The morning after I arrived in Bangkok, I realized I had forgotten to pack dental floss. I speak no Thai and had made my way around the morning by signing and pointing at things I wanted - mostly food - but I couldn't think of a way to sign 'dental floss' without looking absurd, so I decided to go to the Big C, a supermarket that sold toiletries as well, where I could get it off a shelf.
On those shelves, I saw skin-whitening creams. I'd seen these in Mexico; I'd seen them in India. Nivea definitely has the corner on this market. They never fail to make my mind flash on a memory of one of aunts telling, when I was quite young: "Don't worry that your skin is so dark. You have beautiful features." I wasn't surprised to see them here, but I wasn't looking forward to what they implied in terms of how I might be treated. At least it was an equal-opportunity exploitation, I thought. This was the first place I had ever seen skin-whitening products for men.
It quickly became apparent, however, that my skin colour was irrelevant to Thais. I was simply Indian. And Indians were known here. On my second day, on the way to Chinatown, I passed an Indian bank. The food court in MBK Mall in Siam Square - a shopping district in Bangkok I can only describe as Yonge and Bloor on speed - there was a booth with Indian food. There was a stall selling Indian food at the night market in Chiang Mai. One of Lonely Planet's 'top picks' for restaurants in Chiang Mai is an upscale Indian one. And in the Khao San district of Bangkok, an area inhabited by backpackers in search of the hippy continuum on their travels outside the West, I noticed three things I had encountered little of elsewhere in Thailand: the smell of marijuana, the presence of a large number of cops, and the sights and sounds of Hindi- and Punjabi-speaking Indian hotel owners. They were profiting from hippies. Ironically, I thought, and on a very small scale, they were re-appropriating what had been appropriated from India by the Sixties fifty years ago.
I also figured out pretty quickly that Indian tourists were seen differently from white tourists. On the last leg of a trip to Amphawa, the site of floating market restaurants on the Mekong river, I met the lone other tourist catching that train: Luke, a med student from England. We agreed to finish the trip together. When we got to Amphawa, we sat down at an outdoor restaurant at the edge of the river for a beer to celebrate. We asked a weathered fisherman passing by where the floating market was. He pointed down the river. Then he pointed at me and said 'India', he pointed at Luke and said 'falang' ('foreigner'). And then he cackled.
In being recognized as Indian, however, I was also presumed to be Hindu. My first clue was at a food stall where I pointed at a dish that looked delicious. "Beef," the stall owner told me. I didn't have the command of Thai to say: actually, I'm a lapsed Catholic, and even if I were Hindu, I doubt I'd be observant enough to not eat beef. I passed on the dish out of respect for her respect for me. Every trip I make to a new place, I stop at McDonald's once to sample the Big Mac combo. When I tried to do this at a Mickey Dee's in Bangkok, the cashier hesitated and the manager came out from the kitchen to tell me it was beef. I ordered the fish sandwich combo - or 'set', as it's called in Thailand - instead. Given the ubiquity of pork in Thai food, I was glad to not be taken for a Muslim. And I was particularly grateful that no one expected me to be a vegetarian. And, there were other clues. When I asked for directions to a temple once or twice - I visited many temples on this trip - people told me that the temple I was looking for was not the one I wanted. The Indian one was somewhere else in the same general direction.
While I was presumed to be Hindu, I was usually not allowed to be Canadian. At the end of a bizarre conversation with a man in Chiang Mai that involved him speaking slowly and earnestly - as if that were all that was needed for me to understand Thai - and involved me saying 'no Thai', and 'mai' ('no', in Thai) to the cigarette he kept offering me, he finally gave up and produced an English word: "Country?" "Canada", I said. He laughed at me. "You. India". I nodded as if I had been busted telling a lie. 'I'm a South Asian Canadian' was obviously not a concept that was going to be successfully communicated here. From then on, if people asked me if I was from India, I agreed that I was. "Mumbai? Delhi? Chennai?" was sometimes the next question. I decided I was from Mumbai. It reminded me of being in small towns in Guatemala. When people asked me where I was from, I found it easiest to say "la capital" even though I've only ever spent one night in Guatemala City. They believed me. "Those of us who live between categories," says Pico Iyer speaking of this dilemma in Global Souls: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home. "Tend to pick the nearest (or handiest) answer so we can move the conversation along." Given that I've covered many travel miles passing as Latina in different parts of Latin America, it wasn't a stretch for me to accept the disconnect of being a Hindu from Mumbai, India.
Gradually, however, I did begin to feel a genuine connection with the place, and it had to do with the connection I have with my roots in India. The Thai wai is identical to the Indian pranam and Buddhist monks on the street would smile at me when I brought my hands together to show my respect for them. Before I learned the word for 'thank you' - 'khaphunkha' - a namaste did the job for me. Thais are pretty-universally, pretty-deeply Buddhist, and they know that Buddhism originated in India, even if they don't necessarily know about the Kalinga war in 260 BC, the slaughter at which caused King Asoka to convert to Buddhism and then send it east from his kingdom in what is present-day Orissa. Images of Ganesh, the elephant-head Hindu god, deity of fortune and success, can be seen all over Thailand in temples and in shrines. The international Buddhist conference in 1477 was hosted in Chiang Mai at Jet Yot Temple - the first photograph, above - a replica of the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodhgaya, India.
I also learned that those skin-whitening creams had to do with a classism internal to Thailand: the lower classes worked outside and their skin was darkened by the sun, so lighter skin was associated with higher classes. Certainly not the most laudable aspect of Thai culture, but nothing to do with preferring Caucasians or disparaging the melanin privileged. And the profiteering from skin-colour insecurity, I thought, was no worse than the profiteering from body-size insecurity in North America.
The one aspect where Indians are perceived negatively, however, in Thailand has to do with shopping. Bluntly put: we're perceived as cheap. My first experience with this had to do with a purse I liked at a stall around the corner from my nephew's apartment where I stayed when I was in Bangkok. "One hundred fifty baht," the grumpy stall owner told me. "Eighty," I said. She wagged a finger at me: "Thailand, no." I thought of the Russell Peters skit about how Indians and Chinese can't do business because Chinese people can't give you a bargain and Indians can't buy it if it's not a bargain. I bit my lip to not burst out laughing and shook my head. Well, Thais can give you a bargain, but bargaining ain't like it is in India. "One thirty," she said. "One hundred," I said. "One twenty." "One hundred," I insisted. She rolled her eyes. I did the dramatic walk-away. Nothing happened. She didn't concede. I looked back. She had returned to her seat. After that, I noticed a steeliness in people's eyes when I suggested a lower price. So, I gave up bargaining altogether. But everytime I was back in Bangkok, I had to pass the stall with the purse and the woman glowering at me in a way that made me uncomfortable about speaking with her even if I wasn't going to bargain for the purse. Finally, on my second-last day in Thailand, I decided I wanted it badly enough to deal with the discomfort of speaking with her. But, of course, by then it was gone.
*JG
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Posted by: モンスタービーツ イヤホン | 10/19/2013 at 11:31 AM