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| Professor Daw silversmithing Chiang Mai, Thailand, October 10th |
I am not idealizing it but I am in love, perhaps a contradiction. It's just that I understand that Bangkok and Chiang Mai which I visited are relatively safe and that other areas of the country experience unrest and violence.
But...isn't that the enigma of humanity...
We all share genes to a degree that truly makes our silly skin color, facial features, and other physical categorization of people ridiculous....An archaic leftover of obscurantist times that we are not shedding.... because, based on many metrics, we have not fully exited those times yet despite an explosion of scientific knowledge which has given humanity a complex opportunity to move forward.
So yes, we all share genes. Our behavioral differences are based often on many genes of small effects. At the population level, our behavioral differences are largely based on environmental factors.
Why is it that Thai people were not ever colonized by European colonizers? Luck? Interpersonal skills at the right time and place or did it become Thailand by being the uncolonized part of a vastly over-colonized region? Thailand means land of the free.
What is the impact on people of that profound difference relative to other neighbors in the region?
Or rather how do cumulative differences shape a culture over centuries just like individual brains are shaped by experience?
All I can tell you for sure about the Thai cultural neuroenvironment for now as I conceptually endeavor to assemble this puzzle at least for myself is that every Thai child gets a (traditionally one syllable) nickname at birth and that this is a big deal. Like being part of a club. It's being part of a unique culture.
I know because I was baptized Seuxdaw or Daw a few days ago. Sounds like Seeeoodow.
This is how it went: I was having dinner with a lively group of young child psychiatrists also attending the meeting where my fellow Natchanan (nickname Wine) and I were invited. A meeting of the Asian Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Allied Professions, aptly themed embracing intergenerational differences over the next decade -but what are intergenerational differences if not a subset of cultural differences intersecting with developmental differences-. I was jokingly wondering if Tiger was available and was rebuked teasingly, gently but definitively: a boy name and they weren't going to let me be the first female Tiger.
So the whole group was brainstorming. Teasing me more and more mercilessly but then things got earnest and creative. Wait, what if we call her Seuxdaw. See Seux mans tiger, so she can still have that and Seuxdaw means leopard (apparently female-ness ok for leopards.) Also Daw means star and they thought Professor Daw had a nice ring and, furthermore, millennials (those intergenerational differences, I'm telling you...) are into combined names, two syllable names breaking tradition with the ubiquitous one syllabled Chue Len or Thai nickname.
Well let me tell you being Professor Star and telling Thai people that this is the Chue Len I was given and that furthermore I can be Professor Seuxdaw too...Well, it's further easing connections and conversations.
I'm being light hearted about a custom which may have started to ward off the evil eye (where real name or details crucial for harm in many cultures around the world) or to abbreviate long Thai names...
It's a wonderful custom however: parents can choose to be creative and funny and the name usually has to do with something they like (I've met a Tom for Tom and Jerry, a light rain, air, and of course have been traveling with Wine and she has a cousin called Scotch.)
It's neurobeneficial for me, very strongly; a reminder of what I love about humans (humor, creativity, affection) and I need that.
Travel, whatever your age...
Here is to finding the star, the tiger (shhh...) and the leopard in me on the other side of the world.
Here is to finally building environments where the best of human nature can emerge more readily.
Love,
Anne
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