Quarter Year

Earlier in the night we crossed railroad tracks and someone waved me into the buddhist temple, Azure and I stalled at the door. A young monk walked up behind us and encouraged us to go in – he spoke really quickly, and not really in English, but in English. He kept repeating the same words: Pagoda, Buddha, and so on, to the point I couldn’t understand him hardly at all. He took us in to the major sanctuary and we prayed to three images of Buddhas – one of which was an American. I meditated for about three minutes and it felt great. The monk (from Calcutta) told me to make a wish, so I wished for the happiness of everyone around us in the temple. I think that was a good, manageable wish.

Closer to the images, Calcutta monk prayed out loud – he chanted quickly in an unevenly dropping tone, some kind of human noises I’d never heard, like a creative bird’s call or a controlled, rhythmic sigh. It sounded like a few people had choreographed the chant, but it was just him. The power cut out and his prayers continued to run, the thread that connected the darkness to the light. The lights flickered back on and he kept praying.

When we were all finished I donated $1 to the box in front of the image of the American Buddha.

Calcutta monk took us outside sanctuary (still in the temple) and brought out a book (which he carried on him regularly, I guess) that had monthly calendars going back to 1900. I found out I was born on a Saturday. Azure was born on a Tuesday. We walked around the pagoda and found the Saturday Buddha image and poured water on him nine times (good luck for each of our family members) then five times on the dragon underneath, and I’m not sure why. He took us to another Buddha room that had Buddha’s footprint. This whole time he was talking about things I wasn’t really following. He did say that they meditated from 4am to 7am, then collected alms at 8am. They then meditated for three more hours in the evening, which I think is when we met him.

The monk was gaunt – he seemed to eat almost nothing. He even said that he was weak. His teeth were bad and he looked years older than me, though he was only 28. At 18 he became a monk and left Calcutta for Yangon. Here in the monastery, they speak Sanskrit, and apparently he speaks Pali (what the Buddha spoke, maybe Nepalese?) and he says he speaks English. He said that he does not speak Burmese, which is strange considering he’s lived here 10 years. The monks study English, I guess, but it didn’t show: they were incomprehensible a lot of the time. A Bhutanese monk (we later met) giggled the whole time and spoke in such a weird cadence I’ve never heard before. Another Burmese monk spoke bad English as well.

He invited us back to the monks’ living quarters, which we were pumped to see. As we walked out of the temple something strange happened: a man in plain clothes started yelling at the monk, kinda challenging him. Calcutta monk kept walking and from behind we saw him raise a fist and throw it down to the ground, as if he were grabbing whatever anger he had and casting it off. After 10 years I’d expect him to be able to let that pass, but maybe not. There were several things that the monks did that I was surprised about, considering my understanding of the practice. For instance, Calcutta monk was showing us around as if we were his pets (ego) and was jealous when we talked to other monks. Also, he told us that certain things would be good luck, for ourselves, people we loved, our businesses, and so on. And my thought was, “Why the focus on self-serving things like business?” I guess there are people in all religions – young people – who are looking for something and latch onto religion. I think almost all the monks we met tonight might have been like that – just latching onto the practice for the sake of having something. I mean, that’s harsh of me to write, but I saw little evidence of their wisdom. The monks rattled off different Buddhas, different pagodas, they talked about a reverence for their teacher, but it was all kinda shallow stuff.

Calcutta monk took us to see his teacher, who, it turns out, was one of the leaders of the 2007 revolt. He didn’t speak any English (in fact the monks spoke less English than most people we met in Myanmar) so we just smiled and did some ritualistic stuff. Since I was dressed in my sarong thing I knew we’d attracted attention outside, and I could just imagine – as the monks rattled on – plain clothes policemen congregating outside the monastery waiting for us to come out. I’m pretty sure we weren’t followed, though. The teacher gave us each some laminated cards with pictures of Buddha that will make nice bookmarks.

The coolest part of the evening was when Calcutta monk led us into his room – the dormitory where the monks all lived together as in a fraternity. The part they lived in was a wooden addition to the concrete building – something like the wooden house we saw at Sam’s on Lanta. It was a wide porch with wooden boards and walls. We entered his room (after he knocked and told his roommates there was an American girl with him) and sat on the floor. His two friends (Bhutan and Myanmar) sat in front of us with him while people came and huddled behind us to watch the show. They were all interested to see the foreigners sitting in here. Calcutta monk brought out his English phrase book and showed us how he studied, but it was futile, even when I saw the words he was saying I hardly understood him. He was a nice enough guy – good intentions I guess – but just strange.

We sat and went over the same information over and over again. There was some nice music outside, sounded like a Burmese version of swing music or jazz. I read before we came that the Burmese can talk for an hour and not say anything, and this was definitely a night where that happened again and again. The Bhutanese monk smiled and giggled a little nervously. The Burmese monk (who theoretically spoke the best English) talked with Azure as she struggled to understand.

It was very peaceful on their little porch – just evening time in a monastery. Everyone was relaxed. In the little room were some posters of famous monks (who are revered for their messages, as we would have a poster of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in our room). There were a couple hammocks that double as beds. There were woven mats on the ground, used as sitting surfaces or beds, as well. I don’t remember seeing any candles, but I gotta think they were there.

It was a fascinating night – we got to see how the monks lived, we walked down an intense market street at night and down the train tracks, we meditated as the lights went on and off in an enormous temple, we looked at the stars in the middle of a huge city.

As we walked home (we kinda had to force our way out of there) I imagined being in the middle of millions of people with the lights off, as people lived hundreds of years ago, on an obscure sea. A movie theater let out and the air-conditioned air spilled into the alley. We walked down a very dark stretch and felt completely safe. We walked down an alley with dozens of other people with colonial buildings rising on each side. People smiled at us. The boy who made us some sugar cane juice earlier in the day was still making it as we got back to the hotel, eight hours later. The stars were bright above Sule Pagoda, even in the heart of the city.

