The capital of Thailand is Bangkok, but that’s not what Thais call the city. Bangkok was the original site of the capital more than two hundred years ago, but King Rama I decided to move the seat of power across the river to another place called Krung Thep. Today Krung Thep is what we mistakenly call Bangkok.
Actually, Krung Thep is the city’s shortened name. The real moniker is slightly longer. It’s Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Ayuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit, which translates into “The city of angels, the great city, the residence of the Emerald Buddha, the impregnable city of Ayutthaya, of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous royal palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarn.”
That’s a mouthful, so in English we call the place Bangkok. And it’s no city of angels. It might not be the most dreadful town I’ve been to, but it’s big and ugly and more than a little squalid. Ten million people are spread over the mud flats. Sluggish brown canals worm through Bangkok’s centre, their fetid water lapping against building stilts and supports. Every spare stretch of sidewalk is lined with street vendors’ carts, noodles simmering in oil, sun-darkened hands busy in endless toil.
In spite of everything, though, Thais are a friendly bunch. Smiles come easily, and the poverty isn’t quite as grinding as it is in other places. This is simply life in Asia — crowded, dusty, and noisy. Rusty bicycles clank down rutted streets, and songthaews — covered pickup trucks with bench seats — putter along with engines no more powerful than lawn mowers. The antique taxis spew black exhaust and bleat tinny horns every few metres.
The angels must wear earplugs.
I stayed at a little guest house near the river where the floors were polished and clean and girls cooked, cleaned, and played pranks. They’d sneak up with cups of water and pour them over one another’s heads, then squeal with laughter.
There’s a Thai word for this sort of nutty behaviour: sanook. All elements of life are suffused with it. Sanook roughly translates as “the fun factor.” Few enterprises are undertaken without first asking how much sanook will be involved, how much fun will that be? And if there won’t be fun, is it really worth doing?
Those are all good questions. Thailand, unlike the other nations of Southeast Asia, was never under the thumb of a foreign power, a fact that has given Thais a confidence that doesn’t exist among the citizens of its neighbours. Despite Thailand’s penchant for sponging up Western culture, everything here retains an essence of the Thai way of doing things.
There are exactly five first-person pronouns in English. Unfortunately, this is the kind of linguistic fact that bores most people, but bear with me. I have a point to make. The first-person pronouns are me, myself, and I, as well as two more, my and mine, the possessive first-person pronouns. Five. Count ’em. Exactly five.
In Thai there are seventeen of these pronouns. I won’t pretend to understand the deeper intricacies of the language, but apparently these pronouns vary according to who’s speaking, whom they’re speaking to, and the relationship between the two. What I’m getting at is that language marks, very carefully, the social situation in which it takes place. It describes the amount of respect given by the one who’s talking, and the degree of respect for the one being spoken to. It’s another way of defining territory, I suppose, or at least making clear who wields the most power. In linguistic circles that’s known as pragmatics. For my money that’s one of the most interesting and subtle fields in the whole science of human relations.
We tend to be a bit oblivious of social stratification in English because that language is one of the few tongues in the world that doesn’t directly mark it. Most Indo-European languages have familiar and formal pronouns. In French someone is addressed as tu or vous, depending on whether the situation is friendly or formal. English once had thou as opposed to you, but except in school studies of Elizabethan poetry, one doesn’t come across that distinction anymore. Sometime over the past four hundred years the familiar thou vanished and everyone in English became a little more equal — at least in everyday speech.
Don’t get cocky, though. English doesn’t entirely lack such quirky pragmatic structures. We tend to define our relationships in a more underhanded and sneaky manner. Take a simple sentence such as “Open the window.” In real life we would rarely say something so bluntly. “Open the window” sounds like a command. In fact, it is a command, and we would only use this direct form in, say, yelling at a particularly out-of-control child, as in “Go to your room.” By itself these forms are almost rude in their directness, so we soften them with a politeness marker: “Open the window, please.”
