Chiang Mai

The train to Chiang Mai was an all-night party. It was exactly unlike the Chinese train in that our car was filled with foreigners and the Thai crew were partying with us on the way up. We sat next to an exceedingly cheerful bald Amsterdamian in his late thirties who was to trek through the jungles with his father. His father, a good man with a mustache curled at both ends, gave me a small pouch of quality Dutch tobacco. He had been to the Indonesian jungles eight times and is exactly what you'd expect an 18th century colonial safari sojourner to look like.

We arrived at around ten in the morning and tuk-tuk'ed to the Banana Guest House. It's the first time I've never had to pay up front for a room. Even my lunch was put on a tab. We spent the first part of the morning wandering around looking at Buddhist temples. We struck gold with Wat Chedi Luang, a 700 year old temple half ruined 500 hundred years ago by an earthquake. A sign to side read "Monk Chat," so we spent the next hour with a 21 year old monk talking about infinity, faith, science, and Buddhist rituals. I bought a book from him, exchanged email addresses [he also had a cell phone {to call his mother}], and I intend to keep the conversation alive.

I upped adventure up a notch after that. I rented a motorcycle for roughly $3. I've never ridden a motorcycle before, or even ridden on for that matter. I thought it was a moped. It was not. I spent the next hour struggling to keep on the left side of the road, shift gears, and figure out where the hell I was. Luckily the core of Chiang Mai is walled in making it truly difficult to get meaningfully lost. My legs are still shaking from that little party. I'm not sure if I have the testicular fortitude to continue learning this particular craft. It feels as dangerous as it is. I've never wanted a seat belt more.

Don't know where we're going now. There's a lot of "trekking" near here... to village tribes, to elephant riding through the jungles, to white water rafting, downhill mountain biking, even cross-border visa runs to Myanmar and Laos. My gut is telling me to take the three hour bus ride through the mountains to Pai, a hippie hide-out on the Burmese border.

It's an object of curiosity what exactly all these hippies are doing here. We're not talking young dread-locked experimentalists you'd catch a String Cheese Incident show. We're talking mid to late twenties, sometimes older, guys and gals with dreads and very free flowing clothes. They're dressed more native than the Thai's. Sometimes I feel like I'm back at a Rainbow Gathering.

It's also of curiosity my reaction towards them. In America I have a bit of admiration for the legitimate counter-culturalist. But these guys are in Asia. My new neck of the woods. I place where I try my best everyday to adopt to cultural norms. I'm not so appreciate of white counter-culture here, but that could change if I knew how the Thai's felt about it. I think there's a strong chance that this is, indeed, not China and the Thai's really are as non-judgmental as they appear. This is the land of the "girl-boys", the only thing a Chinese person can tell you about Thailand.



UPDATE: The hippies are kind of real, kind of fake. The wear the light, flowing clothes because two pairs can last you until they fall apart. They're comfortable, dry quickly, and pack tight. You can get around with just a normal backpack if you pack light enough. I don't think it's about trying to make a fashion statement.

Letter from Japan

Alvin Saha:

Hey, you don't know me, but I just happened to come upon your profile and I remembered that you used to write for the Spinnaker. I always thought that you wrote good stuff, so I sat down to read your profile, and found out that you are in China. I'm studying in Japan for a year, I've been here for about 6-7 months now, with about 5 more to go. What do you think about China and the political system? I was reading a little bit of your blog, but not very deeply, I must admit. What program are you teaching in China with? I've never been to China, but I've found that Japan is socially repressed and alienating. Oddly enough, it isn't just the gaijin (foreigners) who are alienated, but the Japanese themselves as well. To me, Japan, though a great nation (not to mention a helluva lot of fun), seems to have a large number of social problems that stem not from political repression, but rather societal values and the trouble that the younger generations are having with embracing liberal Western values and maintaining their traditional vales, which are often at odds with each other. Is China like this?

My response:

Hey Alvin,

I'm down in Shenzhen, China's first capitalist experiment [called a Special Economic Zone], teaching at a boarding school run by Beijing/Peking University. I'm teaching grades 3 - 6 right now. It's not quite what I was expecting to be doing but the job has grown on me a lot. I'm thinking next year I want explicitly aim to teach at a college. I'm assuming you're studying Japanese, right? My Chinese is coming along slowly but surely.

Ey, it seems the problems are very different in our respective countries. The Chinese are very family oriented. I mean, I'd always heard that other countries are family oriented, but coming from a divorced family with a great deal of estrangement I always assumed that the other half of America with non-divorced households was "family oriented."

By family oriented, they mean things like my roommate given half of her $250 a month to her parents. They saved a lifetime for her college education and now she subsidizes their future retirement. There's also the dynamic that almost every household being single-child. Kids here are lavished with attention and whatever the parents can afford.

Alienation just isn't an issue that I've seen.

The issues most younger Chinese face is trying to find meaningful and prosperous employment. This is a country that turns old ladies into human lawnmowers. Every store and restaurant has about double the staff that it really needs. There's just too many people... even a college degree in accounting, like my roommate, won't get you too much in your hometown. A lot of them move to the bigger cities for work.

Even in places like Shenzhen, my city, where almost no one is local, people cling to what's left of "traditional" values. Mao destroyed a lot of what we'd consider traditional Chinese culture, but there's an air of prudence about. Girls aren't supposed to wear bikini's to the beach and most of the women I've flirted with have kissed, at most, one boy in their quarter century of life. Being far away from home doesn't seem to erode these values as much as you'd think.

"Modern" is in, but it means money... not culture or thought. There is no art scene to speak of like in Japan. There are no "scenes" at all pushing boundaries and asking troubling questions. Everyone just wants to make enough cash to survive and give their kids a better future. So no, there really is no clash between their take on modern and traditional values.

Glad to hear from you,
- Trey Menefee

Tags: Treyopia China Chinese Japan Japanese culture modern difference traditional