“YAW NAME EEZ?” A GIRL SAID. SHE WAS DRESSED IN A WHITE SHORT-SLEEVED shirt, blue skirt, and matching blue tie. Her eyes were wide with hope and she smiled like an adoring fan. Behind her, a dozen other Thai schoolgirls in matching uniforms looked on, too shy to approach, equally excited to hear the answer.
Jackson smiled back. “My name is Jackson,” she said.
The girl’s smile broadened and she took Jack’s hand, pressing the back of it softly to her cheek. “You ah so bee-you-tee-fall,” she said. “I love Jacksun.”
I’m sure Selena Gomez gets this all the time, but it was a new experience for our little girl and one she had to get used to. Who knew living in rural Thailand meant instant celebrity status for both of our kids? It certainly was a far cry from the danger and violence we’d been expecting when our plane landed in Bangkok a few days before.
Bangkok is the capital of Thailand and a city of more than eight million people. As the most visited city in Asia, it has a reputation as an all-night party town, but none of its celebrated revelry was on display as we arrived. A citywide curfew was still in effect. And since our Thai driver did not speak or play the radio for the entire forty-minute trip into town, it felt as if we were being smuggled in rather than visiting.
After an uneventful drive down an empty freeway, we were dropped at the equally empty Suda Palace Hotel, where hundreds of large, blazing lightbulbs on the building’s façade looked out of place, as if the management hadn’t received the “under siege” memo. The night air was still and stifling, eerily quiet. And when we were shown to our room at the end of a deserted hallway, we immediately locked the door. By unanimous vote, rather than take any risks, we all went to sleep without dinner.
The next morning, to counteract the stress of the previous few days, we each got a Thai massage. It was offered in our hotel by blind male masseurs, and for five dollars a person, it was hard to pass up—though it did prove to be the very opposite of relaxing. Jackson and I went into the massage parlor together, lying side by side on parallel beds. The two blind Thai men who were assigned to us looked like twins; both were middle-aged, dressed in what looked like pale blue surgical scrubs, sporting the same bowl cut hairstyle and matching blue-tinted sunglasses. As they felt their way from limb to limb, often “looking” at the ceiling while they worked, their fingers were like iron rods, digging for pockets of tension as if trying to extract a confession. We never did scream out loud, but Jack and I shared plenty of silent laughing and facial expressions of pure mock agony throughout our hour-long sessions.
Twelve noon saw us running a little late, trying to catch a one o’clock bus to Chaiyaphum (pronounced chai-ya-POOM), a small urban center five hours northeast of Bangkok. From our hotel, we hired a couple of tuk-tuks (three-wheeled taxis) and set off into the bustling traffic of the capital city. With the curfew lifted, the streets were now a logjam of cars, rickshaws, trucks, and bicycles … but no tanks and no Red Shirts. Without incident, we arrived at our first real obstacle: Mo Chit bus station.
Mo Chit is not laid out like any bus station I’ve ever seen. While endless buses idle around the perimeter, the main building has multiple floors of small ticket windows, hundreds of individual clerks selling a myriad of different bus lines, all with routes advertised in utterly incomprehensible Thai. To say the Thai written alphabet is different from its English equivalent is like saying peacocks are different from toads. Thai letters are ornate and cryptic, like abstract calligraphy, every character sporting a fancy curlicue as if showing off for the king. To make this lettering even more confusing to Western visitors, Thais use fifteen vowel symbols that are placed above, below, to the right, or to the left of any of the forty-four basic consonants. In other words, reading was not an option.
As I stood on the first floor wondering where or how to begin, a group of four Thai boys approached me. They were maybe ten years old, dressed nicely, unchaperoned as far as I could see. “What your name?” the boldest boy barked at me. “My name Baa,” he said before I could answer.
“Hello, Baa,” I answered, and all the boys laughed.
“Baaaa,” they all repeated like a paddock of sheep.
“Baaaa,” I echoed, and everyone laughed twice as hard. Now, I’m a pretty good mimic, so I tried again while the sound was still fresh in my mind. “Baa?” I asked.
I had them rolling in the aisles with that one, huge laughs and big smiles all the way around. “No,” the bold boy said when the hilarity had passed. “Iss Baa. Not Baa!” Then they all scrambled away from an approaching security guard, laughing louder and louder as they ran.
