Sorry, no speak English - me
Thai By David Simmons
HUA HIN, Thailand - Like James Bond fans
everywhere, I was looking forward to seeing
Casino Royale, and so my wife and I went
down to the local cineplex - a new addition to our
formerly sleepy beach town - to check out the
showtimes this weekend.
Great! It was
showing in three of the four cinemas.
Not
so great - dubbed Thai only, in all three. Not
even English
subtitles.
Now the
reader could argue - and I would not argue back -
that after living in Thailand for five years, it's
high time I learned enough of the language to
watch a movie and figure out when 007 is saying
"Shaken, not stirred" (although I gather from the
reviews that the new Daniel Craig version has done
away with that line - maybe in the Thai version
it's "make mine a biah Chang").
It's true, we expats are infamous for
laziness in learning the Thai tongue. In many
ways, Thai is not that difficult, at least in
theory - the complex grammar of European
languages, for example, is practically
non-existent in Thai. And yet the very simplicity
of its analytic grammar, free of declensions,
tenses, moods, gender and even plurals, gives it
an alienness many European-speakers find
troublesome. And worst of all, like Chinese, it is
tonal - the bane of every native speaker of a
European language.
Still, to be honest,
the main reason I have not learned Thai beyond the
essentials - "hello", "thank you", "more beer,
please" and "you are very pretty" - is lack of
dire necessity. English, after all, is the
"universal language".
Which is fine if
you're asking directions or chatting up a bargirl,
but the great divide between Thai and other
languages - most importantly English, the rapidly
growing impact of Chinese notwithstanding - is a
serious limitation, one that affects Thais far
more than expats. To foreigners like me, the
language barrier is no more than an irritant. To
the Thais, it can be a serious impediment to
coping in the world outside their borders - and
that is a much more important consideration
nowadays than it was 20 or even 10 years ago.
And, as usual, the Thai authorities not
only seem oblivious to this obvious problem - at a
time when most other countries in the region,
including "economic powerhouse" China, are
striving to improve their people's
foreign-language skills - they are evidently doing
their level best to make the problem even worse.
The latest fiasco is very typical of how
the Thai bureaucracy works. We've seen it many
times before; after years of neglecting a certain
problem to the point that it has become a hallmark
of society, someone in an ivory tower somewhere
decides that a "crackdown" is in order. So legions
of functionaries start firing off memos, and the
police awaken from their normal slumber to mount a
"campaign", endless time is wasted, countless
forests are chopped down to create mountains of
paperwork, and in the end, at best nothing
changes, and at worst problems far more draconian
than the one that started the whole nonsense are
created.
The teaching of foreign
languages, especially English, has always been a
bad joke in Thailand. Even in Bangkok it has never
been possible to find decent English teachers
among the local populace, and so parents serious
about having their kids learn the language
properly have been forced to turn to private
schools, often operated by foreign educational
outfits or religious organizations. Some of these
are well run and hire staff with high standards,
but many of them are not, and do not. Over the
years, Thailand has become famous as a haven for
long-term vacationers who could stay here
indefinitely, doing occasional "visa runs" to
maintain a tourist stamp in their passports, while
supporting themselves in fly-by-night "language
schools".
Often these so-called English
teachers could barely speak English themselves
but, because of another widespread Thai
misconception that "one farang is the same
as any other" (a farang is a white-skinned
foreigner), they could get hired on the basis of
their skin color while, for example, Indians and
Filipinos who were actually fluent in English got
short shrift.
Meanwhile immigration laws,
always among the most xenophobic in Asia, got even
more heavy-handed under the administration of
recently deposed prime minister Thaksin
Shinawatra. Visa costs soared, rules apparently
designed for no other purpose than to increase the
inconveniences endured by foreigners were
introduced (along with exorbitant fines for
non-compliance, even if unintentional or due to
the incompetence of local authorities), and so an
already dysfunctional environment that made life
more comfortable for illegal workers than for
qualified teachers was made worse.
Anyone
in the Ministry of Education who bothered to open
his eyes could have seen any of this, and indeed
most probably did. But in Thailand, government
functionaries never do anything unless a
"crackdown" is ordered from on high. And that
requires something extraordinary to happen.
Enter - drum roll, please - John Mark
Karr.
Karr was just another American
drifting from place to place, supporting himself
by picking up teaching jobs here and there.
Bangkok was one stop on his journey, where one of
his erstwhile employers noted that he was
"articulate and polite" - far more important
criteria to many Thais than anything as trivial as
competence, or the fact that this particular chap
politely and articulately claimed to have murdered
a little girl named JonBenet Ramsey back in 1996.
