Yes Thailand! A Bittersweet Second Attempt at Teaching English Overseas

By Clark Nielsen

After the events of his last book, Yes China!, Nielsen swore off teaching abroad forever. But that promise didn't last long, and two years later, he finds himself at it again in a different part of Asia. Equally hilarious and informative, Nielsen pulls no punches in this overseas adventure about teaching English at a small, rundown high school in the Thai countryside.

Yes Thailand! is one part memoir, one part travelogue, and five parts humor, tying together funny stories from Nielsen's childhood with the amusing obstacles inherent to working and living in Thailand. Written as a series of interconnected essays, Yes Thailand! covers everything from the humid weather to the Thai language, holidays, public restrooms, ladyboys, and visas.

As a follow-up to his China stories, Yes Thailand! sheds additional light on Chinese culture and the differences between the two Asian countries. In comparing past teaching experiences, Nielsen also finds himself growing as a teacher (though not necessarily liking it) and developing an even stronger love for traveling, despite the bad luck that seems to always follow him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Clark Nielsen
• Release date: Jun 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301258260

Clark Nielsen

Clark Nielsen is an American-born author, teacher, and web/game developer who's been writing stories since he was six years old. On the non-fiction side, his influences include David Sedaris and Bill Bryson. But when he's writing sci-fi or fantasy, he turns to Jack Vance and Eiichiro Oda.

Book preview

YES THAILAND!

A Bittersweet Second Attempt at Teaching English Overseas

by

Clark Nielsen

Copyright 2013 Clark Nielsen

Smashwords Edition

CHAPTER 1 - BEFORE THAILAND, THERE WAS CHINA

I wrote a book. It’s called Yes China! You should read it. But if that’s asking too much, allow me to catch you up to speed. From 2005 to 2010, I made a couple of trips to China specifically to teach English. First, I was a volunteer teacher in Hefei. That was five months. Then I was a paid teacher for a summer camp. Six weeks. Then I said, Screw it, put all my chips in, and moved to Changzhou for eighteen months. And, oh, the stories I could tell. Oh, that’s right, I did tell them. Is it alright if I plug my other book again? You can say no. I’ll understand.

When writing Yes China!, there were a lot of things I left out in my attempt to keep the book as succinct as possible. This meant not including such nuggets like the Chinese name I have but am totally ashamed of. Many of my Chinese students had English names that they either picked themselves or were given by a native speaker. Wanting a piece of that cross-cultural pie, I asked some of my first students if they would give me a Chinese name. They came up with Qi Fang. Now these were nine-year old kids, so that could have easily meant eats poo, but I trusted them on this and graciously took the name. Nobody else liked it. Every adult I shared it with said the name was strange. Well, they didn’t just say it was strange. The name outright sucked, and I needed a new one. Because some part of me felt like I’d been officially christened Qi Fang, though, I couldn’t give it up. It was my name! I was just going to have to keep it a secret.

Do you have a Chinese name? someone would ask.

Uh… no…

Do you want a Chinese name?

Nope, I’m good.

So I never completed that part of one’s transformation into becoming a Chinese expert, if having a name is even one of the steps. It must be, though, because the famous expat white guy who appears on all of China’s TV shows had a Chinese name, but I’ll deal with that when I get the call from CCTV. Any day now…

In actuality, my Chinese-speaking skills wouldn’t even land me the role of Idiot Foreigner #2 on the lowest rated show on local television. I can only think of one day where I felt like I was really getting it, where I felt like a pro for being able to speak Chinese with everyone I met. I was ordering train tickets, haggling over taxi prices to a ski resort, explaining to people that I prefer snowboarding to skiing, making small talk with strangers on the ski lift, asking a waiter what I should order for dinner afterwards, and describing to said waiter what I did that day on the slopes. Where did this energy come from? My qi was off the charts. Not to be confused with my qi fang, which was still under wraps.

Maybe it was the excitement of getting to go snowboarding again that unlocked my inner Rosetta Stone. I love snowboarding. It’s the only sport that really tickles my fancy (and it’s the use of phrases like tickles my fancy that has probably kept me out of more manly sports like football). Snowboarding, however, is a rare pastime in most of China. I had to take a 28-hour train ride to Harbin in the North, and then another 3-hour train ride to reach Yabuli and its ski resort. You’d better have a good day of Chinese if you’re going to go through all that trouble for a little snow.

