Hell in a Thai Handbasket

Despite the logistical features of my job and my apartment, I live in Hell.  I won’t call it indescribable because I will surely describe it.  I simply can’t do it justice. Living here is like constantly living in that one fold of the brain; that dark, polluted fold that is dank and dirty from alcohol poisoning and smoke inhalation, that fold of the brain where those memories of trauma live and fight every day for survival…fight to be continuously recognized by the rest of the brain who every day fights equally as hard to forget them.  Pattaya is the sunspot of my brain, the part where nothing glows, there is no beauty only constant reminders of my past battles fought and lost.  Like walking through Dali’s La Persistencia de la Memoria, Pattaya is bleak, with time melting away as if tomorrow is the same as yesterday is the same as a year from now.  It is brown and dusty, a backwards frontier, a prairie of memories I would rather leave dead and lifeless but instead I have to trudge through every day to get to work, trudge through like I would trudge through piles of bodies after a massacre…piles of grey bodies with not even enough dignity for blood.  This place, bleak, misty, black, cancerous, manically depressive has sucked the air out of me, leaving me at times physically unable to breathe.  I am like one of Ursula’s soulless sea creatures, waiting in a cave for the sun to come out and knowing that tomorrow will come and the sun will stay in yesterday, the sun will stay in Malaysia, the sun will stay on the train, the sun will stay in that giddy perception I had of stability and strength in that time years ago when I was looking forward to this day (this decade, time oozes slowly like a dying wound in this town, doesn’t it, Dali?).  I have taken the stability and strength that I once felt, on that 20 hour train ride when time was understandable and I have drunk it down, like a rabbit going through the hole I saw as I emerged from the taxi that this was no Wonderland, but rather a neglected god’s pipedream.  Everyone here has flat affects, no bursts of sunlight or smiles, they are just sweaty and slow moving, cactus-like entities in a gray sky-lined sunset.  Colorless. 

 I won’t go into the unbelievably necessary detail of what I’ve seen here, or maybe I will, we will see how quickly my fingers can move across the keyboard before the night comes and I re-enter my captivity.  I am triggered every moment I am here.  I am strong, but no one, no one with a heart and a story like mine, should ever ever have to withstand this pressure.  I felt I was ready and now I am confident that I am ready, ready to finally make a decision for myself, to see that some things that make me sick are indeed unhealthy.  Yes!  That is the truth, the one truth that is here is that for me, my strength would be in leaving, and letting this town be this town and understanding that my biggest priority is to save myself.

Dirt, dust, noise…there is no beauty here in a time when I need mostly beauty in my life so that I recognize it’s similarities inside of my soul.  Hmmm, I have found the ugliest place.  Self-proclaimed Sex Capital of the World, I have no idea why I even set foot here.  I will figure that out later. I must have not known myself then, two months ago, like I know myself now.  Pattaya is populated with elderly white men, mostly overweight and of Eastern European descent, who have come here to have sex with Thai women.  This can vary from the men who come for a few weeks to the men who come here to live, find a wife or a girlfriend and a job, and settle down.  The town itself is ugly, and now, after mass expatriation, it’s occupants are too.

I live a little bit removed from the crazy sex-tourism scene, in a neighborhood where the men who live here with their Thai wives have relocated, or at least it looks a bit more permanent.  Still though, a ten minute drive to town and I’m right in the middle of Sin City.  Literally.  Las Vegas doesn’t compare.  Women linger outside of every bar, waiting.  Men roam the streets with or without t-shirts on, looking.  Women dance in plastic boxes, waiting.  Women of all colors, Thai women, African women, European women.  This terrifies me….the process that the sex-workers endured to be in a small plastic box dancing for fat Russians in this dark corner of the world.  A subtle rage has been brewing inside of me.  I’ve only gone out two nights in the month that I’ve been here and for the next day after each of them I lay in bed all day, recovering from what I’ve seen.  It makes me physically ill and depressed…in bathrooms of bars I have vomited from the sights and also cried.  This from just two nights out.   Jenna and I receive little to no attention here and have made no friends.  To put it bluntly, we are not what the clientele want.  

The second night we went out, our co-worker Lokki (the youngest teacher at the school besides me and Jenna) took us to a go-go bar.  Lokki informed us that the women would have their clothes so, nervously, we went in.  I won’t divulge exactly everything what I saw in there but it was not, by any standards, what would normally be seen in a bar like this.  The dancer’s eyes were silent, their heads detached from their bodies, and I could only hope that they had developed the intricate ability to black out the present and shove their minds into a blissful and imaginative future.

