Classic!

Two weeks ago, Giggs informed me that she was going to Bangkok the following week to take an English scholarship exam. "In English?!," was my first response because it seemed utterly impossible that she had signed up for an English exam and informed me of its existence one week before its scheduled date. She kept saying that it was "no big deal" and wouldn't be difficult and that it was just practice (all reassuring things to here if only for purely selfish reasons, namely I didn't want to be fired from my teaching gig because I failed to adequately prepare my student for an exam I didn't know about). And then she came back from Bangkok, having taken the exam, and her reaction to it can best be summed up from the text message I received upon her return: "Now I am home! The exam was very difficult T__T (which is the Thai equivalent of the American :( emoticon)."
So for the past week we have shifted the subject of our lessons from general conversation/pronounciation activities to vocabulary drills from her TOEFL Vocabulary Practice Test book (whose validity is questionable at best). The exercises range from the "find the best definition of this word" to the "substitute a synonym for underlined word" variety. The sentences' subjects are mostly random and their difficulty for a non-English speaker is undoubtedly exacerbated by their arcane subject matter (17th century city planning, various types of "aromatic, medicinal Asiatic herbs"). Some of them are also worded in very non-eloquent English. Take, for example, "The practice of lynching was started by a man who was a most law-abiding citizen." Some of the sentences are also just wrong. A sentence describing a "sprawling metropolis" had "C. straggling" as its correct answer.
One of the sentences we recently went over was about Louis L'Amour, a 20th century writer of Western novels. The sentence read, "Although Louis L'Amour wrote a multitude of fictional narratives concerned with the lives of the American Frontier, his works are not considered classics." The correct synonym for "classics" was "masterpieces." This sentence then sparked a discussion about what a "classic" is and what a "masterpiece" is. (Side note: way for the TOEFL practice people to choose someone who no one would ever free associate the words "classic" or "masterpiece.") I started listing a few examples of the most widely known classics in the literary world (Shakespeare) and the musical world (Beethoven, Mozart) and then went onto Andy Warhol and Picasso (neither of whom Giggs had ever heard). I stuck with the Shakespeare/Beethoven explanation and stressed how they were people to whom there has been no equal and whose work is considered the best of its kind. And then Giggs said, "Like Harry Potter." I quickly retorted something about how Harry Potter is popular (widely, mind bogglingly popular) but that doesn't mean it's a classic. "A classic," I said in more or less these words, "is something that people will read or listen to or look at for hundreds of years after its initial popularity."
And then I realized that in Thailand, Harry Potter probably IS a literary classic. It's been translated into 67 languages, including Ancient Greek (talk about a fantastic way to get young kids to learn the Classics, as in Latin and Greek) and Basque. I'm all for the bagillion dollar franchise of HP and its addictive story, but in my opinion popularity does not mean "classic" status. In fact, it was somewhat horrifying to me that she equated Harry Potter with "classic" but has no idea who J.D. Salinger or Robert Frost are. I guess the subject matter of Harry Potter is so disparate from any reality of any country that it is truly universal, in the sense that it can be translated into any language and still have the same resonance. Perhaps the same cannot be said of Salinger although I wonder which of (or whether) the works we consider "classics" in the US are translated and read in other non-Western countries. Aside from Harry Potter and the Twilight series, are sci-fi series like the Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (Golden Compass, Amber Spyglass, Subtle Knife) known outside of the US/Europe? I asked Giggs about Pullman and she said she recognized the name "Golden Compass" from the movie (a truly terrible rendition of the book). In my opinion, encouraging the reading of these books (HP, Pullman's series, even Lemony Snicket) in English is something that should be done more in schools and tutoring programs in Thailand given the pop culture status of many of their movie incarnations. If there's one thing I've learned about Thailand since arriving in August, it is that anything associated with the label Western (particularly American) automatically gains credibility and popularity. So why not apply this to learning English?
Giggs asked what classics she should read and the first thing that came to mind was Roald Dahl. Now there is a classic who could easily be translated and understood by people of a whole slew of cultures and backgrounds. He is magical and fantastical and yet his stories have some moral issues, just as HP does. I wrote down some Dahl titles (Matilda, The Witches, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and told her that it'd be a great idea to find these books in English. We started going over a synopsis of Matilda at the end of last week and during today's class she brought in the rest of the synopsis with all the words underlined that she didn't know. We worked on reading out loud as well as creating synonyms for the unknown words and I have to say that I'm very impressed with how much better her English has gotten since we began our classes in October. So for anyone in the publishing world, here is a marketing idea: translate more verifiable literary classics, sorry J.K. Rowling, of the Dahl/A Wrinkle in Time caliber, into English and have them readily available. Just a thought.