But that’s not really a whole lot better. What would really be heard in a true conversation is probably: “Would you mind opening the window?” or “Do you think you could open the window a smidgen?” Those sentences are already two levels of directness away from the simple request, “Open the window,” and that’s only the beginning of pragmatic complexity. A person could say, for example, “Do you find it hot in here?” which sounds suspiciously like a question. There’s no reference at all to a window or the opening of it, and yet to a native speaker of English (or a native speaker with some sensitivity), the meaning would be fairly clear: “Open the damn window.” That’s linguistic pragmatics at its finest.
So what does all that have to do with Thailand? Actually, quite a lot. Thai is at the extreme other end of the spectrum. The pragmatic structures in Thai are overtly marked. The seventeen first-person pronoun markers I mentioned earlier are all about defining, very exactly, the relationships between people.
In Thailand I’m a farang, a “foreigner.” It’s not a derogatory term. It’s just like calling the sky blue or water wet. That’s what I am — a pasty-faced foreigner. I’d left Bangkok behind and come down to Koh Samui in the Gulf of Siam. It’s one of a string of islands off the southeast coast of Thailand.
In 1981 an airport runway was laid down through the palm trees here, and the little island has never been the same. Tourism took off. I wasn’t at all surprised to see a McDonald’s. But Starbucks? And yet there it was two hundred metres from the beach. Step right up and get your half-caf soy macchiato. Weird.
Thailand is a country that’s never been occupied, except briefly by Japan in the Second World War, so its people don’t have a bad taste in their mouths about other cultures and ways of being. They seem to soak everything up and even delight in it.
Out in front of the Starbucks was an old man with a dark, weathered face. He’d been a fisherman, I guess, once upon a time. When he turned, though, I noticed that he had English printing on the front of his T-shirt: LAUGH WHILE YOU CAN, MONKEY BOY. I had no idea what that meant, but it became a sort of motto for the rest of my trip. It was sanook again — laughing like a Monkey Boy.
I was looking for something a little less touristy than Koh Samui. Thailand has a legendary farang beach culture. Remember the movie The Beach? Leonardo DiCaprio’s character sets off to find a beach untouched by commercialism — a hidden shore where a small community of travellers have set up camp, leaving the world behind. I wanted to discover something like that. Something pure. Something that matched the picture I had in my head of a perfect tropical paradise.
So I took a long-tailed boat, in a rather jaw-clenching passage, over the open ocean, up to the next island of Koh Phangan. People had told me Koh Phangan was what Koh Samui had been thirty years ago, but with one big difference. Koh Phagnan has become world-famous for its full moon party. Every month, a few days before a full moon, thousands of young backpackers descend on Haat Riin Beach, turning it into a madhouse.
Once upon a time the scene on Koh Phagnan was probably pretty cool — a big bonfire, some guitars, a lot of intoxicants under the starry dome — but now it was just crazy. The long white beach was transformed into a sea of bobbing human flesh. Ten thousand people raved all night long, spilling into the water under the greatest disco ball of them all — a tropical moon.
It was already dark when I arrived at Haat Riin by boat, though the moon had yet to rise above the hills. No matter. Coming into shore was like a scene out of Apocalypse Now. Strings of lights were draped across the buildings that fronted the beach, and already the music was thumping so hard that I could hear it far out to sea over the rolling waves.
The throngs were mostly the young über-cool from around the world, sporting uniforms of tattoos and coloured hair. They danced until daylight, roaming from bar to bar, buzzing on whatever they could find.
The Dutch couple I’d come over with got themselves revved up with diet pills and Red Bull. It sounded a bit dodgy to me, so I stuck with green-brown bottles of Singha beer. I lost the Dutch couple for a while but found them again later, faces laughing through the crowds until eventually everything became a tremendous blur of limbs, grins, and bass lines. Here and there girls whirled balls of fire on long strings. The fire drew looping lines though the darkness around them — an effect I’m sure the diet pills enhanced.
By the time the sky lightened, announcing morning, I was wet and tired and caked in sand. I’d had enough and made my way to the boats bobbing just out from shore. Soon I was skipping across the waves in the pink dawn, wishing only for a warm shower and a soft bed.
