Taking the Plunge in Thailand

It’s 7 AM on a Saturday, I’m busy treading water in a sea of pleasant dreams, and already I have three missed calls from the monks I met in Pai last weekend. Clearly strangers to the manners associated with this well-established communication technology, my new friends (Are monks allowed to befriend women, let alone call them on a cell phone?) seem to be breaking rules left and right. In the hour or so we spent chatting about meditation and enlightenment at the hot springs that morning, they chain-smoked an entire pack of cigarettes, downed a few bottles of Red Bull, and used up a roll of film on me and the novices, positioning us daringly close to one another. When I visited them at their wat in town the following day, an industrial-strength coffee pot cranked out cup after cup of thick, black brew while one of the senior monks, anxious to practice his English, took me to see a ganja plant growing defiantly from a crack in the dusty concrete. “Marijuaa-naa,” he said, grinning proudly. I smiled, bemused.

Modernism may be altering the daily practices of these monks, but the way they respond to the changes occurring at light speed in our modern world is perhaps most telling. All things considered, these guys might have it figured out: they take their Five Precepts, the moral foundations of Buddhism, and seek to reconcile them with the uncertainty they face in their daily lives. The Buddha may not have hitched a ride on the back of a motorbike, or used a stereo, or bought himself a roll of Kodak Gold at a 7-Eleven, but in this new age of consumerism and globalization, who’s to say you can’t be mindful with a cell phone pocket sewn into your robe and a liter of caffeine pumping through your veins?

Pëma Chodron, an American Buddhist nun, suggested “We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not-knowing is part of the adventure.” For my monk-friends to turn a blind eye to modern society and all its manifestations would be succumbing to the comfort of their ancient ways; to embrace it within the framework of their quest for spiritual enlightenment, thereby challenging themselves to experience and learn from uncertainty, would be noble.

If Thailand promised one ounce of certainty, it wouldn’t belong in the middle of Southeast Asia. This is the place where seductive landscapes and seedy “sexpats” meet, where a rich, vibrant, and wholly optimistic energy reverberates within deeply impoverished human beings. Laziness and hard work go hand in hand. The best food comes at the lowest prices, and money can’t buy but a day trip’s worth of happiness. In Thailand, contradictions are the fabric of society.

I’ll admit, I've been craving the security and predictability of home—regular contact with my family, close friends, pets (the seven cats that live in my front yard don't count, although the midnight hissing fights and pitter patter of little feet on the roof do provide an illusion of home), soft beds, real cars, the lake, speaking freely to strangers in grammatically incorrect, unsimplified English, running outside (too hot, too many obstacles here), drinking cheap wine and real milk, cooking my own food, washing my own clothes, reading the New York Times, and watching (tasteful) cable TV. These comforts seem all but too far away.

But it’s often the discomfort we experience upon leaving these things behind that gives rise to those startling “a-ha” moments, the ones that threaten to challenge our sense of reality and bring us closer to that elusive meaning of life. And sometimes they arise out of purely candid observations of the world around us, if you let them. Just as I’d secretly hoped, Thailand continues to make me go "Wow" and "Oooh" and "Ha" and "Huh?" with stunning regularity.

Motorbikes are clown cars on two wheels. From the familial to the exotic, everything and its mother has been sighted spilling off the back of one (all at once, it seems). Friends, lovers, sleeping children, parents, grandparents, big dogs, small dogs, stereo equipment, bicycles, boxes, flowers, vegetables, piles of clothing (still on hangers), crates of chickens, pigs, old ladies with mounds of groceries (sitting sidesaddle, naturally), truck tires, rifles, fishing poles, ladders, buckets, and watermelons are all standard cargo. I’m proud to say that over the course of five months, I’ve become somewhat of a stunt driver myself. When I first got my bike, I tried to carry a bag with three yogurts home from the 7-Eleven, and almost tipped over in an intersection. Last week, my friend and I succeeded in bringing a collapsible twin-size mattress home from the department store, on the highway. Watch out, Sandra Bullock.

At school, stray dogs are bathed in the communal hand-washing fountain. Sometimes they sleep on the floor of my classroom. Entire classes show up 25 minutes late because they were “eating,” straight boys hold hands, girls talk openly about being “pretty” or “fat” or “smart,” and if you show up at an after-school event, you can bet your bottom dollar there’ll be boys dressed up like girls, playing the guitar and singing love songs teen-idol style to a sea of screaming, swooning onlookers. A few weekends ago, on a school cross-country bus trip to see some ruins, we watched Thai music videos with karaoke lyrics for six hours on full volume. Then we watched Dawn of the Dead dubbed in Thai. My eyes were covered for most of it, but I’m fairly certain nobody slept a wink.

One leisurely Wednesday afternoon, two of the Thai teachers in the English Department announced they were growing a “magic mushroom.” Apparently if you leave the tiny fungus in a yogurt mixture for over 24 hours, it will grow to be several times its original size, like one of those amazing sponge capsules I used to play with in the bathtub. If you eat it, you will supposedly become immune to any and all ailments known to modern medicine. Upon learning that in addition to its magical healing powers, tasting the disgustingly sour and curdled yogurt would make you more beautiful, a whirlwind of squealing, nose-plugging, face scrunching, and name calling (“You should eat it, you’re the ugliest!”) was unleashed in the office.

These same paragons of political correctness keel over with laughter when I answer the phone, because they know that every other Thai teacher in the school is afraid to talk to the farang. I wonder why my students didn’t laugh when I introduced the word “Xenophobia (n), fear of foreigners” during a game of Balderdash.

Every morning, I spend some time sipping tea and reading the Bangkok Post, a highly credible, sophisticated, completely unbiased, internationally recognized version of The Onion. In addition to following the recent plight of the Prime Minister and his botched business deal, I have enjoyed browsing such headlines as “Girl’s Spit Fetches Top Dollar,” “Naked Man Joins Monkeys,” Woman Hurt by Exploding Can of Fish,” and—placed strategically on the front page next to a tiny article detailing civil strife on the Malaysian border—“New Fern Named After Royal Baby.” The editors might be onto something here. How else would I ever come to know that someone has been stealing thousands of Euro from the Trevi Fountain, or that nine percent of Afghanistan’s population grows opium, or that as of last month I can email the Dalai Lama by going to his website at www.dalailama.com? The world really is getting smaller.

In other news, grammatically incorrect grammar tests have been known to make their way across my desk where they are (thankfully) intercepted before falling into the hands of unsuspecting students. A “final exam,” as we all know, is meant to represent all that’s infallible in this world; it is created by an individual whose past accomplishments might include writing things like encyclopedias and the nutrition facts on the sides of cereal boxes. You just don’t question the final exam. Here are two items taken (verbatim) from the last test I snatched out of circulation:

What's your girl-friend?"

1. 17 year of age.
2. Miss sumalee
3. Chinese
4. A murse

I can't do a good test to day because I've a _____ headache.

1. pounding
2. bitchy
3. stinking
4. lousy

And somehow in the end, it’s the students whose words seem all too poignant. In her final essay, one of my grade 10 students wrote, “As we grow up, we think we need more freedom to do anything we want or to go anywhere we wish, but remember your childhood—what a fantastic world it was, in the older days. A home gives you a rest and a deep happiness in your soul.” Perhaps putting yourself face to face with uncertainty, opening yourself up to new realities and whatever discomfort they may bring, takes you closer to that which you were certain of all along.