Weblog for Andrew Biggs

Tonight, we say goodbye to the English Minute after seven years on the air.

English Minute has gone to air Monday to Friday just before 8 pm, sandwiched between soap operas and the Royal News on channel 3. It has undergone several transformations in its seven years … in the very beginning we filmed it with Khun Hart (Suthipong) as the emcee. After that we changed to Nong Plub, who was a child star at the time. Then we became the English Minute Gang, until we turned into Moo Bahn English Minute about three years ago, and I became the host.

The most recent incarnation was with me and three gorgeous kids — Thomas, Bai-Ngern and Jenna. We filmed 10 episodes per day, which meant every two weeks I got to spend a day with the children. We always had a great time, although by early afternoon we were all getting a little tired. But despite their young ages, all the children were very very professional. I will miss them a lot.

TV shows come and go. I have been so lucky to have worked on shows that lasted so long. Talk Of The Town lasted for nine years, for example, and English Minute for seven. Now it’s time to start work on new projects and TV shows. I am already writing a new show that will feature the talents of these three young actors.

And thank you to all viewers who, over the years, have written in to us, watched us, and commented on us. Love you all!

This morning as I walked out of my house to go to work … look what I found on my driveway!

It’s a giant snail, slowly making his (her?) way down my driveway. It was so big and beautiful. Interestingly, my two dogs, Noppamart and Akradej, didn’t try to attack or eat it. Maybe they were a little afraid of it.

Luckily I don’t own a car. Otherwise I would have backed over it, and the poor snail would have ended up as snail jam.

Anyway it was a good start to my day. How was yours?

Just came back from a wonderful weekend in Phuket and Trang. I went down there as a guest of the Minor Group to talk to parents and kids about learning English. I was amazed at how many people came out to listen to me! In Trang more than 1,000 people were there at one of the speeches … in this picture you can see me and Nong Noon, a 6-year-old who was brave enough to come up on stage and help me with my presentation. We had a lot of fun … guess I’ll have to return pretty soon.

I am currently wading through the five finalists of this year’s Booker Prize.

I do it every year. It looks good for me to be standing reading something slightly cerebral on the skytrain instead of my usual fare (Gossip Star, 191, Plaek). “Goodness, look at that Andrew Biggs – no wonder he’s so intelligent,” I imagine other passengers whispering behind Chinese fans to their compatriots.

I finished this year’s winner, The White Tiger (fantastic) then started a book by first-time-novelist Steve Tolz. The book is called “A Fraction of the Whole” a weighty tome that chronicles the dysfunctional relationship between a father and son. I  have decided it is “clunkily clever”, and I guess you won’t find that critique on any of its future reprints. What I mean is, the book is like me. It’s 552 pages but would look so much better at, say, 350. The paragraphs are long and heavy, and there are times when reading it feels like trudging knee-deep through setting concrete in the Songkran sun. Other parts of it were laugh-out loud and exceedingly clever.

Then it crashes. Around page 480, our protagonist and his father go to Thailand.

How I love it when fiction writers decide to set books in Thailand! But that’s because I do love kitsch. Reading their tomes is a little like walking into a cheese shop. Normally-lucid writers inexplicably froth at the mouth as they write stories about Patpong prostitutes, western detectives or mysterious ancient inscriptions that lead to gold bullion – in Kanchanaburi’s Li-jia Cave, perhaps?

In book shops I usually cast a cursory, cursed glance at the “Novels About Thailand” section, which should by law require a neon sign flashing above it saying DANGEROUS TO YOUR BRAIN: EVEN ‘TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE’ IS BETTER THAN THIS LOT! In this section you will find titles like “Skytrain To Murder” and “Patpong Secrets”  … “Another Detective Ryan Kilmore thriller!” says one, as if Ryan’s up there rubbing shoulders with Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes. Inside are characters as flimsy as cardboard such as Noi the bargirl who makes languid, cryptic comments like “You butterfly same same no good”, causing Detective Ryan to embark on a treacherous journey overland from Bangkok through the malaria-infested jungles of the North as he risks dysentery to encrypt Noi’s verbal code. If only he’d taken Nok Air, whose airplanes are the same color as aforesaid dysentery. Or better still, if only Noi had taken some English classes.

