A Cool Heart in a Hot Climate
I was walking along Sukhumvit Road to my bank when a motorcycle gave me a bump as it passed. I was on the sidewalk when this happened and I wasn’t pleased, and inasmuch as it was the second time in a week that a motorcyclist had run into me on what Thais call a “footpath,” I decided to take action. Motor-cylists had been using the sidewalks as if they were another lane in the road for a while and I figured it was time to do something about it.
I ran behind the bike, catching up in about half a block when the driver parked next to the bank. I reached him just as he placed his helmet on one of his handle grips. He saw me and looked somewhat chagrined.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said.
“Not good enough!” I yelled, and I grabbed his helmet and threw it into the street just as a bus passed, running over it. Then, realizing what a stupid mistake I’d made, I turned about and ran, anxious to get away before he beat the hell out of me or pulled a gun and shot me dead. If that had happened—and, happily, it didn’t—a dozen witnesses would’ve told police, “This farang came out of nowhere and attacked him…”
I can’t remember, and wouldn’t want to tell you if I could, how many times I’ve lost my temper since moving to Thailand. But let me recall, as an exercise in humility, one other incident. This occurred when my computer was giving me fits and I took it to a repair shop, where the owner called the Apple distributor and before I knew it I was yelling at someone at the other end of the phone line, and he hung up on me. I told (not asked) the shop owner to call the man back, which he politely did. The man told the shop owner that he didn’t want to talk to me, I was jai rawn, I had a hot heart.
I grabbed the phone and said, “What do you mean you won’t talk to me? I need help.”
There was a silence at the other end of the line.
After a moment, I apologized. “Look, I’m really sorry,” I said. “And I do need your help.” There was another long pause and he told me to bring the computer to him. When I did, he said it would take a couple of weeks to fix my computer and in the meantime, he said, he’d give me an old one, which he then spent nearly an hour programming for my use. It doesn’t need saying that I felt well and appropriately demoted in the karmic food chain.
Sadly, this is a typical farang way of reacting to the many frustrations encountered on a daily basis and as is true nearly everywhere, it seldom gets you anywhere. Certainly, it makes no friends, least of all in the Land of Smiles, where an open display of emotion is considered extremely poor form.
It is okay to laugh, but even then it’s best if you hide your laughter behind your hand. Even wailing with grief is acceptable, under very specific circumstances. A smile, of course, is even encouraged. And now that Thailand has joined the league of football nations, when the Thai team—or Manchester United, the country’s favorite, for reasons I don’t comprehend—scores a point, it is definitely alright to cheer and pound on the bar top and fall off the stool slobbering drunk. But an open loss of temper is not acceptable. Ever.
We’re talking about jai yen, which literally means a “cool heart.” A heart that isn’t hot. Jai yen has been, and continues to be, the hardest lesson for me to learn, and I recognize the possibility, maybe the likelihood, that I may never completely embrace the concept—that, instead, I’ll always be one of those unpredictable, explosive assholes that the Thais reluctantly but graciously put up with.
Actually, they don’t have to put up with us, and that they do is a sign of their own jai yen.
This doesn’t mean that Thais don’t lose their temper. They do. Getting mad and shooting someone is an efficient and popular way to handle business and personal conflicts. (You just don’t show your anger and you hire someone else to do the shooting, usually from the back of a motorbike.) Thailand also has a growing incidence of road rage and a high rate of rape, wife-beating and child abuse, so it’s clear that jai rawn is not exclusively a farang experience. Yet when it comes to in-your-face, public shouting matches, there is nothing in the Kingdom to compare to life back home in the West, where epithets, curses and tantrums seem an essential part of every day.
My friend Chris Moore, who wrote a book exploring the language use of jai or heart, Heart Talk (1992), includes jai yen in a chapter devoted to self-control. “In Thai culture,” he wrote, “considerable virtue is attached to the ability of a person to exercise restraint over feelings of rage, anger or upset. The idea is not to be drawn into an emotional reaction when provoked. There is an attempt to avoid confrontations and the heated exchange.”
The ideal is to aspire to calmness, concentration and self-control. Thus there are, referring again to Chris’s book, phrases (concepts) such as hak jai (restrain heart), yap yang chang jai (stop heart), khom jai (control heart), sangop jai and rangap jai (calm heart). The goal is to show jai yen, what Chris calls “the Thai equivalent of an English metaphor, a stiff upper lip.” For example, he says, when a woman is told by a friend that her husband was seen with another woman, the woman doesn’t show any emotion. (What happens later between the woman and her husband is of no concern of ours, though it may defy the concept of jai yen.)
Farangs not only find this difficult, they may say it’s hypocritical. If you feel something, show it and say it, is the farang way. Excessive politeness, especially when it doesn’t reflect true feeling, is false and is a disservice to all.
Maybe so, but probably not. Still, the next time a motorcyclist slams into me on a sidewalk, I think I may have a hard time telling him to have a nice day.
Fun & Games in the Slum
Father Joe Maier was telling a story about the children in the Bangkok slums where he’s lived and worked for more than thirty years. It was an inspirational story, the sort Catholic priests like to tell. Father Joe runs an organization with thirty-four kindergartens, more than a hundred soccer teams, five shelters for street kids, a medical clinic, Bangkok’s only AIDS hospice and a para-legal team that represents two hundred kids in courts and police stations a month, so he has many such stories. Many are distressing—no surprise there—but this is a story about sanuk, the Thai word for “fun.”
Near Father Joe’s house was a large open space where ten-wheel trucks parked between long hauls, close to where pigs were butchered for Bangkok’s markets. There was no drainage system and rain and diesel oil and other waste collected in puddles. Yet it was here that the neighborhood children played, because there were no parks or playgrounds, nor any space adjacent to the tired wood shacks knocked up against one another and connected by dodgy pathways just wide enough for two people or one motorcycle to pass.
Near where we stood, three girls were jumping rope—two holding a “rope” made of rubber bands strung together, the third jumping. “Notice that they’re in the puddles of oil and filth,” said the sixty-year-old American priest, “and that they’ve taken off their shoes. Do you know why? They say they can jump higher without anything on their feet. Which is the object of the game: to jump higher.” The death squeals of the hogs rang through the slum in the night. During the day, it was the laughter of the kids.
One writer about Thai culture described sanuk as “the fizz in the soft drink of life. Bottled up by the pressures of face and social calculation,” he went on, “it surges to the surface whenever it has a chance.” In other words, remaining faithful to this wise man’s analogy, it is what an optimist does when life gives him a lemon: he makes lemonade. And so it is in the slums of Bangkok where games can serve as an otherwise grim life’s lemonade stand.