THINK BOX: Playing for team farang ?
Date: 03 Nov 2015 Source: Bangkok Post-Life
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Adam Kohut
One summer when I was young, my mother, my younger brother Clay and I piled into the family Chevrolet Blazer - a tan-coloured vehicle we had inexplicably named Sparky - to make the eight-hour trip south, from Fort Worth to Kingsville, Texas, where my grandparents lived (and still do) in a stately white house that as far as I can tell has stood there since the dawn of time.About halfway there, we pulled over to stretch our legs at a small convenience store. Inside was a very tall, very black man, whistling under his breath as he browsed the coolers in the back, which held sodas and other beverages. He really did draw the eye - he was over 2m tall and so dark as to almost be blue. Clay froze, rigid. He had recently developed an obsession with basketball, a short-lived affair as peculiar as it was passionate. Despite never watching (much less playing) a game, Clay owned an official Shaquille O'Neal replica jersey, which he wore as he revelled in the sweaty gaze of a poster depicting the then-superstar athlete mid-dunk.
To Clay, then, the man in the store was less a chance encounter than an unscheduled meeting with providence.
"Would you look at that!" he shouted, with a gleeful little laugh. "A basketball player!"
My mother's embarrassment was insurmountable. Crimson-cheeked, she issued a hurried apology and dragged outside her star-struck son, whose fingers she practically had to pry from the door jamb. Given any longer, Clay might have asked for an autograph. As it were, my mother managed to herd him - and his cackling older brother - back into old Sparky, which in her haste to escape made skid marks on the oil-stained pavement.
I recall this moment often, especially when I hear the word farang slung my way. I suppose this makes sense, the Thai word for "white people" - which rounds up all humans of a certain race into a singular group possessing the same traits and qualities - being a casual, if absurd, divisor used by the young, the middle-aged, the old, the poor and the rich.
Reverse the situation, I tell myself. Say I stood in the waxen gleam of one of the half-dozen luxurious supermalls that line Sukhumvit Road, pointing at passers-by and declaring: "Asian!" Fury would reign. I'd go viral, left like a sacrificial offering to the insatiable scorn of internet hysteria. Maybe someone would beat me up. I'd almost certainly be labelled a racist.
Newspaper headlines in the past few weeks alone have seen Thais outraged by foreign men swindling millions from Thai women in various cases of online romance fraud (conveniently looking the other way as multitudinous instances of the same crime are committed by Thai women upon dim-witted foreign men) and a pseudo-scandal involving differing admission fees for Thais and foreigners to a national park. Anywhere you go, you run into this schism - us and them, a perfect breeding ground for double standards - which is bizarrely encouraged, overlooking (or disregarding) the idea that it is at direct odds with the country's attempt to close the gap separating it from the Western world. Building a bridge is arduous enough. Why insist on using rotten wood? For the remainder of the journey, my mother gave Clay and I the time-worn parental spiel on the pitfalls of shallow judgement, of taking purposeful detours to call attention to difference.
Why was the man a basketball player, in Clay's eyes? That was the important question, the question my mother demanded my brother and I ask ourselves. The answer was not because Clay had seen him shooting hoops in the parking lot, but because the man was black. The problem was not in people's differences, but in the focus - and in the resulting judgements - on them. "And we've all got it hard enough, without you circling it in red," my mother said.
Perhaps there is room in society for the preconceived notions such as those floating within the word farang, or in the idea that every tall black man is an NBA star. Perhaps they make a bit of sense.
And no, maybe we don't, all of us dumb humans, play for the same team. Hell, I'm not convinced we share the same court. Which means we're out of active competition. Fair enough. But then, what's the point in keeping score?
Adam Kohut is the sub-editor for Guru magazine.
"Building a bridge is arduous enough. Why insist on using rotten wood?"