Way up on the northeast coast of Koh Phangan I found a terrific beach in a double bay called Thong Nai Pan. I rented a thatch hut on the sand for $6. A plate of pad thai, a full meal in itself, cost fifty cents. I figured that if I sold everything I had back home, I could live on the beach for another twenty or thirty years.
There was a neo-hippy air to the place. Cushions and low tables on bamboo platforms created little chilled-out cafés where, as in Amsterdam, you could get almost anything. One afternoon I glanced at my bare feet and realized I hadn’t seen my shoes for a couple of days. Later I found them outside a restaurant where I’d left them several days earlier.
On one of my last days in Thailand I was walking on a distant stretch of beach, completely by myself, when I heard a crash in the nearby foliage. Right in front of me an elephant lumbered out of the palms, thundered onto the beach, and waded almost delicately into the surf. When the beast was about knee-high in the surf, it knelt and wallowed in the water.
Then a man, the elephant’s handler as it turned out, came out of the trees. He stood beside me and watched the magnificent grey colossus gambol in the water. The handler had a long barbed stick to steer elephants. The hook would snag the beasts’ ears and turn them in the desired direction. I figured the elephant frolicking in the sea was employed to move the trees cleared for more hut enclosures. Still, as I drank in the spectacle before me, I realized how strange and surprising this world was — as unpredictable as a giggling Thai girl dumping cold water on a smug foreign head, or an elephant thumping out of the bush to take a bath.
The pilot’s voice crackled over the intercom. “If you look out the left side windows, you’ll see Gunung Agung.” He paused for a moment, then added, “Boy, I never get tired of that.”
I peered across the aisle. Framed in the airplane window was the largest volcano I’d ever seen. I had left Thailand, flying south, and was now somewhere over Indonesia, a chain of ancient volcanic islands. The most famous Indonesian volcano is Krakatoa between Java and Sumatra. It blew apart in 1883, causing the Earth’s weather patterns to change for several years.
Gunung Agung was on the next island over. It shone in the morning sun, standing head and shoulders above the intricately terraced rice paddies of the incredible little island of Bali. “I fly over this all the time,” the pilot continued. “But I never get used to it. Look at that. It’s beautiful.”
And it was.
Our plane touched down at Denpassar Airport in the south of Bali. We were mobbed by touts as soon as we got out of the terminal. Most of them wanted to take us to Kuta Beach. That was where most of the tourists went; the place was a sprawl of partying Australians, drinking and surfing and then drinking some more.
I’d had enough of beach life at the Full Moon Party in Thailand. To me Kuta isn’t what Bali is all about. If you get beyond the ravages of tourism, Bali is a tiny jewel and houses one of the world’s most remarkable cultures. So I managed to ward off the insistent young men tugging at my sleeves and boarded a minivan inland to Ubud, the centre of cultural life on the island and home to artists, dancers, and woodcarvers working at the very peak of human inventiveness.
Most of Ubud gathers around a central street. At the top of it is the highway leading south or north, while at the bottom is the Monkey Forest Sanctuary. There’s not really much of a forest left, but there certainly are monkeys — nasty brutes that snap at your fingers. A roadside stand outside the sanctuary sells bananas to feed the simian brigands.
I saw one girl hide a few bananas under her shirt, thinking the monkeys wouldn’t notice. She figured she could hand them out gradually. Big mistake. They were all over her. My method was to chuck all the bananas I had and take a quick step back. It was like witnessing a shark feeding, or mauling. The greedy little creatures stole from one another, bared their fangs, and exhibited the most appalling manners.
A little deeper into the sanctuary is the first of three Hindu temples. Out in front are statues of lions and wild boars. Ganesh, the elephant-headed Hindu god, is there, too, as well as unfamiliar dog-faced demons and fat little gods. Around each of the midsections of these stone gods the villagers have draped black-and-white-checkered cloths representing the duality of good and evil. Red hibiscus flowers are tucked behind their stone ears, and offerings are placed in front of them: fruit and more flowers generally, but sometimes, inexplicably, full bottles of Coca-Cola or Sprite. Thirsty business, this being a god.