The system is a grid with about five main streets running East-West, then about 60 side streets running North-South. On all the streets there is a wide, frustratingly bumpy sidewalk upon which the world sits, chats, eats, cooks, sells, buys and so on. It’s tiring to walk because you have to watch your step, then look up and make sure you’re not walking into a grill, then maybe sidestep a person or hop down on the road to avoid something. Very tiring.

The cars stick almost exclusively to the main streets and they drive like bats out of hell. Imagine that driving down Montlake you discover that 1) 80% of the cars had disappeared and stop lights don’t really matter and 2) there are no traffic cops. Even careful citizens might push 90. Azure and I had a couple scares where it was evident that, no, really, they would hit a pedestrian without slowing down. Noted.

On the side streets, though, there are so few cars that it can be quiet in the middle of the day in the heart of the urban center. You can hear birds flapping their wings. Footsteps might echo between the high buildings. Kids play soccer in the street, people walk down the middle. At dusk, young men run a net across the street to play that foot-volleyball game, taking down one side if a car does come through.

When I first noticed this phenomenon of having fewer cars on the road (and even car-free zones), I wrote in my journal, “This is good for all the reasons that are so obvious that I don’t even need to write it.”

But then I started noticing all the other reasons that people don’t mention in the usual diatribes against cars:

Little people under trees.

Space
First, without cars my concept of the space was scaled down to human size, speed and volume. The city became human-centric, which is really the way a city should be. People walked anywhere safely, they called down the street to each other, they kinda lived out doors. Being outside in the city wasn’t unpleasant, which was kinda a revelation.

In most cities, people are pinned between cars and buildings. People are diminished by cars, they have to give up right of way, even if the law doesn’t say so. They have to, otherwise they’d be killed. Cars are the fastest, biggest, loudest and most dangerous things that are in our physical space. Cars dominate people, period. I hadn’t seen it this way before – I’d always thought, “I need to make sure I don’t get hit by a truck.” I didn’t even question whether a truck should be allowed to dominate human space.

Incense on a tree

Focus
Secondly, the attention of life refocuses on interacting with people. Walking down the street I looked forward to passing someone, to smelling what they were cooking, to kicking the ball away from the kids.

In most cities, yielding to cars tacitly legitimizes the purpose of those cars… cars or trucks will kill many people a year. Why are these bullies even allowed in our space? Commerce. So commerce is important enough to allow people to be penned onto sidewalks. This isn’t overt, it’s subconscious. I’m sure every one of us is thinking, “Yeah, of course I have to let a truck come down my street – they need to do business, after all,” and in the process we give value to conducting business even if it creates a space that’s not conducive to natural social living.

Penned-in.

Movement
Third, humans naturally move in patterns that don’t have anything to do with the patterns of roads. On the side streets in Yangon, people walked down the center of the road. They crossed at a diagonal because there was no rush. Someone might drift a couple feet off the side walk and stop to talk to someone there in the middle of the right lane. Kids played wherever – their ball hitting a wall, bouncing across the street, hitting the other wall.

Before this trip I hadn’t understood that, just because I might be killed, my movements in most urban spaces are completely unnatural.

Presence
Finally, on carless, human-sized street, it’s a lot easier to be mentally present. When we host dinner parties, Azure will often make two rules: 1) Leave your cell phone at the door and 2) don’t make any other plans for later that night. If you can’t follow both these rules, don’t come. The reason she makes these rules is that the experience is so much better if people are thinking about what’s going on here, in front of them, being present.

I found that taking away cars had the same effect.

We walk down the street at a human pace – the bubble of space that we’re conscious of is pretty consistent, about 20 feet in either direction. People see us coming and going, they anticipate us stopping, they anticipate smiling at us. We see food, we smell it, we stop. This is the rhythm of being in one place and moving at human speed.

Cars imply ELSEWHERE. They move so fast that they symbolize coming from somewhere else, going to somewhere else. We sit in one spot at human-scale but they’re engaged in some other activity that has nothing to do us. A passing car implies an origin and a destination, neither of which are HERE. It DIMINISHES the present.

And because they’re the fastest, biggest, loudest and most dangerous things in our physical space, they DISTRACT from the present and demand our attention, even if it’s as slight as changing how we walk.

And why do we sacrifice our space, focus, movement and presence? For ease of commerce. These are four aspects of being human that are tough to measure but have an impact on our mental health. They’re the things I recognized in the Rio favela when I thought, “This neighborhood is different and I can’t figure out why. How is it that I’m envious of the way people are living in a slum? There’s something natural about this life.” It was human-centric space.

First off, in May 2008 Cyclone Nagaris swept through and killed 138,000 people in region. (pause for effect). The government wouldn’t let relief in before it was far too late, and disease spread in ways we haven’t ever seen before (except during the 2005 tsunami aftermath) or since (except during the 2010 Haitian earthquake aftermath).

The second reason the city feels small is that in 2005 the dictatorial government started construction on a new capital city and relocated all employees, and necessary services, by force. So all of a sudden, 925,000 people were removed from their lives and told to start over in a development that looks sickeningly like the Issaquah Highlands. Our bus drove smack through the middle of this manicured new capital – about 4 hours north of Yangon – so I can report on it firsthand, through a bus window.

