Quote: (09-12-2017 06:55 PM)MRG1946 Wrote:
Quote: (09-11-2017 12:25 PM)MRG1946 Wrote:
When a massage lady comes into my apartment and stays for a few hours, the neighbors won't start gossiping.
1. In a culture where direct speech is forbidden, gossip is used to inform someone that he is doing something that violates cultural norms.
2. I listen carefully to gossip that reaches me, in order to mentally "map" the gossip networks which touch me. I try to learn the inputs and outputs of those gossip networks. And I sometimes "salt" the inputs, intentionally, in order to see what comes out, where, and when. (But the actual transmission paths are unknown to me, and unknowable.)
3. I actually pay for gossip, with generous tips, as a way to encourage the locals to keep me informed of gossip (related to me) that I otherwise might not know.
4. Finally, how to I know that the neighbors won't gossip if a massage lady comes in to my apartment for a few hours? People don't gossip about what is ordinary and common. Gossip is about what is (a) strange and unusual, or (b) violates cultural values.
I'd be willing to believe that all of this is true if during your ten years in Thailand, you've become 100% fluent in Thai.
If not, I think it would be safer to consider the possibility that we Westerners have a tendency to exaggerate our knowledge of and connection with other cultures.
If I had a yuan for every time a Westerner (who was completely incapable of performing any communication beyond asking for the bill and saying hello in the local language) told me "I can understand a lot more than I can speak," I'd be wealthy enough to retire in Bangkok.
I know from my own journey of settling in Asia, that due to being incredibly out of place upon arrival (no way to avoid this, outside of Hong Kong, you'll stand out and feel out of place no matter how much you try to convince yourself otherwise), I was quick to exaggerate in my own mind my familiarity with the local culture.
At that point, showing others that I could perform even simple communication tasks, such as telling the wait-staff at a restaurant how many seats we needed or asking for the bill (about all I could accomplish during my first 3 months in Beijing), was really important to my sense of identity, because without that, I was nothing more than a speechless infant from the standard of local survival skills.
Since then, as I've actually acquired some legitimate communication skills in Chinese and have accomplished other things that have been enough to not feel totally vulnerable (driving a car in Beijing traffic, finding and negotiating rental of an apartment all by myself without speaking a word of English, routinely communicating with clients who speak no English, saving some Hungarian diplomats and helping them contact and communicate with the police after they were attacked arbitrarily by some locals), I have a level of confidence in my identity and feel less of a need to prove myself to others (as well as myself).
I highly suspect, however, that if I hadn't pushed forward to learn the language, now seven years into living in Asia, I'd still be attempting to use any justification necessary to prove to myself and others how accomplished I am (because I'd probably still feel like a vulnerable infant).
As such, based on my own journey and my observations of others who have spent years here without learning to say more than a few words, I'm incredibly suspicious of any expat in Asia's claims to have special localized skills that can barely be defined and certainly cannot be proven or disproven.
Language skills, however, have proven to be a very helpful metric for determine who actually knows what the fuck they are talking about. As a comparison, imagine your reaction to a Japanese person in the USA who had plenty of detailed opinions to share about the way things are in America, but couldn't actually speak any English.
I write all this to say that as outsiders in Asia, we'd probably be best off erring on the side of caution about everything we believe we know unless we can be 99% sure of the accuracy of the belief.
Anything else and we run the risk of ending up in compromising situations OR (and possibly worse) missing out on the satisfaction that comes with actual accomplishment by not acknowledging the serious room we have for growth.
In my time in Asia, I've noted that the people who do learn to speak the local language and those who don't are two completely different breeds of people.
(It's also not unusual for people who have learned foreign languages successfully in other parts of the world, to completely fail at learning the local language in Asia. There previous experience doesn't bump them into the camp of people who have put in the effort in Asia).
In my experience, despite all of the opinions they are eager to share, the group that does not speak the local language are essentially perpetual tourists.
That being said, regardless of his local language status (the level of which I can only speculate at), a lot of his information here is very accurate and very helpful. I just hesitate to take anyone's word for it when they claim that they know with certainty the degree to which they are the target of local gossip in Asia.
I can't speak knowledgeably about Thailand, but I have some stories about gossip in China that would turn your toe-nails purple.
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