Visit to Samrong

Today, I had the chance to visit one of my classmates from the AUA Thai program at his home in Samrong district of nearby Samut Prakan province. Richard teaches English in Japan, but his family lives here in Thailand. His wife Kwan is from Buriram
Province in NE Thailand on the border with Cambodia.

Some of the things you will only see as you get further and further away from Bangkok are: (1) a tuk-tuk powered the traditional way; (2) a traditional style farmer's market; (3) a jackfruit tree:




As Richard and I got to know each other during breaks between classes, I came to learn that Kwan is ethnically Khmer and comes from a largely Khmer village. As a result of her being born and raised in Thailand, however, her spoken Khmer sounds slightly different from the Khmer I grew up speaking. In Khmer, we note this distinction by calling the dialect she speaks “Khmer Leu” and the one I speak “Khmer Growm.” These spellings are my own attempts at transliteration, so ask me to say them for you some time if you want to hear how it actually sounds. They translate into “top” or “upper” Khmer and “bottom” or “lower” Khmer, respectively. This has more to do with geography than any kind of social hierarchy as the speakers of Khmer Leu come from the highlands or northern Cambodia and along the border with Thailand. Anyhow, the speakers of Khmer Growm comprise the majority of the population and live in the river valley areas and in the cities. One interesting thing I should share though is that Richard tells me that apparently, the Khmer Growm consider the Khmer speakers in Vietnam the Khmer Growm and themselves the Khmer Leu. For my part, I hadn’t even heard of the term Khmer Growm. However, it makes sense to me that if there is an upper Khmer that there should be a lower Khmer as well. When my mom told me about the existence of this distinct group of Khmer speakers to me as a child, I imagined something like Cambodian Indians – hah hah. I guess when you belong to the majority group, it’s easier and sometimes more important to establish who doesn’t belong to it – a kind of identity formation in the negative or defined by exclusion of others.

So although the two “dialects” are distinct, I can understand Khmer Leu without too much effort. I put dialects in quotation marks because my only other experience with them is with Chinese. If you know anything about my family background, you know that we’re ethnically Chinese and that we speak something other than Mandarin – Chow Zhou. The other dialect I’ve had some exposure to is Cantonese. In most instances, these three dialects share very little in common when spoken. However, all Chinese dialects share the same writing system. I don’t think that somebody who speaks only Mandarin could easily understand somebody who only speaks Cantonese in the way that I can understand both versions of Khmer. It does, however, take a little bit of concentration on my part as well as a little bit of repeating of what is being said. In the end, I was able to communicate with Kwan and her brother as they spoke to me in Khmer Leu and I to them in Khmer Growm. Of course, being able to throw in a little Thai when necessary helped! Apparently, they had as much fun as I did with the whole situation. Through our conversation, I found out that Richard’s live-in brother-in-law has a family in the provinces still, even as he is now living in Samut Prakan and working at a nearby factory. His wife and children operate a small shop selling various goods. I was also able to meet two of Richard’s children, who claimed that they could understand Khmer but are unable to speak it. I think they were just being modest. They communicated this to me in a mix of Khmer and Thai, so it is a good think my Thai is at a point where I can hold simple conversations!

Richard’s neighborhood was quite a lovely place, I’d have to say. He was very apologetic from the start about how his home and way of life was going to appear very basic to me. However, I found it to be a very refreshing retreat from the constant buzz of life in Bangkok. Aside from the killer mosquitoes that seemed intent on eating me alive as I am fresh meat to them, it was a fabulous afternoon. The dogs and cats that ran around all had caretakers and seemed to belong to multiple households…not that there was too much in the way of delineation in terms of personal property in Richard’s neighborhood. Earlier, I had asked Richard who the lady sleeping on his couch was, thinking that she may be Kwan’s sister or cousin or something. He replied that he didn’t really know who she was and that perhaps she was one of the neighbors. I found this to be a rather delightful example of Thainess that one would have a harder time finding amidst the distorted Thainess usually seen in Bangkok.

So after several instances of being asked if I was hungry, I finally said yes, whereupon Kwan jumped on a bike and rode off around the corner. She returned about 15 minutes later with dinner and set up the table for Richard and I. In the normal Thai fashion, she dutifully pointed out to me which dishes were spicy and which ones were not. But she did it in Khmer, which I found quite amusing for some reason.

This is a picture of one of the neigborhood's back streets:


Finally, it was time for me to go home and get out of their hair. It was about 18:00 at this point, so I had to brave the Bangkok rush hour traffic. Yeah. That was exciting. It took me over an hour and a half to travel less than 30 kilometers.