Cultural Literacy

Last weekend was Loy Krathong, a traditional Thai festival where they weave rafts out of banana leaves and float them out to sea in the evening. The krathong (raft) is covered in flowers and garnished with a candle and a few baht coins. As it floats away you are meant to let go of the bad things from the past year and think good thoughts for the future.

I came back to Languagecorps the day of Loy Krathong to find some of the girls who work at the bar making their own krathongs. I managed to communicate my curiosity and they invited me to make my own, a "farang krathong" if you will. I and another Languagecorps student Joe sat down to create our masterpiece together. It came out rather lopsided, with a layer of folded banana leaves, a layer of flowers, and then a second tier of folded leaves with the candle and some insense. I thought it had a certain naive panache. Joe described it as "when you hit a grand slam on your first at-bat." We were very proud of it, but the girls kept laughing at us when we tried to talk to them. They finally took a picture of us with our krathong, and Joe the surfer flashed the hang-loose thumb and pinky wave. This made the girls laugh even harder.

We went to beach and floated it away, which would have been peaceful if there hadn't been several thousand tourists doing it at the same time, and setting firecrackers off in the process. It felt like a warzone. Some kind of kratongs are actually plastic bags tied to sterno cans that lifted off the ground like hot air balloons. Those were particularly dangerous when they caught fire several hundred feet in the air and then began to descend into the street.

Anyway, the next day in Thai class our teacher Jam taught us, at our request, some Thai slang and some words about Loy Krathong. To my great embarassment I discovered that the word for banana (gluay) is just a tone mark away from the word for the male member. All the time while making my krathong I had asked for more banana leaves and the girls had giggled uncontrollably. Bow I suspected why. Also, I discovered, I had been using the word for transvestite- kathoey- and krathong interchangeably. And to top it all off, Joe's hang-loose hand in the girl's photo in Thai signaled water buffalo horns- extreme stupidity. Not the smooth assimilation into Thai culture that we imagined it to be.