The Deteriorating Relationship with My Prison

You might be wondering about my last post. Let me explain:

As you may already know, my school shares many traits with a prison. Guards, walls, not being allowed to leave, fake temperature readers to make the outside world think things are great and H1N1 free--not sure what that has to do with a prison, but they have it. I, behaving as I sometimes do, have begun to openly defy some of the absurd rules the school enforces. I leave the school after work, for instance. I leave on the weekends, for example. Pretty rebellious, eh?

The reasons I can do these things are because I am a foreigner and because the Thais are A) scared of confronting me because I tell them "no, that's unfair, not right, wrong, ridiculous" (I have to use many ways to explain it in case they don't understand one of the words), B) incapable of responding to a "no" because Thais know nothing but blind obedience, and C) scared of my permanent departure as I am a cash cow (my face in their school newsletter means a bag full of tuition money from the eager parents).


The point is I deal with the imprisonment. I leave on my motorbike and look good on it. I walk away from things that might be cause for labor lawsuits elsewhere in the world. But recently the school started messing with my Chinese friends. Last week, a rather loud hangout session occurred, and a Thai teacher became a bit peeved with the excess noise. Instead of asking us to be quiet, a very reasonable response, he blasted his music (good for getting to sleep, yeah?) and hoped we would get the hint... we didn't. As a result of this little encounter, the school had individual meetings with the Chinese teachers (only) and told them they were bad people, embarrassing to the school, floozies, yada yada yada. The Chinese, as people of many Asian cultures do, took this treatment as an indication of a serious character flaw. The school told them they couldn't leave the school, couldn't drink, couldn't party, couldn't cause the school to "lose face" again. I told the Chinese, bullmerde (excuse my French).


La Révolution.
In secret candle-lit meetings (kind of serious), I told them that the school is wrong, that the Thais are handling the situation poorly and immaturely. I told them about itsara (Thai for freedom) and how the school was infringing upon theirs. And most importantly, we came up with a solution. The eight of us (3 Americans and 5 Chinese) rented a house. We moved in a few nights ago. We drank and were loud and had fun outside of the school grounds. Of course, we must move about in the cover of darkness, and of course I am learning a little Chinese so we have a code language--the Thais know English a little too well.

All is well at the moment, but it is more than likely that the iron fist of tyranny will come crashing down again.