Of course, the monkeys clamber all over the temples. We watched as one smart little thing bashed a coconut on the stone walls in a vain attempt to get it opened. Beside the temple, workers were mending a fence, and one of them had to halt work frequently and yell at the monkeys. He had parked his bicycle beside the trees, and the monkeys, one in particular, kept climbing up to chew on his bicycle seat, taking great chunks out with relish, chewing the foam, and running off when the poor man desperately attempted to stop him.
Where, I thought, was the god of bicycle seats and why couldn’t he fight off these almost human-faced little devils?
Indonesia is one of the great land bridges of the world. More than seventeen thousand islands are strung like a necklace in the sapphire waters on either side of the equator between Malaysia and Papua New Guinea. When Krakatoa exploded, an intense interest was focused on Indonesia and something quite unexpected was discovered. An ancient skull cap was unearthed on nearby Java in 1891. Tests showed it to be seven hundred thousand years old, and it captivated the scientific world. Was this the missing link? The flat plate of bone (and a femur that turned up later) is still hotly debated in the anthropological community. Creationists cry out that it’s only the skull of a gibbon, though most serious scientists have now classified the remains in the rather nebulous category of Homo erectus. This was a stage that preceded us — Homo sapiens — so it seems “people” have been wandering across the Indonesian archipelago for a very long time, since we first stood on our own feet.
The indigenous people of Australia are believed by many to have migrated to their current location about seventy thousand years ago when the water levels of the world’s oceans were lower and they followed game across a land bridge connecting New Guinea and Australia. Still later, Indonesia was likely the launching pad of Polynesians sailing into the vast stretches of the Pacific Ocean.
The Indonesian archipelago has always been a great crossroads, a bridge across worlds, and Bali sits in the middle of everything. The earliest writing in Bali is carved into a stone pillar near the village of Sanur on the east coast. It’s Sanskrit and dates to the ninth century A.D. The pillar was left by traders from India making their way across the islands, and it must have been these first merchants from the subcontinent who brought the first glimmers of Hinduism, a religion that took root a thousand years ago to form a great Hindu empire known as the Majappahit Kingdom.
Eventually, however, a tidal wave of Islam swept into Indonesia from Malaysia. The Hindu dynasty faltered, and the last Majappahit king, with an entourage of scholars, artists, and intelligentsia, quietly slipped away to little Bali. There they set up the odd mix of religion and customs that is Balinese Hinduism. Agama Hine Dharma, as it’s properly known, focuses primarily on balancing the good and evil spirits of the world. It’s a tremendously complex system that addresses itself especially to the calendars and rituals involved in the planting and harvesting of rice.
Rice cultivation is crucial to the Balinese way of life and has shaped the island both geographically and socially. Where it was once thick jungle, the quintessential Balinese landscape is now terraced with rice paddies. Each community has a subak or rice-growing organization that manages work, allocates the use of water, and plans irrigation schedules. What’s more is that all these schedules are arranged around a highly developed set of rituals based on the whims and acts of Hindu gods and goddesses.
Everything is calculated from the various transportation systems of these deities (some fly on birds, others hitchhike on snakes) to their emotional colours and even to their associated compass directions. It’s tremendously elaborate, obtuse even, and it’s just the sort of menial job for which humans, always fiddling with numbers and schedules, are perfectly suited to undertake.
I suppose that here I could come up with another bizarre linguistic fact, such as that the Balinese have one hundred and twenty different words for rice. That sounds plausible. In truth, though, it’s blatantly false.
I have a problem with this idea of counting words. It’s said that Arabic has five hundred words for sand, and of course everyone knows the story about the Inuit and their many words for snow. That’s all wrong, of course. And even if a particular language has an overabundance of words for a specific thing, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. In English there are a considerable number of words to describe the properties of light, far more than other languages. We have shine, sparkle, and twinkle. We have unbelievably subtle distinctions such as glimmer and glitter but, really, it doesn’t mean we see light better than other people. It doesn’t mean we’re the world’s authorities on the properties of light.
