It’s a strange thing to be just past halfway through this internship coming into September. Now is the time of year the “Such a Great Summer <3” posts start rolling in, class schedules are getting nailed down, and if you are someone like me who has been both student and staff in university your new job is underway. I was reminiscing with a high school friend who, like me, had recently graduated and he explained to me that this September is the first time since we were four years old that we would not be returning to school. While this is technically not true for me as I complete a course as part of the CAPI internship, it may as well be. I also realised that this internship with just under three months left will be the first time since high school I am doing the same thing for more than four months. There is no break followed by a new job, new classes, and new starts.
It’s been interesting coming to terms with this as I do love what I’m doing now. My work matches my passions, my opportunities to travel and explore South East Asia are a privilege, and Bangkok is a city that I truly love. There is no hard reset button I’m searching for and yet… It’s weird to not be passing some imaginary finishing line at this point of the year. I’m a planner and a reflector, both personality traits with their negatives and positives. I want that fresh start that gives me an excuse to look back on what I’ve done with criticism and celebration. I want to set too many arbitrary goals for myself that I will struggle to meet. Because then at least I’ll be hit by that wave of potential that this time of year is filled with. Its so much harder to manifest that energy on a random Sunday when you know the same Monday is going to meet you when you wake up. But here I am trying: midway through deep cleaning my apartment, I’m out for coffee at a favourite cafe and using this blog as my soundboard for reflection and accountability for future plans.
Reflecting
I was Face Timing my mom this morning as I gave her much of the same reflection I shared in the introduction of this blog. “It’s so weird being half way and having so much I still want to do in the city,” I told her, “you would think I would have completed more, having been here so long.” She reminded me, “You have always been your biggest critic. It’s better to spend time on actually enjoying less than to do everything on your list.” I knew she was right, and yet I caught myself doubting, what on this “list” have I done at all? In pre-training we were told about the power of a goal list and how past interns had displayed their lists on a poster in their apartments as inspiration. Well, I’d tried to replicate the latter, but that poster currently sits rolled up in my bedroom unfinished after multiple failed attempts to make it artistic. So instead, I will reference the list I made in a throw away journal. Rather than tick boxes it included different monthly themes: May – settling in, June – exploring the city and Pride, July – experiencing more of Thailand and South East Asia, August – building community and connections.
My first blog that covered much of May and June, so I will reflect on them shortly. Both of these months fell quite neatly into their themes. May really was a time of adjustment, but in such a subtle way that you take for granted how much emotional labour it was. After my recent visa run I stayed at the same hotel two blocks from my apartment that I stayed in after arriving in Thailand for the first time. I remember that first time being overwhelmed by the bustle of the night traffic and completely confused by the structure of the roads as my taxi navigated under the skytrain and past small basketball courts surrounded on either side by busy streets. The walk from my hotel to my apartment to move in felt daunting. I did it in multiple steps, first braving going to the Seven Eleven nearby for breakfast and then going out again to make the trek to my apartment, nervous to walk the back streets alone past zipping motorcycles and bustling food carts. When I made the trip the second time I did so at night and felt completely comfortable, the walk also seemed to take a quarter of the time. I was at a loss to understand why it felt like such a big deal only a few months ago. The same could be said for the bus to work, the train ride to the Siam district, or wandering the Chatuchak weekend market. The growth that it took to reach comfortability with the city is one that could easily be forgotten, but that still impacts me on a daily level.
June was perhaps one of my favourite months of my internship so far. With my new found confidence navigating the city, which comes in great thanks to the interns who visited me, I was set on a mission to explore Pride in Bangkok. I have a strange relationship with community building, one I have reflected on more over the past few months. I often struggle to find “permission” to become part of a community. For much of my life this has been circumnavigated by filling rolls of necessity: becoming a leader or responsibility holder to give my presence purpose. Being in a new city, a new culture, I have encountered even more barriers to finding community, especially when unlike other CAPI interns my work is in a quiet office, not within a school or local organisation. Pride Month then became the invite I needed to put myself out into community I at least knew I was a part of due to my queerness. Out of all my months in Thailand, this is the one where I felt the most grounded in other people’s presence, and while I did not make many long standing connections from the events I attended, I did feel a part of something.
I visited art museums, attended book launches, and went to music performances, many times being the only non-Thai person there, let alone the only person not already knowing most other people in the room. And yet these events were the ones I felt the most welcomed at. One event I attended was a small art exhibit on identity that included illustrations of flower vases by kindergarteners, featured interpretative dance and music performances by teenagers, and was organised by adults, making it a multi-generation expression of queerness. The art gallery worker welcomed me and explained the exhibit and what was happening in English to me over the course of the performances. I got to share my own connections, having recently attended a GAATW event on dance movement therapy where we too did interpretive dance inspired by illustrations. This event has now inspired my future plans for building queer community in Canada.
Another event I attended was a book launch for an illustrated book on the legalisation of gay marriage as told through the perspective of a cat adopted by a lesbian couple. At this event I was once more one of the only non locals and in fact sat through an hour long discussion of the book in Thai. At the end of the presentation it was asked in Thai if anyone had any questions and then, obviously just for me, again in English. The small crowd and I had a good laugh over it. Part of what made this event extra special was the conversations I had with other members of the crowd and the creators of the book itself about queerness in Thailand and my background in queer history in Canada (including a comic zine I made on queer history). I bought a copy of the book and had it signed by the creators, inspiring others to have theirs signed as well. I was remembered at the library when I returned a couple weekends later for attending the event, which made this connection feel even stronger. This month gave me the initiative to go out and be in community, even if just for a moment, and is something I hope to replicate more in my final months here.
