25: Worshipping Giant Chickens, Cinderula, and the Sizzler.

One Saturday evening, Jon and Film took me to a triple birthday party. Of the three men celebrating the passing of another year, I was acquainted with two. One of the birthday-ees was the fifth grade teacher at my small school, Krue (teacher) Piirat. Piirat is a rather unusual looking fellow by any standards, but particularly in Thailand. He is jollily rotund with freckles, a mustache, and a short ponytail- none of which I have ever seen on another Thai person. At the party, he continually asked me if I was drunk yet, when I was clearly drinking only water, and was merciless in his attempts to make me eat more of the field rat curry. Many of Jon’s friends were there, as well as people I knew from around the village. But, one man was conspicuously absent, Ay. Ay was Jon’s close friend and a member of our biking group. We had biked together every day for months when suddenly he disappeared. I asked Jon where he went, and was told that Ay was sick. It wasn’t until this Saturday night that I found out it was brain cancer, and Ay only had a few days left to live, if that. I promised to go visit him with Jon and Film the next morning. We entered Ay’s house to find a gaggle of women keeping vigil on the floor (traditional Thai houses have very little furniture), next to a pile of blankets. It took me a minute to realize Ay was underneath them, laid out to rest on a mat. Naturally slight, the illness rendered him emaciated, and all I could see among the fabric were sunken cheek bones. He was not conscious, but we talked to him just the same. True to Thai culture, there were no displays of emotion, but rather every effort was made to ensure his comfort. He passed away later that night.
I arrived at school the next morning to find all the teachers dressed in black. Normally on Mondays, we wear white as a sign of Buddhist purity, and the hushed voices told me something was wrong. Apparently over the weekend, three eighth grade students on a motor scooter were hit by a car- two boys and one girl. One student had been killed, while the other two remained in the hospital. The cremation ceremony was the next day. That night, I went with Jon and Film to the wat for the first day of Ay’s funeral. I’ve been to multiple Thai funerals before, but never of someone I had known. As we lit our incense stick s in front of the shrine and listened to the monks chant, I focused my mind on Ay’s memory and saying goodbye to a man who had been kind and welcoming to me.
The next day, I spent hours helping my sixth graders prepare for Wednesday’s regional academic competition. The Thais take these competitions very seriously and everyone was freaking out over various projects and preparations. My students were going to perform an English skit of Cinderella, which Pii Som renamed “Cinderula” for some reason. Moments of the skit preparation were fun, such as training a puberty aged boy to be an evil stepsister and orchestrating the final kiss scene, where Cindy had to “kiss” a prince charming a foot shorter and 40 pounds lighter. These moments aside, Pii Som and I were continually at odds all day. While I was encouraging the students to have fun and be silly with the skit, and she was yelling at them for not memorizing their lines fast enough. Som can be impatient with the students. She blames them for not learning fast enough or not understanding, when really the responsibility lies with her, for not teaching them adequately. She kept exclaiming how unintelligent and slow they were in front of them, for simply forgetting a line or not reading dramatically enough. I felt she was being unfair and mean, and she felt if she didn’t insult them, they wouldn’t practice hard enough. It was a tense afternoon. I coped by giving the kids big smiles and thumbs up whenever she wasn’t looking.
School closed an hour early that day for the cremation ceremony. There was a big crowd. At the end, as per tradition, everyone takes a flower, walks up the stairs onto the platform of the crematorium, and places it in front of the coffin. Crossing the platform, I caught a glimpse of the deceased student’s picture, standing next to the coffin. It was a girl, not a boy as Pii Som had told me, and a girl I knew. I stood there in shock, shaken and disoriented. I knew the girl, she was one of the first students to reach out and talk to me on my first day at school, when I was overwhelmed and being treated like an alien by a majority of the students. She was a smart kid with a chance of a future beyond rice farming, and the surprise of seeing her face next to the coffin rather than the anonymous boy I was expecting pushed my already teetering emotions over the edge. I put on my sunglasses and walked away from the crowd, breathing deeply and trying desperately not to cry as the teachers discussed the lack of food options at the funeral. That night, I went to the second night of Ay’s funeral. Three funerary events in 24 hours was more than I could take.