So, no, the Balinese don’t have an especially large number of words for rice (and I doubt they have a word for snow at all). Practically speaking, there are only three categories referring to rice: padi, from which English gets the term paddy, as in rice (though the word here actually only refers to a growing rice plant); nasi, which is cooked rice; and beras, which refers to the harvested but not yet cooked rice.
The real story of language is, as always, far more interesting. In Bali the people actually have a number of completely different languages to talk about rice. Remember that stuff about Thai pronouns and English indirectness? Well, that’s peanuts compared to what goes on in Bali.
We’re into the territory of pragmatics again, and the languages of Indonesia contain some of the most interesting structures I’ve ever come across. In Bali there are five almost completely different forms of the language, depending on who’s speaking to whom and what the given situation is. To provide a simple example: on Java, the next island over, they speak in two forms:
High Javanese: Menapa pandjenengan badé dahar sekul kalijan kaspé samenika?
Low Javanese: Apa kowé arep mangan sega lan kaspé saiki?
Both of the above sentences mean: “Are you going to eat rice and cassava now?” Notice that the only word identical in both sentences is the one for cassava (kaspé). Everything else is so different that they could almost be considered separate languages. Imagine if you had to speak English to your social inferiors (say, children and maybe lawyers) and French to your superiors (such as your boss). That’s something like the linguistic situation on Java. Now imagine if you had to speak English to children, French to your boss, Spanish to your friends at work, Italian to your neighbours, and Portuguese to strangers. That describes the social and linguistic situation on Bali.
So saying that the Balinese have umpteen dozen words for rice really misses the point. It’s not the rice they’re naming. They’re indicating the relationships between themselves. They’re identifying one another.
One hot tropical evening, with the thin slice of a crescent moon hanging inexplicably upside down in the sky, I travelled to the outskirts of town to see the famous legong dance. In Bali, dance is an incredibly sacred affair. A combination of movement and storytelling, it’s an infinitely subtle and refined orchestra of gestures seen nowhere else on the planet.
The central dancers in legong are two girls, usually no more than eight years old. The girls start training for the dance as soon as their feet touch the ground, literally, and the stretched fingers and darting eyes, the strange cock of the head, and delicate side steps are a choreography handed down through the centuries. Even at eight years of age, these girls are masters and a joy to watch.
The story of the dance derives from a Javanese tale dating to the twelfth century. On a journey a king finds a maiden lost in the forest. He takes her and locks her into a prison. When the maiden’s brother, a prince in his own right, learns of this, he threatens war. The king is warned by a bird — a black raven — that this fight will end in his death. Foolishly, he pursues the war and is indeed killed. The maiden, in her captivity, holds two fans, and it’s these fans, come to life, that are the legong. Magically, the young girls appear and dance, dressed in gold brocade to symbolize the fans. Without question they’re the stars of the show.
Underscoring the intricate dance is the gamelan orchestra, which uses a series of instruments that look like upturned metal pots. The instruments are struck with tiny mallets so that gamelan music plinks and plonks quite delicately, reminding one of the sounds of a child’s toy piano. However, the plunking is steady and hypnotic and becomes almost trance-like. Four or five men sit on one side, with the omnipresent checkered cloths about their midsections, playing wooden flutes, while a single drummer stands behind them. On the other side of the stage are the gamelan players proper, seven or eight men with an assortment of different-sized pots clustered about, all within reach of their tiny dulcimer hammers.
Spellbound, I listened and watched. This was no Kodak moment, carefully crafted for the entertainment of tourists. The story really did unfold like a fan and was sheer magic.
The next day the sun dangled directly overhead so that there were no shadows anywhere. It sat on my head and shoulders, heavily, tangibly, like the meaty hand of a belligerent god. On a fence in front of me was a poster. CREMATION TODAY, it read. TOURISTS WELCOME.
It seemed strange that someone would put up posters to announce such an event, expressly inviting tourists, and for a moment I suspected a catch, a scam, one more way of separating the naive traveller from his sweaty dollars. But then I didn’t know Bali.