My 'Hood

This post is dedicated to my 'hood, which here refers to both my literal neighborhood (as in the roads that run perpendicular and parallel to my house) and the larger "neighborhood" of the province of Phang-nga. My town, Phang-nga, is one of many towns within the province of Phang-nga (kind of like "New York, New York" but this is "Phang-nga, Phang-nga"). But I'll start this post with some pictures of my soi (soi is Thai for road). I live on Soi Rung Ruang and it looks like this...

One of the best parts about my area is that it's removed from the main street of town. It's relatively quiet (except for that rooster and the occasional 12 year old on a motorbike) and it's the perfect area for an afternoon walk. I walk to my after school tutoring at the Genius School (where I get to play/teach this adorable little boy...) but that walk requires walking into and through town and Phang-nga is not exactly pedestrian friendly (read: no sidewalks and buses that barrel down the road at speeds of approximately 100 km/hour) and the whole experience usually ends in me showing up to Genius either 20 minutes early or 10 minutes late and sweating profusely and vowing never to do that walk again.

The other route I like to walk is on the roads behind my house which run parallel to a river and lead to a pretty fantastically green landscape of limestone cliffs and rubber trees. Here is the photo tour...

Total number of squashed frogs on a 1 hour walk: 8

That small row of buildings is Anuban Phang-nga, the school where I work.

The road that runs behind Anuban is empty except for some barbed wire squares that hold various livestock. The houses that dot this backyard area are sparse but they coagulate around the river. Some of them appear to be simple family homes and small children are usually running around outside dousing each other with water bottles.

Others are fancier and seem to function as coffee houses or karaoke bars. Karaoke is huge here and the only karaoke bar I've attended was a windowless cube on the side of the road a little bit past the main part of town and the experience was...interesting. That is to say, karaoke (for me) has always been sort of a "let's all forget our tone-deafness and sing those songs we used to love in middle school" experience. In Thailand, karaoke is an art form. They are good at singing and they sing long, slow, intense ballads in Thai and if you try to sing a Backstreet or Eagles song, you are ocularly booed off the stage.



Right next to this strange marble-square-courtyarded house is the river. And the river is really quite breathtaking. When there is no rain the previous day, the river is shallow and the water flows over the stones of the river's bottom in the most perfectly meditative way (as in "I could stand here and watch the water flow over these stones until the sun goes down").

The road on the other side of the bridge that traverses this river runs along the base of the cliffs. The intensities and varieties of "green" are astounding. See below picture:

This is one of the many rubber trees that populate the province of Phang-nga. They are planted in perfectly symmetrical rows that extend as far as the eye can see over fields that dot that cliffs and roadside land. The effect is spectacular and on misty mornings the fog is trapped within the endless rows of trunks.

Now onto the other 'hood...Phang-nga Province. About an hour away from Phang-nga is a little place called Bangsak. The drive to Bangsak is largely a trip over winding roads that cut through the spectacular landscape. This is an example of the roadside vistas...

Side note: The sky in Phang-nga has been particularly surreal as of late. Here is the view I got while walking back from Genius one afternoon...

And here is the view from the road on the way to Bangsak. The beams of light are celestial and mythical and it really makes you think that Zeus could very well be up there behind the clouds shining a flashlight onto the mortal world.

