by Stuart

Oh, the idealism of youth. Of course, we agreed with our lecturer, teaching English in Thailand would make us better at teaching English to migrant Australians. Goes without saying. We would give superb lessons in Thailand, and we were going to Change the World.

But something intervened. The World Changed Us.

Those of you who assumed that a degree in Primary Teaching wouldn’t be a ticket to the jetset life, stop sniggering. Some thirty of us aspiring teachers found ourselves preparing lessons in forty-six degree heat on the outskirts of Bangkok, albeit only metres from the end of the international runway at Don Muang Airport.

Were those lessons superb? Er…no. We sweated through hours of classes with primary students, sang songs with tertiary students and even injected a certain Australian je ne c’est quoi into proceedings at the Royal Thai Airforce Academy. Our students learned very little.

But our lecturer was right: the experience would make us better teachers when working with new migrants to Australia. How? By placing us, however fleetingly, in their shoes. Like many migrants, we were living in a land where we couldn’t speak the native language.

It became clear that one could survive in outer Bangkok with a woefully small Thai vocabulary. I’d be surprised if I learned more than about twenty phrases: enough to buy food (aroi ma — very delicious!), say my name, and catch a bus going in completely the wrong direction. It became clear that one could live in a place where one didn’t speak the language: but that one’s life would be superficial and disconnected.

After living in a very multicultural place like inner Sydney, outer Bangkok was alarmingly monocultural. Everyone except us was Thai. Not to say there weren’t stark divisions between religions, jobs and wealth among the Thai people: we were surrounded by appalling poverty and ostentatious wealth, piled one on the other. But nonetheless, us pasty Australians stood out like the gangly, perspiring ferang we were.

Wherever we went, we felt like the centre of attention: I quickly learned that the woven-bamboo sunhat I’d blithely chosen to wear denoted me as a delivery person: a cyclist earning a tiny wage as a messenger. A friend had, unknowingly, opted for a hat associated with market gardening, and the spectacle of us walking to school aroused lots of comment and mirth from the locals, all in a language we didn’t understand.

Not to say that the attention was unwelcome: we were treated with such extraordinary generosity wherever we went. A young assistant in the supermarket assumed I was German, and practised her best danke schoen on me. I replied in my politest schoolboy German, so as to not offend.

As obvious outsiders, we were welcomed, and treated with warmth and affection: really the reverse of the government-sanctioned response in Australia. Nothing we could have done would have repaid the dignity and warmth of our welcome in Thailand. (And just a tenth of that dignity and warmth would restore credibility to Australia’s immigration system).

The language barrier didn’t divide us from the Thais, but it did cause another strange change in us.

My own language, even living amongst other Australians, became impoverished. We were so used to speaking simply, and in concrete terms, to be understood by our classes, that we began to speak and think that way all the time. “I am going to the garden. Would you like to come?” See Dick and Jane. Within a matter of weeks, my ability to communicate (in English or Thai), felt limited to the most obvious and literal level. Through heat or laziness or otherwise, subtlety and nuance had been stripped from our language and our lives.

I haven’t ever migrated to a country where I can’t speak the language. I don’t know if this dislocation of thought and language is a common experience for migrants, or if I can presume to generalise based on my experience. But I hope that it made me just a little more attuned to the experience of Australia’s newest arrivals.

Was it a World-Changing experience, as our idealism had hoped? No, not at all. Were we changed? Immeasurably.