is, she picked the smallest most gutless of them all to be her husband.
I imagine their courtship thirty years ago being something like a wrestling match, where she pinned him in like three seconds, told him to get in the car and drive and here we are today. She is the overbearing type who will tell the driver what kind of gas to get and how much and the illusion of him as the “husband,” is repeatedly shattered each time she reaches into her wallet and waves money around in his face. (for gas, for food, for the newspapers he so loves, etc.)
For awhile I thought he was a little off; whenver we are driving somewhere and Pi L. gets out of the car to stretch her bum knee he often starts muttering to himself in rapid Thai. Now I understand it is his only release, those few moments when she is out of the car, because invariably she will get back in and light into the little guy about something that most likely has nothing to do with him. She will break into a shrieking, hot pink-lip-sticked litany about the state of the world, huffing and puffing as she goes, and render him utterly silent. Nothing to do but touch foot to gas pedal and unnecessarily grind the gears of his poor sad maroon steed.
At first Pi L. drove me nuts, always coming to pick me up to early or too late, leaving her thirteen year-old niece with me for five days while she went away so I could “have a friend,” and constantly ( and I mean constantly) giving me food I neither wanted, could eat or wanted to eat. (Some examples: can after can of jasmine rice, bottles of oyster sauce, value packs of Mama noodles– pork flavored, and more fruit than frankly, than I could poop out.)
But once school began and the third-grade teacher started her perpetual disappearing act and hauled me off to lipstick cult training camp for the weekend, I came to see Pi L. as an ally and a friend. It was an uphill struggle for us because of the culture, but I think now she enjoys all her secret knowledge about what makes me tick.
I know when I am with her I can expect to stop for noodles every twenty-five mintues, know that we have reached a point in our relationship where whatever I don’t finish will get poured in her bowl, along with Pear, her niece’s leftovers, and those of her two grandchildren that stay with her during the week and go to private school in our town. I also know she’s taking care of me. She has very much asserted herself in that way, and now I find I appreciate usually, as opposed to resenting it, as I did at first.
I trust her so much that when I found out that getting a van to the airport to pick up my dad was going to be really expensive, I called and asked if she would take me. She gave an emphatic yes and while I am afraid we won’t ever make it to the airport, I really can’t wait to see how my Dad reacts to this lady. This real fine lady and her one of a kind shriek.