The town of Khao Lak is on the way to Bangsak. Khao Lak is super touristy but the plus side of the tattooed and sunburnt population that it tends to attract is that these people also, apparently, like the same kind of food that I tend to crave. The exception to that is the McDonald's in Khao Lak which is always heavily populated and serves (me) the sole purpose of providing iced coffee with real milk. They also serve something horrifyingly green that they call "apple juice."

My two favorite food haunts of Khao Lak are the Deli-Butcher, run by an awesome Irish couple named Richard and Trish who provide percolated coffee, jazz music, homemade cheese, and hilarious stories of their time in Thailand, and The Rusty Pelican, a Mexican restaurant run by an ex-SoCal dude (which is truly the best way to describe him) named Mo.

This past weekend a couple of us stopped by Mo's for his burritos and mojitos/Fat Mexicans (a tequila shot with Tabasco sauce). After gorging on some burritos (pretty sure I ate mine in less than 5 minutes), we ordered a bowl of incredible mussels cooked in white wine and butter (two things that I haven't enjoyed since arriving in Thailand). And they were turquoise.

Bangsak is about 20 minutes past Khao Lak and the plan for Friday afternoon (no work because of a Buddhist holiday) was to meet up with some friends on the Bangsak Beach and go swimming/build a bonfire. We arrived as the sun was beginning to set and after a cloudless day the effect was incredible. I really am obsessed with the sky here (as Steve and anyone with whom I've had a conversation about the sky will attest). I think it has to do with growing up in a city and never really spending serious amounts of time in a place where I the sky was something that ended at the horizon and not at the roof of a building.

 But I think you will agree that that cloud is perfectly placed. How could I not take a gazillion pictures?

(Caption: Steve entering the ocean.) Bangsak Beach has remained untouched by the tourists who flock to Khao Lak (for the most part) so on most days there are only one or two other people in the water.

The beginning of the bonfire. For the past few months, a movie has been filming on the Bangsak Beach (starring Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor) about the 2004 tsunami which destroyed pretty much all of Bangsak. The replicated damage of the tsunami is right on the beach (kind of disconcerting) but the various wooden objects that the production crew left behind made for great bonfire-starting material.

Once the sun was below the water line (ie. it was too dark to take more pictures), my friend Leise and I headed into town to pick up some Thai take out. As we walked back down the beach, bags of khao paht gai (fried rice with chicken) and curried vegetables in hand, we saw the enormous cloud of fire rising from the beach and realized the bonfire had finally ignited.

The next day, everyone woke up early to head out to the Similan Islands for our day of snorkeling. Leise planned a day-long adventure for a group of about 11 of us and it started at 7:45 on Saturday morning. After being herded into a minivan and taken to a "briefing room" (which was a wall-less atrium with picnic tables), we listened to a 10 minute presentation about the day's plan (the guide mimed "snorkel" and "hike" approximately three times in the space of five minutes...I counted) while dousing ourselves with high SPF sunblock. We gathered our snorkeling materials and headed to the motorboat that would serve as our tour bus/boat for the rest of the day. The ride to the Similan Islands (one of the top ten diving spots in the world and ergo an ideal place to do some snorkeling) was about an hour. For some reason, our group decided to sit in the very very very front of the boat with me sitting at the crux of the V of the bow. Needless to say, I spent the majority of the ride clutching on for dear life while also trying to convince myself that I didn't need to pee because the bathroom was a very treacherous leap from my seat. Once we got to the Similan Islands and I stepped onto solid ground (in other words, I literally hurled myself from the boat onto the sand), I forgot all about the ride.

This picture needs an explanation. The lady on the right is of a certain type of tourist who takes it upon herself to be photographed in a bikini while posing in rather salacious ways on and around the various boat decks/rocks/sand dunes/waves/beach swing sets of Thailand. This is a phenomenon that I've noted since getting here in August. If she was going to pose, I figured I'd snap a shot too. The man in the background is her boyfriend and he got vehemently macho when his gf needed help from Steve to cross the rocks. He walked over (while clutching onto the boulder) and literally puffed his chest out.