There are perfectly manicured roads for homes that don’t exist. The homes themselves look like suburban American homes. At dusk one night, hundreds of people were walking miles from one construction site back to somewhere, wherever the hell they lived, because there are almost no cars in the country (more on that later). As these people walked, they didn’t walk past any food stalls or stores, just curbs. Most importantly, the new city feels STERILE. In order to understand why this is so different to an unluckily relocated Myanmar resident, you need to compare three ways of life:

First, a picture of the streets of Yangon. Take this in:

Life lived on the streets as in most major urban areas. Next, a picture of village life (this one from Bagan):

Immediately an hour outside of Yangon the living situation goes from urban poor to rural. I’m not talking about American rural where people wear ugly jeans and live in quiet but clean homes, but ancient rural like using a caravan of oxen to pull your carts up a river. Huts made of whatever natural materials (palm fronds, etc) are around. Farming for your food. I can’t imagine the people in these small villages have much commerce because they don’t seem to have many possessions. The above photo is taken from the center of a very large village in a tourist town, so even this area is more developed.

Anyway, point is that these are two of the common ways of life for a Myanmar person: Yangon urban living and ancient rural. Which brings me to the new capitol. Here is a picture of the Issaquah Highlands which, I swear to god, is exactly how the streets of the new capitol look:

(photo courtesy of Jeff Youngstrom’s Flickr page)

It makes me hyperventilate.

I guess what I’m trying to show with these pictures is the cruelty of the government not only in moving so many people without their permission, but moving them from a rich civic space to a bleached suburban space. In Yangon’s urban center, people don’t seem to buy their food in grocery stores, they buy them from ladies selling produce on the sidewalks. If you can afford to eat out, the food vendors are on every street corner and up and down the side walks. Kids play in the streets, people chat on the sidewalks, that’s where life is lived. The streets of the newly constructed capitol were manicured, clean and deserted.

Finally, in an effort to clean up the city center, the government forcibly relocated 15% of the urban population, all squatters to a township outside the city center, I guess. I don’t know much about this.

Anyway, the reason that it feels like Yangon’s population doesn’t fill its urban space is that it can’t – people have been moved by force. In this way, it feels post-apocalyptic in the urban center, with most buildings falling into disrepair as the tropical climate starts to take them back.

I LOVED this feeling: life is being sucked out of the buildings and back onto the streets. I can only hope that’s how our apocalypse goes.

When I first wore it out of the hotel room I was nervous, like I was taking a risk that I’d be stared at while walking down the street. I was one of the only Westerners wearing this get-up, and people would definitely notice the difference. I expected that locals would look at me and think I was stupid or trying too hard or whatever. A poser. Which isn’t that big a deal, I could cope with that, though it would be a disappointing reaction for a place that’s otherwise full of extremely kind people.

Of course the cynicism was not at all what happened. What happened is that I got a lot of thumbs-ups from delighted locals and those who could say it would smile and say, “That looks good! Very handsome!” For the most part, though, people did what they did before: they glanced at us and didn’t take much notice. It feels good when that happens.

Other Westerners, for the most part, DID look at me in the way I feared: “Who’s this poser?”

I don’t know if it’s personal or cultural, but this experience revealed the cynicism about standing out – that someone going outside the norm should first be mocked, then admired if closer inspection warrants. I think I’m a cynical person, and if someone, say, wore a cowboy hat in Seattle I’d react negatively about it even though I logically know it’s ok.

I guess the fear of standing out is the potential negativity, the judgment that I’m a person pretending to be something I’m not. But I’m sad to see young men wearing jeans and t-shirts. Others cultures have thrown away their own traditional dress, though it endures even here in a major city, the only major city in SEA where this is the case. I don’t think I can contribute to the preservation, but I can make a quiet statement (if anyone even cares) that what they have is beautiful, it’s enough for me, and I like it. Jeans are boring and ubiquitous. Why sellout your traditions for the symbols of Western consumerism? Why be the same as everyone else?

I called over the manager – a 30-year-old heavy-set man – to ask him about the boys. I could imagine him being intimidating to kids (big dude, lazy eye), but the boys stood tall when he approached, so it didn’t seem they were afraid of him or had ever been hit or anything. I started my questions carefully, “Why do the boys all work at this shop and not another shop?”

He said they have scouts in Bagan who find poor, uneducated families and want their poor, uneducated kids to work. So the restaurant takes the boys off their hands and brings them to Yangon. They promise to provide the kids valuable experience in the restaurant industry, considering tea shops are very popular in Myanmar. Tea shop workers can make good money, though not as much as educated people. (Educated people earn between 40,000 and 100,000 Kyat a month – around $40 and $100. I’m sure the kids at the tea shop are making way way less. $10 a month to sleep in the restaurant and probably work full days.) He says, “of course” most kids send money home – that’s the point – but a few waste it on sweets or games or whatever.

When you start talking about scouts in another part of the country sending children to work in the cities, it begins to sound very child-slavery-like. As Westerners we’re confident in our stance against child labor, so much so that we imagine it to be a universally held belief. But the manager told us all this stuff matter-of-factly, openly, with no concept that it might be a controversial practice.

When we left, Azure and I talked about how im-fucking-possible it is to pass judgment on this specific business because we just don’t know enough. Maybe the work will keep the boys from prostitution or drug use or crime. We don’t know. We wondered if the line about giving the kids experience in a reliable professional field was actually true.

What we can say with confidence are two things: First, the most pressing need is education, and that falls at the feet of the government. We suspect, however, that the Myanmar government intentionally makes people’s lives difficult so they don’t have the tools or energy to revolt.

Secondly, we can invoke the rule of labor we learned in Indonesia: If the job gives the worker the opportunity to BETTER THEIR LIFE, then the system is justifiable. If not, then the system has to change. Of course, the minimum wage is so low even in the US that people don’t have opportunity to improve their lives here.

