So, this is approximately late August or early September in Idaho- I honestly don't remember the date. I am a fat delusional 19-year-old who's spending his waking hours reading books, lifting weights, and playing video games, going to his first ever house party where I am served alcohol.
Needless to say, I went a little nuts.
So the party goes off, the guy who brought me disappears- apparently out into the hills to get drunker and fight with whoever wanted a go, but I can only vouch for the guy ever getting drunk in my presence. I, unaware of what being drunk feels like, continue to drink well after that point. In the course of an evening, a large bottle of vodka mostly disappears, and one of my last clear memories is of taking a large swig toward the bottom of that bottle, having done my share to help put away most of it, and some whisky, everclear, gin, kalua, bourbon, and probably other things that were lost on me at the time.
After that, the next thing I remember is coming to in the hospital and apologizing profusely to the nurses and saying "you guys should really be helping people, not dealing with this shit". Shortly thereafter, the humiliation intensifies as my dad shows up with his friend, who was at the time my jujitsu instructor, and who was coaching me in physical fitness, and he's this brilliant engineer with a ton of patents and all this shit. I didn't put such words to it at the time, and it was certainly nobody's intention to do this, but part of the cringe factor of looking back on an event like this comes from being at your lowest and most humiliating low- the drunk underage idiot evicted by ambulance from a friend's house party, and my dad shows up with this guy who's a huge role model really made me painfully aware of how badly I'd fucked up.
One of those situations. But I was really surprised by how quiet the guy was. Looking back I suspect he has his own perspective on benders, but he's a boisterous, rambunctious gregarious guy, and so his quietness seemed odd that day.
Anyway, that day wound up being the 24 hours to sober up my dad gave me- I think I sarcastically counted out the 30 hours it took for an actual conversation to happen- and then my Dad sat me down in the living room, and I think my mother was also there but my memory isn't perfect, and he said "OK, so this was a cry for help". And he proceeded to explain how my Aunt, his sister, could take me on for a year if I were going to art school there, which seemed like a good option at the time, as I'd just, in a few months, been fired from a lucrative industrial photo editing job I had1, and had given up on the degree I'd pursued for a few semesters at a local college- game design2.
So, on the basis of moving further away, I chose Thailand. Which entailed being a missionary- and I, as a frustrated "athiest", said "fuck it" and decided it was better to be an atheist missionary than a 19 year old living in his parent's back yard shed. One of the amazingly frustrating and condescending shitty things that drove that was being banned from a forum where I was admittedly an ass, but partly on the basis that the people there took me to be a Christian troll, when I was genuinely- if stupidly- an atheist and on their side and just not up to speed. Because my upbringing had left with lots of really severe science denialist bullshit, which in retrospect seems more the result of the environment my parents chose for me, rather than anything to do with the views of my parents themselves.
Why a missionary? why that? Well, it was something my parents came up with as what they thought was a good opportunity, because my mom's younger brother, of course, had married a Thai nurse who was going to the Laotian church he attended near his house, her younger rabidly Christian brother wanted a white person to come help his missionary friends3 teach English.
This point bears examining for some people; Thailand is a country that is a study in contradictions, and one of those contradictions is the idea that while Thailand, that is, the Thai people culturally, as I interacted with them, would utterly reject the notion of justifying anything on the basis of race, but still point to the darkness of the skin of criminals (never mind that it is the same darkness of skin as the majority of the Thai population!)- the correlation is not so much that anybody is better by birth, but that if you are less educated, less looked after, your skin gets darker because you work in the sun more. This bias is leveraged by their culture, in their famous hospitality, as a more or less universal "benefit of a doubt" that is more easily granted to lighter foreigners than darker ones- Thai people have had no shortage of interactions between all of civilization between the pacific and Indian oceans, as Thailand, for approximately the last 700 years4.
In practice, this means that Thailand is, or at least can be, an easy place to integrate for lighter skinned people, and indeed, historically and today this has been and continues to be borne out- there are more Thai-Chinese families, where Chinese men5 have married Thai women, than there are in neighboring countries like Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Burma, and so on.
