Culture Shock in Thailand

Because Buddhism is non-theistic, meaning that the subject of God, or gods, is not part of the matrix of what constitutes Buddhism, my having been born into a Western world kind of family made me curious about it just because of the non-theism.  I wondered why Buddhism was thought of as a religion if God had no metaphysical role to play in the dissemination of the mystical truths based on faith in religions I learned about as a child.

 

In my mid 20’s I met a fellow who had been stationed in Viet Nam during the war and managed to get to Thailand pretty regularly as his military job was demanding and draining.  An abundance of rest and recuperation time in Bangkok allowed him to explore as a tourist at first.  He took tours of temples, the famous Golden Buddha made of solid gold, the towns that were the capitals that came before Bangkok, the hotels along the Chao Phraya River, the cosmopolitan Thai restaurant scene, the beaches, the tourist islands.  In time he made some Thai friends who opened a window for him into the Thai culture.

Bangkok, where the Ultra Modern meets the Ancient

 

I found myself drifting off into daydreams of Buddhist temples and narrow speedboats on the arterial river of Bangkok as my new friend stoked my imagination with his exotic stories, spinning in those daydreams a fantasy that I would one day travel to the kingdom.

 

Golden Buddha 5.5 TONS of pure gold

And one day I did.  It was later in life than when I was exposed to Thai culture by my early adulthood friend, more than a decade later.  During the time that passed I graduated from college and became a teacher of Spanish. I switched careers after studying gemology, a fact that caused me to enter the world of gemstones. 

 

In the beginning, in order to get started selling colored gemstones without a large bankroll, I had to invest in less expensive gems like amethyst, tourmaline, citrine, peridot, aquamarine, and the like.  In order to firmly establish myself in the gem trade, however, there was a subtle pressure from jewelry store owners to have at least one of the three precious colored gemstones among what I offered for sale: emerald, ruby, sapphire.

 

A few years of business had to transpire and profits made in order to be able to afford to inventory one of those three very expensive gems.  If one chose emerald, it would be necessary to explore the gem offices in Cartagena or Bogotá and form a relationship with an important supplier who could make you competitive selling in the American market.  If, instead, one chose to stock ruby and/or sapphire, Bangkok was the smartest place to start.  Hence it was business that, magnet-like, pulled me to a Buddhist business culture.

 

Many amazing hotels on the Chao-Phraya

Jewelers everywhere were selling the types of “semi-precious” gems that I carried.  They were readily available and making connections with the suppliers higher up the food chain was easy to do by simply attending the annual Tucson gem show one time. A few thousand gem dealers displayed billions of dollars-worth of every gemstone anybody has ever heard of.  However, as easy as it was to connect in that world, it was the exact opposite to establish supplier relationships for fine sapphires in Thailand: extremely difficult.

 

A Struggle to get top color Sapphires

The point-word in the last sentence is the adjective “fine.”  I met dealers immediately, but they all wanted to show me inky black sapphires or pallid, nearly colorless ones.  I was establishing myself in the gemstone world and needed to have inventory that would make people’s eyes water.  To do anything less was to appear as just another somebody with cheap stones for sale.

 

Unforgettable Temples in Thailand

Everything I tried seemed pointless as I wandered aimlessly from dealer to dealer unaware of necessary-to-know culture cues unfamiliar to me in the beginning.  I decided to spend some time gaining familiarity with the phenomena that bring people from all over the world to visit.  On a tour to Ayutthaya, a city that was a capital of Thailand before Bangkok, there was a tour guide who spewed facts like tour guides tend to do. One of those facts, for me, offered a helpful insight into the Thai way: that in the 1700’s, the Burmese razed and burned this capital.

 

Ayutthaya: razed by Burma in 1767

Thai people tend to be independent and proud of what they have and who they are.  They had to struggle to take their country back from Burma, one factor that contributed greatly to the Thai sense of independence.  In the 19^th and 20 ^th centuries the French had colonial influence throughout Southeast Asia.  When they attempted to add Thailand to their fold, the king of Thailand offered to give away a small section of their southern section if the French would agree to just let them be.  And the French agreed.