Mercifully, there were a few English-speaking bus reps wandering around Mochit—which spared me the indignity of mispronouncing the word “Chaiyaphum” to all four hundred agents—and we made our bus on time. Five hours later, we reached our destination, where no fewer than twelve people were waiting for us, including the director of the school we were headed to. His name was Mr. Mongkut and he was a serious man, in his mid-fifties, stout with short hair, wearing a crisp white uniform. He stood at the end of a long receiving line and shook our hands with great solemnity, as if greeting us at a funeral.
“You come now,” he ordered, pointing toward a waiting white van, and we followed obediently. I thought we were going to spend the night in Chaiyaphum. At least that’s what our contact at Volunthai had told us. New teachers usually get one full day of teacher training before heading off to their assignments. But for reasons that were never fully explained, Mr. Mongkut wanted us to go immediately to his village and teach the next morning. (Clearly, he was eager to obtain—and vastly overestimating—our English teaching skills.)
In the van, our driver was a polite thirty-year-old man named Lek who spoke limited English but was constantly smiling. Beside him, a hip eighteen-year-old girl named Ban acted as our translator, when she wasn’t texting on her smartphone. “You need make stop?” Ban asked before we pulled out into traffic.
“Actually, yes,” I said, remembering. “We need to get some clothes.”
In Thai culture, appearance is everything. How nicely you dress will determine how much respect you are given. Thais like you to be clean, well dressed, and full of easy humor. Meet these three requirements and you will be loved to bits. After nearly three months on the road, however, our clothes were far from clean and hardly what you’d call nice. So we pulled in to a Chaiyaphum department store for a little shopping and our first real dose of regular Thai life.
A few things stood out right away. For one, most items were very inexpensive. At thirty-one Thai baht to the American dollar, even the nicest clothes cost less than five bucks. For another, there was not a single pair of shoes in the shoe department that was ever going to fit on my huge American feet; even the largest size was five sizes too small. But the thing that stood out the most, beyond small shoes and cheap clothes, was … us. In the bustling store full of people, we were the only Western faces, and all eyes followed us. One little boy simply could not contain himself when he saw me.
“Falong! Falong!” he shouted. His face was surprised and excited. He jumped up and down, laughing and screaming, pointing his finger at me. “Falong! Falong!”
(To be technically accurate, the word the boy was shouting was farang, but I’ll be writing it the way it was pronounced. After hearing it so many times, it’s hard for me to think of it any other way.)
“What’s he saying?” I asked our translator, Ban, who was beside me on her cell phone.
“No problem,” Ban said. “Means ‘foreigner.’ ”
“Falong!” the boy screamed at the top of his voice. Then he hugged my legs and ran beside me, clapping his hands, utterly blown away by the fact that I was there at all. “Falong! Falong! Falong!” he blared like a siren.
Ban smiled. “We no get much visitor,” she explained.
Eventually we made our purchases, hopped back in the van, and set off for Nong Kha, a tiny village in the countryside about one hour north of Chaiyaphum. A local family had agreed to host us for the next month, and the homestay house we were taken to looked promising. It had two stories with lots of room, just off the main road behind a sturdy metal fence. After greeting our homestay family, we were given the entire second floor with two large separate rooms—kids in one, adults in the other—and an open-air porch overlooking a rustic chicken house, green rice fields, and distant mountains. Each room had powerful fans to blow away the oppressive heat and new micro-screens in the windows to keep out the oppressive bugs. Beds were comfortable. Our first home-cooked meal of pad thai was delicious.
Our new housemother was a powerful fifty-year-old woman named Fang. Fang was a teacher at the school we were headed to, and she took in boarders from time to time to supplement her income. She was a serious woman, always dressed and made up as if going to the office, even on her days off, even in the stifling heat. She shared the house with her first-grade granddaughter and her bedridden husband, both high-maintenance members of the family. As a result, Fang was a blur of activity, completing an endless daily To Do list that now included “Feed hungry Americans.”
“You like meat?” Fang asked as we were getting ready for bed on our first night.
Traca, being both a strict vegetarian and a polite houseguest, tried not to be difficult. “Don’t go to any trouble,” she said.
