And that was to teach. Oh not just your run-of-the-mill, garden-variety primary school teacher, putting up with a load of crap from over-indulged, pampered twats but in a poverty-ravaged, god-forsaken tiny-ass village in Chiang Mai. First and foremost (the second, less important reason is that I've always loved to teach), I was badly smitten with the country and to a large extent still am. I cannot explain the whys and hows I became so enamoured of a place that is insanely polluted, tied up in the weirdest most arbitrary, ever-changing rules and worst of all, inhabited by my most hateful and feared nemesis, The Cockroach. Yet there I was, willing to do all that I could to stay there for as long as She would have me.
Alas, it was not to be and all those carefully nurtured dreams were shattered in one fell swoop when reality gave me a good, hard kick in the butt. This girl just ain't white. To qualify as a respected TEFL teacher in the Land of Fake smiles one has to be deemed a *Bloody Native English Speaker* which I apparently am NOT. Doesn't matter if I only think and speak and dream in the damn language coz who gives 2 flying fks as long as I'm not Caucasian. This heart-wrenchingly aching memory was dredged up to kick my insomnia up 24839849 notches by an old post that I'd unwittingly and most unwilling come across while looking up the email contact of a lost friend (where the fk are you aaron?! T'was you who started me on the post beneath and now you've simply vanished! Pfft).
QUOTE(realthaideal @ 2007-07-12 17:30:33)
You gotta be like, fully from some country, where like, they fully speak English all the time. You know what I'm saying ? I mean, like, you fully gotta speak how they speak in the streets, and also be able to sound like some full-on smack 'n stuff who could do some business or something. You know? If you can do that, you could fully be a teacher n stuff.
QUOTE(fennielyn @ 2007-07-12 19:20:43)
What realthaideal says is like totally foreals. I'mma spread the word. No, I mean, like seriously man!! Because ya know like how the media and the TV and the radio and the movies teach us how to, like, speak? And hey I'm down with that! Coz, dude, who can deny such a totally awesome truth, yo. Heck, chyeah. AND if you've got a somewhat *White* look to go along with that then hurrah!, completely *white* looking, even better! I guess then, we don't need anymore evidence to reinforce the fact that this weird-ass, reverse semi-racism is rampant in the teaching (English) realm in Thailand, things ARE just the way they are and I don't see the situation taking a turn for the better anytime soon. Having said that, somehow I can't seem to work up any sort of genuine indignant outrage as I normally would under similar circumstances. It could be that I've grown up, grown older, grown tired of the constant struggle, grown resigned...or it could simply be that I've fallen irrevocably in love with my very real and very sweet Thai friends whom I know don't have a single prejudiced bone in their bodies. What they do have though are some very deeply ingrained ideas and ideals about certain things and how they *think* should be done. Even if they understand how wrong these concepts are, it's hard for them to actually FEEL the wrongness of it and believe me, I've tried to explain so many freakin' times and given so many freakin' examples. After much beating of chest and pulling out hair, I gave up. I still love them though despite the mulishness. They honestly can't help it. =(
A little anecdote. For illustrative purposes only. =P A few weeks ago I tried to explain to this Thai guy whom I'm rather close to how ridiculous I think it is HE thinks that he is *allowed* to have another girlfriend if he happened to fall in love or whatever, with another girl while still in a relationship but a girl, say maybe me, is completely forbidden to see 2 guys at the same time, well just make dam sure he doesn't find out coz he'll freakin' KILL the guy. His words, not mine. (And I know he would too.) Then, something about Thai men being warriors back then blah..blah it's how they've been for hundreds of years, they will not stand to be cuckolded etc..etc.. So that's when the indignant outrage spilled over and threatened to flood my insides with pure rage. We argued back and forth and he even admitted to how UNFAIR the whole debacle is and in my fury I said then the girl should damn well have another bf too if she so fancies and he said, "Mai dai...you're a girl, people will not respect me if my girl has another guy, means you really look down me. I understand that it's not fair, that you will be mad and I don't blame you but cannot. YOU don't understand coz you from farang country." I'm like," ...the hell?? I'm as bloody asian as you are!" Guy getting all exasperated, " Mai chai! Your country already like farang one, cannot compare with us, so you mai Kao Jai" Uhm..kay. And that was that. It slays me still when the memory of that comes back as it does now...but there really wasn't anything I could do to make him FEEL and not just know that it's unfair and so so wrong.
