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Doing the Right Thing
In June 2005, when I first started this blog, I wrote this
I have had occasional moments of uncertainty about whether we are doing the right thing for Neung. Sometimes it feels as if we are ripping a child from her home and her family. But ... the reality is that Neung's life opportunities will be very different if she lives with us. Were she to grow up in Nam Kem, the best outcome for her would probably be to end up working in a resort. That would be fine, but there are also many far worse outcomes for poor young women in Thailand. If she lives with us, she can be anything.
On my last visit to Thailand, I met a member of the waitstaff at Le Meridien that I had not seen before. Her name is Khun Da. (While she has apparently been working there for some time, she was previously working for room service rather than as a member of the regular waitstaff, and so had had little contact with the guests.) She came up to me, and told me that she knew Neung -- in fact, she was Somsri's roommate in the Sofitel staff dormitories. She told me things that many people have told me about Neung's mother: how friendly she was, how she often talked about Neung and worried about her. She told me that Somsri was unwell on the morning of the tsunami, and had wanted to call in sick, but had had to go to work anyway because they were short-staffed. And then Khun Da said something extraordinary. She said that Neung's mother had sometimes said that she thought it would be good if Neung could go and live with foreigners, so that she could learn English and get a good education.
As I wrote in that same post, sometimes I feel that everything I do for Neung is in fulfilment of a promise that I would I could have made to Somsri as she died.
6/9/2006
Lost and Found
I created this slideshow without particular intent to share it, but I now think that it is perhaps worth posting here. It is really a rough cut, created in iPhoto; at some point in the future I hope to redo it more carefully in either iMovie or Adobe Premier. Because it was not originally designed to be posted on the web I did nothing to keep the file size under control, and so the large version is over 30MB. You have been warned. However, you really should watch it in the high resolution version if you can.
The music is "Lost and Found", by the wonderful Patty Larkin. (You can preview and buy her work here, here or here.)
Lost and Found (Quicktime, hi-res (33 MB))
Lost and Found (Quicktime, lo-res, (10 MB))
To protect Ms Larkin's copyright, these links are password-protected. If you would like to see the slideshow, log in as "guest" and enter the password "<Jill's last name>1". (Note that Jill's name does not appear anywhere on this site.) If you do not know Jill's last name but would like to see the video, then please contact me.
6/9/2006
Pride Undisguised
Neung was already four and a half when we became her parents. This is oddly liberating. She is who she is, and who she is has very little to do with our influence on her and nothing at all to do with our genes. And this means that I can feel pride in her accomplishments without that seeming as if it has to do with my own ego.
She has just started Elementary school. She attends an international school that, while not a British school, has a strong British influence. One of its characteristics is that it is divided up into houses, and the children can win points for their houses in various different ways. At the school assembly yesterday, points were awarded for the first time in the school year.
Neung obtained two merit points for "helping others settle in".
So I take no credit for the fact that she is such a wonderfully empathic child. But I am proud, proud, proud of her.
Update: All right, I know what you're thinking: every kid in Year 1 got a certificate for something. And you're wrong. I think they only handed out about half-a-dozen of these for the entire Elementary school. Did I mention that I am proud?
7/9/2006
I Don't Just See the King
A Thai friend recently sent me this link. It is a Thai commercial (half in English, half in Thai) to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the accession to the throne of the King of Thailand. You can look at it how you will: as a piece of propaganda, or as a moving tribute that does get to the center of how most Thais feel. I actually think that it is both.
8/9/2006
The Post that I am Embarrassed to Write
Yeah, well that's what a blog is for, right? You put things down and pretend no one is going to read them. So here are two questions I ask myself from time to time: how smart is Neung?; and how much do I care?
Let's get the obvious out of the way first. This has nothing to do with how much I love her, or how wonderful a kid I think she is, or what her worth is as a human being. I would hope that those didn't need to be spelled out, but I might as well be explicit.
The short answer to the first question is that I still don't know how smart she is. I don't have enough experience of children to assess what a typical five-year-old is like, and -- entirely appropriately -- her kindergarten didn't provide much comparative information about the children. On top of that, there are two special considerations that make it hard to assess her abilities. One is the fact that she is learning in a language that is not her mother tongue (though her English is better than her Thai at this point), and this is undoubtedly a challenge for her at times. The other is the fact that her background left her with a great deal in the way of street smarts, which often leaves the impression of greater maturity and intelligence than she actually possesses. She certainly isn't dumb; and nor is she a prodigy (she isn't beating me at chess, or composing sonatas), but beyond that, we really have almost no idea.
The second question gives this post its title: I do care about how smart she is. There are two reasons for this. One is for her sake: her life will be easier if she is at least somewhat smart. I don't want her to have to struggle in school (or in university, assuming she goes to one). I also want her to be able to get a decent job without difficulty. I want her to have the abilities to do whatever she wants to do.
The other reason that I care is selfish, and there is no avoiding the fact. For better or worse, Neung is growing up in an academic household. I mean, you are talking about two people who, when we were doing relief work in Thailand after the tsunami, spent half of our time debating whether or not there is any such thing as pure altruism, and the other half worrying about whether it would have been more efficient to have stayed in Singapore, consulted for the week, and then donated our fees to relief charities.* Jill and I talk, question, challenge, discuss, debate. We read books, blogs, newspapers, magazines, academic journals. I would like it if Neung grows up enjoying being part of such discourse; I would like it if she is curious about the world and how it works; I would like it if she gets lost in the interior worlds of books; I would like it if she is enthralled by the beauties of mathematics; I would like it if, like her parents, she cares why people behave as they do and why societies function as they do. I would like all these things for her, perhaps; but most of all I would like them for me. It is not a matter of pride (as I just said in an earlier post, it is not as if my genes are on the line), but simply a matter of wanting to be able to share all these things with her.
Then again, as I write this down, it occurs to me that this may not be about smarts as such. What I care about is not so much whether she is smart, but whether she is intellectually curious. And while these two things are surely correlated, they are not the same. So the good news for me is that she does seem to possess real intellectual curiosity. When we were in Washington this summer, we went to the Natural History Museum and the Air and Space Museum, and she ran from exhibit to exhibit, soaking them up. Both times, we had to leave long before she wanted to. She seems to want to learn; she seems already to enjoy knowledge for its own sake. That is already more than I have the right to hope for.
9/9/2006
*I actually think the answers are no and no, but those are topics for another day.