A teacher in Siam

When I was a boy, world was better spot
What was so was so, what was not was not
Now, I am a man, world have changed a lot
Some things nearly so, others nearly not.

--Oscar Hammerstein II

I saw the movie of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, The King and I, as a teenager, and soon after acquired an LP with the songs from the Broadway production.  I liked the songs, of course, but I was also attracted by the supposed exoticism of far-off Siam.  The story of Anna, a British teacher, hired by the King of Siam to teach his children, a teacher who ended up teaching the king himself a thing or two, was perfectly designed to appeal to 1950s America -- a nation confident that it had a thing or two to teach the world.

The story was based loosely on actual events that occurred in the court of Siamese King Mongkut in the 1860s.  I'm not sure that I realized -- or that all American viewers realized -- that the story dealt with the distant past, rather than the recent past.  I knew enough to doubt that the King of Siam -- many  maps still called Thailand "Siam" -- actually strutted around manfully like Yul Brynner, but I had no doubt that the king, whenever he ruled, had been an absolute monarch, had a childlike fascination with the "advanced" culture of the West, spoke in fluent but pidgin English, and devoted much of his time to his many wives. 

That was the nature of foreign potentates.

Even the name "Siam" sounded wonderfully strange and exotic.  Some day, I perhaps dreamed, I might board a steamer in San Francisco and make a port of call at mysterious Bangkok.  A once in a lifetime visit that would be the wonder of the folks back home.

I never dreamed that by the time I had reached retirement age, my passports would bear any number of stamps from Thailand.  Or that "Thailand" is what everyone would be calling Siam.

Or -- and this is what really prompts this post -- that one of my very own nephews would have just moved to "Siam." Denny moved this past month to Chiang Mai, Thailand's second largest city, where he will begin teaching sixth grade in the fall at the same international school attended by his third grade daughter.  This past week, he sent us "farangs" back home an email bursting with excitement about the colleagues and neighbors he's already met, the school at which he'll be teaching, and the house he's leasing.

Knowing Denny's excellent reputation as a teacher in California, I have no doubt that his sixth graders will be well taught in the coming years.  And Denny will learn as much about Thailand from his students as he will from reading the local papers and talking to his neighbors.  For as Anna herself told her pupils in The King and I:

It's a very ancient saying,
But a true and honest thought,
That if you become a teacher,
By your pupils you'll be taught.

Denny and I traveled together to Chiang Mai a decade ago.  It's a beautiful town, with exotic tropical vegetation and exciting outdoor markets.  It's certainly different from America.  It's not the mysterious Orient, however, that I would have expected from watching Yul Brynner cavorting about the stage.   It's a real world filled with real people -- people like everyone else in some ways, but uniquely Thai as well.  Denny will learn a lot, and --whenever he returns to America -- he will have a wonderful background in another culture.

And I intend to learn a lot from his adventure, as well.  For me, as well as for the King: "World has changed a lot."  And my passport has room for many more stamps.  Stamps from Thailand.