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.