Sandy Does Southeast Asia

The front window of my house looks out onto a temple complex. Sitting at my desk, I can watch monks working in their yard. Right now, for example, one of them is using a hoe to turn over dirt and move it around. He is also engaging in one of the more popular pastimes in Southeast Asia – burning piles of stuff. He stops in the shade of a building and rests, leaning on the hoe. The scene is pure eye candy – blue smoke drifting across a backdrop of palm trees, iridescent roosters strutting in the dusty foreground, and in the middle of it all a saffron robed monk – perfectly composed to play into my Western conception of The Serene Spirituality of the East.

When my friend Jessica heard I was moving into this house she congratulated me, then said, “Just watch out for the monks.”

“Watch out for them how?” I asked.

“Oh, you know how they are. And that temple has an especially bad reputation.” Before I could tell her that no, I did not know how they are, she got distracted and we never had a chance to finish the conversation. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the word ‘especially.’ An especially bad reputation.

Thailand is reputed to be a very spiritual place. On the other hand, it is also hailed as a one-stop shop for sex and drug tourism. I have not seen either go-go bars or recreational drugs on the streets of Nong Khai but you would be hard-pressed to throw a rock on those same streets without hitting a monk. This would seem to make a case for the Spiritual Thailand side of the debate. You could take it further and say that maybe the sex and drugs are primarily for tourists while Thais themselves are devout, spiritual people.

You could say that but you’d be wrong. The fact is that monasteries in Thailand are something like bible camp in the States. Young men don’t go because they have any interest in spirituality. They are simply packed off to do their time so their families can feel pious and earn the approving nods of their neighbors. Luckily for the boys, they don’t have to stay for too long, a few months at the outside. Just long enough to say they’ve done it and then get back to their regularly scheduled program of clubbing, buying motorbikes and – since 95% of the sex industry is for domestic consumption and the average single Thai male avails himself on a surprisingly regular basis – visiting prostitutes.

“They won’t actually do anything,” said another long-time resident, reassuring me. Since the warning to watch out for the monks, I’d questioned every person I could, both about how the religious system works here and the potential dangers of living next to a monastery. “They’re not going to hurt you. They’ll just stare and maybe try to chat you up. It’s an annoyance more than anything. Don’t worry about it.”

The truth is, I wasn’t worried about it. I was more curious than anything else. I was curious about why Thailand has a reputation for being Spiritual with a capital S in the first place, when all signs so far have pointed to superstitious and status-conscious. In other words, it looks an awful lot like what we’d call plain old religious at home.

One day recently, I found myself swept up in a wave of expats fleeing our neighborhood just ahead of the mosquito extermination truck that sprays poison liberally over these streets every couple of months. It was a group I’ve never spent any time with – The Nong Khai New Agers. I don’t hang out with them not because I have anything against them but only because they are an exclusive clique, and try as I may I can’t seem to make inroads with them. There I was though, finally included in an outing.

As we sat and drank Thai iced teas, the two look-through-you-like-you-don’t-exist women sat on the opposite side of the table pretending I wasn’t there, while on my side of the table – with the man and the one woman I’ve managed to get on speaking terms with – the subject turned to my writing. I chatted about it a little and asked their advice in a friendly conversation way, since the man is an artist and the woman is very interested in literature, but the topic was soon exhausted.

I was also having some difficulty focusing since I’d noticed that the woman sitting directly across from me – the New Age Alpha Female of Nong Khai – had drawn in her eyebrows using a dark purple pencil. Now, I’d noticed before that she always wears head to toe purple including a particularly striking little turban but this…well, this was taking it a bit far. I was of course fascinated and began to really look at her. I saw how the blankly disinterested look beneath those purple eyebrows could easily be mistaken for calmness or even serenity. And then when I looked closer, it dawned on me that, exactly like one of the monks across the street from my house, when viewed with just the right lack of cultural information, one might automatically assume she was emanating a deep spirituality.

It strikes me that one of the real draws of foreign travel and even more, of living abroad, is that it is so much easier to see what you want to see, to be seen as you choose to see yourself, and to discard the rest. You can go about your daily life without all those messy details that can be so difficult to ignore at home, like ordained spiritual leaders who are more interested in sex than God. Even if you’re aware of them, it’s not your culture and therefore not your problem. You can create communities that reinforce your pet ideas about things like spirituality while vigorously insulating yourself from the reality of the culture in which you live. And that, I suspect, is the greatest luxury of being an expat.

Tags: Expats, Monks, Nong Khai, Spirituality, Thailand

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2006 at 8:17 pm and is filed under Nong Khai, Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.