Azure and I aren’t opposed to kids working in general, but with some major restrictions: It should be a family business, they need to be there by choice and the work needs to not interfere with some kind of more formal education.

Kids were working all over the country – selling things to tourists, selling things to locals, making and selling food, cleaning, serving, moving heavy stuff and so on. We saw kids working in Indonesia, I saw kids working in India years ago as well. It’s a fact of life in the Third World and to ban it outright without thinking of the consequences could be devastating for the families. To me child labor is not the problem itself, but the symptom of a disorganized (or worse, sabotage-minded) government.

I didn’t say a word to anyone for the day, a reminder of my aborted 10-day retreat in 2008. At the time I didn’t understand the point of meditation, but they also did a shitty job of explaining it – here, though, the monks did an excellent job explaining, in careful English, the foundations of Buddhism and how it’s separate from the traditions of Thai Buddhism. For example, women never touch monks. But that has little to do with core Buddhist beliefs and more to do with culture. (The fusion of spirituality and culture is at the center of many religious problems, in my opinion).

After a day of silence we split into discussion groups, each group with a monk, and let the questions fly. I unloaded my doubts on the young man from Laos:

“I know we’re not supposed to enjoy the food – that it should only be for nourishment – but I don’t see the harm in enjoying something as it’s presented to you if you can avoid attachment.” I remembered admiring Claude for savoring a poem by the fire, and the monk didn’t answer directly.

“There’s a guy in my hometown who murdered four policemen. What would Buddhism say a society should do with him? He’s a risk to kill again.” I didn’t mention that guy was already shot, but the monk avoided the question again.

“Would a good dog be reborn as a human?”

I think others in the group weren’t really interested in what I was asking because the subject was often changed to the monks’ daily life.

Monks live in temples and follow five main rules, etc. Here’s the interesting part: apparently there are monks who find the temples too rigid (or something) and take to the countryside. They’re called Forest Monks. My eyes lit up.

“There are Forest Monks? Where?” They wander! They’re nomadic! They walk (alone) across borders – Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Burma – as they wish, popping in to villages to receive alms. Giving alms is a daily tradition here, a lovely beat in the rhythm of life. Every morning around sunrise monks wander around (towns, cities, villages, wherever) with their bowls out. Local laypeople come out onto the street with their donations – usually rice, but sometimes milk bottles or other foods – and set them into the bowls. The monks will stop and say a prayer over the donor.

So I asked where do these Forest Monks sleep? Do they take refuge in people’s homes or in local temples?

“They sleep in Monk Tents,” he revealed.

WHAT? “There are Monk Tents?!” I think everyone in the group could tell that I desperately wanted one even though I’m not supposed to WANT anything, definitely not at a meditation retreat. But to me this was bigger than WANT, this was like realizing that we are all, in fact, one pulsating energy field, but especially me and the Monk Tent. I had to have one.

“You can find them at Monk Stores. There’s a company that has a Monk Factory and makes Monk Accessories for the Monk Stores. It’s a really good business.” This was all blowing my mind. Monk Tents! We had to get one.

The next day, after saying goodbye to the monks and goodbye to Mathew (who’s now safely back in Seattle) we went on an excursion to find a Monk Tent. We went to the Wat and convinced them that, no, we don’t want regular tents, we do actually want a Monk Tent even though we’re not monks. They pointed us to one store. No Monk Tents. After a few missteps and misunderstandings, we finally discovered a store where they had Monk Tents! BUT… it wasn’t how I imagined it. The Monk Tent is two items: a traditional orange Monk Umbrella (for rain and sun) and an orange mosquito net. The umbrella is stuck into the ground, then the mosquito net is draped over it and the monk meditates or sleeps underneath. It’s actually a smart solution to the problem of sleeping unprotected: it’s lightweight, compact and the umbrella has several uses. But seeing how simple it was, we couldn’t justify buying one when it would be so easy to make… alas, we have no Monk Tent… yet.

The alms-giving, to me, is one of the most beautiful, thoughtful practices I’ve seen in all my time traveling. There are a lot of people who come out to give at sunrise. The monks don’t eat to enjoy, as I earlier complained, they eat to nourish their bodies so they can continue to pursue peace and the end of suffering. The people who donate food don’t do so out of pity, but reverence for the monk’s pursuit. This is so different than alms-giving in the West. In the West we often help out of pity, which strips people of pride. Either that, or a person asking for food (who may, in fact, be working for peace) is looked upon as parasitical. Certainly no reverence for the needy in Western cultures. In a lot of ways, Buddhist practices sometimes flip our Western culture on its head. Another way is that Buddhism invites its practitioners to think critically about the nature of the universe (vs. the advice we got at the Catholic convent last year to stop questioning things)… and another example is that Buddha is not a god, he was an actual person who gained understanding about 2500 years ago. And so on.

At the beginning of the whole thing, a lecturer said to us, “You know what -isms came before Buddhism in Thailand? Animism and Hinduism.” He gave an example of each, how they endure. “Then came Buddhism. You know what the latest -isms are? Consumerism, materialism. People extract their meaning from money and objects.” I’d never heard it so simply explained. It’s the latest in a string of religions. I thought about how last week we splurged on jeans, underwear, art, lots of food, and how completely disengaged that pace is from the rhythm of life at the temple.

I’m occasionally challenged to name places that would be “better” to live in than America. Politics, wealth, health care, weather, food, culture, lifestyle… there are a lot of variables. The variable I saw at the meditation retreat is something I’ve never even thought about as a part of a country’s make-up: peace – with oneself, with others and with nature. That’s the core of Buddhism and Buddhism has a powerful influence on Thai life.

