For your average European tourist Thailand is the gateway to the Orient. Sindbad, as much as he disliked tourism, was not quite prepared for what he experienced in the kingdom of Siam. Although it was the only Asian country beside Japan to escape colonisation, it suffered a harsh blow from modernity. On touristic spots the original culture only existed in traces, like the remnants of rainforest in the deserts of palm plantations. And what was there resembled a museum rather than real life.
The sparkling immaculateness of the few buildings constructed in the traditional style was like the sterile perfection of the National Hungarian Folk Dance Ensemble, having zero connection with everyday life. The refined traditional aesthetics stood in sharp contrast with the messy uncaring of the present, just like the childlike niceness of simple people with the dull money-hungriness of shopkeepers and tourist raisers. The whole country appeared to be a run-down tourist farm where care is only taken to the cleanness of stalls to ensure the proper development of livestock.
We've became the new pigs, Sindbad thought, even getting vaccinated now. What could these chirping people have originally been like? Probably not like the grim shopkeepers and bus company folk who try to rip you off with transparent tricks to gain an Euro or two. More like the young kid who stopped first. Happy, melting with genuine niceness, almost excusing himself for not going farther.
Far from touristic spots, in the outskirts of Bangkok, where people looked at the white man, the seafarer met another face of the culture. Easy eye contact, immediate communication, good will and loads of smiles were characteristic of the street, where the foreigner could only communicate with gestures. The two-storey buildings, markets, sellers hidden behind noisy main streets brought back a feeling of a world before the megalopolis.
Classifying ethnic groups has led to great troubles in the past, thus people understandably shy away from making generalizations about nations. The focus today is on individuality, national characteristics are thought to be prejudices, or, at most, surface phenomena. Yet Sindbad, who had lived in multiple countries from his teenage years knew all too well that distinct groups of people are quite differently organized inside. This has nothing to do with being "good" or "bad"; they simply work in different ways. Individuals have little choice in this matter: even if they rebel against their culture, they do it according to the unwritten laws of that culture. Those that know German hippies know what I'm talking about, thought Sindbad. There are a few white ravens here and there but their weight in the whole is like that of a fly on a freight train.
The important differences are not dances and ceremonies but less tangible, more important things: thinking patterns, personal relations and emotions. Sindbad in the old days set up three rough categories. The first one had ‘normal’ people, who, besides Europeans, included Africans, Latin Americans and Indians. The second consisted of emotionally challenged North Americans. The third group was fish-faced Far Easterns with unfathomable emotions.
Various racist ideologies — being ignorant of the flexibility of the human nervous system — believed the differences between peoples were genetic. The difference being in software instead of hardware doesn't make it less real, Sindbad thought. This is part of the reason why learning a new language is difficult for many people. If you don't take on the vibe of the group the words won't make much sense. The logic of your mother tongue also influences your thinking. Here's a simple Thai greeting:
สวัสดี ครับ S̄wạs̄dī kráp
(‘so white crap’ may help you remember). Or ‘Thank you’:
ขอบคุณครับ K̄hxbkhuṇ kráp!
(‘cop can crap’).
’kráp’ at the end of these phrases is a polite particle that only men use. The female equivalent is ‘kâ’. The most exciting feature of the language, of course, is that it is tonal. Every word has one of five tones. ‘Po’ in one tone means paternal grandfather, in another a kind of crab. This, wile probably opening a wide swath for puns, means that people in these parts don't really speak; they can only sing. This is as strange for us as our hard consonants for them.
Why a certain group of people becomes the way it is is an interesting question. Some connections between climate, geography, landscape and culture are quite obvious. Frozen lands sprout more distant folks, hot places bring out boiling emotions, that's a commonplace. Hot and cold are, of course, relative; Southern Italians think Milanese are frosty folks. The reason for tropical peoples' laziness is not only the scorching heat that makes it hard to move your bones. It’s also that they don't need to be busybodies. They stick a twig in the ground and in a few years they can sit in the shade of their new tree. There's a twelve months growing season and one doesn't really need a house, a roof will do. Every Szekler (a type of Transyvanian mountain Hungarian) is stubborn, but those higher up are more hard-headed than the ones on the milder slopes. Or take the legendary hospitality of Muslims. If you are inhospitable with a traveller in the desert, he will die. And you might need to travel any time.
Subtle energies of nature probably also influence us in ways we are not aware of, Sindbad thought. We are not as independent of our natural environment: water, air, flora, even local microorganisms, as we'd like to think. They are just starting to discover the effect the hordes of little creatures, our gut flora that live within us have on our consciousness. South-East Asian spicy hot cuisine is probably not an accident. European visitors there often restrict themselves to drinking filtered or boiled water. At least those that refuse to add to the flood of murderous plastic bottles.
Not knowing basic features of a culture or a geographical place might wreak considerable havoc. The plane that took us to Canada in the early eighties — Sindbad recalled — was 80% full of Vietnamese immigrants. They were so clueless about life in the North that they arrived to the 30 degrees below in plastic slippers on their bare feet. We, in the former Eastern Bloc had no idea of capitalism when communism collapsed. In our naivity we thought Western companies line up in front of our factories because they want to help...1
Then there's homesickness. Is it only an emotional phenomenon or could it also have a physical component? Could our body be needing the usual conditions of light, minerals, weather? In the colorful Australian avian clouds why did I, after some time, miss seeing a chikadee? — he wondered.
The colorful sugar cone hills of Chinese rice paper paintings over my tent might give a few clues why Far Eastern culture is so down-to-earth and abstract at the same time, he thought. The many-hued gods are sitting directly over our heads, over the rice paddies.
Some features of the Far East will soon be familiar for Hungarians, he thought. After the masses of Chinese colonists2 it's swarms of guest workers now. You mean they will eventually return home? Some will. Let us focus on hybrid vigor. The most we can do is teach them Hungarian. Otherwise, after so many places, dumbed-down English will become the connecting language in Budapest.
The hardness of Hungarian, just because it's somewhat different from surrounding languages, is an old wives' tale, he added. The school way obviously doesn't work, but we didn't learn to speak from conjugation tables, either. I could make amusing, inspiring videos that make picking up Hungarian more easy. Ideas abound but the technical skill base is missing. In case you know any film-making wizards that I could cooperate with, do tell me, winked Sindbad to the reader.
Those Western companies that bought up huge production sites for peanuts either sold the physical assets, kicked everyone out and closed shop so they can import their second-rate products, or, in the best case used the factories for raw material manufacture.
Reports about Chinese living in Hungary are always quick to conclude that their numbers have been stagnating since the nineties. Ask the drivers of bus 9 that skirts Eastern Europe’s largest Chinatown what they think about that.