We accept that these trashy books are just that – trash – but look what I found in a book short listed for the Booker Prize this year!

On page 504, the protagonist is hiding in mountainous jungle somewhere north of Chiang Mai. He watches as a group of villagers start to gather in a clearing ahead. Then this paragraph:

I stood up on my tiptoes to get a better view. As I did, I saw a shadow creeping up on me. I spun around. A middle-aged woman holding a basket of apples was staring at me. “Stay down. Don’t let them see you,” she said in an accent as thick as the jungle around us.

Dear reader, I am willing to suspend belief about the apples. Isn’t she more likely to be holding a basket of mangoes, or papaya, or chilies, or dead rats, or anything but apples. But here is an upcountry farming woman who can speak English! “Stay down.” Come on … surely she would be saying something more like “You! You! No! Down!”?

It gets worse. Read what happens next. The first sentence is the gnarly middle-aged woman:

“I know you.”

“Do you?”

“You’re the doctor’s friend, aren’t you?” she asked.

Oh my god … A QUESTION TAG! I’ve trawled the streets of Sukhumvit trying to find one of those. Our protagonist has found one in the middle of the jungle! Man, that opium must do wonders for your English ability!

Then, finally, the old apple grower lets loose with this in perfect past tense:

“They dug up the bodies,” she said.

“They dug them up? What made them do a creepy thing like that?”

“They thought it might be a plague of some new virus. A couple of years ago, we had an outbreak of chicken flu. Now there is much vigilance when it comes to multiple deaths of uncertain causes.”

FIND THIS WOMAN! Give her a PhD! Make her lecture on English grammatical structure and usage at Chula or Thammasat! She’s a bloody genius! What’s she doing wasting her life collecting apples in the Golden Triangle when she can talk about vigilance and multiple deaths of uncertain causes!!! Don’t you see, dear reader? It’s crazy! It’s ludicrous! It’s –

But hold on there a moment.

Nineteen years ago I was a backpacker in the North of Thailand. I ended up in a tiny, tiny Karen village buried in the hills of Chiang Mai. Nobody spoke English, and some didn’t even speak Thai. That night the men sat around in a circle, with a bottle of local whisky. One glass was poured and passed around.

I was seated between the one man who did know a little English and a crusty old bearded guy who smiled a toothy smile but hadn’t said a word. Under the spectacular Chiang Mai night sky, in that beautiful little village, we passed that glass around.

“Why is there only one glass?” I asked the group. Of course, nobody understood what I was saying, but I did succeed in plunging them into multilingual silence.

“Why … the glass … why … only one?” I tried again, sounding a bit like Noi the bargirl.

The man on my left who knew a little English tried his hardest to understand so I pointed at the glass and made a “number one” sign. “Why one? Why not two, three, four, five? Why not one glass for each person?”

It worked! He understood!

“We are … together. We fun. Drink together. Make fun for everybody.”

I got it. But then, a tap on my right shoulder. I turned to face the long-in-the-toothless man on my other side, who said simply two words with a smile.

“Group dynamics.”

And that was it. Group dynamics. And not another English word for the rest of the night. Who could imagine I would have heard those two words in the middle of those rolling hills so far away from English speakers?

This incident remains a mystery to me to this day, and shames all of us into realizing that no matter where we go in this wonderful country, we may just stumble across those cardboard cutouts like Detective Ryan or Noi.

Stay down. Don’t let them see you.

I am munching on a delicious fetmot as I write this column, and –

I’m sorry, what was that? You don’t know what a ‘fetmot’ is? Come on. How long have you been in this country?

I was reminded of fetmot this week as I made one of my infrequent visits to Emporium, where I used to work. Ah, Emporium. Wasn’t that an exciting place to work for a while? Anytime you had a dull patch at work you could catch the lift down to the airy, khunying-infested walkways and escalators and pop into shops like Giorgio Armani to check out the latest overpriced shirts from Italy, making a mental note of their designs in order to pick up an identical one for one-twentieth the price at Chatuchak that coming weekend.

And the food! Cuisines from around the world, including my favorite, fetmot, which I purchased whenever I was in a rush and had no time to assume my faux hi-so persona.

