Things I've observed, part 1.
Since this is sort of a random items post, I thought I'd include this photo. I took this in a Bangkok mall. Is this not the worst design of a bathroom sign that you have ever seen? Why is the woman so small? Why is she being crushed by the elevator? Why why why?
I just opened up a page of notes of things I’ve wanted to remember to write about this week. The page says:
Chinese tourists dressing in matching outfits and coming to our house
Stomach trouble
Racism bikes
Cha chas
Getting on buses with my kids
Pink hijab
Dentist glass tables bikes
Middle aged dancing man
Spanish people durian
Do you want to know? Are you ready? Are you afraid? Because I’m going to tell you about all those things, one at a time. Today I’ll tell you about Chinese tourists, Stomach trouble, and Racism bikes.
Ever since a Chinese movie called Lost in Thailand came out, there has been quite the influx of Chinese tourists in Thailand, which is often very comforting to me, especially when I see women of a certain age in hats, walking with their hands behind their backs, slightly stooped. It reminds me of growing up in Edmonton (going to a school that was partly Mandarin immersion) and near Vancouver. It feels like a big, hearty sigh of relief, like the way I feel when I meet Canadian people my parents’ age, it is so pleasant and familiar.
Because Eastern cultures typically have less rigidity around the concepts of personal space and privacy than Western cultures do, Asian tourists are particularly gleeful in the role of tourists. This is increasingly evident in the advent of our “everyone on the globe has a camera” times. It feels wrong to generalize the concept of “Asian” anything, since the differences between say, Thai and Japanese cultures, or Chinese and Korean cultures are so very striking. But it’s true that while I have NEVER had a European tourist ask to take my family’s photo (Wait, maybe there was one photographer in Goa?) we get requests (or non-requests—just photos taken) from Indian, Chinese, Thai, Korean, and Japanese tourists frequently. It’s something that would feel like a rude request in Western culture, but in Eastern culture is not considered the least bit rude.
Lately I’ve taken a lot of joy from something new I’ve noticed from Chinese tourists—it fits into the gleeful tourist category. I keep running into whole large groups of people walking around wearing the exact same thing, some kind of Thai tourist outfit bought in a night market somewhere. For fun! Let’s all get red elephant print pants and white Thai shirts and wear them at the exact same time! It looks amazing. Yesterday I saw two women wearing the exact same outfit, a black and white print dress with a large white hat, espadrilles, and black sunglasses on. I love the fact that other people do this—something that would never occur to me as a thing to do—in this world there are so many options for fun that I don’t know about. I’m going to see if Chinua and Kai would like to try it. (Ah ha ha ha ha ha.)
Chinese tourists in Pai often mistake our house for a guest house. Sometimes they stop at our house because the guest house they have a booking with is just one more building down the street. The funniest example of this was the girl who was holding out a sheet of paper to ask me if she had the right place, but was terrified of Wookie and hopped backwards on one foot all the way out of our courtyard and into the street where she hid behind her friend, all because Wookie sniffed her leg. When she was gone the kids and I just looked at each other. “Did that just happen?” I asked. “That was like a movie,” Kai said.
But sometimes people are still looking for a room, and they come and peer into our windows. It happened the other day. A girl came and held her hands to her face as she looked in the window, then walked back out to the road. “I think she got the point,” I said. I mean, there are toys all over the floor and sometimes dog food dumped out where Isaac has been trying to eat it again, and maybe somebody’s half finished lunch has still not been cleaned off the table. But she came back to look in the windows again.
“It’s not a guest house!” I called to her. “It’s just my house!”
Then Kai told me about a day when he was working on his math at the table and a man came into the door and began speaking to him in Chinese. After a few minutes, when it became clear that Kai didn’t understand, the man said, “One room please.” It would be weird if it happened once or twice. The fact that it happens often, like really often, just makes it hilarious.
You darling readers think I should be chill about housework. What you do not realize is that not only do I have friends in and out of my house, and landlords in and out, but I also have the whole world looking into my windows, my neighbors stopping to pull kafir lime leaves off my trees and ask me what I’m cooking for dinner, random people taking pictures of me as I’m walking up my stairs, men yelling “Hello!” at Solo, who, Solo-like, disdains to answer. I am a hippie foreign mother poster child. I hope that I’m doing okay.
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The stomach trouble thing is small—it’s just that I got sick with a terrible stomach ache and that brought a lack of appetite so complete that every kind of food I think about sounds distasteful. It makes cooking hard. Shall I make green curry? I think. No, because green curry is the most disgusting thing in the world. How about fried rice? Fried rice is clearly foul. Pasta? Pasta tastes like worms. I have to force myself to cook. Hopefully I’ll get my appetite back soon.
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That brings us to racism bikes. This is a long story.
When I bought my bike I bought it from a place I’d been eying in town that had a few used and new bikes sitting out for sale. I walked in and fell in love with the purple city bike. The man who ran the shop immediately pulled it out, adjusted the seat a little, and told me to take it for a ride. I rode away with it, I was smitten, I bought it, and the whole exchange was the kind of fairy tale shopping experience that I dream about. I’ve been riding everywhere and it feels amazing. (Bicycles! You get places fast and get exercise!) Chinua borrowed my bike a couple of times, and started thinking he should get one. So I told him where the place was (down that road on the right hand side) and he went off to look around.
When he came back he told me the guy at the shop had gotten really upset when he wanted to adjust the seat of the bike he was looking at. He asked him if he could test drive the bike and the guy refused. What?
“He must be racist,” I said, kind of joking, kind of not. It was the only reason I could think of that his response was so different. Let me clarify that in the years since Chinua and I have been married, our life has been charmed, race wise. We’ve never had hurtful things said to us about being married to each other, and living in Asia provides a special buffer. (Although if I hear someone express shock that I think dark skin is beautiful one more time I will scream). But it has happened (mostly in the States) that when I walk into a particular store, people are friendly and relaxed, while if I walk into the same store with Chinua, people are different- tense, guarded, less chatty. It doesn’t happen all the time, or even very often, but it does happen. I thought the bicycle story was this kind of phenomenon, and it made me sad.
Chinua bought a bike and it broke on the first day, obviously flawed. He replaced it with the same type, and it broke again. He returned the second bike and said he would take more time and find a better quality bike. The man at the bike place had been a bit of a jerk about the crappy quality of his bikes, saying that it was because they were only made for Thai people, not big foreigners.
Then the other day, Chinua said, “I found another bike place, directly opposite of the stupid place, but great! With a really friendly owner and really nice bikes.”
“On the left hand side of the road? With the fridges?”
“The fridges are on the other side, that’s the stupid bike place. This is the left hand side.”
“That’s your right hand.” (We get left and right mixed up more than we used to, and I think it had something to do with the fact that a right turn in traffic is essentially the same (crossing the oncoming lane) as a left turn would be back in North America, and vice versa.)
It turns out that Chinua had been at a different bike place the whole time! My bike guy hadn’t snubbed him at all. In fact, as Chinua looked at the most expensive bike in the shop (just for looking, not for buying) the guy insisted that he take it out for a ride! Bike guy isn’t racist! Hooray!
Whew. I didn’t even realize how stressed out I had been about bike guy being a completely different person to my husband until it turned out it wasn’t the case. Bike guy is just a nice guy.