The day's trip included stops at five of the nine islands of which the Similan Islands consist. Two of them also involved short hikes through the jungle to less populated beaches. The snorkeling itself was unbelievable. As you can see from this picture, the clarity of the water was astounding and it greatly facilitated optimal fish stalking. Our guide informed us that we might see a sea turtle but not to get our hopes up because they don't like being followed so they usually swim away quickly. I was content with spending hours gazing at metallic rainbow fish (just like in the book) and swimming through schools of fish (it was the ultimate Nemo experience). But then I saw a group of people all swimming in one direction and I figured I would follow them. By the time I made it over (rough current + awesome fish = slow movement on my part), they were all shouting about seeing a sea turtle!!!!!!!!! Which I had missed. I was pretty upset because I've never seen one in the wild but then I saw Steve jet off in the opposite direction of the crowd. I decided to follow him and when I put my snorkel mask underwater I saw him swimming along the bottom of the ocean floor right next to the giant sea turtle.

The Red Cross Fair

The (apparently) annual Red Cross Fair started on the 2nd of February and will continue until the 11th. The preparation for this Fair involved closing half of the two lane road and transforming it into a curbside of various tents and tables. The first offerings of the Fair that I spotted were approximately one week before its actual Grand Opening and they comprised enormous potted trees, a cornucopia of absurd proportions of stacks of brightly patterned mattresses of all shapes, sizes, and widths, and various wooden furnishings (read: ornate and v. shiny wooden bed frames and/or wardrobes and/or elaborate swing sets). Who exactly is buying these items and then figuring out how to relocate them to a house is unknown. This preview of items ended up serving as a pretty astute representation of the do-we-really-need-this-many-variations-of-the-same-basic-thing atmosphere of the Fair itself.

I've never been to a fair outside of those I've experienced in Phang-nga but they strike me as the sort of place where one finds a lot of small children hyped up on pastel sugary things and adults indulging in unnecessarily fried items (oddities/goodies such as fried oreos, corn dogs and the infamous fried dough of water parks come to mind). Fairs in Phang-nga are, shall we say, same same but different. The first thing that struck me about the Red Cross Fair was that it had little to do with what I assumed to be Designated Red Cross Activities...like maybe a blood donation table (not that I'd ever trust anyone with a hypodermic needle at a fair) or random stands offering information about why MSG is dangerous or a "help the tsunami victims" table. Aside from that realization, the other thing that quickly dawned on me was the absurdity of the spatial planning on the fair. Practically any event in Phang-nga that is seen as slightly "new and exciting and potentially, OMG, WESTERN!" in nature (weekend markets, Mister Donut, etc.) brings with it an incredibly (as in not to be believed) large number of people. A good example of this is the Big C, which I've alluded to before. Big C = Walmart of Thailand. It's where I bought my fridge, dishes, candles (see previous post on candle + coral arts and crafts activity), Diet Coke (best discovery of the Big C), shampoo, ear drops (ear infections in Thailand are pretty miserable), wonton sheets and frozen edamame. I try to buy most of my actual food groceries from the local market, but Big C obviously also offers a whole lot of food/snack items that range from pig intestines (ew?) and really any part of any animal to instant coffee and seaweed flavored Pringles. But I veer from the subject germane to this blog post. The point of this description is not a laundry list (as any English teacher would describe it) of Things You Can Find at the Big C. The point is that the Big C opened in October and it still has the same eyes-to-the-ceiling aimless wandering effect on the locals that Times Square has on the fanny packed tourist. So back to the spatial planning issues of the Red Cross Fair. A lot of very eager people + three rows of stands with two walking lanes sandwiched in between (sort of the Club of space, if you will) = a very claustrophobic and highly sweat-inducing experience. Not to mention the fact that throngs of people moving at a very, very slow pace through a fair make for some unpleasant olfactory experiences around certain of the food tables. The sensory elements common to massive outdoor gatherings (fairs of this nature and summer music festivals and other such circus-meets-a-suburban-mall type experiences) are usually saturated with aggressive assaults to most of the senses. They are loud, smelly (as in there are a lot of smells but not all are necessarily bad), and brightly lit and each individual part begs your attention. The whole thing is, especially for someone who's been living in the pre-Fair small town of Phang-nga since September, sort of overwhelming.

