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Published: September 14th 2022
I had a temper tantrum this morning. Not on a local thankfully, but enough histrionics to shock and awe the morning commuters. Before the yelling, it was a typical Friday morning. Eslyn and I left home around 6:45am. The birds were making a racket in the banyan tree. A new offering of pineapple, bananas, and marigolds garlands had been left on the altar in front of the spirit house. The sun was shining, and the sky was blue. Neither the maddening heat of the day nor the inevitable street-flooding downpour had yet arrived. Nearer to the park, the pungent smell of fish sauce and cooking oil rose from the street-food kitchens and hung deliciously in the air mingling with the frangipani. We had made it out the door on time, so instead of dodging morning motorcycle commuters, we detoured through the park to watch the walkers and joggers, the tai chi-ers, the bench sitters, the cat feeders, the weightlifters, the idlers, and the calisthenic-ers. Then we took the sky train a couple stops. On our way to the car park, where vans waited to carry kids to school, Eslyn skipped along happily chatterboxing. The weekend was just around the corner. Two
other kids walked ahead of us toward the waiting van. Though mostly full, there was no line, and space for a few more. The kids in front of us got in the van. We sawdeekap-ed (greeted) the driver, and then as Eslyn was about to climb through the door, a lady rushed up with her kid and pushed him into the van ahead of Eslyn. Unfortunately for everyone, that straw broke the bezerker’s back.
After 6 months of polite passive aggressive comments to parents, nannies, and children who failed to grasp the concept of lines and turn-taking, today, I completely lost my shit. There was some yelling. Okay, a lot of yelling. Some gesticulating. Miraculously, there was no cursing. What I said was something like, “What’s wrong with you? Did you just slither out from under a rock you uncouth human abomination? Have you never seen a line before? Do they not have these where you come from? Were you under the impression that inconveniences like waiting your turn don’t apply to you? Are you so rude and entitled that you think your time is more important than everyone else’s? Also, you are a bad mother.”
She decided
to yell back. She claimed she hadn’t seen Eslyn. A bigger person would have accepted this flimsy face-saving excuse and got on with the day. Alas, I am not a bigger person. “Preposterous!” I declared. With a grandiose sweeping arm motion across the empty plaza behind us, I inquired “How did you manage to cross this wide-open expanse and not see the ONLY child standing IN FRONT OF the van you were rushing to get to? Was the CANARY YELLOW shirt not bright enough to catch your attention?” I am sure my sarcasm was not entirely appreciated, but since the crazy train had left the station, I kept shoveling coal.
I was clearly overreacting, but I figured the relationship between lines, turn-taking, and common decency and courtesy were things she might be familiar with. I was reasonably confident she was from a wait-your-turn country, though I do recognize there are places in the world where you don’t do this. I recall being in my early 20s in India with my legs spread wide, arms fully extended, swinging the backpack on my back like a cudgel and holding on, white knuckled, to the iron-barred ticket window in a train station
while my buddy Jamie, standing between me and the window tried desperately to push a fistful of rupees through the window to the bored attendant. Meanwhile, dozens – or maybe hundreds, perhaps thousands – of wiry, mustachioed touts with blood-red betel stained teeth tried to crawl under and over my arms and through my legs to push their money with a little baksheesh (bribe) through first. In India, queuing – at least queuing for third class train tickets - was a quaint affectation of colonialism discarded along with the British Raj.
Only a few thousand kilometers and the Bay of Bengal separate India from Thailand, but this is not how things work in Thailand. In Thailand, the default is deference – to monks, monarchy, age, authority, common decency (and if we are being honest, foreigners.) They give up their seats to old people, pregnant women, children, and monks. They let people exit the train before boarding. They don’t honk. They wai (bow) a little when they cut you off in traffic. They wear masks because the Thai Health Authority recommends it. They appear to consider others before themselves. And they wait in lines. What they certainly don’t do is
scream at strangers in public.
Rather, Thais cultivate ‘jai-yen,’ a cool heart. Jai-yen is the cultural ideal to stay calm and composed, to be non-confrontational, and to navigate tense or antagonistic situations without losing your cool. It is contrasted with ‘jai-ron,’ the hot heart, which is the propensity to confront, escalate, raise your blood pressure, yell, rage, and act like a lunatic – or a brutish foreigner. This isn’t to imply that Thais don’t get angry, but they do a waaaaaay better job of hiding it and keeping their cool. This cultural disposition – which is either real or a romanticized fever dream cooked up by foreigners smitten with Thai culture – may also be reflected in the oft heard phrase ‘mai bpen rai.’
o You are going to be late, mai bpen rai.
o I accidentally poked you in the eye with an umbrella, mai bpen rai.
o My kid just vomited in your taxi, mai bpen rai.