Wednesday morning, I woke up before dawn to go to the academic competition. All the teachers from Thangam school went together in Piirat’s pick-up truck, the windows of which were stuck in the down position. I sat shivering and miserable in the back of the truck for 2 hours as we wound through mountains. By the time we arrived, I was in less than a good mood and had a cold. I declined the offer of sticky rice and dried spicy pork (at 8 am) and dragged Orasa off with me in search of a hot beverage. We scrounged up coffee and then checked in. I was pegged to be a judge for the impromptu speech competition, and upon check-in, was informed my time slot was switched to the morning, which meant I would miss my kids performing Cinderella. I had worked with them for hours, revising and translating the script, helping them with emotions, providing costumes, and I was counting on viewing the final result. But no, instead I had to sit and listen to 15 students tell me in broken English the “notable” places in Phitsanulok province.
When things wrapped up, I took the lunch box they gave me with (surprise surprise) rice and a bag of curry, and set off to meet the teachers and students at our picnic site. Of course I dropped my curry bag on the way. The Wheel of Fortune had fallen from my smoking-project-success-loving-site high to an I-have-a-cold-and-hate-everyone-low. Plus I felt like crap. After lunch, I tried to feign interest and walk around the school, scouting other competition categories, but all the people and stares quickly overwhelmed me in my current state of mind. I felt unhinged, once again on the verge of tears. I asked Orasa if I could sit in a quiet corner somewhere and she installed me under a tree near the nurse’s office. I sat in blissful isolation for two hours, napping in the sun and reading Dostoyevsky. By the time she fetched me, my spirits were higher.
The next day was Thanksgiving. I imagine I would have felt homesick anyway- imagining my family and friends snug at home and gorging themselves on turkey, mashed potatoes, and pie- and the struggles of the week and my cold only made it worse. The difference in the way I dealt with the deaths of two people who mattered to me (namely to display emotion) and the way the Thais deal with it (saying that to cry is to behave like a child) made me feel more like an outsider than I had in a long time. I felt a gaping disconnect between me and the people in my village. They couldn’t possibly understand what it was like to be thousands of miles away from home on Thanksgiving, and that made me feel sad, distant, and a little resentful. I tried to explain Thanksgiving, but with my limited Thai, I only managed to convey we give thanks for our family, something vague about Indians and people from England, and that we worship giant chickens.
Fortunately, that weekend was the Unofficial Peace Corps Bangkok Thanksgiving Sizzler Extravaganza. My journey down started off an a high note when I made a bus driver and an entire bus of people wait 15 minutes for Kelsi to arrive from Sukothai. As soon as we were seated, I broke down in tears about my miserable week, and after a few snacks, promptly fell asleep. I crashed at the PC lounge that night, along with a big group of last year’s volunteers who were in BKK for their “Close of Service Conference”. They brought books and DVDs to pass on, and I happily pounced on the newly refreshed library, grabbing novels by Nabakov, Phillip Roth, and Thomas Hardy before anyone else could. I also found a salmon pink homecoming dress in the “donated clothes” box and wore it into the wee hours of the morning. The next day, Beau and I took the sky train out to Chatuchak market, a labyrinthine mix of booths that sell everything from stolen shoes to incense to puppies. We turned our market stroll into a beer crawl, and then met the rest of our friends for a night out.
Saturday morning was the Gender and Development Committee election. I ran for chair, and at the time of publication do not know if I was chosen or not. That afternoon, we held an informal Thanskgiving-esque sports day in Lumphini Park. Unfortunately, a pudgy Thai policewomen had a serious problem with us playing football on the grass, and said if we didn’t stop, we would be kicked out. And by “us playing football”, I mean I was lying on a mat on the side, eating fruit and listening to the guitar. The Sizzler dinner was quite the spectacle, with 60 volunteers descending en masse onto the unsuspecting patrons of the Thong Lo Sizzler. The food was less than delicious, but they sold actual wine and the “chocolate mousse” tasted ok if you mixed it with the “raspberry mousse” and covered them both in whipped cream. It felt American, and that is what mattered. A rooftop sky bar, impromptu dance party, English language movie, and trip to the foreign food grocery store helped squelch my homesickness. After a few days of good, old fashioned American fun, my equilibrium was back. And I can now check “going to Sizzler” off my bucket list.