Upon passing through the fluorescent archway of the Red Cross Fair, I was greeted by a literal wall of smoke whose scent can be best described as "meaty."

The first of the stalls at the Fair were the food stalls and in Thailand this means one thing: a whole lot of skewered meat ("meat" here is used in its most general sense as the "meats" range from orange-y BBQ chicken breasts to grilled squid on a skewer to kabobs of hot dogs that have been sliced in such a way that they resemble the cracked crusts of delicious baked bread).

Aside from the meats, the food section always offers pastries in the form of tables selling donuts, lots of crepe-like things filled with a gooey marshmallow paste and stringy brown sugar (huge disappointment...texture = cardboard with stringy sugar), and other baked goods whose appearance suggests far more culinary delight than they actually hold (the lack of butter in this part of the country is surely the main reason for this). The exception to this was the table that sold banana bread and muffins (I was in heaven).

The other stands that appear at every fair/festival I've attended include the chestnut stand (huge fan) and the fried bug stand (not a huge fan). At the Red Cross Fair, there was also a "Ministry of Labor" tent (sounds like something out of Harry Potter) that offered 150 baht (approximately $5) hour-long foot massages. Also please note the font chosen by the Ministry...and the person in the background actually getting a massage.

From the brightly lit stalls of smoke and scent, I was herded among the sweaty mass to find the inner circle of the Fair. There I came to the absolutely terrifying ferris wheels whose motors are the same ones used on the long-tail boats and are controlled by the exact same extended metal oar.

Other rides included a small roller coaster, a kids' train track loop thing, one of those physics-experiments-high-speed-maypole-with-metal-cars-flying-around-a-circle things, and two inflated climbing structures. Remember that all of this was constructed and put up in about a week and that it will all be dismantled and taken away on the 11th.

Across from the ferris wheel was a tent of small children hula hooping (in a previous post I mentioned the advantage of learning how to hula hoop from a pre-K age). It's clearly some sort of athletic achievement to be able to do this on command and the Thais appropriately prize it.

The strangest tent at the Fair was most definitely this one:

After paying the 20 baht required to enter, I was greeted by a lady in the blue mermaid suit of the above picture sitting in a lawn chair on top of some wood chips next to an inflated wading pool. In front of her was a cage with an absolutely enormous, Nagini-esque snake as well as some other animals (like turtles who really just paled in comparison). On the other side of this mermaid was what appeared, on first glance, to be a woman's head sitting in the middle of a table. Upon further inspection, it was revealed to (obviously) not be the decapitated noggin of a Thai lady but simply an optical illusion of mirrors on the bottom of the table that reflected the wood chipped ground and therefore made it appear that there was nothing (aka a neck) under the table. It was...odd. And rather disconcerting. And also a very strange job.

Towards the end of the Fair there were two stages. These stages are a commonplace entity at any large gathering in Phang-nga and their purposes are always the same. One holds some sort of performance (song, dance, karaoke, miming) that involves makeup and clothing prep of a Liberacean level. While this visual/auditory spectacle goes on, the other nearby stage is occupied by three to five Thai men (this is the case at every single Thai festival/fair/school function I've attended). These men are each armed with a micro- (sometimes mega-) phone and they stand in a sort of awkward barbershop-quartet-minus-one-barber-formation and appear to be addressing no one in particular besides each other.

