Written Philosophically by John Irvin                   No. 13                                                  May 1, 1998

LOOKING BACK AFTER A SECOND YEAR

        Welcome back to my series of newsletters about Thailand. It’s been more than a year since I started writing these letters, and two years now since I have come to Thailand. How have my views changed? Do I still like living here? What are the things that bother me, and what are the things I like? How has the economic situation affected me? I’ll try to answer these and other questions in my next series of letters. Right now, I’ll just try to sum up my feelings about living here.

I still have the same job – teaching at Chiang Mai University. I have been living in a house outside of Chiang Mai now for about nine months. I like it because it’s quiet, and because I like being surrounded by trees, but it’s a little isolated, plus when it rains we have frequent power failures (we’ve had about six in the past month). I end up sitting in the dark or going into town, where the power is always on. I have a few friends, but I don’t have a family or anything like that. Most of my spare time is devoted to writing and learning to use the computer. My social life has not exactly been exciting over the past year.

The economy has affected my thinking about the future – it has for every foreigner living here. But it has not taken away my job, or changed my habits very much. I have been a pretty low spender since I have been here, so it’s easy for me to keep on doing it. I can live cheaply, and do what I want. I have become settled here in Chiang Mai.

I have learned to like the food much more than I did when I first came here. I eat a bigger variety of things, and I can go for days without eating the same thing twice, except for fried rice and kwaytiow (noodle soup), because they serve those everywhere here, and I don’t mind eating them a lot anyway. I now relish the thought of Thai food, and generally don’t feel any great need to go out and find farang food, especially since it is usually served in places that seem far removed from Thailand in atmosphere, and also because it’s more expensive. I can eat Thai food for about a hundred baht a day, and that suits me just fine.

When I first came here I really missed good western food – pizza, spinach salad, Mexican food, Greek food, Italian food, among others. Until you get deprived of your habitual food, you don’t realize how emotionally involved you are with it. I think we are all emotionally involved with our food. We think about it, miss it, look forward to it… and then we eat it. If you don’t believe me, just choose one nationality – Italian, Thai, whatever you want – and then eat only food of that nationality everyday, every meal… for six months. That is one of the sacrifices you make when you choose to live in another country. Even with the exotic culture, and all the fun, foreign living is a continual saga of denial of familiar comforts, and constant assault with the unfamiliar.

Another way in which I felt alone has been in communicating with people. I have made a continual effort to learn more Thai, taking a writing class, where I learned the alphabet, and a conversation class, where I have tried to make real sentences. I have always had Thai people I know teach me a few words and phrases, and generally been eager to learn. But many times I have been unable to express what I wanted, or needed, even after I thought I had practiced and practiced. It can be a real confidence deflator, and living in a constant state of limited speaking ability can make you feel a baby – stupid, and dependent on other people.

Beyond mere grammar and words, though, communicating with the Thais requires an adjustment of thinking, of values. Their thinking is shaped by their experience, and the collective experience of their entire society, which is always going to be different from my experience and values as an American. One of the things I have come to expect now is that even though I can speak the words, and we can smile at each other and be eager to communicate, we will never really be in the same world, even when we are standing in front of each other. It’s sad sometimes when I realize this.

I do have some friends in Chiang Mai, most of them foreigners, but also a few Thais. I don’t like to belong to farang clubs, or anything like that. I’m pretty much a loner; I like making my own path, and I like to choose my friends according to their qualities, not their ability to keep me entertained with gossip. I have become somewhat of a recluse living in my country house, where I work on my writing or practice guitar for hours on end.

I liked the weather when I first came to Thailand. It was always hot, so I could walk around in shorts all the time, even at night. And then came the rains, and again I thought it was beautiful the way it just poured, and the wind blew, and then everything became so green again. Now, although I still enjoy the beauty, I yearn for a climate that is a little less brutal: it has been continuous summer in my life for two solid years now, and that’s a long time.

I have enjoyed riding my motorbike. It’s fun to zip around in the open air, and it can cool me off (a little) on hot days. I also like the idea of using two wheel transit, something proportionate to the number of bodies being carried. I figure, why does one person need a whole car to ferry him or herself around? On my motorbike, I drive around cars that have clogged up the roadways, and parking is always much easier. But driving in Thailand is more dangerous than it is in the U.S., and on a motorbike, it is really not safe. People have narrowly missed hitting me several times, including at high speeds on the highway. On this score, I feel the longer I stay in Thailand, the more the chance that I will be in an accident, and that is kind of scary.

I like the cheap labor and ease of some services, most notably laundry, tailoring, haircuts, motorbike repair, and other minor repairs. You could never get service this cheap, and this fast, in the U.S. I’ve had shoes brought back from the dead, favorite shirts sewn up, and so on, for very cheap prices. When you live with deprivation every day, you might as well enjoy as many benefits as you can.

So, will I stay in Chiang Mai? The answer is, I don’t know. But there are many benefits of living here, including an easy pace of life, and a wonderful and very different culture that what I have ever experienced in the U.S. Whether I go or stay, I already feel that I have gained a lot in experience that most people living in my own country have never had. I am thankful for that, at least. And for the time being, I am still alive and kicking in Chiang Mai.
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Next: The quality of life in Chiang Mai.

© Copyright 1998, John Irvin

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