A road sign, a receipt, and a book I’m desperately trying to translate

By Jeremiah Cordial

MY hands were drenched in sweat the moment our plane landed in Bangkok.

Thailand greeted me with road signs written in Thai, and I found myself taking more photos of them than the actual city itself. While doing so, I shifted my gaze at the scenery that consisted mainly of cityscapes, ancient temples, and complex yet structured highways.

Navigating the city of Bangkok gave me that particular feeling of being stuck in a loop of constant curiosity and the urge to explore. I felt particularly drawn towards road signs as I was trying to practice my Thai reading skills. To my surprise, I was able to read decently if slowly.

I studied basic Thai three years ago but I read like a first-grader. Setting foot in Thailand was a reverie. I could look anywhere and find something to read. Road signs. Billboards. Posters. Signages. Plate numbers. Heck, even their food packaging. I did worse in speaking.

My hands quivered the first time I tried to speak to the locals.

Later that night, we passed by a fruit vendor who offered us lychee for neung looi and my immediate instinct was to respond, “one hundred?” And I was right.

I reckoned that there was a pattern in communicating with the Thais. Ask a Thai vendor, “how much?” and they will reply in English. But ask them, “thao rai na khrap?” and they will reply in Thai.

A souvenir vendor, believing I was a Thai, asked me in a quick sentence I could not follow.

PBdN cHAmPIONS INcLuSIvE wORkPLAcES fOR PwdS

THE Philippine Business and Disability Network (PBDN), a for-and-by business platform that provides barrier-free workplaces for Persons with Disability (PWDs), recently held their annual conference titled Working Beyond Barriers at SMX Aura. It is estimated that there are over 650 million persons with disabilities in Asia, according to the United Nations Population Fund. Meanwhile, the Philippine Statistics Authority shared that the unemployment rate for PWDs increased to 7 percent in January 2022, highlighting the challenging environment that the PBDN Conference is attempting to address.

With the theme “Towards building a more accessible and equitable society for

For the first time I composed my first sentence without looking into Google Translate and said, “pom mai phut phasa thai, pom phut phasa angrit ” (I don’t speak Thai, I speak English). She switched to English and told me she thought I was Thai. And although she did not give me any discount, I was happy with that little conversation.

REcEIPT IdE ATION IN Chiang Mai, we stayed at a hotel adjacent to a kindergarten with a sign that said “rong rian,” which means school in Thai. Ours was a “rong raem,” which means hotel. This pattern intrigued me to look for any building that started with “rong,” which indicated a place or a building of a particular function or purpose. Although not a rong, art studios, cafés, and indie book shops were around Chiang Mai. Nobody among us was interested to see the tigers but instead, we were all searching for creative spaces. There was a particular street where we found these, and I could not help but notice the fact that these spots were embedded within the soul of the city itself. We visited as many sites within the town as we could to find a piece of something we could take home, not as a tourist but as a consumer of their creative works. cREATIvE SEARcHINg

During those visits, I collected our receipts seemingly a frequent reminder for me that we paid taxes. But receipts tell stories. They could reveal one’s spending habits, preferences, and consumption patterns, if played creatively in the head.

If I bought a tablet of Imodium, a bottle of coke, and a bunch of bananas, it could mean I’m saving myself from diarrhea. Similarly, if I bought four bags of chips, a few canned drinks, and a Durex, it could mean I was having some Netflix and chilling with someone. I did have my own receipt story I bought five hundredworth (in Thai Baht) of groceries and had the clerk raise her eyebrows for a lot of purchases that night.

I SPENT more money for books than for food.

From each local bookshop we visited, I bought one book to take advantage of my access to Thai literature, which I cannot find anywhere in the Philippines. One particular book I grew fond of having was titled A Monkey’s Vision That Came Before. It was written in Thai. I was trying my best to translate its contents and annotate it. I brought it to almost every place we went to so I could try reading it from time to time.

I even carried the book to a beer shop and a bartender was surprised to see me with it. He asked if I could speak Thai and I explained to him that I studied basic communication skills a long time ago, but I was trying to practice it more often then. I asked him if he could take a look at the book and told me that it was written poetically something too advanced for beginners like me. However, he encouraged me to keep on trying before he served me my next glass.

I couldn’t get past page one until now. I was relying heavily on Google Translate by reading the text out loud and seeing if I got the tones right. Most times I got it, but it took a lot of effort and time before I could move past the next sentence which, by the way, didn’t have spaces after each word. Where do words end?

Where do I pause? How do I stop?

In no time, we were back in the Philippines. There were major changes in the way I looked at our towns and how we shaped our own creative spaces. I was after all with a team of creatives coming from a literary forum among Southeast Asian delegates in Bangkok, and searching for inspiration among the towns of Chiang Mai for the rest of our trip.

While we could not make all cities thrive in the same manner, we could strengthen their distinctiveness so integration could be possible. It is a collective effort, if not, a combined individual pursuit, to have such a dream realized. But for the meantime, I would continue to search my way, travel more, create stories, and finish translating that book.