As for me, I went blank.  I couldn’t move, except to go into the bathroom to cry.  I couldn’t communicate anything to my mind about my desire to leave.   My mind was lacking the ability to create memories and I became suddenly exhausted.  The synapses in my brain had stopped firing and sat quietly with me, trying to slow my heart rate to normal.  I remember feeling hot and dark and wishing I could burn the building down.  I remember wishing I had a lighter with me and planning where the fire would go, grateful that my mind had found some sort of visual escape from what was in front of me.  Knowing I was free to leave at any moment was too much of a burden for me; in that situation years ago, in that voyeuristic and assaultive phase of mine, I was not allowed to leave.  

Looking back on that night, two nights ago, I remember flashes of heat and cold and of faces.  I remember feeling like I was drowning in a Jacuzzi, and I remember, unfortunately, some of the things that I witnessed. Later, I will analyze reaction, later.

Later, meaning when I leave.  I put in my notice at work and have only two or three weeks left here.  I will try my best to shorten my time to the end of this week.  I have decided to travel and apply for jobs that begin in August or later.  But first I will travel and get back to myself.

My students!

My kids.  I love my kids.  They are the cement that is begrudgingly keeping my feet glued down.  Despite the fact that I am clueless when it comes to teaching, that the first day I made a girl cry because I put her in the corner (protocol for misbehavior), and that each day I am reminded of my inadequacies, the kids love me and I love them back.  

Of course, I have my favorites, but the majority will use any chance or excuse they can get to inch as close to me as possible, to touch my clothes, to put their hand on my knee, to look longingly into my face, to get out of their chairs while I am at the board so that when I turn around I have three kids just standing next to me.  They love being close to me.   I love that they love it.  When I read to them, they crawl over each other to try to sit on my lap and by the end up the story, two of them have their chins resting on my shoulder and two more have their hands lightly resting on my knees.  It sounds odd, I know, but they are comforted by me, I think, and it boosts me up and makes me feel like I could have some real influence on them.  Then, of course, they act like the five year olds they are and I get frustrated.  I now have 20 of them.  One doesn’t know her ABC s and about 6 are fluent in English.  I’ve catered to people’s needs my whole life but this is completely different!  I am “Teacher Becca” to them and no matter what I do, what I threaten or bribe them with, they will always, always, shout my name out while raising their hands, just to show me that they’ve finished the first math problem.  I can’t count how many times I say “That looks wonderful, now do the next one” in one day. 

Every day one of them will inevitably have some sort of emotional episode that either makes me laugh or fear for their life.  A few days ago, a kid drank all of the ink out of his pen.  The other day, a girl got squished so hard between the desks that she couldn’t call out to me for help.   One of my favorites, Stephen, a chubby boy with a round face and pale skin, cried because his friend promised him that he would tell him a story, and then broke the promise.  They are adorable!  I can’t help myself, I could tell you about them all day long. 

The other day, Chester, the student who drank his pen, called out to me, “Hey Sexy Lady”, which then got repeated by his friend.   I don’t think I have ever seen myself get so angry.  It took my all my strength to not walk out on these children and I swore up and down that if I ever see Chester’s parents I would punch them.   The disgusting, hellish culture of Pattaya seeps in to these children’s minds, and I am reminded of that as I tell them each day to keep their hands to themselves, to not call people that, to look at the girls in the eyes, to keep their clothes on, things that I can’t decide are part of this hyper-sexualized culture or simply part of being young.  I don’t want to analyze it because it makes my brain turn dark when I do.

My Job!

I teach first grade here.   We had two days of training in which there was an ideological tug of war between how harshly to discipline the kids (in Thailand, disciplining the kids comes before rewarding them for good work.  It comes before feeding them or letting them ask questions) and how much to let their minds creatively flourish.  We would literally hear two opposing points of view within minutes of each other… “tell the students what the rules are going to be first and have each one of them bow to you before school starts” and then, “have the students develop their own rules.  Take them outside and have them experience nature”.  Or, “have them write word for word what you write on the board, to practice their handwriting” versus “don’t have them copy what you write, or else they won’t understand what it is that they’re writing”.  The school is undergoing some changes, from traditional learning models to more modern ones, and the battles are being fought right now between the stubborn teachers and the ones most gung-ho about change.  It makes my job a little bit harder, as I have to prepare lesson plans weekly and on a term basis, while following the traditional curriculum and also having to do creative projects with the kids almost every day.  I guess it’s what every teacher goes through…the basic curriculum alone is enough to keep me busy for the whole term.   

