Power Cut

The lights went out this evening in the southern Thai village where Jip grew up. I was visiting her mother. We had been putting our feet up, watching a bit of TV. Mom suggested that I walk across the main room and check out the front window to see if other houses had power. They didn’t.

As I groped my way back across the room, it dawned on me that the phone in my pocket can become a flashlight. The beam revealed a large scorpion crawling slowly across the floor where I’d just walked.

Mom reacted casually. I froze in my tracks. She said, “I’ll fetch a kitchen knife.” Evidently she planned to cut the scorpion in half. Somehow the scorpion figured out her plan. It scampered.

When Mom returned from the kitchen she saw she was too late. Then she looked at my spooked expression. “Don’t worry,” she comforted, “It’s only the tiny ones that can kill you.”

Retrace

On the outside of an old letter I found the address of the Chiang Mai house where Jip stayed briefly as a researcher 23 years ago. Recently I passed though that neighborhood, a rabbit warren of little sois where house numbers have no rhyme or reason.

I walked around the ancient community, armed only with an envelope that read “7/1, Soi 2, Thippanet Rd.” Lots of helpful people scratched their chins and pointed, saying it might be “around that corner” and so on.

In one dead-end soi I met a woman who had never seen a Soi 2, but said she would ask the postman the next time she saw him. She took my phone number. That kind offer happened about 45 minutes into the search.

I re-traced my steps, planning to head home. It was getting dark. Expecting a shortcut, I headed down a soi I had passed earlier but not entered because it was labeled as “Soi 6, Wualai Rd.” A grandma swept her driveway behind a gate. Two noisy dogs told me to go away, but on a hunch I decided to ask anyway.

She motioned for me to come closer and I shouted my question. “Twenty years ago?” she smiled. She waved her neighbor over.  The two of them talked. The neighbor looked doubtful but agreed to be my chaperone on an expedition to look for “Auntie.”

After two twisty turns, we found Auntie on her porch. She hollered down to us that her address was “7/2, Soi 2, Thippanet Rd.” I knew from experience that 7/1 isn’t always next door to 7/2. Auntie encouraged me to take a look anyway—though she couldn’t understand why I didn’t just phone for directions. The chaperone wished me luck and headed back to her own place.

I carried on a few more steps around yet another corner, and there it was. As the crow flies, the weathered old wooden structure sits only about 300 meters from the house of the woman who said she could ask the postman. It had taken me about 15 more minutes of walking to get there.

Even before I saw the blue plastic sign displaying the numbers “7/1,” I had no doubt I had arrived at the right spot. For anyone else it might have been unremarkable. To me it looked astonishingly like the classic two-story Thai house in the South where Jip grew up.

Conundrum – a book review

In 21st century Thailand gender switching isn’t rare. Per capita, more Thais than Westerners identify as something other than what they were born. Pop culture here validates the numbers: TV and movies are full of transgenders. And many many foreigners come to Thailand for sex re-assignment, making this country number one in the world for this kind of surgery.

Gender identity has made headlines here recently because a candidate for Bangkok governor courted the “third-sex” vote. Also, Thai universities have been debating whether or not to allow ladyboys to dress normally—in other words, as women—when receiving their diplomas. Until now, Thai graduates who were born as men have had to line up with men, wear male clothing, and accept a sheepskin printed with their male name. Universities have come down on different sides of the question over the past few months.

A singer on “Thailand’s Got Talent” created a stir two years ago with a dramatic change in voice register midway through a song. Part of what’s fascinating about the clip is the enthusiastic reaction of the crowd. As the vocalist reveals her deep baritone, audience members instantly back her (him?), swaying along with the melody, and merrily flashing the thumbs-up sign.

These news items swirled around in my head as I read an old title by one of my favorite writers, Jan Morris, who was born as James. She transitioned in England during the 1960s and published Conundrum in 1974.

Her written account describes her confidently achieving what she calls the “fulfillment of my life’s desire.” She never doubts that she has always been female. Even though she had succeeded as a British man—serving in the military, fathering five children, achieving a fair degree of fame as a journalist—she nonetheless felt trapped in the wrong body.

Thus she began, at age 35, “one of the most drastic of all human changes, unknown until our times, and even now experienced by very few: but it seemed only natural to me, and I embarked on it only with a sense of thankfulness, like a lost traveler finding the right road at last.”

Reading the book forty years after it was written, I wondered how many of the Thai transgender I encounter feel a similar confidence.

It’s certainly unfair of me, with no personal experience in these matters, to question people I don’t know from Adam. When they cross my path here in Chiang Mai it’s usually because they are working behind counters in places where I shop. The impression given by many of these striking young specimens is one of play, or at least experimentation. They seem to share Morris’ delight in her identity, but lack the thoughtfulness that lies behind it. It’s difficult to imagine most of them ever saying of their decision what Morris says of hers in the opening chapter:

I believe it to have some higher origin or meaning. I equate it with the idea of soul, or self, and I think of it not just as a sexual enigma, but as a quest for unity… a dilemma neither of the body nor of the brain, but of the spirit.

Of course countless factors play into how people see and present themselves. I don’t pretend to understand others’ journeys. I won’t even try to touch here on the questions asked by Thai women who transition to become men. I also don’t know how to think about Thai men who dress and act as women but prefer to associate with gay men.

Just the same, fresh from finishing Conundrum, I can’t help pondering the Thai take on transgenderism. According to one Thai friend, it’s seen here less as an existential dilemma than a financial one—those hormone treatments aren’t cheap, and they’re not covered by the national health scheme. Somebody else suggested to me that the importance placed in Asia on external appearance motivates many transgender. In other words, they’re fascinated as much by beauty as by identity. And peer groups play a large role—one study found that over half of all ladyboys named friends as their primary influence. Evidently the increased attention and improved self-concept that result from a gender switch justify the tough stuff: risk of rejection by family, hassles at the hands of officialdom, and physical suffering for those who go the whole distance and acquire a new set of genitals.

Despite the many struggles they face, it’s safe to say transgenders in Thailand are well tolerated, perhaps due to a common belief that all of us have shared those orientations during past lives, and will do so again in the future. Yet tolerance isn’t the same as acceptance. Some Thais privately feel that past-life sexual sins explain being born transgender or gay.

Some anthropologists note that in Thailand people see men and women as being more similar than most other cultures do. Positive social attitudes towards the feminine have traditionally been expressed in language and rituals. As transgender numbers increase, so will general approval.

Writing in Conundrum, Morris herself appears to feel satisfied, or at least amused, by the many different cultural reactions to her transition:

I found response of English gentlemen ever more agreeable, enlivened always by that instant flicker of amused attraction which every woman knows and no man can quite imagine. Frenchmen were curious, and tended to engage me in inquisitive conversation, nearly skirting the issues with small talk until the moment came for a swift oblique dart to the heart of things—“You are married, yes? Where is your—er—your wife—your husband, is it?” Italians, frankly unable to conceive the meaning of such a phenomenon, simply stared boorishly, or nudged each other in piazzas. Greeks were vastly entertained. Arabs asked me to go for walks with them. Scots looked shocked. Germans looked worried. Japanese did not notice.