So – early tomorrow we’re heading to Myanmar for about 10 days. We’ll be mostly out of touch, but you might as well visit the blog a few times just to drive up the stats.

Sam believes that genetics, essentially, make black people less intelligent. He called it “instincts,” but he implied that these “instincts” couldn’t be overcome, so I thought of it as genetics. He said instincts, like how Jews are two-faced and women are untrustworthy, are “hidden” in people and there’s just not much anyone can do about it.

In America it’s an unwritten rule that people have the same capacity for intelligence (happiness, pain, love, compassion, etc) regardless of their race (sex, sexual orientation, religion, etc). Another unwritten American rule is that you don’t openly question the first rule. Don’t worry, this post isn’t going there.

This story is beside the point, but it will illustrate Sam’s dedication to Buddhist practice. Sam lived with a nagging, painful neck injury caused by a car accident. Finally, eleven years to the day after the accident he decided to get rid of it for good, so he sat down and meditated for three consecutive days. He didn’t eat, didn’t drink, didn’t move from the spot upon which he sat. He focused all his attention on his neck, visualizing it healed. When, 72 hours later, he finished the meditation, he could move his neck freely – he twisted in either direction to prove it. Healed. Hearing this story before the questionable comments, I thought, “Wow, to meditate that much means this guy must be a river of compassion!”

Sam’s phobias seem inconsistent: Buddhism teaches you to love others unconditionally, I thought, so how does he reconcile the practice with the lack of respect? (Well, there are plenty of people who manage to hate despite their loving leaders, so perhaps Sam is to Buddha as America’s anti-gay Christians are to Jesus and the Taliban is to Muhammad).

Sam asked Ali what he believes happens after we die. Ali responded that he feels this is it – there’s no afterlife. Sam said, “So you don’t even believe in re-incarnation?” (which, I suppose, is an afterlife scenario halfway between “this is it” and “there is a heaven”). Sam does believe in reincarnation, obviously, in which one’s karma determines their station in the next life.

So I wonder, Does Sam believe a person’s race is determined by karma from their previous life? In his beliefs, would a good dog be reborn as a Jew? Would a bad Eskimo be reborn as a Latino? It all seems ludicrous to me, but who am I to judge? I have no evidence either way.

I never asked about racial hierarchy as dictated by karmic law because I wanted to be polite: I was in his house, after all. The more relevant topic to come out of this exchange is how a guest should relate to their host. I was brought up to be polite (which in our culture means not talking about touchy subjects) in someone else’s home, but that could be just as much a culture-based practice as the one about not questioning racial equality.

About being a challenging guest, one view is that we travelers can claim “ignorant’s license,” which allows us to say or do things that might be rude in the town we’re visiting but can be written off as cultural differences. For example, Ali suggested that Sam’s hellion of a son (my words) needs more attention from his father, especially considering that Sam splits time between his two families in different cities. It would be inappropriate to say such a thing in England or America, but Sam doesn’t know that, so it might as well be said and written off as a cultural difference. And to be fair, we don’t even know if such a statement is inappropriate here in Thailand. So Ali chose to say what he was thinking and put the onus on Sam to blame the cultural difference if the statement does prove to be insensitive.

(I have a British client who says, “I don’t know why American parents are always gushing about how much they love their kids… I mean, my kids are alright. They’re just kids.” Who knew parental gushing/pride was cultural?)

Anyway, back to the story at hand: So, can a guest challenge their host’s opinions? Mathew says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks (Sam’s in his late 50s), so you might as well just listen politely and even goad them, then later blog about how fucking crazy that guy was. To all the old dogs reading this – can you teach an old dog new tricks? Have you been open to major philosophical changes as you’ve aged?

I’m coming to the conclusion that if you can manage to cleanse your argument of judgment, then these topics are fair game. The key – as is the case with any communication – is to avoid taking anything personally and think about whether you’re making unfair assumptions when you’re speaking. For example: ‘having unconditional love for all people’ and ‘thinking that Jews are two-faced’ aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

Here’s the argument that won me over: I’ve spent 30 years wandering among millions of people on this planet, starting on North America. Sam has spent almost 60 years wandering among millions of people on the opposite side of the world. Finally, after all this time and all these people, he and I have come together for one night to talk face-to-face on his porch, and it will never happen again. The odds are astronomical that we should be here! With that in mind, it seems like a waste of an opportunity that politeness prevent us from discussing important topics. To me, the devil is in the intent.

As for Sam, his views are consistent with Buddhism in this way: he says that they all come from careful observation. I imagine (assume) he’s dealt with a few Black people he found to be dumb and a few Jews he found to be two-faced. We asked him whether he would ever visit America and he said that even if he was given a free ticket he wouldn’t go. “Too dangerous.” He’s afraid of the guns (of course) and thinks Americans hate people from other cultures (he mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan). In response, Azure showed him pictures of our house, our chickens, the Demeules’ lake house, our friends cooking and smiling, and Sam said, “You must live in a really nice part of America.” Well, yeah, I guess we do.

Either way, it’s hard to trust the opinion of someone who learns about the world through observation but would refuse a free ticket to a place they’ve never been. Not that we’re even close to understanding how his version of the world operates, but is his observation of race so different that he had to ask if Obama was as smart as Bush?

I like this about Sam – an in-the-moment simplicity developed through attention.

We scored an awesome situation, yesterday evening, relaxing on a wooden porch that reaches over the water on Ko Lanta’s eastern shore. The wide, parallel floorboards run from the porch railing to the house, then up the wall to the high metal roof. The tide was just creeping over the rocky beach. As Az and I laid there we heard boats motoring in the distance, rolling waves and chirping birds. We heard hammers tapping metal, people talking, people walking, people singing, cooking and crying, a Muslim call to prayer and occasional wind. The loudest sounds bounced off an island across the channel. The sun was just pushing through the clouds, though it was late enough that none reached the east-facing porch.