I teach English, Science, Math, ESL to a predominantly Thai speaking class, geography twice a week, social studies, and library.  Most days I have one or two hours free, meaning I am on, teaching, for six hours. We are not allowed to wear shoes in the school and the classrooms  are all hard tile floors, so by the end of the day I am exhausted, hot, and my feet feel like they are about to fall off.    We can’t have the AC on unless there are students in the classroom which may seem normal in places with moderate temperatures but here in Satan’s large intestine, it becomes like living in a room of flaming hot Cheetos mix.  I have about two minutes of silence after the students leave and the AC is turned off that I can do work before my arms start to melt.  I usually opt for popping a few Advil and doing my lesson plans in my classroom while the Thai teacher teaches them the Thai alphabet (imagine 20 kids yelling sharp, tonal accents one after the other for an hour…after a while it becomes like a soundtrack to a cheaply made horror film).

I had two Thai teachers who would help out with discipline, getting the kids to pay attention when I was writing something on the board, etc.  The Thai teachers don’t speak much English and teach their own classes and after a few days I realized that when I was teaching they would leave the room, leaving me to my own devices , which is terrifying!  Imagine having 20 precious little faces staring up at you, hands folded and waiting for knowledge to pour out of your mouth, only to realize that when you speak they don’t understand a majority of what you say and you don’t understand any of what they say.  Two of my Thai teachers are no longer my Thai teachers, now I have a different one, and there are constantly Thai women in polo t-shirts floating in and out of the classroom carrying posters with symbols on it.  I can’t understand a majority of what they tell me, and judging by the look on their faces most of it is pretty important.  The clashing of cultures often makes me laugh to myself.   

I have 15 to 20 students depending on the day, just today I got three more students.  They are mostly half Thai and half foreign (Russian, Scottish, Chinese, Korean, etc).  Their mothers are typically Thai and their fathers came here on business or holiday and decided to stay. My students range anywhere from being completely fluent in English (which for some is their third language) and able to read, write, and do simple math equations to, on the other hand, not understanding simple commands and not being able to sound out letters and simple words like “cat” and “bat”.  I spend a lot of time figuring out what to do with the advanced kids and how to cater to the ones that need the most help.  The same goes for my ESL class, which is huge (25 students) and has one student who has such severe ADHD that she isn’t part of the class, she just runs freely around the classroom and whenever I try to give her work to do, the Thai teacher takes it away.  In that class, I feel like a zookeeper.  It’s incredibly difficult to manage fluent speakers with children who can’t tell me their name in English.  I asked the Thai teacher for advice and she told me to be louder and yell at them more.  I can’t let myself do that.  Even though in this school, the children are forced to learn things that I didn't learn until I was much older, and disciplined in a way that maybe was fashionable 25 years ago, I have to remember that behind those worn out and tired eyes is a five year old who would much rather be playing than learning a bizarre language that their mom can't even speak.

The Beginning - Logistics

I came here  after a beautifully long train ride, most of which found me sitting backwards talking to other young teachers about the enigmas of the country I would soon call home.  Jenna (my college friend who is doing the same thing here that I am) met me in our hotel lobby on the busy and white-filled, foreign-restaurant-lined Khao San Road and we began our adjustment to each other, Thailand, and the rock hard beds we would soon grow accustomed to.  We arrived by taxi in Jomtien the next day and I knew I felt…different.  Along the way I lost my innate sense of where the beach was, where water was, where the end was, where I could go if I needed to see something finished and I all of a sudden felt dizzy and lost.  

Jomtien was not the small town I envisioned and I was confused by how there seemed to be no separation between Jomtien and its evil twin, Pattaya.  Or should I say evil step-sister.  Pollution, converted pick-up trucks, motorbikes, dust, condos, resorts, hotels, brown water, 7/11s and a certain buzz of complacency of people accepting this place for what it is overwhelmed me as we pulled into the school, a small tropical oasis off the main road.  We met Tom, an older man from Boston who has been teaching there for a few years.  He is one of the most helpful people I have met since I have been here.  Later, we would rent a motorbike from him and buy two phones from him.  

