Thailand

But first we have a Christmas show to write. It has to be twenty minutes long. I want all 35 children to have a speaking part, showcase their creative dance work we’ve been playing with on Monday mornings and they love the Elephant song (It goes “The elephant moves very slowly…”) and they’re really good at acting out the “I’m hungry” family story and pretty good on the theme of animals so we’ll make it about Animals in the Jungle of Bangkok. They’re also rubbish at sharing (rubbers, crayons, space) so we’ll make the moral of the story about sharing what you know, what you have. This is the first script I have ever written. My first draft is considered too long and I need to take out one of the ‘sharing stories’. That means I have to find new parts for some of the animals. OK, they can be mountains and Christmas trees and they will narrate the story so that my original narrator doesn’t feel the weight of the world on her shoulders. Shit, they kind of need one to one coaching for each line and what are the others meant to do whilst I give this? Never mind, we’ll work on the dance. We’re going to open with a snowstorm using their wind catchers they’ve made and white cotton scarves as props for drifting across the stage. 32 children enter stage left. Think rolling, twisting, falling snow, settling before bustling off again snow. Exit stage right. Um, looks like a riot. “What do you think Miss Maintanee?” Miss Maintanee looks alarmed. She says it’s ‘mai suay’ (not beautiful). She wants me to teach them a dance. Ok, let’s work on the songs. The songs are great. Back to the dialogue. Everyone is really quiet. Except when it’s not their turn to talk and then they’re telling their life story really loud to kid next to them. No one has any idea when it’s their turn. My animals are half asleep, missing their lines, utterly confused and inaudible. Let’s work on another dance. To ‘Everybody needs Somebody’, I see the mountains and trees initiating it with some Salsa style strut forwards, followed by step right, turn, step, clap - step left, turn, step, clap and as the scenery passes the animals they all join in. Second verse they all break off into their groups and free style into a line in which they will pass a ball in the most creative ways they can. I love it. The class love it. They’re making bridges, they’re striking poses, they’re head-banging, ballet dancing, showing their gymnastic training and shaking it. Miss Maitanee disciplines them. She shows them some alternative moves (spotty dog jogging on the spot, miming washing your face, swinging your hips). They all begin to copy the new moves. I hate these moves. Back to practicing the script. I enroll the help of James a Grade 2 teacher and friend. We are going to be Christmas show buddies. Once a week, James will assist me with my class and I will assist him with his. This is so much easier. James works first with the elephant family. He has father elephant moaning “I’m hungry, very, very hungry” in a gruff father like voice (father elephant hadn’t said a word up until this point). James has mother elephant yelling across the Hall “I’m hungry, very, very hungry too”. He has the monkeys scratching away (like monkey’s do) as they call over “Come here, come here. Have some bananas.” He has brother and sister elephant calling, “Were hungry, very, very hungry.” and mother and father calling back “Come here, come here”. And then he has baby elephant with this baby voice, saying how hungry he is and then father, mother, brother, sister and the monkeys call over in delight “Come, here, come here. We have some bananas.” With new found hope I try to work James’s magic on the panda, giraffe, cheeta and camel who have to play being cold, very, very cold. For some unknown reason, one of the animals always either misses their cue or forgets their lines. The entire class is bored. Especially crocodile who had mastered “Come, here, come here. This warm sun is just lovely” four weeks ago. I talk to some of the bosses. One sees the riot of a snowstorm and suggests smaller groups of movement. Ah, that looks much better. Another senior member of the Thai staff team suggests I work on the dialogue with small groups in another classroom while Miss Maintanee works with the rest of the class. This works wonders. Alas, I get a grip on the cold ones. Then I work on the animals that are bored:
“Oh look, here come parrot and peacock.”
“Oh what a beautiful ball they have.”
“I wish we had a ball. It’s so boring here”
“Everybody, come and play with us”
Lines are audible, they’re in the right order and they actually get what they’re saying. I come back down to the class with the last group – beaming. The class is rehearsing to ‘Everybody needs Somebody’ but this is not the dance I choreographed. They are in a V formation jogging on the spot, miming washing their faces, shaking their hips and back to washing their faces. Miss Maintanee and Miss Baiyamat are having a great time. I am sooooooooooo sad. A few days later I try to bring back their creative movement but it has gone. They instinctively turn to jogging on the spot, washing their faces and shaking their bums in unison (eight counts for each set).