After migrating from the above performance/speech/who knows (three men with speech amplifying devices do not make for a very pleasant noise), I headed towards the covered tunnel that led around the perimeter of the fair and back to the initial food stalls. The tunnel was cramped, as tunnels tend to be, and was packed with people and my immediate reaction was "if there is a fire, we are all going to die." The activities within the tunnel mainly consisted of various games (throw a tennis ball and knock over a stack of soup cans, shoot a pellet gun at a target in specific locations in a specific pattern that is unknown, throw darts at balloons, etc.) whose prizes were large stuffed animals, bottles of Sang Som (Thai rum/whisky...it's referred to as "Special Rum"), cartons of eggs or soda water. Not sure if you get to decide which of those you receive or if it's based on merit or who puts in the most effort or something middle-school-moral like that.

I will publicly admit that at an earlier festival Steve won one game and was given a large Pooh bear whose t-shirt reads "HAPPY" and I am now the proud owner of this bear and have used it in many classes (it's a great prop for teaching prepositions about relative space...next to/above/on top of/etc.).

The rest of the tunnel was full of stands selling clothes, sunglasses, watches, wallets, lighters, leather vests, teeny bunny rabbits in costumes...

and uncomfortable looking jeans. 

And this concludes the monthly post about Phang-nga's social calendar and the fairs of which it consists.

The Mistake

This is a story from a couple of months ago and I realize that I've told it to some people. In November, I started teaching a 23 year-old girl named Naruechon ("Giggs" for short...duh) who is hoping to take the TOEFL exam and move to America or the UK to get a Master's Degree. Her English, when we began, was the equivalent of most "English speaking" Thais in Thailand who have graduated from a university in Thailand. In other words, she understood about 50% of what I said. The TOEFL exam, for those of you who are unfamiliar with it, is essentially the SAT for non-native English speakers. On the first day of what would be our five-day-a-week lessons, she brought me her Thai TOEFL book. The first sample section was a paragraph about a 15th century explorer and the questions that followed asked things such as, "What does this passage imply about the affect of medicinal knowledge on the colonization of territories?" Giggs knew neither what "imply," "affect," nor "medicinal" (not to mention "colonization") meant. In addition to this kind of question, her first book had examples with faulty grammar that they claimed was the "correct" answer (eg. "The roads is paved with cement. CORRECT"...helpful, right?). So, I decided that two changes needed to take place. The first was to get rid of this clearly non-accredited TOEFL book and the second was to switch the purpose of our lessons from strictly "teaching to the exam" to just general conversation. By the end of the second month of our classes, Giggs said she went from understanding half of what I was saying to understanding 90% of it.

But the story I want to tell is about that first week of classes. The initial lessons were spent engaging in general conversation about what she was interested in, what life in Thailand was like for a girl in her 20s, what her university at Bangkok was like, why she wants to go to America, etc. She became noticeably loquacious when I mentioned pop culture in America and her first response to the topic of movies was "I love Shawshank!" As a side note, a common thread I have noticed in Thailand is an utter obsession with all-things-Western. One example is the Mister Donut that recently opened in town. I know, for a fact, that donuts existed in Phang-nga before the infiltration of Mister Donut and his fluorescent icing. However, Mister Donut is seen as a Western chain (although I've never seen it anywhere outside of Asia) and the Thai people flock to it like they are on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Trays with at least twelve donuts are the norm for people waiting in line and little kids usually coagulate around the cashier with chocolate and sprinkle covered visages. Another example is the obsession with t-shirts with English writing on them. It doesn't matter what the shirt says or whether it makes any actual sense in English (example: "love me love mine family"). These shirts are especially rampant among the tween population, although it is very hard to tell the difference between a tween/teen/twenty-something since infantilization (read: braces just for the sake of braces because they make a girl look younger, pigtails, plastic hair clips with bows and furry attachments, etc.) is almost as popular as the Americanization of clothing.