Alas, it’s been downhill ever since.

When I talk about my Chinese-speaking skills (or lack thereof), people will often ask, Well, doesn’t your wife teach you Chinese?

And if there is a better segue into talking about my Chinese wife, I’d like to hear it. Her English name is Sarah. I didn’t mention much about her in Yes China!, because I didn’t want to embarrass her. Now that we’re married, though, all bets are off!

Sarah and I used to work at the same English training school in Changzhou. In fact, as the receptionist of the school, she was the first one to greet me when I stumbled in mere days after arriving in China. She opened the door for me and brought me a cup of water while I waited for the manager. Of course, I don’t remember any of this. I was jet lagged out of my mind. To this day, Sarah gives me a hard time about not remembering our first meeting.

The fourth time I went to China was specifically to go propose to her. The night of the big question, we went out to dinner at a nice Thai restaurant (see, it all makes sense). Afterwards, we went to a park, the one where we had shared our first kiss. A friend set off fireworks on the other side of the park while I asked Sarah if she would suffer through a long-distance relationship, thousands of dollars in immigration fees, and loads of demeaning paperwork to be my wife. Okay, maybe it was a little more romantic than that. The logistics of it could wait.

So, yeah, the plan was for us to live in the US, and we had to long-distance it for several months while I sorted out the visa application and found stable income back home. But even though Sarah may have agreed to move to the US, I had no intention of locking China out. Okay, sure, I didn’t particularly enjoy living there after so many months of teaching, but I also have nothing against visiting it from time to time. Hell, I have a lot of friends from China that I miss, and now… I have a lot of family from China.

Over a year after our American wedding, we decided it was time to head back overseas and have a Chinese wedding for Sarah’s relatives. Chinese weddings are… different. The bride and groom normally get their marriage certificate months before any actual get-together. Only after they’ve saved up enough money do they throw a party, which is more like a big banquet. The MC officiating the event gets more attention than the actual couple. The wedding itself is mostly a chance for everyone to eat lots of food, smoke expensive cigarettes, and toast each other until they’re drunk off their rockers.

Well, that’s what we had to look forward to. But, hey, if we were going to be in the Asian neighborhood, we might as well take advantage of it and visit another country. Hmmm… what about a country that starts with T and rhymes with highland?

Ooh, the plot thickens!

There’s a reason why we settled on Highland with a T. In college, I had become really good friends with an international student named Surf. After graduation, I moved to China, and Surf stayed behind to finish up his own degree. Immigration is a pain in the ass for everyone, though, and once he graduated, Surf only had so many months left on his student visa before he would have to go back home. Granted, he could have stayed in the US if a company was willing to sponsor him. The thing about Surf, however, is that he’s an entrepreneur at heart and was trying to establish his own business. Unfortunately, he couldn’t pull it off soon enough, and it was back to Thailand with him.

Even in Thailand, however, Surf was determined to wear the badge of self-employment and had his hands in several different projects. One of these start-ups was a snack food shop that he would set up outside of the local schools’ gates. Another project was a recruitment service to provide foreign teachers to nearby schools. English, Chinese, and Vietnamese teachers were all in high demand. Hey, I could help him with two of those!

Sarah and I were going to be in that part of the world, anyway. I desperately wanted a break from my 9-5 office job and a chance to see another country. Thailand (thanks largely to knowing Surf) had been near the top of my bucket list. It seemed like a perfect fit. The plan was to stay in China for one month for the wedding, teach in Thailand for four months, and then give China another month before moving to the US again. Any more than that risked us losing Sarah’s permanent residence status. I told you… immigration’s a pain in the ass. Hopefully those six months would still be enough to satisfy my travel itch, a prickly disease I seem to have picked up in China that I couldn’t get rid of. I needed to travel. I needed that fix again.

CHAPTER 2 - NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE

Surf had warned me that where he lived was kind of a small area, and we wouldn’t even be teaching in his town but in a smaller town fifteen minutes away. I looked up some brief statistics on Charoen Sin