Picture the scene. You’re sitting in a crowded food court at a suburban mall at noon on a Sunday. Hundreds of people, trays in hand, venture into the matrix of tables looking for that rarest of lunchtime commodities: a place to sit. A few tables away from you, a young family – mom, dad, and a three-year old girl – have secured that prize. But, their lunch is not yet in hand. A brief discussion, then mom and dad stand up and walk away to get their food. The three-year old is left alone to hold the table.
Let that sink in.
Now, from where you’re sitting, you can picture those obviously negligent parents returning to the table to face a phalanx of mall security, local police, and a nice young woman from social services all waiting to remove the child from such a dangerous environment, slap the cuffs on the neglectful mom and dad, and make everything take just long enough for the local news crews to arrive so a statement to the press can be made.
That won’t happen here. Not because bad things don’t happen here, they do, but because bad things are very unlikely to happen in general. There are a few reasons for this.
A few posts ago I alluded to the pay-it-forward attitude that allows driving in Thailand to work as smoothly as it does. There’s a feeling that if I cut you a break now the Universe will put me in front of someone willing to do the same for me when I need it. Sort of a karmic credit account. The opposite is also true. And people realize that payback is a bitch.
There’s some of that at work here but there’s also a societal cohesion in Thailand that would be considered very retro in the west. A feeling that whoever you are, you’re in the same boat. This results in extra sets of eyeballs making sure that this abandoned child was being looked after. The result is that the parents got their lunch, the kid did her job, and, in the process, learned a little something about responsibility and success. Lessons that in the west are currently frowned upon.
So sure, any prospective kidnapper would be aware of the protection Thai society bestows upon this child and may consider a snatch and grab not in their best interest. But that doesn’t explain how, in food courts everywhere here, office workers daily stake their table claims with employee badges, shopping bags, purses, water bottles, or even mobile phones without worrying whether they will be there when they come back to the table with a bowl of noodles. Even in Thailand there aren’t enough eyes to look after all the tables with a tempting iPhone or purse sitting there available for the half-second it would take to make it disappear. But that, judging from the continued prevalence of the behavior, happens so infrequently as to even float that concern partway up the what-if decision matrix.
I chalk this up to a pervasive awareness of what I call SES or Someone Else’s Stuff. A feeling that, however much I want to have the things that you do, those things are yours and I’ll just have to get my own. I have experienced this personally with that most fungible of possessions: cash. One of my near daily routes takes me past a bus stop.
A brief aside is warranted here. Public transport in Bangkok (as expected in a hierarchical society) falls into a tiered system with the expensive, modern, air-conditioned mass transit of the Skytrain, monorails, and subway at the top with fares in the US$1 and up range (“up” capping out in my experience at just under US$3) and the various bus services – a contracted public-private arrangement, similar to the service in the Caribbean I’ve talked about – which start at a little less than US$1 and go down to about twenty-five cents. The cheap buses are really the last choice other than walking. They are old, tired, with rusty bodies and wooden floors. The have no air-conditioning beyond what nature provides which results in a drown or steam choice during rainy season. I have never been even slightly curious about what the experience would be like. (Which makes me think there may be a How to Get Around in Bangkok post in your future.)
At the bus stop in question there are always people waiting for the next cheap bus. It’s a heavily trafficked area with the stop being just beneath the Skytrain station. A service that no one waiting at the bus stop can comfortably afford. I stop briefly to put my Skytrain payment card away and as I do a couple of one-thousand Baht notes (roughly US$30 each) stick to my hand and, unbeknownst to me, flutter to the ground as I walk away. A few seconds pass and I am tapped on the shoulder. I turn, and a woman is standing there holding my money and telling me I dropped it. Sixty bucks. Five days pay for a minimum wage worker. All because it was Someone Else’s Stuff.
Even that amazing act of social solidarity doesn’t take the cake.
Starting on the fourth and nineteenth day of every month, the cases come out. You see them everywhere. People riding bikes with a case strapped to or balanced on the handlebars. People sitting by the side of the road or on the sidewalk, cases open in front of them. They look kind of like a larger, but much thinner version of a James Bond briefcase but packed with a different kind of weaponry. These cases are packed with Hope in the form of tickets for the fortnightly letdown that is the Thai National Lottery. These cases don’t come cheap for the vendors, each can hold up to 500 tickets and each ticket costs the vendor the equivalent of US$2.25. That makes the value of each case US$1,125. When you factor in the retail markup it balloons to US$1,600. Keep in mind that the average monthly salary in Thailand is about US$480 so those cases hold some serious coin, as it were. Plus, any of them that are winners could be even more spectacularly valuable than the case itself.
Now hold that thought.
On my recent scooter road trip, about which much was hinted but little delivered, I was riding through Thailand’s northern fruit basket and came upon a side-of-the-road fruit stand. A small table was set with oranges (it was that season) accompanied by a cash box. You picked your oranges, figured out what you owed (arithmetic being a subject still taught in schools here), and paid your bill. Next to that table was a smaller table, also unattended, which supported a case of lottery tickets. The process was the same: grab your ticket(s), figure out what you owe, and pay. It all runs on the Honor System with an extra shot of SES.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Thailand can get you with some not quite entirely honest cons that range from the playful to the obscene. Most of the cons that are run on foreigners are by other foreigners. The “Hey, where are you from? Oh, cool. Do you have any money from there you can show me?” is a popular one. Thais like the tuk-tuk scam for foreign tourists the most because they, other than possibly claiming that “The Grand Palace is closed today”, deliver exactly what they promise. So, not without some irony, an honest scam. All of these can be easily defeated by not being stupid.
In the west we live on largely ignored platitudes like “Do unto others…” or “Be the person you want you to be” or “Honesty is the best policy”. In Thailand, it would seem, honesty is the only option.