I really did want to see what happened at a cremation, though, so I went to the designated meeting place where they squeezed eight or nine of us into a minivan. I had no idea where we were going, and after an hour or so of driving, we were delivered to a village lane and the bus sped off. This was to be the first of many confused moments. Carefully crafted confusion, I might add.
We knew we were in the right place because lying in the dust was one of the large papier mâché statues used to transport bodies to the cremation site. It formed a pretty good semblance of a lion, and I found out later that this was the animal representing the caste of the deceased.
To get out of the sun we walked up the street to a pavilion that had been set up. In the pavilion were more gamelan players. The musical pots and pans were attached to large wooden frames so the musicians could carry everything and play as they marched. Soon we were all marching. As the procession started, we galloped ahead to snap photos. In front of the procession trundled a truck with a large water tank. A man stood in the rear of the truck with a high-pressure hose and swept it back and forth over the dusty road. Sometimes he aimed it up to shower water over the mourners. Far from being insulted, they good-naturedly smiled and laughed at the shower.
The native marchers couldn’t really be called mourners. The entire village seemed to have come out — several hundred people, most of them dressed in black, and they weren’t acting that mournful. In fact, they giggled openly, sang, and even danced. This was a scene of real celebration distinctly in opposition to our sombre Western funerals.
In fairness to Westerners and to human empathy in general, the bodies to be cremated in this ceremony aren’t recently deceased. It’s the custom in Bali to bury corpses immediately following death so that the earth will clean the bones, which means only the bones are actually cremated. There’s also a practical aspect to the ritual, since the passage of time after burial allows the family of the deceased to save up for the cremation ceremony. The entire village is invited to these extravaganzas so that they cost a pretty penny to put together. For that reason, too, several people are often cremated at once in a sort of funeral by bulk. A prestigious day is divined and only then do the old bones rise from the earth. They’re wrapped in white shrouds, gingerly, and placed on a bier usually shaped into the animal that represents their caste.
On the day we went, the villagers sang and chanted, with three papier mâché towers, like parade floats, tottering above them, shouldered into the air by dozens of men. Every few metres the villagers would stop and turn the giant statues, spinning them awkwardly three times before continuing the procession.
As I mentioned earlier, the ritual is all about confusion. The Balinese Hindu belief is that a spirit separated from its body by death will be confused and will desperately try to cling to what it’s known for a lifetime. It will try to return to its body so it can stay in the village, which means it has to be coaxed away, fooled a little bit. The loud noise, the jingling and clanking, the singing and dancing, are all done to confuse the lonely spirit.
The spirit is literally spun around, mixing it up further so that it can’t find its way back. Lastly, the mourners dress in black so the spirit can’t see them. The idea is that it won’t recognize anyone and will be forced to conclude that it must go elsewhere. The day I attended the ritual the locals, of course, were dressed in black. We tourists, I later found out, were invited on purpose. Like all good tourists everywhere, we wore an assortment of badly fitting colourful hats and an unflattering rainbow of shorts. What we didn’t wear was black, especially in the tropical heat. So the first people the spirits saw were us. No doubt that scared them immensely.
The cremation ceremony is quite brilliant. Bali is a place that has soaked in the sauces of many different cultures. From each it’s taken a little something. At a performance of another sacred dance I watched a scene unfold in which the god Rama was surrounded by hideous demons. They bubbled around him and spoke in distinct English. That was a poke at us — a highly traditional dance with white-faced demons from the wicked West.
From birth to death and everything in between the Balinese have an approach to life that’s radically different from that in the West. The culture is rich and the language is almost insurmountably difficult. It has an internal sense, though, largely based on the old Hindu caste system.
The indigenous language of Bali, as a whole, is called Bahasa Bali. As I said, it marks social structure exactly, so much so that, depending on who’s talking (and who is being talked to), any one of five completely different forms might be employed. Each has its own vocabulary, and to some degree its own grammar. According to the particular caste of the speaker and specific caste of the individual being spoken to, up to five completely different sentences might be uttered — all meaning the same thing.