Sunrise the next morning

Three years ago we drove past the traditional wooden houses on this, the less-touristed coast. They seemed to glow with lives busied by projects unrelated to us Westerners, and I was hungry to see it. I remember hoping that, if only we looked curious enough, if only we drove slow enough, we would be invited in. It’s harder than you think to get inside someone’s house when you’re traveling: most locals assume you want to see the tourist sites, and we don’t commonly invite ourselves to dinner. And I remember, years ago, peaking into one of these houses and wondering about the natural light climbing from the sea-side back porch, up the hallway boards and through the front room, where families live open to the street. How to get invited inside? For years now I’ve tried to imagine rhythm of this traditional Thai life. What would be inside that house?

Yesterday, when we drove slowly along this road, a simple sign read, “B&B.” We had to stop. Kim welcomed us and called her husband, Sam. Sam had the idea for the B&B: he fantasizes about a worldwide network of homestays welcoming travelers, who later repay the good deed to travelers in their own town. It’s the exact same idea as Couchsurfing.com, but in its infancy and without a website.

Finally, we were invited into the house.

It’s open and airy, constructed completely of wide wooden planks, except for the metal roof high above. It’s like sleeping in a Wild West saloon, or so I imagine. The kitchen sits in the dark, unpainted entry, where only a little natural light drips in through the front door. This is the front half of the house. We walked down the hall toward the sea. The back of the house is dominated by one enormous room, separated from the hallway by a slatted wall. In this room the whole family sleeps on wicker mats and keeps all their possessions.

The bedroom.

A wall panel opens to the outside to let a breeze roll through. Off this bedroom is the main bathroom, which consists of a gravity-flush toilet and a wash basin. The Thai shower two or three times a day to keep cool, so the bathroom floors are always wet, which we find kinda repulsive. The hall opens onto the sea-side porch with solid, waist-high railings. The high ceilings theoretically keep the house cool in the summer, though I’m sure there’s only so much you can do.

When at home the family splits time between lounging on the front porch, lounging on the back porch, and, in Kim’s case, working in the kitchen. On another home’s porch I saw people sitting or laying on the floor. We did the same in Sam’s. He said they sleep in different rooms depending on how they feel. Sometimes it’s the bedroom, sometimes the back porch, sometimes a little loft in the “attic” (the space above the hallway). Most families have their kitchen and toilet in the back of the house and they throw all their natural waste onto the beach for the high tide to reclaim. He said the waste would feed “the animals,” meaning crabs and fish.

At one point in the evening Ali, a very nice Brit who arrived at the same time, suggested we turn on some music, but I noticed that nobody else in the town was listening to music. We could hear everything along the shore – all the motors, dishes and discussions. No music. In fact, Sam said that the villagers prefer to listen to the waves rolling under their porches and the wind stroking their metal roofs.

Just then, though, bass started booming from a couple doors down. On my walk to the store I found the culprits: a group of Westerners, who were renting the house, played music without noticing they were the only ones doing it. I later asked Sam about the religious makeup of this little fishing village. The main town is Chinese (slash Buddhist), and this half is Muslim, but in a few years it will be Protestant.
“Why Protestant?” I asked.
“Because Westerners are buying up all the houses: the five at this end of the street have already been sold.”
“What will happen to the Muslims?”
“They’re moving into the hills.”

As soon as we got inside, we were invited to dinner. We were also invited to sleep there, but had already made arrangements on the other side of the island. Because we never say no to a home cooked meal, we happily accepted the offer for dinner. Kim, Sam’s wife disappeared into the kitchen for about an hour while Sam, Ali, Mike and I sat and talked while Don, Sam and Kim’s son, played on his bike and screamed as loud as he could. The dynamic was such that Ali and Sam would talk with intermittent spurts of Mike and Sam talking, at which times I would talk to Ali. I would later find out that Sam has many “quirks” one of which being extreme sexism.

I was very happy to have Ali there that night. Not only do I enjoy the company of a good Brit, it also cut the awkwardness of Sam not being fluent in English and Mike asking many slow questions, only half of which Sam could understand and respond to. Sam’s English was good by Thai standards and I can’t say I speak any second language as well as he speaks English, but it still wasn’t easy like how I could ask Ali something and get a straight, simple and fast answer. Ali had spent more time with Sam and could answer some of the questions without actually having to ask Sam.

Kim came out with a beautiful grilled fish platter. Apparently Sam and Ali had talked about sushi in the minibus where they met, so dinner was served with wasabi and soy sauce. Mmmmmm.

Sam and Ali and I had some beers and we stayed well past dark. The next day, we were invited to return, though I was a little worried about overstaying our welcome or having it become awkward. I liked having Ali there to promote a group feeling. He had a very easy manner with Sam and would joke and include him in a way that is very difficult to pull off. We were to call Ali the next morning to get a report on the situation.

On the phone, Ali told us all was well, so we packed up our things and drove back across the island to Sam’s house. We got there around 1pm and I was exhausted from the night before (bad hut situation). Sam and Ali were just getting back from a walk when we arrived. They had eaten lunch before we got there, so we put our things down, hung out for a second, then went to find food in the town. We got back, took a nap and when we woke up, Ali had returned from his bike ride and internet outing.

Like a good Englishman, he brought booze back and at 4:30 he poured our first drinks and while Sam continued to nap, Ali sat and talked to us.

Not a photo for Ali’s mom.

