He tries not to get the three confused.
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Home HIV and the Developing World Another World gay life on five continents God Would Be An Atheist Fiction Opinion Reviews martin@martinforeman.com Appeal to your wallet:   14 July 2003 |
I’ve mentioned before that I’m moving to Bangkok in October. After five years sleeping in London the travelbug has woken up and is demanding to be taken out. Earlier in the year I considered my options. Greece (where I lived for a year), Brazil (two years) and the United States (four) have been ticked, but that still left most of the globe to consider. It was also an excellent opportunity to air my prejudices. Africa was out – I’ve travelled there frequently in recent years and each time been depressed both by the extreme poverty and my reaction to it. Eastern Europe beckoned – apart from a weekend at a conference in Krakow it’s almost thirty years since I crossed the iron curtain – but I could not shake off the undoubtedly false impression of cold grey winters, widespread depression and petty crime. Southern Europe is definitely on my list, but it’s for my retirement, when I want not only warm climes but a social security system that I hope is still functioning. The Arab world? I have always wanted to study its language and read the classics of its golden age, but Islam casts too long a shadow in the modern world for an openly gay man. The Indian subcontinent was more inviting – my visits to Kathmandu, Bombay (pre-Mumbai) and Madras (Chennai as was) have been invitations to explore Aladdin’s cave, but – I don’t know why - it doesn’t enthuse me. Australia or New Zealand? Possibly, but I already speak English and I want the challenge of a new language and culture. Siberia? Too cold? The Pacific Islands? Perhaps… But as I let each region audition for me I knew it was a formality. My mind had already decided where I was going, long before I started thinking about it: my next home would be in East Asia, preferably China. I have always been fascinated by its culture and history and, while I knew that the Middle Kingdom of solitary hermits and wise travellers in quiet contemplative landscapes had long ago disappeared, I told myself that two or three years immersed in its language would let me glimpse the country’s ancient history. The question was where to go. My nostalgia for rural life is largely faux; I am predominantly a city man, so the choices were limited. In the end I decided that Beijing was too cold and Hong Kong too Cantonese. Despite its mountains of concrete, Shanghai, it seemed, was the answer. Then I remembered the internet. Because I make my living online, I cannot live in a society where access to the web is censored (local servers) or prohibitively expensive (connecting to servers abroad). So Shanghai faded. To maintain the Chinese connection, I thought briefly of Taipei, where I had the tenuous connection of one of my books being published in a pirated edition, but no-one, not even my Taiwanese friend, displayed any enthusiasm for the country, so I crossed if off the list. Tokyo was the next possibility. I had visited once on business, in the early 1990s, arriving with a head full of preconceptions. No-one speaks English; you won’t be able to get around; the Japanese are racist and won’t like you or help you. But the reality was that while English-speakers were rare (and the native English speakers I came across were the only people who ignored me - details in next month’s Another World), everyone I spoke to was unfailingly polite and helped me insofar as they could. Although I had no success in raising any money for the charity I worked for, I had a pleasant time and resolved to return. The thriving gay scene and the fact that in my eyes the Japanese share with the Italians and Brazilians the privilege of being the handsomest men on the planet, was an added bonus. Reality knocked. Japan is expensive for a freelance whose income mostly comes from the US and Europe. Somewhere to visit, perhaps explore, but not yet somewhere to stay. And so I settled on Bangkok. Last, as the cliché reminds us, but not least. I’ve enjoyed every visit there and it has all the ingredients I need to bake my domestic cake - a low cost of living, friendly people and a clearly identified culture. Not to mention beaches and a lively gay scene. And while Thai men do not rank as high as Japanese on my personal wish list, they are pleasing on the eye - almost certainly more so than I am to them. So I set my alarm for early October and began making preparations to leave. Considering the chores that are part of moving abroad – in particular emptying, cleaning and letting the house – learning another language should not be a priority. Many Thais speak English and I will have plenty of time to study after I arrive. But that hasn’t stopped me dropping into Foyle’s in the Charing Cross Road (once the World’s Worst Bookshop, but considerably improved since the previous owner died), to buy Thai language books and tapes to teach myself the basics. If I have any talent – and I’m not convinced that I do – then it is for languages. Based on no evidence whatsoever, I’ve always assumed that, like mathematics, trainspotting and autism, linguistic skills are more masculine than feminine. They all come down to patterns and rules and puzzles. A foreign language is a maze, a quadrilateral equation, a mystery that can eventually be resolved with patience and determination and an ability to interpret systems. I began at school, studying French, German and, briefly, Russian. When time hung heavy, I would go to the library and flick through the Oxford English Dictionary to see how words had changed over the centuries. Another favourite tome was The Loom of Language, an introduction to comparative linguistics – how languages are related and how they develop over time. Thus I learnt that French and Italian and Portuguese and Spanish were brothers (as was oft-forgotten Romanian), Danish and Dutch and German and Swedish were sisters, and the two groups were cousins. English was Teutonic but after being raped by her French cousin (the metaphor came several years after school) she stands apart from both sides of the family. Too fixated on the Europeans, TLoL (published in 1944) said little about the exotic languages beyond the Iron Curtain, other than flashing the jewels of Arabic, Sanskrit and Chinese. It was more interested in suggesting that there were too many languages, a heresy today, when too many are dying. Its final chapter was a plea for an international language and a lengthy comparison of now-forgotten artificial tongues. (Anyone for Interlingua? Novial? Ido?) But whatever the books faults, it was thanks to The Loom of Language that I studied linguistics at university and have up picked up language after language as I strolled through life. Linguistically speaking, however, I haven’t strolled far. My first conquest after school was Modern Greek, but its only idiosyncrasy from a Western European perspective is its tense system and a less familiar vocabulary than you might expect. It was followed by Portuguese and Spanish, which present fewer challenges, apart from getting my mouth round the vowels of the former; once they were on board Italian was a doddle. But the exotic tongues – Arabic, Swahili, Hindi – remained out of reach, except for a year of Chinese. I learnt enough in that time to feel familiar with Mandarin’s monosyllables and its apparent lack of formal grammar, but on my one visit to China I could do no more than ask in shops for particular coloured clothes, or check that they were cotton. Back home, with no-one to talk to on a regular basis, I let my grammars and character notebooks languish on the shelf. So here I am, excited by Thai. I have not progressed far in Benjawan Poomsan Becker’s Thai for Beginners, but I have learnt enough to recognise contours of the language. Originally monosyllabic, like Chinese, it has been watered down with borrowings from various Indian languages and English, so that two and three syllable words are not uncommon. And like Chinese, it has tones – the bane of every European student, with five to confuse (one more than Mandarin). Tones mean that such words as new and no, near and far are distinguished only by whether the voice is high-pitched, low-pitched or riding a mini roller-coaster, allowing plenty of scope for misunderstandings. I therefore look forward to conversations where I inadvertently insult someone’s mother or commit myself to buying a trinket for a hundred times more than my monthly budget. And yes, such things happen: it was several weeks before a British friend of mine in Brazil realised that nasalisation could be important in Portuguese; in the meantime each morning at the baker’s, while he thought he was asking for bread, he was actually requesting the male sexual organ. And unlike Chinese, Thai has an alphabet – 80 or so letters that curl like snakes along the page. Since acquiring my first typewriter I have lost the ability to write English with a pen and have not even attempted to write Thai. But, Mr Gates, I have to thank you for including Thai in Windows XP and so I am learning to word process in that language. Look forward, after a year in Bangkok, to occasional columns in the language of Siam. As with the regular columns in English, just don’t expect me to add good style, grammar or humour… |
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