This is linguistic pragmatics gone ballistic. Initially, two Balinese strangers, not knowing the other’s caste, start a conversation in what’s called Basa Alus, the high language. Basa Alus came directly from the Hindu-Javanese court languages of the tenth century. It was the language of the original Majappahit Kingdom, the tongue of the scholars and artists who arrived on Bali with the exiled royal court of Java.
At some point in our hypothetical conversation the caste level of one speaker would be asked (or surmised) and the levels would be adjusted accordingly. The Balinese language uses very few greetings or politeness markers otherwise. There are no equivalents for please or thank you, for example, nor is there anything that translates into “good morning” or “good evening.” All these things are marked in the form that’s used.
A second form is called Basa Lumrah and is applied when talking to people of the same caste, and between family and friends. A third is called Basa Sor and is employed when speaking to people of a lower caste or to people who are non-caste. Basa Madia is a fourth form and is a polite language utilized for conversing with strangers or with people to whom one wishes to show respect.
Basa Singgih, the fifth form, is the most distinct of all. Its grammar and vocabulary are completely unlike the others. t’s used to address persons of high caste, usually in formal and religious contexts. Even the Balinese aren’t always fluent in this language. Written Basa Singgih, oddly enough, is the language seen on the signs of welcome and farewell found in most Balinese villages.
Between the five forms there are separate vocabularies that encompass about a thousand basic words. Most of these relate to descriptions of people and their actions. More recently, the five forms have become blended and simplified so that it’s now common to speak of three forms: a low or informal Balinese (essentially Basa Lumrah), a polite Balinese (mostly Basa Madia), and a high Balinese (a mixture of Basa Alus and Basa Singgih).
For example, nggih or sometimes saja. In polite Balinese yes would be inggih or patut, and in high Balinese yes could only be patut. On the other hand, the word for no in low Balinese is sing or tuara, while in polite Balinese it’s tan and in high Balinese it’s nenten or tan wenten. Bewildering, isn’t it?
Languages are relative things. They describe a particular manner of existence in the world, a way of being that’s somehow different from that of the speaker of a different language. The Balinese languages are a good example of that. It’s almost impossible for us to untangle the complexities involved in their social stratification. It’s enough perhaps to understand how very different the whole system is from English. But, and here’s the crux of the matter, the truth is that it’s merely a different set of rules, a different game, for getting at much the same things done with English.
Actually, English takes as many different forms as Balinese does. There is, for starters, no single language that can unequivocally be called Standard English. We speak in a variety of ways, and like the Balinese, what we say is largely a product of the social situations we find ourselves in.
There are, of course, many different accents and grammars in English, each quite accurately marking our social and geographical status. For instance, there’s the Cockney English of a character like Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (here, even the name is telling) who speaks like this: “I ain’t done nothing wrong. I’m a good girl, I am, and I won’t pick up no free and easy ways.” Such speech is replete with double negatives, archaic contractions, and slang that locates her specifically to the poorest neighbourhoods of London at the end of the nineteenth century. Contrast that with the proper Oxford English of Professor Henry Higgins or, for that matter, the queen of England. And yes, all these accents and dialects are most certainly English.
We have Irish and Scottish and idiolects such as those found in African-American hip hop lyrics. We have the baffling jargon of legalese (its sole purpose is to baffle, one might say) and the Latin-based vocabularies of medicine and science. We have the slang of teenagers and the soliloquies of Hamlet.
But all of the above are grandly, profoundly English.
Even a single individual, in the course of a normal day, speaks in a number of completely different forms. Think about it. Among friends we might well swear more freely, especially over a beer or two, watching, say, a hockey game. But at work, or in a job interview, or meeting in-laws for the first time, we speak quite differently, since we’re acutely aware of the different contexts and change our language accordingly.
All peoples, in every language, adjust their words to the social situations at hand. The Balinese system is almost absurdly overt about it, while English marks things more subtly, but everything comes down to much the same thing. We have different systems, sometimes unimaginably dissimilar, but we’re all aware of the social context and how much obsequiousness or straightforwardness is needed. That’s a fundamental component of our communication with one another, and many of our mistakes — our miscommunications — in understanding people from different language backgrounds can often be traced to a difference in how the relationship between the speakers is marked.