Back to the story. For our next class, I asked Giggs to bring in a list of her favorite actors and movies. The following day, she brought in a stack of DVDs and a list of actors. The actor list was as follows: Hugh Grant (with a star next to it), Natalie Portman, Lindsay Lohan, Kevin Costner, Colin Farrell, Megan Fox (with a star next to it), Keanu Reeves, Jessica Alba, Jim Carey, Adam Sandler, Will Smith and Tom Hanks. Then she showed me the stack of movies she brought from home. The Incredibles, Made of Honor, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Night at the Museum, The Reader, and He's Just Not That Into You. I started asking her questions about each movie (did she like it? what was the movie about? etc.). Clearly the answer to "which of these things is not like the other?," The Reader struck me as a particularly odd movie choice for a 23 year-old Thai whose all-time favorite actors are Hugh Grant and Megan Fox. So, I asked her if she liked the movie (the same question I'd asked of the previous four movies) and her response was, and I quote, "I did not really know why the main woman had the mistake or why the mistake was why she was in the court." "The mistake...?" I asked. "You mean she was a Nazi?" She gave me a quizzical look and then said, "The mistake. She could not read or write. That is why she in prison. Nadti? I don't sure that word, you write."

I spelled Nazi. She gave me a blank look. "Um...Jews. The Holocaust," I began to ramble sure that someone who had graduated from a good university in Bangkok would have some idea of world history or at least World War II. Again, all I got were blank stares. I know, I thought to myself, I'll just look it up in her handy Thai-English dictionary. "H": no reference to the capital H Holocaust. But that was, admittedly, a long shot so I flipped to "J...e...": jewel. No Jewish, no Judaism. Curious to see if this was just a secular dictionary, I flipped to "B" where I found Buddhism, Buddha, Buddhist. "C" where I found Christ, Christianity, Christmas. "M" where I found Muslim. "I" where I found Islam.

How could I explain The Reader to a person to whom the word Jew had no meaning or significance? How could I explain Kate Winslet's very two-fold "mistake" (being a guard at Auschwitz, the reason she is on trial, and being illiterate)? Revealing her illiteracy by providing a handwriting sample at her trial would also reveal her innocence in the matter of which she is accused, namely writing a letter that detailed the account of the death of 300 Jewish women who were caught in a fire. She is so ashamed of her illiteracy that she would rather be seen as criminal than as illiterate. (Sorry if that description ruined the movie for those of you who haven't seen it, but the movie's plot is necessary to this story.) I'd never felt as glaringly culturally distinct from another contemporary. That history, that destruction, that immorality and inhumanity. How could those not be a part of someone's consciousness? Maybe, I thought, World War II is just not taught in Thailand. But that would be nonsensical as much of their continent was involved to some extent in the War. I gave it a shot. "World War II?" I asked. "Oh yes! German War. I know. World War song (Thai word for "second" or "2")," she responded. So she knew about the "German War" but not about the Jews. And not about the Holocaust. And not about Nazis. Bumbling and awkward, I crossed about the Nazi I had written in what suddenly appeared to be staining, indelible black ink on her notebook page. "I will Google later tonight," she said, stopping me as I attempted to cross out the word.

A loss of words is something I have grown accustomed to over the past six months. In this situation, the loss was not something that could be as easily Charades-d as many of the difficulties in communication that I face on a daily basis. "Quiet" in Thai is ngiab (phonetically) and that was explained with a whole lot of miming before I learned the proper inflection and pronunciation of the Thai command. How do you explain something like "Jew" without the word itself? It's the hardest game of Taboo. The Holocaust is not something I spend all of my days thinking about, but it is certainly something of which I am aware simply in terms of my knowledge and understanding of history and the terrible potential of human nature. As Giggs packed her stuff up, and I wondered slash feared what her parents would say if they saw her googling "Nazi," I was struck with the thought of what it would be like to lack the vocabulary for an entire classification of people. Strange, the ways in which the fissure between Western and non-Western culture (and, unfortunately, knowledge) come to light in the most unexpected of moments.