Yes I will get to its meaning in a moment, but isn’t Thai a wonderful language? Since its inception – if a language can indeed incept – it has borrowed liberally from other sources, such as Chinese, Cambodian, Portuguese, Hindi and English. One simple Thai sentence these days is like falling into an atlas. But for me, one of the more interesting aspects of the language is how English words get picked up and used within the context of Thai.

We farangs often get hot under our western collars at the way Thais mispronounce even the simplest of English words, but there is often a good reason. Some sounds in English simply don’t exist in Thai, and vice versa. For this reason, English words get moulded into a new form within the context of Thai.

And English words enter and leave the Thai language quicker than smelly English teachers restamping their tourist visas in Hat Yai. Ten years ago the country fell into crisis and suddenly every Thai knew what “IM-Ebb” was. (It was IMF, but Thais don’t have an F sound at the end of their words.) I remember being a little surprised by the first Thai who shoved a plate of food in front of me and said: “Or Derb.” Of course, he was saying “hors d’oeuvres” which has sneaked its way into the Thai language. Of course he was. But before you snigger at the crazy pronunciation, peer into the gaping chasm that lies between the way we westerners pronounce this word and the ludicrous way it is spelt, thanks to its shameful French origins.

In more recent times a verb has entered the Thai language which means “to stand up and make a speech in public”. This verb is to “hye-bark”. Can you guess where this verb comes from? A hint: It’s not even a verb in English. It’s a place.

The answer is “Hyde Park.” In Thai, “to Hyde Park” means to get on your soapbox and make a protest speech. If you asked 100 Thais where Hyde Park is situated, you’d have a handful who could tell you. But they’d all know the verb. For example: “He will Hyde Park tonight at Sanam Luang.” “Do you know who will be Hyde Parking today?”

(I figure the past tense would not be an irregular verb … or would it? “Last night I Hyde Pack outside Parliament.” “I’ve Hyde Puck so many times I’ve lost my voice.”)

If you think that’s ludicrous, I have an even better one for you.

One slang word for “dead” in Thai sounds like this: “Det-sa-mole-ay.” For example: “I think Somchai will be det-sa-mole-ay if he doesn’t pay his debts.” “If that fat guy with the Jatukarm Ramatep amulet around his bulbous neck doesn’t stop hogging the karaoke microphone, he’ll be det-sa-mole-ay before midnight.”

I would like you now to put down your copy of Brunch and say that word out loud. “Det-sa-mole-ay.” Sound familiar?

It should. It’s an English word. Or rather, the name of an English song. In Italian. Back in 1954 Dean Martin scored a #1 hit with a song called “That’s Amore.” “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore …”

How … the … hell … does … a cheesy English song … from 50 years ago … become a Thai adjective …. for “dead”?? Somewhere along the line, a Thai decided “dead” sounded like “That’s amore” and used the title of this song in its place. As crazy as it sounds, he or she was right – with the first syllable anyway. That’s why the title of a hideous old love song by a det-sa-mole-ay singer means “deceased” in Thai.

Sometimes I wonder why. I remember when the first taxi hit the Bangkok traffic with the plastic TAXI METER sign screaming for attention from the roof. Was it so difficult not to have written METERED TAXI? The same goes for those ubiquitous BAR BEERS in places like Chiang Mai and Pattaya, where westerners way past their use-by dates empty their hearts along with, ultimately, the contents of their fake leather wallets to girls one-third their age. It wouldn’t have taken much to have called them BEER BARS like the rest of the world does. Or am I just being bitter and twisted?

I love the Thai language and the way English words enter it. But pity the intrepid English word that ventures its way into the labyrinth that is the Thai language. By the time it has passed through all the twists and turns, it emerges a shadow of its former self.

Like “fetmot.” And what, pray tell, did it start out as? Why, “Fresh Mozzarella Tomatoes And Pesto Sandwich”, a popular choice at any Au Bon Pain shop. Only it’s shortened by the delightful Thai staff to “Fresh Mozarella,” then “Fresh Mot”, then “Fetmot”, then …

… Fot? Only time, dear reader. Only time.