Published on January 31, 2005

The posh prep school for affluent young Thais has a mission to bridge the East-West divide by cramming students with sufficient vocabulary and math skills to attain minimal scores on standardised tests for entering US and English universities.

But culture shock is remains common here.

One of the jobs of farangs was the tidying of grammar and toning down the fawning essays of students eager to get into – as they put it – “prestigious and renowned” institutions, like Northeastern Spudsville Community College.

Overseeing it all was a Chinese-Thai emperor-entrepreneur who ran the school like his own little fiefdom - since it was.

The surreal style of the owner, who went simply by Ajaan, shined through in the way he arrived at his school. When he arrived, what looked like an ordinary wall of glass and steel magically rolled away with a squeaky rumble, creating an entrance through which his Mercedes or BMW rolled in. New students unfamiliar with the spectacle were often startled to see the lobby suddenly turn into a parking space in a style resembling the Batmobile returning to the Batcave.

When he emerged from his car, it wasn’t cameras but wais that flew up to faces, and with such obsequious speed that I was surprised none of the employees ever put an eye out.

Clad in a riotous rainbow of tight and shiny Versace, Ajaan cut a dramatic figure that stood out by design from the front-desk secretaries in company uniforms and students in conservative university uniforms.

By the time he had strode off towards the classrooms, the secretaries’ cosmetics and fashion magazines had re-emerged and farang counsellors could stop implementing a manager’s request to “look busy” when the boss was around.

Eccentric assignments seemed to set the tone for my job as one of the editors in his school. Ajaan insisted on the best in everything, and the simulated tests had to be as close to the real thing as possible. While this was doable in a land of quality fakes, more mammoth job requests also came our way.

One of these was for me and the 10 or so of us counsellors/editors to whip up five example sentences for every word in the English language.

After the shock wore off we actually did make a go at it, although we still had most of the 400,000 or so words still to go after a few weeks in the project.

Ajaan was miffed at why we’d hadn’t finished this undertaking, his mind leapt, as it often did, to other gargantuan projects, such as the untangling of an entire encyclopaedia full of words uploaded by a shoddy scanner that had misread words like “bin” as “6m”.

While the generally obstinate farang sometimes responded less than robustly to the professor-king’s whims, the Thai staff were more subtly insubordinate.

Their tact in circumventing the modernist designs of a pair of Thai sisters with American MBAs brought in to streamline the cosy bureaucracy was admirable.

Even the state-of-the-art imported toilets refused to ascend to Ajaan’s vision of a new world order when they failed to hook up seamlessly with local plumbing, leading to a slow, steady drip over the marble floor.

Yet somehow the mismatched expectations between workers and the boss and cross-cultural kinks somehow ended up working out, or forgotten because of the great perks.

Year-end parties featured luxuries like Chao Phya cruises and lucky draws with Bt100,000 cheques given out to employees.

Ajaan could fly us to Hong Kong for a free vacation. In a dinner cruise on Victoria Harbour, as steam from a dozen dim sum savouries clouded the view of madly blinking New Year lights on the famous skyline.

But somehow the thumping Cantopop karaoke made like Miles Davis, with the seemingly discordant elements, like those at the school, resulting in a kind of offbeat harmony.

Carlton Cole

The Nation

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