Most situations seem to be mai bpen rai-able. The meaning of this phrase includes ‘you’re welcome, no problem, yes, no, don’t worry about it, and whatever will be, will be.’ Perhaps ‘mai bpen rai – jai yen-ness’ is how you deal with the heat and humidity without going insane; perhaps it is what belief in dharma and karma looks like in practice; or perhaps it is something cooked up by the Tourism Authority marketing department, but whatever the case, you probably should remain cool and not get upset about things you cannot change. And anyway, it’s bad manners to get worked up about a motorcycle on the sidewalk. “Jai-yen! Mai bpen rai!”
By noon, I had almost completely rationalized and justified my earlier behavior. I decided to take a swim and reflect upon the mysteries of the Thai language. Over the years, I have discovered, much to my dismay, that learning languages is very hard; on the other hand, making stuff up about them is very easy. I enjoy poking around languages and then making sweeping generalizations based on selective observation and bad language skills. Lazily floating in the pool, I watched the clouds swirl overhead and thought about the Thai ‘jai,’ the heart. In addition to jai-yen/ron (cold/hot heart), there is quite a lot of other ‘jai’ in the Thai lexicon. Amongst the paltry pickings of my vocabulary, I found naam-jai (generous), son-jai (interested), sia-jia (sad), puum-jai (proud), dtok-jai (shocked), dii-jai (excited), and greng-jai (like considerate, but way more complicated and also wrapped up with conflict avoidance-face saving Thai-ness in ways I poorly understand). Although English has some heart too (big-hearted; broken-heated; half-hearted; to lose heart), there is clearly something heart-centric happening in Thai.
Tellingly, it is not ‘merely’ the emotional that is grounded in the heart; for example, the word ‘to understand’ is ‘kao-jai’. The literal translation of kao-jai is ‘to enter the heart.’ So understanding is a matter of the heart not the mind. In the post Enlightenment West, mind and reason were divorced from emotion and body. Where ‘Cogito ergo sum’, the heart is handmaiden to the head. Not surprisingly, in English, our jai-yen and jai-ron are related to the head not the heart; consequently, we ‘keep a cool head’ or are ‘hot headed’. I am not smart enough to know how or why, but I am certain that it is significant whether you run your metaphors through the heart or the mind.
Later that afternoon, I was back on the sky train heading to pick Eslyn up. Though an amusing diversion, ill-informed meditations on language and culture are largely long-winded rationalizations for behaving poorly. The lady probably did just make a mistake. These happen. Unfortunately for her, I think line-cutting is the sum of all evils, the embodiment and ugly manifestation of privilege, selfishness, and entitlement. Eslyn attends a private international school, so I worry about this. A LOT. Environment has a way of shaping identity. Of course, parents everywhere and at all times have tried to figure out how to bridge the distance in space and time between their own misremembered childhood and the childhood they are tasked with not ruining. My version just involves navigating international waters. Nonetheless, it would likely be smoother sailing if I spent more time cultivating a cool heart and less time raging about line cutting.
Things read and consulted to bolster the questionable claims made. (Apologies for Travel Blog's not user friendly formatting absurdity. This is the reference page so it doesn't really matter.)
What some white people had to say about Thai jai things:
• “Phrases every visitor to Thailand should know: Jai yen”
https://www.travelfish.org/beginners_detail/thailand/9 • “Jai Yen Yen – What Does It Really Mean?”
https://www.thethailandlife.com/jai-yen-yen • “Mai Pen Rai-NOT! A Lesson in Thai Culture”
https://mythailand.blog/2016/06/27/mai-pen-rai/ • “The art of being ‘greng-jai’”
https://www.bangkokpost.com/life/social-and-lifestyle/1446319/the-art-of-being-greng-jai What a (maybe) Thai person had to say:
• “The Heart Culture”
http://www.thaibis.com/a-z/t/tc/the-heart-culture What someone with academic credentials to say things about cardio vs. cerebro-centric cultural models:
• “What's in a heart? - Culture-specific concepts of emotionality and rationality”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242392722_What%!s(MISSING)_in_a_heart_-_Culture-specific_concepts_of_emotionality_and_rationality photos from the web:
• big bad wolf:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/424182858644302738/ • head exploding GIF:
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/604819424936878489/ • Indian ticket window:
https://openthemagazine.com/sports/no-country-for-spectators/
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Home and Away
Bob Carlsen
You might want to add this scholarly book about Thai "face."
https://www.amazon.com/Way-Thais-Lead-Social-Capital/dp/6162151166