you've never had an accident like this before

My friend, Heather, told me that everyone driving in Thailand gets one accident

when you're sitting the classroom listening to class presentations and all you can think about is how many minutes till you can run out of the classroom and drive to the nearest 7-11 so that you can buy a box of Oreos and eat the whole thing there and then, and then your students ask you something and you start responding with, "Oreo," but catch yourself midway and manage to turn it into "Oh, really?" except it sounds more like "ORLY?"

The responsible tourist

More and more, I get the feeling that 

I accidentally hung out with a bunch of hippies in Pai.

 

I found myself drawn to the sounds of live music wafting from the riverside... I nervously approached the bar man for a beer, but he had a warm smile and urged me to sit down—where was I from? how long was I staying in Pai? Korean? he'd met a Korean girl just last night! etc. /// He had "Sticky Rice Blues" tattooed on his inner forearm and wore a leather vest... hair about as long as mine...//

Between a number, he called me out—"Ajarn! Teacher! of Love!" and _____ ; and as the night progressed, he got drunker and a little bit more sloppy ... he asked me where my boyfriend was, and I unhesingtatingly said that he was in America; "What do you think of him?" "I love him!" (he slaps me playfully on the shoulder; guurrrrlll). "What does he think of you?" "He loves me! I think..." "You think? Come on. You should be with me. Have you ever had a Thai man before?"

I laughed. No, I hadn't—was that bad?

"You know, there's a reason why there are so many foreigners who keep coming back to Thailand..."

Race, and Rage.

$600-a-month might not seem like a lot, especially to my friends in the States doing the similar jobs who are making at least three-times as much. But it is definitely enough to live a comfortable life here in Chiang Mai, where coffee flows like water; the meals go anywhere from $1-$3 ($3 being an extreme extravagance.)

But even despite these conditions—these perfect conditions that are made to cushions the blow of working-life realities for the recent college graduate— money just seems to slip through my fingers. (Am I just so ill-equipped to be an adult?)

To make up for the money I'd lost settling in—the motorcycle purchase, the house deposits, etc—I sought out the AUA, a private language tutoring center in the Old City that gives some of the more decent wages in town for English teaching (which exists in abundance in Chiang Mai.)

Some instructors came in and out of the room, in their night-market-bought linens and patterned fabrics swishing, talking ____. I sat sheepishly in the corner with my backpack and motorcycle helmet, flipping through the only English magazine on the table and being painfully aware of my ///. The Thai clients in the room filtered out one-by-one until the woman behind the desk finally called me out, the last one left in the room. I sat down in front of a lady at the information desk... I told her awkwardly that I was there on the recommendation of a professor at my university and wanted to know of any teaching positions available.

"I have my resume here," I said as I started fumbling around my bag, but the secretary stopped me. She looked me up and down and asked me what my nationality was. I answered: Korean.

She smiled a little too widely and said, "Sorry—we only accept native speakers here."

I stared.

"... But I am a native speaker," I said, slowly.

"American or British only. We need native speakers."

I started stuttering, half in surprise and half in disbelief that this was happening. "Y-yes, but—I was only born in Korea. I studied at an international school for most of my life and then went to an American university for four years. English is my main language. I don't—"

"Native speakers," she repeated with finality. "I'm sorry."

Something red-hot bubbled out of me and I couldn't stop myself from glowering at her and leaving the room... It didn// I stomped over to my motorcycle, frustrated. "Racist!" I found myself muttering under my breath. "What a fucking racist!"

But maybe those weren't the right words. I know that I was looking for something to accuse this woman, and the [accusation] of "racism" is one of the bigger forms of arsenal. ///If it wasn't a problem of race, what was it? And if it is, then why do I have such a problem identifying it? To be fair, this isn't really any different from me being unable to work in the U.S. as a non-U.S. citizen. Or maybe it is: at least as a non-U.S. citizen, there's a /// But I think it hurt me on a deeper level because it cut me where ... I know that this will be one entry in a series of many about the extremely different experience that an Asian, non-U.S. and non-white foreigner has as a traveling expat... It's a very different, very unique, very frustratingly lonely experience. And it sucks that the one skill set that I have to offer—teaching English—is rejected based on preference of nationality, which has never meant anythign to me.