One of us on the move, one not so much

Today when I went to my Thai language class, the school was closed for the holiday. It wasn't one of the many Buddhist holidays that sneak up on Presbyterians unexpectedly but had something to do with the armed forces.

At the end of Saturday's class there was some mention, I think, of no classes on Monday. But the class is conducted entirely in Thai, so I wasn't sure and I neglected to ask one of the more advanced students. Mai pen rai.

The theory behind the American University Alumni Association language program is, you learn the way a baby learns to speak, through constant exposure. This is butressed by a lot of repetition. Each class has two teachers conversing with each other and with class members, and the classes always start off with the day and date and who is in the class that day. (You can show up at any fifty-minute class from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.) Maybe there are sorng puchai (two men) and saam puyee (three women) or whatever. The biggest class I've been in had fourteen (sip-see) puchai and puyee. After the preliminaries there might be some palaver about, for example, food, farm animals, colors, games or national customs. The teachers are skilled, animated and---this helps---always pleasant and entertaining.

The AUA brochure advises against mixing this approach with others. And it says that after about 800 hours things really begin to click. I have 790 hours to go. Some of the other students say the AUA directive is hooey. They didn't begin to make real progress until they supplemented the AUA program with private tutoring or, in one case, married a Thai. The other students I've met---a Chinese woman, a Japanese man, an American man who married into a big Thai family, a Vietnamese woman and a Danish gay couple who moved to Bangkok in October---all live here and have a bigger stake in learning Thai than I do. But I've paid for thirty hours of classes, frequently pour over my Lonely Planet phrasebook and dictionary during the day, and am doing what I can.

I walk around Bangkok saying, The sky is blue, That tree is green, This house
is white. I am still shy about using what little I know with actual Thai human beings---in my normal interactions with non-English-speaking Thais, I never seem to have occasion to say That shirt is pink (champoo). The other day I did present a hundred baht note and brazenly asked the Sky Train change lady to give me back 50 baht in coins and a fifty baht note. She didn't laugh at my Thai, and she gave me what I asked for, and her lips formed what might have been a smile. (In Paris once, when I attempted to use my high school and college French to buy a subway ticket, the ticket seller looked at me with such contempt I was lucky he wasn't armed.)

I am reading an enchanting book that is full of wonderful insights and humor about farangs encountering the Thai language and culture. For three years I had put off picking up Carol Hollinger's "Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind." I feared that this popular memoir---it's in all the bookstores here---by an American Foreign Service officer's wife first published in 1965 was going to be "cute." I grew up in a place where "cute" was the highest aesthetic value, and I had my fill of "cute" decades ago. (In Central Pennsylvania "cute" was what most people preferred to "different" or---God forbid---"odd.")

Not "cute" at all, Hollinger's memoir of teaching at Chulalongkorn University while managing both a household and the often grim social life expected of a diplomat is sharp and funny, especially about her insular, germophobic American colleagues and acqaintances. She takes to the Thais right away---to their keenness, their humor, their Buddhist calm in the face of large and small disasters---while never hiding from herself or the reader the inhumanity of some Thai practices. There's a hairraising scene where Hollinger reluctantly releases all the boys from a class at their request---the girls all stay put---only to realize that they have then gone and dragged another student out of a classroom and seem to be trying to drown him in a nearby canal.

Hollinger's well-meaning blunders reminded me of Peace Corps life. Like the early Peace Corps volunteers, she often got in trouble for engaging the culture so energetically even at the risk of offending the local or foreign social mores, and for acting a little too "democratic." She drove the university administration crazy, but her students praised her at the end of her first year because, they said, she made them think. Apparenly that was a novelty at Chulalongkorn.

Hollinger took great pleasure in the way Thais regularly mangled the English language, and it gave her the freedom to go ahead and mangle theirs. There's a funny scene where she goes looking to buy advance tickets for Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments" (all this takes place in the late fifties). Hollinger can't find the theater and somehow ends up in Chinatown, where she goes into a shop and asks in the only Thai she can come up with where she might obtain tickets for "Ten Necessary to Do." Before Hollinger is rescued by a student who happens by, she is reviled by a sizeable Chinese family who mistake her for a tax collector.

I Googled Hollinger to find out what she had been up to for the past 50 years. It broke my heart to learn that she died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 45 and never lived to see her terrific book published. But it is still in print, and she would be amused that near the front of the Asia Books edition, it says the book was originally published in Boston by Houghton Miffing.

News: There have been Joe sightings across Southern Asia. He was largely incommunicado in northern and eastern Burma after I left him there March 23; the internet was down because of repair work on a cable, supposedly, and the entire country had run out of phone cards. He did manage to get a call through to me on a land line, and then phoned again Saturday from Calcutta. He said his Burma treks were of varying interest and that Calcutta made Bombay feel like a month in the country, or words to that effect. Now he's on his way to Varanasi for a week of photography before heading back to Calcutta and then Bangkok April 15. He said India is still India, hot and crass and difficult, but paradise for that rare type of traveler, the man for whom sensory overload is just barely enough.