Sawasdee-Kah from Chiang Mai! #2
Where I actually do talk about Thai Pronouns. Free form essay continues...
This is part #2 of a freeform piece, a personal narrative and memoir that also encompasses the subject of evolutionary selection pressures.
The Thai’s have a good pronoun system here.
Actually, I’m not even sure if they are technically pronouns1. Bloody hell, it’s only my third sentence and I’m digressing already. But this does demand an explanation. I’m a writer who left school at 16 with zero qualifications and a recommendation from the careers adviser to get a job on the cheese counter at Tescos. It wasn’t that I was stupid. Upon entering Shotton Hall Comprehensive in Peterlee, puberty hadn’t broken through yet. I was undiagnosed Asperger Syndrome (still awaiting an NHS ADHD assessment 40 years later), and puberty is where, for many of us, the wheels come off. I was quirky (or “weird” as my older sisters preferred), I swam a lot, and I wrote a lot — poetry, novels, film scripts. Life was not very good at home, so I spent my time either in the swimming pool or in my room, in a kind of flow I’ve never been able to reproduce since, writing on a manual typewriter I’d bought from a friend (for five pounds!!) which had only one ribbon but I found that if I kept turning it back on itself I it would still work. If there was an internet at the time I might have become known as some kind of prodigious teenage writer. As it was, it more resembled the line in The Waterboys’ song, “Whole of the Moon”
I had a prodigious imagination and for the first three years in comprehensive, I did very well academically. Then puberty hit. The swimming stopped & the hormones began. My mother, for reasons I didn’t understand until very recently, took me to the GP and asked that I be put on the pill at 14 to “regulate her periods”. The real reason was that my mother believed that my stepfather was having sex with me. He wasn’t, but since he’d sexually assaulted both my older sisters by then, it was only natural for her to believe the same was happening to me. So she took precautions. The wrong kind, obviously.
I developed an eating disorder. I read a pamphlet about calorie counting and it became an obsession. I already had OCD, turning the light on and off nine times for luck before bed, then nine times nine times — yes 81 times — before bed. I became anorexic. I thought of calories as if they were money, not wanting to “spend” more than £100 per day. At my lowest weight, I was six and a half stone (91 lbs) and my periods stopped. So did everything else. I became a slave to calorie counting. It took up every waking moment of thought.
No one noticed, except the boys at school who thought I was hotter and would say they wanted to see me in stockings and suspenders, which, by that time, my stepfather had also requested. I had no idea about the sexual abuse of my sisters. Rather than a family coming together under such stress, ours did the opposite. Everyone was in their niche trying to survive. My oldest sister had married someone she didn’t love at and left. Home was a web of dysfunction, if you sought help from anyone, you would only find more abuse. The prevailing instruction to me, from my mother and my sisters, when I would go to them and ask why life was so bad for us —our stepfather was also a violent alcoholic who my mother shacked up with when I was four years old and as she worked full time, he became our primary carer — was to “keep your mouth shut!” I don’t know if it was my personality, my Aspergers or both, but that wasn’t an option. I blabbed everything. This was the 1970s however, so no one believed a word of it. Not from such a strange child.
Anecdote: my mother went into hospital when I was around nine years of age. My father had died of, what began as testicular cancer, when I was two years old. I had no memories of him nor were there any photos of us together. Yet he was the person I prayed to every night, hoping he was looking down on us, on me, hoping someone, even in heaven, loved me and would look after me.
When I was around nine, my mother went for a stay in hospital and, my imagination went wild. On visiting her I remember asking, “You’re not going to die like dad did, are you?” “No”, she said, laughing at my cute nativity. I got a cuddle for that! She then went on to explain, “No, I have a cyst in my tummy and the doctor is going to put a vacuum up my fairy2 to suck out.”
That is actually what she said to me. To ME. …………………………………..smh
We all know what she’s describing here, right? I cannot begin to know what she was thinking. Regardless, I was comforted and the next day at school, because I was so delighted she wasn’t going to “die like Dad did”, I happily told my teacher what she was in hospital for, using her exact words.
We lived in a small mining village. As if the family was not scandalized enough with us children often running the streets in the middle of the night, knocking on doors, asking neighbours to call the police because Ray (that was his name) was drunk and was killing our mother because his supper wasn’t ready when he came back from the club. No, I had to go open my blabbermouth. I did not know the rules. I still don’t. Not when they include hiding bad things or me “shutting up”.
We moved to Peterlee. A larger town where my mother worked in the dole office, and where I would “come of age as a woman” (people still thought that way in the 70s) — soon after.
I’m aware I’ve not even gotten on point regarding the subtitle yet. I will. “Had’yer pash”3 as they say where I come from. My present situation — not knowing what a pronoun is (or how they describe it in an academic exam) demands context! Anon!
Actually, I think I’ve written enough for now. It’s quite taxing writing this and remaining upbeat as the memories flood in. I mean to keep this light. It’s getting late here in Thailand. Oh Krap! Which reminds me, I will describe this first paragraph upon part #3!!!
Until next time :)
Part 1 is here
Part 3 is here
I actually do know what they are and they aren’t pronouns. But some of you may have noticed I am using this as a device to write about other things. Similar to what’s called in movies a “MacGuffin” device.
This was our synonym for vagina.
“Hold your passion”
Keep swimming even if current is a headwind.