I learned a couple of things that day. That you could argue til you're blue in the face and you could patiently smile until your lips drop off but you can never convince a Thai who's dead set in his/her ways and ideologies of the truth in yours. I'm still trying to deal with that. All this crap has been passed down from generation to generation and also perpetrated by the people they have the utmost respect and love for: the people running the country. How can I possibly hold this against them then? And so I don't. But God, don't even think for a moment that I'm not thoroughly pissed off, because I AM. There is a whole lot of anger and frustration in me, I just don't know WHO and WHERE to direct it at anymore which probably explains the drunken stupor I find myself in more and more each night.
SO, moving along now...I know that try as I might, it'll probably be a bloody hard, uphill task finding any sort of teaching assignment even if I were passionate about and am completely dedicated to the job AND have a truckload of experience to boot. Who gives a rat's ass that I don't speak with any discernable accent and the darn pronunciation is crisp and the only language I dream in, think and speak with is English? In fact, I'm sorely ashamed of the fact that I'm not as effectively bilingual as I should be, considering that I studied my 2nd language for ONLY a good 10 years. If I choose to be completely honest, I really shouldn't consider myself even remotely bilingual. Yea, it really is *that* bad, the 2nd language. Perhaps I'm just not much of a linguist or perhaps it's just that my heart and my mind recognized and fell in love with what I was truly in tune with. I remember also always being singled out by my 2nd lang. teacher who took un-natural pleasure in taunting me with my less than stalwart grades and complete lack of interest. Maybe I found the contempt in her eyes when she looked at me so fking inspiring that I started hating the language even more and in doing so become utterly lost in my 1st language to the point that I had no eyes or heart for anything else. Literally. Who knows.
But because I've been cursed with the ass-luck of NOT bearing even the slightest bit of Caucasian likeness, I'm forever deemed not quite worthy of teaching a language that sounds *that* much more palatable coming out from Drew Barrymore's pretty lips than say...Lucy Liu's little pout.
So yea, I'm still trying to make peace with that and come to terms with the fact that I may never be able to do what I love to do, in a place that my heart wants to be, because of an outdated stereotype, so bear with me here if you detect a whiff of bitterness. I'm completely counting on "And this too, shall pass", to work it's magic.
Maybe schedule a colonoscopy to take the mind off such dreary thoughts and oh to make sure that I don't DIE from the ass-cancer. See, it's working already. (I'll be needing that single-malt now, yo)
[End]
Well, have I completely managed to let go of this strangely deep-rooted longing for the country? There are times when I thought that the desperate yearning had begun to ease, but then I'd hear some go,"Sawadee Krub, sabai dee mai krub?" And my heart would skip 32 beats and then take this godawful plunge somewhere down south and I know. Sigh. I know then that this unwanted, inexplicable attachment I have for this country is still as strong as it was before. My heart had just somehow devised a makeshift shield, a shoddy, cloaking mechanism of sorts to seemingly make the pain invisible, but it just ain't enough to hoodwink this heart forever into believing that it isn't there, nor stop it from creeping up on me at the most unexpected, unforeseen, unforewarned times. And and when that happens, I am robbed entirely of my breath, my whole being suddenly poised and centred around a pain so sharp, so all-consuming, I thought that, this is it, surely Death is now upon me.
But then it passes! Lleaving behind only a whisper that makes me finally kao jai, that it's never going to go away and that I'll have to brace myself for the next time I pass that fruit stall in Geylang Lorong Uneven Number that is run fully by a Thai family and I'm tempted to stop by just to ask them," ah ni mango, tau rai ka?", the next time I see Kao Pad Ng'er sold at some random hawker stall, the next time I spot a bonafide Katoey at some dodgy area which knowing me, I'll probably find myself stumbling into, I'll just have to brace myself for the onslaught of that thing that feels like death yet isn't.
Time heals? Pfft. Fking load of bullcrap.