 

At some point the word “Farang” appeared in the Thai lexicon, meaning foreigner.  One of the main differences between our culture and theirs hinges on what cultural liberties are granted by the status implied by “Farang.” It is not hard to understand how a people who managed to avoid colonialism, whose world-famous cuisine is uniquely their own, who believe you are born good and improve through life, are nationalistic.  Add to this the Thai historical DNA resulting from what the Burmese invaders did and you can speculate why the Thai culture envelops an acceptable double standard: one for Thai people and one for farang.

 

I eventually got acquainted with Thai cultural symbols, temples, Buddha, the monarchy, behavioral customs, and kept learning until I was able to find my way to the inventory of fine quality sapphires that I was associated with as a gemstone dealer.  One of my most important lessons came from a woman who was a vendor of fabric.  To make sense of what she did to me, I had to see it from the perspective of a culture other than my own, a most daunting task.

 

The Shangri-La hotel in Bangkok gave its guests a card to keep in a shirt pocket to use if you got lost and wanted a taxi to take you back to the hotel.  I saved one of these from a trip to Asia I made in the 1980’s and have included it here. 

 

Since I was fond of three-piece suits at the time and there was a very able tailor located at the Shangri-La, a one-person operation with superior quality craftsmanship, but very few bolts of cloth to choose from, thinking of the clever card the hotel gave out, I asked the tailor if he would please write out instructions in Thai for a taxi driver to take me to the area in Bangkok where I would find warehouses full of bolt choices of wool cloth, which he agreed to do.

Tuk-tuks, 3-wheels: a very common form of taxi service

 

I found something that satisfied me in a section labeled WOOL, spelled out in English, and carried it to the counter with the instructions from the tailor stating how many meters of cloth to cut for me.  Delighted by my find, I taxied back to the tailor and handed him my prize. He said: “This is good looking, but I thought you wanted wool.”

 

“What?” I wondered aloud.

 

He told me what I had was polyester cloth, not wool.  To prove it, he picked up a cigarette lighter and held a corner of the cloth above the flame until the room began to smell like camphor.  Next, he held a piece of wool cloth above the flame and it began to smell of burned flesh, nothing subtle about the difference.  Stunned, I taxied back to the vendor, deposited the polyester on the counter while I announced that I knew it was not wool, expecting her to be surprised, humbled, apologetic.

 

“I know,” was her bewildering answer.  I was so stupefied that I couldn’t think of anything to say.  She offered no apology, no refund, no credit, nothing.  Finally, I asked her how she could sell polyester as wool.  I can hear her answer in my mind as I write these words 4 decades later: “You farang.”

 

Until that moment, the sociological phenomenon known as culture shock carried only abstract and academic meaning.  This Thai citizen brought the concept to life for me.  It turned out to be good for me to realize I was the oddity that stood out instead of the other way around. Confronted by a difference of attitude in which I was the fish in the fishbowl, the tiniest minority, all attempts to make the situation fit the norms and institutions familiar to me were inevitably and appropriately futile.

 

There was a second important gleaning moment for me as a man in charge of a temple exhibiting one of the famous Buddha statues confronted my lack of cultural acuity, opening my eyes further.  An English-speaking Thai person had brought me to this temple where people were seated on the floor admiring the Buddha.  I sat as well.  Seconds later the temple director headed toward me with anger written all over his face, his hand held out to slap my face.  I moved a little to prepare to stand up and he halted his threatening advance instantly, turned, and walked back to where he had come from.

 

I asked my English-speaking tour guide for an explanation of what had just occurred. “You had your feet pointed toward the Buddha.  Never do that.”

Thai Etiquette from the Web

 

I suppose you could conclude that culture shock is a product of the lack of familiarity with the norms of the culture in question.  There are scores of examples I could use from my years of travel to Thailand, all matters of how people perceive and do things differently. Like learning to speak a foreign language, at first it is unfamiliar and disorienting to learn the ways of another culture without becoming self-conscious about it, but once it becomes more automatic, you can see the world around you from an entirely different perspective and make sense of it being appropriate to use secondary values and a double standard with the farang.

 

I made a close friendship with a man named Sanit who mentored me in Thai ways over the years.  He was extremely helpful in interpreting mystifying events for me such as the custom of never touching a Thai person’s head.  Sanit explained to me one day that the head is viewed as our personal temple and anyone touching it violates our person.  Some years later while conversing with Mr. Sanit I asked him if you could touch the head of your wife or husband.  His answer: “When you married, can touch anything.”