This was Sam’s second family, which we weren’t surprised by at all. We knew he was 57, that his wife was probably 25 max, his son 2. He only lived there for 3 days a week and lived on the mainland the rest of the week with his other wife. Ali never asked if the two women knew about each other, but it didn’t really matter. Polygamy isn’t something I can get over. I’ve watched Big Love, I try to be cool with it, see the positives for women, but I can’t. I just hate it. The only glimmer of karma that I could see from the whole thing was that Don, Sam’s son was the worst kid I have ever met and Sam, being sort of old, had to deal with him, even if it was only 3 days a week. Sam said that Don was so bad, that perhaps he would have to teach the child himself because in Thailand, no school would accept such a “naughty” boy.

Naughty is a funny word because it literally means bad, but in the English language it has a sexual connotation that is undeniable to a native speaker. When Sam would use the word naughty, we would undoubtedly giggle like 13 year old boys at whatever it was he was saying. It’s words like naughty that determine whether one is fluent in a language or not. Sam was not and so there were many things that would make us giggle over the next eight hours, either out of fun or discomfort or pure horror.

Sam woke up from his nap and joined us on the porch. It was about five thirty and he asked us what we wanted for dinner. We tried to stress that whatever was easiest would be fine for us, so Kim made the most elaborate curry possible, Masaman. It was delicious of course, but I hated that it took so long and she had to spend the time away in the kitchen making preparations. She seemed used to it, but I still felt bad.

I think Sam thought he treated her like a queen. She got a nice house, all of her needs were met. Later that night, she silently joined us and Sam rubbed her back for a little while. At one point Don poured a whole bottle of Fanta on the floor and after about a half hour of ignoring it, his reluctant parents cleaned it up. Sam told us that he was being a good husband, normally he should never have to lift a hand to do any housework. Not a dish, not a broom, nothing. I seared, Ali protested.

Ai and Sam.

Ali is a funny kid. I say kid because he is seven years behind us and very much like we were when we had just graduated college. Since I consider myself to have been a kid at that age, I call him that, though he is actually by most standards an adult. In the first half hour of knowing Ali, he told us that he had gone to a great masseuse when he first got to Thailand. He hadn’t paid enough for a happy ending, but had given himself one when he got home. “Wow, Ali,” I said, “That’s a lot of information.”
“TMI,” he laughed.

I don’t believe in “too much information“. The more information, the better and so I liked Ali a lot. He got his degree in computer sciences and didn’t seem that thrilled with it. His internship at the UN had been a highlight and he wished he had studied something that would bring him closer to politics or international relations. Ali has big goals and something that I admired about him was that he wasn’t afraid to put them all out there. Many people fear failure or at least public failure and keep the big dreams in. Ali told us that he wants to change the world. He wants to make enough money to have real influence, help developing counties, fix corruption. That big.

Ali’s parents are from Iran. He lived there for four years in his tweens. His dad is a journalist and his mom a librarian. Ali speaks Farsi fluently and Mike offered that this alone could land him a job in some foreign affairs department. He could change the world that way. But Ali had accepted a job as an IT person in a large firm in London, where he would have a high starting salary. He really was convinced that money was how he would change the world. The risk he was taking was sacrificing his dreams for money that would change the world.

You are probably wondering why I am spending so much time talking about an English kid when Sam, the old Thai man is who I am here to learn about. The simple reason is that I really lost interest in Sam the minute he started in on his views. He was a weak, scared old man with two families that seemed too much for him. I didn’t like him. I spent time listening to Ali because he’s the one who wants to change the world in a way that I hope he does.

Sam said Kim didn’t drink. In his Thailand, if a woman drank, she wasn’t marriage material. I took another drink. Women are supposed to be obedient and submissive.

Sam mentioned that Jews were really smart. It took a while to understand that he was saying “Jews” because the topic came out of nowhere. Ali said that, yes, many of his Jewish friends were intelligent. Yes, but do they have many friends, Sam asked. Ali said they had more friends than he did. But are they good friends, Sam asked. They must be hiding something.

Ali didn’t let things slide. Mike and I both sat back as Sam insulted my gender and his heritage and Ali fought our battles. It was the first time I realized how non-confrontational I’d become. We were staying in this guy’s house and he was old enough that we probably weren’t going to change his opinions, but Ali tried anyway and Mike and I respected him for that. It inspired us. Maybe it was worth it to put up a fight. With Sam, I didn’t care. He was old. He was afraid of the world. If he got a free ticket to America, he wouldn’t take it. He couldn’t understand how we could walk around with money in our pockets and not get it stolen. There were gunmen running wild in America.

I had some photos of Little Home on our camera, so I showed him pictures of scary America, where my dad and I built a chicken coop and we planted a garden. Autsy made a bunt cake, freaky stuff like that. Sam said that I must live in a very very nice part of America and I told him, yeah, but most parts are nice. I always try to put it in perspective. If America is 20 times the size of Lanta, the bad parts would measure about the same size as the small town we were staying in. He didn’t believe me.

He wouldn’t go to England either for similar reasons. He thought the people were mean and Ali said most English people are really nice. They are nice in a different way. They are more accepting and fun, but they don’t wave and smile like Thai people do, so to Sam, no, they weren’t nice.

I have found myself thanking my lucky stars on several occasions that I was not born a woman here. When Sam started talking about Hilary Clinton, Ali almost lost his cool. She was too smart for a woman. No wonder Bill did what he did. Although it is not an uncommon opinion among some circles in America, the admission that she was too smart for a woman is very rarely admitted. Sam would never want someone like her for a wife and Mike felt quite satisfied saying that Hilary would not want Sam for a husband. I couldn’t help laughing at the idea of Hilary in Thailand being second wife for a sweaty man like Sam.

Can you see Hil Hil with this one?