White people end up with a similar bias- maybe it has to do with the history of colonialism in southeast asia, and the resistance to it by Thailand6, Whatever the origin of it is, the generic stereotypical perception, by Thais of westerners, is that they are, or at least have the chance to be, well educated, fabulously wealthy, and that for all this we tend to be a bit oafish and clumsy with the expected social niceties, and so charity must be granted to us for our differences in order to properly accommodate a relationship that might become beneficial.
But nonetheless, we speak English natively, and being able to communicate with us is a solid cachet of points in the pecking order of Thai society, and so there is always a demand for white native English speakers. Particularly, since Thai society is rather sexually conservative, and the appetites of foreign men have led to an entirely different reputation abroad, for white native English speaking women, who won't try to fuck all the teachers and janitors at a given school that hires them quite so often as the white native English speaking men seem to.
As a white guy, ostensibly a missionary- I was, again, an atheist, but not "out" to my family, I wasn't quite a white woman, but being a missionary- as long as you're relatively straightforward about that, and I was- is considered a pretty good second best, at least by the sort of people without better options, who don't know better, or who are otherwise Christian themselves already.
And so my adventure began, about a month after that hangover, with a 30 hour plane ride to no bed, no air conditioning, no heated showers, no toilet paper, no sitting toilets, and no food that was available to be had in any language I spoke. I promptly enrolled in a Thai language school and began rapidly acquiring Thai, getting my bearings, and learning my way around. two weeks after I landed, I was told by that missionary family I was supposed to teach English with that "We don't want you, you speak too fast."
And I was cut loose to do nothing and find my own way.
Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been if I'd left those idiots and done something besides study theology.
1 - - - - In the course of processing hundreds of images, I processed things faster than anybody they'd ever seen, but with an error rate that was unacceptable
2 - - - - Because the coding, in Visual Basic 6 and in preparation for Visual Basic.Net, was too painful. I have never quite forgiven Microsoft for what it did to Basic as a result, and that debacle itself turned into one of my earliest sequential forrays into the discipline of programming- but that's a story for another day. Suffice it to say,
there once was a language called Basic,
It was a marvelous script to write pong <sic>,
When in Microsoft trucked,
and the other scripts ducked,
And Basic was Basically™ fucked.
3 - - - - a North Korean-American family, and literal cousins to the Kim dynasty
there. Fitting, kind of. It sheds a lot of light on the country when
you learn that the leading monarch/godhead was a protestant preacher's
kid, and that there's still a continuing successions of preachers kids with their own cult outside those borders.
4 - - - - Perspective, is about the age of the kingdom AND the time that
one of it's dynasties- at the time, I think it was siriyothai- first
established formal relations with Korea, a years-long nautical voyage
away. Formal relationships ended during the warring states period in Japan, because neither country could get ships around what was the Japanese pirates on one side, and the Mongolian and Chinese on the other, but this perspective has led me to ask the question: Is kimchi the Korean recreation of Som Tam, as it would be after a years-long nautical journey to a foreign land during the iron age? Is it, in fact, a faithful korean recreation of a highly esteemed but perishable foreign delicacy? It fucking isn't, but now all the white people reading this are googling both those things, all the Thai people are laughing and all the Koreans are saying "What the fuck is Som Tam?"
5 - - - - This one is a weird historical detail,
particularly, since Imperial China didn't allow women to travel, in
order to anchor its male citizens to China by family, which is why Chinese men being able to marry outside of China at all was a big deal- just think about how unpopular they were in your country at the time, and then ask how many of them were getting laid.
6 - - - - Really, the use, by France and England, of Thailand as a 'buffer state' between French Indochina and the British Indian Territories, which at the time, extended East into Burma, making Thailand a natural border between the two colonial empires, and sparing Thailand an ugly share of the most disgraceful histories of those two states
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