The parents are keen to know what the costumes will be. I am keen for us (the class) to make our costumes or use whatever the children already have in their wardrobes at home. I already have animal masks made and in one lesson we make palm trees, Christmas trees and mountains. The trees and mountains look like three year olds have made them. Miss Ushma (Art teacher and friend) works on them and transforms them from brown poo like heaps of cardboard to glittering grey snow capped mountains (like something out of Southpark). I propose all the animals bring in leggings and a T’shirt in the colour of the animal they are (green for the frog, yellow, for the camel, black and white for the Zebra) but this is met with grave concern. So, instead, my Thai teachers are instructed to buy the leggings and T’shirts from Bobai market on Saturday. Although things have never been the same with Miss Maintanee and Miss Baiyamat (we are not speaking) since the day they changed my dance, I cannot allow them to work on a Saturday without me. I insist on coming with them. They are meeting at four thirty because the market finishes at eight. That’s fine with me. And then I have a conversation with Mr Ol and he reckons Bobay is a morning market. I speak to Miss Baiyamat and yes, it’s a morning market but I’m not sure because her English isn’t that good and I haven’t a clue how to talk about the time in Thai. So, I get up at 4am on Saturday morning and flag down a motorbike to Seven Eleven and sure enough they are standing in the pitch black waiting for me. We arrive at the market at 5am delirious from the hour and we begin to walk the line of the market as the sun rises. It is very surreal. You would think it easy finding leggings and T - shirts in the most basic colours, but this market only has children’s T- shirts with statements on like “Save World, save, Life” or cute pictures of elephants, pigs or pandas. Miss Maintanee and Miss Baiyamat love these and propose that we just get T - shirts with some eco friendly message on or a cute animal sewn on. But they just wont work for me with the masks that I’ve already have made. We walk for three hours seeing nothing but the eco friendly, cute animal picture options. The only plain coloured clothes we see are ladies leggings. Panic is beginning to set in. The stalls are beginning to pack up. We buy 14 pairs of ladies small leggings. (The class are 5 -6 six years old.) By now we are all starving. We agree to go for breakfast and wait an hour for the shopping centre to open. There are shorts for the boys in the shopping centre but they have pandas on the pockets. I hate them but I don’t care. I need to go home to bed. They have the right sizes (children’s sizes) but we have to wait for the shop owner to arrive. The woman in the shop can’t sell them to us. We wait 45 minutes for him to arrive. An hour later we begin again looking for T’shirts. We end up buying ladies T - shirts for the whole class just because they are plain and have the right colours. I offer to carry the bulk of it home as unlike Miss Maintanee and Miss Baiyamat I don’t have to be at University in an hour.

In the midst of my Christmas show crisis, I publicly admit that I am ‘in a relationship’ with Krungthai (or at least about to be). He is moving in with me! We have seen each other a few times over the last few months but in the main, the relationship has been a long distance one. (When I moved to Thailand, he moved to the Netherlands. When he got back, I went to India. When I got back, he went to Issan. When he came back from Issan, I went to the Philippines. When I got back to Bangkok, he went to Sukhothai. So, Krungthai moving into my apartment seemed to be the easiest way for us to test things out. Since I moved into my apartment, I have not turned on the TV (It’s all Thai channels.). Now, the TV is on from the moment he comes into the apartment to the moment he leaves. I like to cook my meals. Krungthai likes to cook the meals. I don’t have a problem with clothes on the floor. Krungthai has a problem with clothes on the floor.

Through a friend of a friend, Krungthai gets a job at a fancy restaurant off the Sukhumvit road. He works six days a week, sometimes seven. He leaves for work at noon and comes back at midnight. I leave at 7a.m and I’m asleep by 10pm. To see him I go for dinner at the restaurant.

Unfortunately, this Christmas Show thing is continuing. (Yes, I hoped it would go away.) We practice the show once a day and very slowly, they get the gist of it. We have a rehearsal on stage and they get stage fright but later we work on projecting their voices on command and speeding up the dialogue and I force them into doing mini shows at assembly and they begin to look like this is their second job. It is the night before the show and I am still making Christmas trees for the stage, bananas for the monkeys (I forgot to buy some) and a beautiful ball. (I have lost the ball we were originally using). Of course I’m making everything from paper mache which doesn’t really give anything enough time to dry given that the show is first thing in the morning but I can only make things from paper mache. I can’t face going shopping and I can’t draw so paper mache just seems to be the safer option.

written by  Yee Ling Tang on January 10, 2010 from Bangkok, Thailand
from the travel blog: the break
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