To be or not to be considerate

Posted by admin on September 24th, 2007 filed in Lifestyling, Thai habits

That is the question in Thailand but just exactly what is considerate? Thai people have entirely different principles, expectations and judgement when it comes to being considerate and foreigners can find them exasperating, while often appearing unintentionally inconsiderate themselves.

Fitting in with your community and peers is always in important in Thailand, and most Thais will put the group before their own selfish needs in social circumstances. Since most Thais couldn’t bear the thought of being alone they will try hard to fit in with groups, colleagues and neighbours. In short, they like to be part of a community and this tradition is seen in modern Thailand from their preference to live in gated communities or housing projects.

Ironically, once they are outside of their ‘comfort circle’ and free of responsibility to be considerate, Thais can often become inversely inconsiderate, for example when driving. Behind tinted windshields they are anonymous and unmindful of the simplest of road rules and safety when in traffic. They will park where it pleases them, ignore road rules, keep others waiting and drive dangerously. Yet they wouldn’t think of parking on their neighbours streetside lawn to avoid blocking a road.

Many habits here which foreigners find irritating and down-right inconsiderate simply don’t even register with Thais. One of these is noisy, and Thailand is in fact an incredible noisy place. There is a continual babble of constrution sounds, noisy vehicles, karaoke, barking dogs, you name it and it drives farangs crazy. But the thai barely notice it. They switch off to it. They can happily sleep through it all, study to it, watch TV with a stereo simultaneously playing and so on. Noise is security, silence in eerie. Try telling a Thai to turn down their karaoke machine and they’ll look at you as if you’re a party pooper.

Thus it is that I had a recent encounter with my ‘inconsiderate’ neighbours. They are simple types, who have spent their lives harvesting rice and tending their orchards. The city has grown around them, the paddy land they inherited has been sold off bit by bit so that they are now retired an no longer plant rice. What was once farm area is now suburban. Where once their dogs roamed freely and barked incessantly, now they have complaining neighbours and farangs at that!

Recently they locked up one of their dogs in a tiny hut (Thai’s tend to treat animals in a less humane way) and it yelped and barked incessantly for more than a week, all day and night until I’d simply had enough. My Thai family laughed when I threatened to complain and my wife simply wouldn’t go and speak to them on my behalf, so I went instead. I practiced carefully in Thai how to politely explain that the dog is disturbing us all and keeping me and our child awake. I tried to reason that it was cruel to keep the dog in there and would just keep crying. Their answer was that it had a tendency to run away and that they would built a perimeter wall in the future but until then this was the simple solution. I left it inconclusive, but later the dog stopped crying.

However, this wasn’t very polite is seems, for it’s not considerate to take your neighbour to task. They later spoke with my wife, bewildered and indignant it seems that I had the temerity to complain. This is Thailand, dogs get locked up and they bark, too bad, what’s all the fuss about, the noise doesn’t disturb us, they said. In fact, after all the effort they made to be good neighbours, bringing around fruit periodically, this was a slap in the face.

And so I was left to explain to my wife why foreigners complain when something is inconsiderate but she could not understand our point of view. Here in Thailand you don’t complain you learn to put up. That is a major difference between Thais and Westerners, we exercise our right to complain and rely on complaint when our judgement about considerate behaviour is wrong. But Thais don’t complain for the sake of improvement, they seem complaint only in a negative and face-losing light.

In the West our neighbourhoods are orderly, people don’t mow their lawns on a Sunday afternoon, but occassionally there are heated words over the fence. In Thailand there is construction noise 24/7 and a calamity of noise and disorganisation, with unruly dogs running wild, but there is always harmonious relations between neighbours no matter what.