July was the first month I ventured beyond Bangkok since arriving in the country. I visited Chiang Mai early in the month, followed by a visa run to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and finally to the city of Pattaya and island of Koh Samet in early August. To go from staying in Bangkok for the full months to travelling out of the city every other weekend was a strange shift, one that I would have paced more if doing again. Each trip was amazing, exposing me to a new culture and allowing me to reflect more on my love for Bangkok in my time away from it.
My weekend in Chiang Mai, including a day trip to Chiang Rai, was wonderful. Another intern, Malcolm, showed me around. I got to be around mountains again, not too unlike my Okanagan town back in Canada, and learned quite a bit about Buddhism while I listened to the audio book version of The Dhammapada and explored some temples. The city with all its nearby hiking spots reminded me of the kind of place my parents would visit and claim intentions to move to (a thing they often did when we travelled when I was a kid). But after a while I started feeling reverse claustrophobic not being surrounded by sky scrapers.
Kuala Lumpur was a dream. I was unsettled at first by the expansive yet empty nature of their roads after being in the controlled chaos of Bangkok and the lack of consideration for pedestrians in the city design was confusing yet familiar to North America. I fell in love with a local street market and met a lovely woman selling clothing of a modest Muslim design that somehow doubled into matching my gender expression. She was so happy to have sold the items to me she took my picture, and now visiting her stall again is on my bucket list for when I return to the country. The movie theater turned bookstore located near China Town, recommended to me another intern, was amazing and reminded me of the sort of place my sister would love. I got to explore graffiti and street art, even talking to an artist while he worked on a project. I even got up early for the Battu Caves, and enjoyed a talkative taxi ride, followed by visiting the temples inside the cave when locals rather than tourists were present. KL helped me gain confidence in my ability to solo travel in South East Asia, especially as my stress was at a minimum (minus the very confusing three minutes when I thought my train station was inside a mall lol).
My third trip to Pattaya city and Kuala Lumpur was equally a success, although as my first beach trip in a few years I will say my bar was rather low, marked as “operation don’t get heat stroke.” I enjoyed a sailing day trip that made me reminisce of the week I spent living in a sailboat when I was a teenager, survived the obligatory “hit on by a well intending stranger at the hostel” moment, and got a healthy amount of sun. Koh Samet was a great opportunity for people to watch, swim, and read a “beach book” (for me an academic book I bought before I realised that my job description would be mostly “read”). More than this, Koh Samet was an opportunity to meet up with other interns from Nepal to Malaysia and hear about their experiences.
One of the hard parts about taking these opportunities to travel has been balancing them with working and general well being. While I love plane trips and the adventures themselves, they did mean some residual tiredness the week after. I lost some of the routine of local exploration I had built up the month prior as I focused on resting and cleaning my apartment on the weekends in between the trips. Doing it again, I would pace the trips out more. Part of the result of this as well was both feeling like I had too much on my plate and yet nothing really going on. As I look towards my final months here and the few trips I have planned, its important to me to find small local connections I can keep up even on low energy weeks and continue budgeting time for exploring new parts of Bangkok.
The other main piece worth reflection on here is my work itself. I enjoy working at GAATW and the topics that I’m researching and supporting programming for are really important. Each day I understand just how multilayered activism and anti-trafficking work is. As I approach the end of my internship and pick up more responsibilities I look forward to giving back to the organisation I have learned so much from. It’s strange discussing my work in tandem with learning more about the other interns’ jobs, because we are each so unique. This is also yet another space where our struggles are different too. It feels so weird to discuss struggling with sitting at a desk from nine to five in a quiet office when compared both to the other intern placements and in the groups GAATW works with this is nothing. It is yet another reminder of the constant presence of privilege.
Planning the Final Months
As I look ahead with a better understanding of all I have accomplished, there is still so much I want to do. But interestingly it is mostly simple things. I think there is a pressure sometime to get everything perfect now, but in reality a lot of self growth takes time. With only three months left I can’t manifest a deep community connection out of nowhere, I can’t learn all of the Thai language, and I realistically won’t become completely social media free. But what I can do is try and give myself as many opportunities as I can to be here and present in the experience. Christy, another intern, included a to-do list at the end of her second blog and I would like to replicate some of that here.
- Create opportunities to be around community – from my experience in June, I’ve realised that what I seek almost beyond being a part of a community is to be around it. In a lot of ways this is easier when you only have so much time. I want to attend more community events put on by the galleries and libraries I’ve grown a connection to, explore new activities, and maybe attend some classes. Sure, I might not leave with a best friend, but an interesting conversation and a smile from a stranger go a long way.
- Find small daily ways to connect with the city – I can’t go out and explore a new district every day after work, but I can find other ways to be present with the city. I want to clean my balcony so I can watch the traffic at night, go to the pool at sunset, stroll the street market on the way home from work, and search for undiscovered graffiti along my commute route.
- Make more time for hobbies and to slow down – I was sold the idea of having more free time during this internship, but it feels like that time is slipping away. In the evenings after work I want to dedicate myself more to keeping up with hobbies and a routine that will help make the evenings more relaxing, like reading and working on my art journal.
- Finally, I want to continue fostering my passion for this internship in creative community building ways. My capstone project has already been started and I want to put into it the energy it deserves. I have loved talking to other interns about their queer experiences (my topic) and I look forward to the conversations I have yet to have. I also want to find time for other smaller artistic explorations like photography and drawing.
To think this is only the midway point is crazy, until I realise how much I’ve written here with still so much going unsaid. I am forever grateful for this opportunity and I hope the meaningful memory making continues.
All the best from Bangkok,
Trinity