Well, you know how that story ended. Karr
got himself arrested by Thai police, and
subsequently scored a free flight courtesy of the
American taxpayer back to the US to face the music
for killing little JonBenet. Minor problem: DNA
analysis proved Karr couldn't have done it, so
that was that.
Still, the Karr story
wasn't over in Thailand. No, this was clearly a
job for the Crackdown Brigade! Karr had been a man
of questionable (if polite) character, and not
only that, he was a farang who probably
didn't have the right papers. And worst of all, he
had made Thai officialdom look lazy and
incompetent.
And so practically overnight,
the long-hallowed practice of staffing Bangkok's
myriad private language schools with drunken
Germans recruited in go-go bars was called into
serious question. The Giant Crackdown Broom was
taken out of the closet and, along with the
drunken Germans, people who had been teaching and
living quietly in Thailand, sometimes marrying
local people and having kids of their own, had to
prove their credentials or face deportation, huge
fines, and possibly imprisonment.
The
horror stories have been burning up the forums and
chatrooms (those that are still functioning after
an earlier Crackdown on such sites that Thai girls
might have been using to find foreign boyfriends -
this was the Crackdown Against Naughty Sex
Behavior by Our Precious Youth, if memory serves).
Here's one gleaned from Ajarn.com, a website for
expatriate teachers in Thailand, as told to the
site by the head of an Australian school that runs
a joint-venture institution in Bangkok.
The teacher in question, the website was
told, "was caught up in one of the immigration
raids because the usual Thailand red tape meant
that she was left waiting for three months while
[her] new employer sorted out her teaching license
and work permit. When the immigration police came
a-knocking, she didn't have a scrap of paper to
show them and was duly arrested. She was
fingerprinted and detained at the police station
(along with 10 other teachers from the same
school) from 10am to 9pm.
"How humiliating
an experience is that? Eventually the school
coughed up 30,000 baht [more than US$800] a
teacher by way of a fine and the 11 teachers
appeared in court the following day - where they
paid a personal fine of 2,000 baht and were placed
on a good-behavior bond for one year. So a teacher
doing nothing more than following what she was
contracted to do suddenly found herself with a
criminal record.
"And do you know what the
biggest laugh was? Those teachers were told they
could go straight back to work but make sure they
had the correct documents within a given
time-frame. Now, can you make any sense of that?"
Sure, if you live in Thailand. This is the
place that for months was scaring away tourists by
conducting random urine tests in fancy nightclubs
in the War (the next step up from a Crackdown)
Against Drugs, rigidly enforcing early-evening
closing times at licensed drinking establishments
while Sukhumvit Road, one of the most heavily
touristed streets in Thailand, turned into
Southeast Asia's biggest outdoor brothel, ignored
by police. Tourism revenues lower than they should
be, while even places like Singapore and Vietnam
are booming? Gee, wonder why?
But we
digress. There are, according to Ajarn.com, some
moves afoot, especially in the southern province
of Phuket, to get the Education Ministry to
rethink some of the more draconian aspects of its
new rules and enforcement procedures for teachers,
before the last one switches off the lights en
route to more welcoming environs in China, Taiwan,
South Korea or Japan. The legitimate schools are
not arguing for a return of the bad old day of the
drunken German go-go-bar recruit, only that
licensing and immigration rules make sense, that
they be consistently applied, that the fees be
rolled back to reasonable levels given the
traditionally low pay of teachers in Thailand,
that teachers already in the country be given
reasonable time to get their paperwork in order
before being summarily arrested and/or deported,
and so forth.
But this is not, or should
not be, about giving teachers an easy life. There
is, after all, no doubt that some of them have
brought the current crisis on themselves by taking
advantage of the lax enforcement that is the norm
in Thailand between Crackdowns, and by tolerating
questionable behavior by the authorities and their
employers simply because Thailand is a nice place
to live. Most of us expats are in a similar boat.
No, the real victims of substandard
teaching have always been children, and therefore,
since children are the future of any country,
Thailand itself is the loser. By being more
concerned about officiousness, collecting
exorbitant visa fees and fines, and the appearance
of keeping the likes of John Mark Karr out of
Thailand than about genuinely improving the
quality of foreign-language education, the
authorities are dooming their youth to isolation
behind an impenetrable language barrier.
As poorly educated, linguistically
challenged Thai youth more and more find
themselves unable to cope in a global economy, it
will be a disaster beyond even the capabilities of
the newer, cooler 007. Or at least I think so;
I'll have to wait for the English-language DVD of
Casino Royale to hit the local shops to
make sure.
David Simmons is a
correspondent for Asia Times Online based in
Thailand.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
about sales, syndication and republishing
.)