The school is beautiful; there are gardens, a pool, housing for the principals (May and her husband Eric) and some other teachers, there’s a covered playground and air-conditioned classrooms.  The playground has raised fans that spray mist and despite my misgivings and initial mind-travel into the terrors of herding hundreds of children into a cement room and turning on fans spewing liquid, I held my tongue and was at least grateful that this tiny piece of Jomtien seemed somewhat immune to the depressingly stifling heat.   After touring the school, Jenna and I went with Tom and two other office ladies to look for housing.  I was already exhausted, tearing up because something inside of me was fighting and losing my orientation, unable to find a locality, a tropicality, the rurality I was instinctively looking for.  The freedom I once had a few days prior in Malaysia to look for my own place to stay and to not have to put up any professional fronts slowly trickled out of me.   In Malaysia I was only barely beginning to find, or build, my roots, to live in my colors and now here I was, washed away into everybody else’s paint streams.  

I felt the dear of standing still come back.  This fear was ugly, it was tepid and stagnant and brought back memories of the lukewarm terrifyingly pungent baths I used to take when I was younger and would get sick in my bed.  I felt I would never get to know this place, not only because I straight up didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t let myself be my own enemy enough to admit that I pertained here.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Jenna and I found two rooms, one floor apart, on a busy and loud road.  Our landlord is 19 and his girlfriend a few years older.  They are sweet and naïve; sweet enough to have painted the complex immensely bright colors, which I thought was a good omen, as my room is the exact interpretation I have of the color cerulean.  My room is simple.  I have no desk, which I now see as one of the banes of my existence…I feel trapped every time I come home exhausted from school and my only options are a table-less chair or my bed.  Ugh.  Needless to say, I would like to move out to a room with a view that’s quieter, has a kitchen and a table, and properly draining water in the bathroom.  Ahh, luxury. 

Pattaya

I understand that it’s been a long time since I’ve written.  A lot has happened and at the same time I feel as if no time has gone by at all, like I’m still stuck on a dirt road somewhere, hair matted,  brown dust in my brown eyes, hundreds of emails to respond to, lifeless with friends hanging in the balance.  I always, always feel like I need a shower here and for a myriad of reasons.  

I find myself not wanting to start at the beginning because that seems ancient to me, a beginning that I would not want to remember, a beginning that is maroon and bleak and has gotten browner and browner since, like a forgotten blood stain.  This place is like a forgotten blood stain, the Tijuana of Thailand, the asshole of the world, filled with the assholes of the world, but let me start at the beginning, even it means playing that low bass music that mistakenly rhymes with my heartbeat, taking out a bottle of wine, and trying to find a place to sit in my own home.  Trying to find a place to sit and trying to find some air to breathe because this place surely (surely as the air is polluted and the prostitutes roam hungry like they’re looking for their long lost watering hole, surely as the night never comes but the Russians always do) has reserved its limited air capacity for others.

On the train to Thailand, 4/29

On the train, I can't help but feel that movement is happening for me. That movement is happening only for me and I love it. Rickety and slow, but steady and free, I have become this movement. Free yet on track, going through Tuesdays as bleak as the smell that once was them, as bleak as the tears that was that one Tuesday, yellow and pertinent, standing out like my hip bones used to. I am rounding out in the best sense of the word, not just from curry and naan and noodles, but from the buffer zones and self-protection. My face, smiling and bright emerges from where it once hid behind my seat belt and cried. I am now beginning to begin the process, that thing is starting to happen I think, where I crave it, I crave to be alone, I know people who know me, I am allowed to show them my face without makeup, I am allowed to share Pringles in the seat of the train station with a three year old Asian girl while showing her my Kindle and laughing, trying to teach her words while she giggles. I used to not do that, I used to want to do that or approach it gingerly, now I jump in. I see myself in these children, in the girls watching Toy Story, in the girl wearing a leotard dancing around the train station, stopping occasionally to get a chip or dried mango from me. I see them and I feel a part of me, an innocence spring up from a place within me previously unknown. Then the pain comes and I almost start to cry – like the pain of the world mixed with my own childlike pain all on my shoulders at once creating this impossible inability to sit up straight, or pick my feet up when I walk. No matter how stained my fingers get with curry or how stained my heart gets with dragon-fruit juice dripping from its chambers, I will still be burdened until the one day when I will work through it. I will be strong enough to remember this pain and carry it, not to throw it away. But for now, sitting on this train, hilariously bunched with the two other foreigners I realize that maybe,just for now, and just for a while, its ok for me to sit with this idea that I am building up the strength to be able to handle this; to walk with it on my shoulders because it will never, ever go away. I will only one day be able to contain it, carry it, love myself peering out from underneath it and eventually I will swallow it and it will become me. I don't think, but again this is part of a process, that I will ever become it again.