“Okay. Chicken?” Fang pressed. “And fish? No problem.”
The next morning, after a good night’s sleep and a breakfast of chicken and fish (along with fresh vegetables and fruit, which Traca ate), we put on our new clothes and walked a quarter of a mile to the Nong Kha School. When we stepped into the courtyard, we found many students cleaning the grounds, sweeping, picking up trash … but as soon as they noticed us, they all stopped whatever they were doing to wai us. A wai is a Thai greeting: palms together, hands below the chin, bowing slightly, huge smile on face.
“Good mawning, tee-chas,” they all said. Girls giggled. Everyone looked happy.
After checking in at the office, we were whisked back outside for the morning assembly. I was hoping to ask the staff a few questions, maybe get some language games or basic English teaching tips to start with, but everything happened too fast. In no time, first period was starting and Traca and Logan were led away to teach Patom Three: third grade.
“Where should we go?” I asked Por, our handler at the school. Por was maybe thirty, neat and smiling, not a wrinkle on her crisp militarystyle uniform.
“No room now. You teach hee-a,” Por said, pointing to an empty cement volleyball court. “Iss easy, yes? You go.” Then she left us with twenty-five students, sitting on the ground, no chalkboard, no supplies, no nothing.
It was hot, nearly one hundred degrees, and I was already sweating through my new button-down shirt.
“What do we do?” Jackson whispered.
I had no idea. I looked out at the eager sixth graders, then back at Jack. She just shook her head and pointed at me as if to say: This one’s all yours.
“Okay,” I said. “Hello.”
“Good mawning, tee-cha,” the students all said in unison. Clearly, they had done this before.
“My. Name. Is. John,” I said, enunciating each word. Then I pointed to Jackson.
“My name is Jackson,” she said, playing along.
We were twelve seconds in.
“What. Is. Your. Name?” I asked the group, pointing to the first student in the semicircle.
“My name iss Pee-ta,” Peter said.
“Hello. Peter,” I said, relieved to be communicating even in this small way. I had no Thai to fall back on or translator to turn to. It was English or nothing. I pointed to the next student.
“My name is Chimlin. Nickname Jim,” a cute little girl said.
“Hello. Jim,” I said. I had twenty-three to go. “And. What. Is. Your. Name?” I asked the next girl in line.
“Name is Baa,” the girl said.
“Hello, Baa,” I said, and everyone broke out laughing.
What we learned in that first hour-long class was that the students already knew every word and every possible thing an untrained English teacher might instinctively try to teach them. They knew the alphabet. They knew the ABC song. They knew the days of the week, months of the year, body parts, colors, things outside: house, sky, tree, rock, grass. Then I opened my backpack and asked them to identify every item I pulled out: pen, paper, passport, pencil, book, you name it. After this, I started drawing pictures in a notebook and discovered they also knew every animal I could think of, every fruit, every object.
“What. Is. This?” I asked, sketching quickly.
“Iss spoon,” they all said in unison.
“Yes. And. What. Is. This?” I asked, more sketching.
“Is faurk,” they said.
Jack chimed in when I floundered, and together we made it. When the period mercifully ended, the students stood up happily. “Sank you, tee-cha!” they all said, smiling, wai-ing. Then Jackson and I retired—like soldiers in retreat—to the tee-chas’ lounge to regroup.
Things got a little easier after that. Our next class was taught in an actual classroom with books to read from and props to hold up. We weren’t the Berlitz family, but we got better all the time. And no matter what we did, the students seemed beyond thrilled just to have us in the room. They especially loved Logan and Jackson.
Without exaggeration, our kids were treated more like visiting pop stars than untrained volunteers. Jackson often posed for pictures after class and signed autographs for her adoring fans, while Logan had a teen idol effect on the young Thai ladies. They shrieked when he looked at them, screamed “I love you!” when he passed by. One girl was so nervous around him, she peered over a sheet of paper the entire class, afraid of what direct face-to-face contact might do to her. It was crazy.
But it did make one thing very clear: The fear we had felt before arriving in Thailand was long gone. Our new village was peaceful; the villagers were kind. Near as I could tell, the greatest risk we were facing would not come from angry protesters. But if it was possible to be killed by adoration, the kids needed to be very careful.