Getting to Thai Square One — 'Twas Half the Fun
Mind and body, mind in body — what can we do with what we have? What should we aim to be and do, given our abilities and what our experience teaches us?
Those questions used to drive my life. They have led me to many places, given me many friendships. They led me, a so-called “white American”, to the summit of my life, as father or “Khun Paw” of a Thai-American family.
Like most of us who were born in America, I didn’t learn much about Thailand while growing up, although an uncle and aunt as well as one of my mother’s officemates made trips there 50-plus years ago and came back with stories of a beautiful city with canals and temples. Instead of learning about Asia in school, I became focused on the ancient world of Greece and Rome and the modern European countries, since my family had moved to Italy when I was 8 years old.
Living in Rome in the 1950s was marvelous for my sisters and brother and me, since we attended an international school where our friends were from different countries. We enjoyed learning about other people’s customs and history, feeling like we were experiencing their culture firsthand without even traveling there. One of my classmates in the sixth grade came from Thailand; his father was the Thai ambassador to Italy. Once he took us to visit the Royal Thai Embassy. What seemed most important at that time, however, was that his younger brother was a very good soccer player!
In the mid-1960s, at college in the USA, my father told me about President Kennedy’s visionary project of the Peace Corps. “Dad, what could I possibly do in such a job?” I replied, feeling quite incapable of presenting myself as a teacher or any kind of professional person! But the idea grew on me. I heard that the Peace Corps was working in Indonesia — that was just the ticket, I thought, I could go there and discover my maternal roots … Then bang! came 1965 and President Sukarno decided to play the Cold War game with the Communists, so the US Peace Corps was booted out of Indonesia along with all Americans.
Where to turn, to fulfill what had become my obsession to find my Asian roots? The name of Thailand somehow floated back into my consciousness and I was suddenly hearing references to international work going on there and especially about Peace Corps projects that I, fresh out of school, might fit into. So I made my way into a training program for English teachers; after two months of it, I thought that really, the students would likely prove to be more clever than I was, so I looked deeper into the Peace Corps job roster. An ongoing health project was possibly going to be renewed and called for new volunteers: malaria eradication. Now that sounded like a challenge that I could handle and it might even point to future career directions for me to explore.
After three months of training with some hair-raising episodes in rural Hawaii (where we all were shown how to catch and kill a chicken and cook it over a fire, as preparation for life in malarial forests) and in the “Wild West” scenario of Manila, Philippines (where nightclubs posted signs asking patrons “Please check your guns at the door”), we were judged ready to go.
D-Day finally dawned when we took a bumpy prop-jet from Hong Kong and landed at Don Muang. Was it hot? We had been outfitted in filmy white shirts and khakis so we could resemble junior government officers, but all our preparation melted away as we filed out of the plane and onto the tarmac and suddenly felt like pancakes in an oven. Never mind, when we were presented to the health officials in the VIP room, our hands shot up in a wai and the dialogue drills came back full force: “Sawatdee, khrup! Sabai dee!”
My assignment turned out to be a parcel of mountainous provinces so far from Bangkok that I had to fly in and out and take the office jeep on local tracks to do my job. There was the ocean nearby, some consolation, but no hotels and highways of course and no access to beaches, except by winding through Muslim fishing villages or picking out a path through rocky or wooded terrain. (Hey, wasn’t it better to stick to the malaria patrols and offices, than be the only madman in sight doggedly seeking a beach?) Someone introduced me to an old farang who lived in the hills, the engineer of a tin mine who remembered when the weekly mail boat from formerly British Penang was his only connection with the rest of the world. The other local farang I met was a geologist who spent most of his time at sea prospecting for oil-bearing shales under the ocean floor (hm-m-m … sounded other-worldly) — and collecting exotic shells.
And where was this conjunction of past and future, in 1967? … a place on few lips, an island province and a thickly forested mainland with a ferryboat joining them: the western wilds of southern Thailand consisting of Bhuket Island (yes, they used to spell it with a “B”) and mainland Pang-nga, Krabi and Trang.
The deepest significance of my assignment became clear only years later, when it dawned on me that I had left behind my greatest discovery there, the source of so much of my learning about things Thai — a recently graduated school teacher who was organizing summer seminars in Phuket for Peace Corps volunteers from all over the country on how to understand their impact as farang and how to give more as teachers … You’ve met her here in Boston and know her as “Paa Lec” and as my wife, Khun Wilai Phromphen. Together with our son Julian, we form a Thai-American family that has made a home in different countries but counts Thailand as our true family destination.
~ Kim Wells Atkinson, Brookline, Massachusetts.
