Panda Bear

I came to Thailand to experience.  The program, ISDSI, touts its "experiential" approach to learning abroad on every bit of propaganda I read before I (and graciously, my parents) decided to sign up.  I have done little but "experience" in Chiang Mai.

Since my last post, the whitened pads of my fingers hoisted my weight up a cliff. I shook eggs from the mouth of a Tilapia fish.  My vocal cords trained themselves to distinguish "falling" from "low" tones. Six classmates and I carried a faux-injured girl across a river, racing a thunderstorm and flash-flood.  I stood beneath a waterfall.  A doctor pried back my tongue and inserted a flame-sanitized mirror down my throat, searching out a bamboo sliver.  I have screamed in alternating frustration and encouragement during CrossFit workouts.  I nearly cry out of patronized frustration. I laughed at my own childishness. 

These visceral experiences are earthy and shallow.  They are easy to digest (save the bamboo, apparently).  More difficult to tease apart is the world beneath the surface. Although the word "what" entered my Thai vocabulary immediately, we only just learned the word "why." I don't mean to sound like an undergrad with a soapbox constructed from a couple 100-level Sociology course and a plane ticket (guilty), but it's true that the "culture" of a foreign society is one of the most toughest concepts to sift apart.  9/11's tenth anniversary springs this stream of thought.  I scroll through Al Jazeera's daily news and consume brittle facts that say little about what is actually happening.  This is when I feel the loneliest, though in my ignorance, I am not alone. One of my instructors at ISDSI, a woman who has been living in Thailand off-and-on for three years asked me to explain to her what, exactly, a "tiger mother" was, as she'd heard the term and read its colloquial definition, but missed its cultural significance.  Similarly, the girls I babysat this summer (too young to remember the attacks) asked me why America was nervously preparing for "another 9/11," as the date comes and goes every year. 

Today I circled my submerged feet in a hot spring as I sucked the yolk from an egg I'd boiled in the same water.  The day slipped by, submerged in the bubbling pool of "experience," oblivious of where the tourist-contaminated water flows, not to mention what's happening in war-ravaged Burma, only 70 miles to the west. I grapple with my naivete, and I grapple with my guilt.  Like 9/11, not everything comes with a tidy resolution. 

Humor presents itself as the only viable front against bewilderment.  The Onion's penetrating coverage of today's services ("9/11 Memorial Curators Decide Not To Display Swastika Formed By Twisted Girders Found At Ground Zero") comforts me more than Obama's video address on the matter.  Similarly comfortable, my host family has taken to calling me "Pandah Beaar," after my dangerous run-in with the bamboo shoot.  Feels like home.