Sometimes Ali would throw out equally offensive things at Sam, like when he told him that the reason his son was so bad was that he was an absent father. Maybe if you were around more, your son would be better, he said. It was a completely valid point. The kid did whatever he wanted, he hit Sam, he yelled at nothing, he slammed his bike around on the ground, anything to get attention, but none was given. Ever. No discipline, nothing. Sam thought he was being a better dad this time around, his two kids from his older wife now in their twenties. He wasn’t being a father at all that I could see and Don’s eyes were very destructive for it. The kid would look at things and you could tell that even at two, he was calculating how to break them.

Don’t be fooled by this little one

Some of Sam’s opinions came out of the 1960s KKK handbook. Black people had lesser intelligence and that different races were born with different instincts. Often times, Sam would lean in to Ali like he was sharing a secret with him. I think he felt like they were comrades. Sometimes Mike is left out of the “inner circle” because of his obvious closeness with me, which I am always proud of. Ali debated, but made no headway with Sam and when he turned to us and asked if we supported Barack Obama even though he is black and we are white, we were so shocked that “of course” was the only witty comeback we could think of. I know this shouldn’t have come as a surprise to us, but who asks that? Really? He also asked if we thought Obama was smarter than George Bush even though Obama’s black.

In the morning, I took pictures of the boys sleeping on the porch. In the dark, I recorded the 5am calls to prayer being projected over the loud speaker. Sam came out and took pictures of them too. I think he wanted to put them on his B&B website. Normally, I would have offered to help him build one and done it for free, but I didn’t offer this to Sam.

I fear that the issues that I have with Sam are cultural. When we got to Thailand from Indonesia, we breathed a sigh of relief for having gotten back to a culture we could understand and relate to. I am starting to think that there is so much more to Thailand than what meets the eye. The people are friendly, they wave, they do tourism extremely well, but there are dark parts. Mike claims that being a Buddhist country, they are nicer, more accepting and I want to believe that is true, but there is another side to this country that sits beneath the surface that I remember keeping at bay last time we were here.

We packed up our stuff in Krabi and loaded it all on to the scooter that we had rented for the week. The decision to scoot was made based on our past experience of getting dropped off at the pier in the hot sun to be bombarded with screaming tours. Not wanting to relive that experience and having been inspired by the Balinese, scooting with all of our stuff, some loaded in front at Mike’s feet, one pack on his front and a large one on my back, is our choice method of travel.

When you ride, you see this all the time.

The ride to the ferry was easy. It only took about an hour and a half and when we pulled in, no one really spoke English, so we bought a ticket and got in line. We were under the impression that the ferry didn’t leave for two hours, so we settled in a shady spot with our scooter and waited. We hadn’t been sitting for more than a minute when we saw a ferry pull in. Mike got up and with a series of gestures, discovered that the ferry was actually leaving in 5 minutes. I think it actually leaves about every 10 minutes, but we didn’t know that at the time.

The little ferry from the captain’s tower – Mike asked to go up and take some pictures.

We were on a real high when we made it to the main island. The woman in Krabi who had tried to sell us a shuttle service told us it would be a 3 hour ride and cost about 300 baht to cross on the ferry. It only took 2 hours (though by the time we put our stuff down in the bungalow we would stay in, it was exactly 3) and the ferry cost 43 baht for the two of us and the bike.

All of our worldly possessions loaded on the poor scooter. I seriously hope it makes it.

We immediately went to Sea Pearl (the place we stayed before) and found the overall appearance to be the same. The prices had gone up by about $10, but we were happy to see that the woman was still working there, though 3 years later, she was no longer playing The Eagles on repeat. It was full, or we might have considered splurging on the room, so we headed south to the cute hippie beach that we remembered from our last trip.

This is when we realized how much it had changed. Whereas last time, the small, pot holed road that led south along the coast was lined with sparse wooden bars and some good budget bungalows, it was now packed wall to wall with bars, restaurants and family resorts. The place we ended up finding was across the road from the beach and cost the same as we paid 3 years ago to be right on the beach. Fortunately there was beach and pool access via a larger resort on the other side of the road. We put our things down and went across to check it out.

It was very much like a large children’s play area that you would find at McDonalds. All of the features of the place were painted in bright pastels and everything seemed over-sized. We tried to order food, but ended up back across the street at a noodle stall instead.

We were a little down, so we decided to take a nap. We can’t claim total ignorance on Lanta’s changes. All of the guide books say that it has now been “discovered,” which it has. You really can’t go anywhere on the island without seeing other tourists. It isn’t big enough to sustain a real authentic area and host as many tourists as it does each year. Even still, we wanted to give Lanta a fair shot.

We woke up from our nap covered in sand that had been mysteriously falling on us from the ceiling and went for a sunset drive across the island. From our last experience, the other side of the island still held what we thought to be a real authentic fishing village. We hadn’t seen any restaurants or places to stay 3 years ago, so we still held out hope that things hadn’t changed. They had. When we got there, we were greeted with taxis and restaurants. It was still far less crowded and much more peaceful than the other side of the island. We drove out onto the long pier and watched the sun go down over the island as the squid fishermen prepared their boats for the all night trip. Mike went over and watched them loading up and I took a few pictures of the town. It really didn’t look different than before, the houses all looked the same, build on stilts over the rocky beach, backs opening to the water and fronts to the street.

Old Lanta Town (the fishing village) as the sun sets over the hills.

Mike wants to be a squid fisherman so bad, he is practically drooling.

We drove along the shore to the south into one of the long narrow neighborhoods built in this style and saw a few “rooms for rent” signs and were interested. Near the end of the road, we saw a sign that said “Sam B&B.” There was a woman sitting outside, so we stopped and asked about the place. This is where we met Sam, Kim, Don and Ali.