Our Family
As an American married to a scientist from tahiland my life has turned in a direction that has led to many adventures and interesting times. With our American-Thai daughter, our family at all times is a meeting of two languages, cultures, and religions, in addition to two business and political systems. While the intersecting of these various institutions has created some minor conflicting viewpoints, it has led to an environment that fosters the opening of minds and to a great opportunity for personal growth for my wife, my daughter, and myself.
My precocious and well rounded daughter has been the biggest beneficiary of our unique family. She is a great student with a big personality and she carries herself with the confidence that has been gained by meeting many varied types of people in many parts of the world. She has spoken with Ann Curry of the Today Show in New York in February 2007, and she has gotten on stage and supported the People Alliance for Democracy (PAD) in Thailand in July 2008. I have to believe that her life experiences gained from the meeting of two cultures has made her into such a complete and well rounded person.
~ Vincent Marzilli, Jr., Narragansett, Rhode Island.
Taking an American and Thai Path in Life
Growing up and growing older in two cultures seems much better to me than having only one — even though it means more work! Especially the two cultures that we, who are part of the American-Thai community, know best.
In America, we learn as kids that we need to form our individual goals and strive to realize our dreams. On the other hand, our parents also teach us to be responsible for our own actions and do our part to help the whole community. In all we do, we are supposed to show initiative.
As an American youth, I traveled to Thailand to fulfill both goals and dreams. I signed up to serve in the US Peace Corps for two years as a volunteer in malaria eradication. My career goals were to work either in public health or medical care. The opportunity to join the Thai national malaria eradication project seemed like just the ticket to see which kind of work suited me better.
At the same time I wanted to learn about the cultural roots of my mother, who had been born in Java to a Dutch-Indonesian family. Thailand appeared to offer many characteristics that would allow me to “rediscover” some of the qualities of my family legacy.
Peace Corps training was a life-changing experience in itself. Veteran volunteers put us through role-playing scenarios that were supposed to model how we might handle real issues in our life to come in Thailand, from the work place to social life to our own private time. How would we greet someone whose relative had just died? How would we respond to workers who wouldn’t follow our suggestions just because we were the new guy on the team and our proposals differed from what they had been doing for years? How should we find out what our community expected of us, so that we could do our jobs effectively? The issues stretched our minds beyond our short life experience.
The best part of training was — can you guess? — “haad phuut phasaa thai”: practicing Thai language. The Peace Corps had corralled a group of Thai graduate students in Hawaii who could take the summer off and coach us in how to conduct conversations in Thai. Expecting visitors? Take a breath and say (in Thai): “Please come inside. You don’t have to take off your shoes.” Or, having trouble with the hot food or hot weather? Tell yourself: “Mai pen rai!” And never forget your gender! — “khrup” for guys, “kha” for gals. Language teachers and aspiring volunteers, together five hours a day for over three months in “boot camp”, we became brothers and sisters, and still feel as close today.
Looking back on our training program, I realize that it introduced us to a realistic set of features in our future lives in Thailand. We were training to become volunteers who would help Thai people to change their lives according to their own needs and wishes. Yet, we had to be aware of how Thai Buddhist culture and thinking focused on living in the present moment, adjusting to the real situation rather than trying to change it. Therefore, we had to find our personal ways to modify our American mindset about “doing” and practice Thai ways of “being”.
Even without saying so, our trainers showed us that living in Thailand is highly interpersonal — almost everything we would want to do in our jobs and daily life would depend on a one-on-one transaction. We would have to absorb a whole new thought process of how to approach tasks, how to deal with issues, so that our Thai associates would understand what we were doing without feeling alienated. For Thais, social relationships are a fine art that everyone must master.
In getting there, we needed to “remake” ourselves. We had to use our American initiative and analytical skills to learn how to do the opposite, so to speak — how to live in the present moment rather than in our dream of whatever improvement plan we had for our community. We had to cool our passion for doing the job fast in order to follow the path of moderation. We might need to settle for comfortable compromises among differing views of the issues. Above all, we had to understand how others might see us, since we would certainly be viewed as models of the behavior and attitudes that we wished others to adopt.
Now, after years of living in both American and Thai cultures, I can see more than just the differences between them — I can appreciate the similarities between Americans and Thais, although we might use different sets of tools to get through daily life and to do what we need to do. I cherish the spiritual and “people-focused” approaches from my Thai experience that enhance my goal-oriented American legacy.
I am most glad that my two cultures have helped me see how all humans are truly equal. Rich or poor, brainy or brawny or variously endowed, we embody the same value as living beings. Our only differences are in lifestyle, activity and the record that we leave behind. Did we do good for those we touched in our lives? Or did we focus more on what we could gain for ourselves?
The most important outcome of our lives is our impact on other people, the fruits of our personal relationships. That understanding is a key to living a satisfying life that my American-Thai experience has given me.
~ Kim Wells Atkinson, Brookline, Massachusetts.