Sometimes whole oceans of misunderstanding lie between people. Sometimes words do fail us. I flew home by way of Osaka, Japan. Actually, we touched down there for a couple of hours. I was continuing on, flying into the broad Pacific, but even as we were descending over the great inland sea called Seto Naikai, something about the date tweaked my memory.
It was August 6, and it didn’t take me long to remember that this was the exact date, back in 1945, that a plane ducked out of the clouds, just as we were now doing, not too far from where we were, to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Everyone knows the story, but few are aware of what happened in the days leading up to the bombing. It’s actually one of my favourite linguistic stories, a case study in pragmatics and an excellent example of miscommunication.
On July 26, 1945, a final ultimatum was issued to the Japanese prime minister. It was called the Potsdam Declaration, and it came from the Chinese provisional government, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain, and President Harry S. Truman of the United States.
Truman, desperate with the moral consequences of unleashing the terrible weapon now available to him, offered a last way out to the unsuspecting Japanese. I can imagine him well. He wasn’t the sort of politician we have today. Harry was a simple farmer and had worked on the railways in younger days, even sleeping in hobo camps — a true man of the people. I can picture him wracked with guilt, sitting slouched at the big desk in the Oval Office, head lowered with the crushing weight of what might soon happen.
So, knowing what the others didn’t, he spent a little longer on the paragraphs intended for the Japanese prime minister. “The might that now converges on Japan is immeasurably greater than that which [was] applied to the Nazis,” he wrote. “The full application of our military power, backed by our resolve, all mean the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and, just as inevitably, the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.”
Of course, Truman couldn’t tell the Japanese exactly what was going to happen. The atomic bomb and the Manhattan Project were still carefully guarded secrets and would be for another ten days, but he meant precisely what he said about “utter devastation.” He wasn’t mincing words, and he fervently hoped his message would be taken to heart.
I guess the U.S. president didn’t really expect a reply, but it’s in the reply that the story gets interesting. On Saturday, July 28, Prime Minister Suzuki agreed to hold a press conference at four o’clock at which time he would answer the Allied declaration. To the all-important expected question “What will you do?” Suzuki replied suddenly and simply, “Mokusatsu.”
Mokusatsu is an intriguing word. Moku means “silence,” whereas the word satsu means “to kill.” The literal interpretation then is “to kill with silence.” As with many words, however, there are different shades of meaning. Mokusatsu, under some circumstances, can refer to the withholding of opinion. We can understand it in the context of the way in which politicians often respond by saying “No comment.” It’s a sort of ducking of the question, maybe leaving it for later, perhaps hoping the whole issue will go away. Or, a little more aggressively, mokusatsu can signify a conspicuous ignoring of something, as perhaps one might disregard a troublesome uncle who’s had too much to drink at a wedding. Of course, in extreme cases the word can be translated as a “fuck-you” silence.
However, the silence of a “No comment” and the silence of a “Fuck you” are quite different, and Truman’s translators had a real job on their hands. As it turned out, the translation was as predictable as it was tragic. Truman remembered it like this: “They gave us a very snotty answer. They told me to go to hell, words to that effect.”
Nine days later the United States obliterated Hiroshima and sixty-four thousand innocent souls. The silence kept up for another day and then Nagasaki, too, was annihilated.
So here’s the point: what did the Japanese prime minister really mean? To the end of his life in 1948, Suzuki refused to say. Saving face is incredibly important in Japanese culture, and who’s kidding anyone — it’s important in every culture. If Suzuki had truly meant for the Americans to wait a few days, if he had meant to say he needed more time to answer the proposal fully, then apparently he hadn’t made himself clear and the bombing could be seen as the result of his ineptitude.
On the other hand, if he had truly meant to tell the Americans to go to hell, then by doing so he brought hell itself down on two of his cities. In either case he would have lost face for his decision. So perhaps it was best to say nothing.
Sometimes words carry the weight of a bomb.