My new goal is to learn a little about the Thai political climate, that which is all around me, yet about which, until recently, I have remained entirely ignorant. In a recent interview, a prominent Thai political pundit reduced the whole thing down to three words: monarchy, military, and bureaucracy. Beyond yellow-shirt-Mondays, posters of the King and Queen flanked by waterfalls and pagodas in every house, and the song between the previews and the feature, the monarchy doesnt really affect my everyday life. And, knock on wood, I have had little to no interaction with the military, beyond the just-finished-high-school city boys serving their mandatory 6 month service at rural road blocks (read: perennially adjusting their uniforms, ogling the odd attractive female passenger and taking photos with their camera phones of said female passenger). Bureaucracy, however, has been a different story.
Thus, the triumvirate may well better be described as leung(yellow in Thai), leering and lackadaisical, or else saffron shirts, shoddy soldiering, and sheets upon sheets of paper (hows that for a scatagories score?).
However, despite the lack of opportunity for word games, my love-hate-love-again relationship with the Thai government reflects a troika more likely composed of bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy. Let me offer a single task; one which is, admittedly, universally infused with bureaucracy in all cultures, and thus a completely unfair test, but which happens to illustrate my point.
I think even nomadic cultures living in yurts have to go through the process of taking a scrap and waiting for a corresponding red number to come up with a “bing-bong” to signify that counter four is ready, and that they should present their carved bone identification in triplicate.
I am of course talking about getting my drivers license.
This desire grew in me after seeing all of my friends motorbikes getting chained up with a padlock by a policeman (he even chained up one guys push bike), for violating a sign that was, and still is, completely and utterly encompassed by the foliage of a tree. Luckily I had gotten a ride with a friend, but otherwise my bike would have undoubtedly been among the shackled. While the others ransomed their bikes back with their licenses, which they could later claim for a fee at the police station across town, I would have been stuck. I had never even considered getting a Thai license before, as, just about every Thai person I know doesnt have one, and this doesnt stop them from weaving through traffic with their left blinker on carrying half-a-dozen propane tanks in a home-welded side cart resting on a bicycle tire. Or else chauffeuring their family of five (including infant in moms arms, and toddler perched on dads lap hanging onto the mirrors) to and from school in the pouring rain with only dad wearing a helmet. [A nod to vietnam is due here, where common motorcylic feats include: a ten foot orange tree standing upright(personally witnessed), and three large sows, tied over the back of the seat, STILL ALIVE(witnessed by the moms). I have been told, that outside the city, such a feat is reguralry accomplished with a full grown water buffalo, but i cannot personally attest to it]. While all these people habitually flaunt the rules, with no consequences, I know it is just my luck that a mere few weeks before coming home, I would undoubtedly be caught for something, and, not having my license, end up severely inconvenienced. Plus, a Thai license would be pretty good for a backup photo ID.
The building stands a few miles outside the city, marked only in Thai. When I walked up, I was pointed to a window, behind which sat a nice-enough-looking middle-aged man. I said, in proficient Thai (I know because he clearly understood me), I want to get my drivers license, please.
There are any number of predictable responses to such a request, however, naively perhaps, I had never thought Why? to be one of these.
Stammering, I responded, um, because I dont have one . Thinking, optimistically, yet tragically fallaciously, that this was reason enough.
He responded with a grunt, and proceeded to stare off into space a few feet to the right of my head, at what I determined, upon over-the-shoulder inspection, to be an entirely unremarkable wall. After a length of silence, and a prolonged exhale of breath that Jon Heder would envy, he asked if I had my passport. When I told him yes, his face clenched involuntarily, as if he had momentarily been jabbed in the ribs, and as I started to pull it out of its case, he dismissively waived me to the next window.
One small, yet not insignificant bureaucratic hurdle surmounted.
At the next window, she was younger, and by extension less jaded.
Do you have a copy of your passport? she asked, as if genuinely interested.
This time I remained silent as I pulled out the copy I had made just outside the Royal Thai Embassy in Tokyo, right before my visa was denied. As I pushed the sleek, Japanese copy paper across the counter, this victory over the Bureau of Transit softened, if barely perceptively, my disappointment about not having received a visa a few weeks before. After all, despite being thousands of miles from one another, are they not two arms of the same bureaucracy?
She did not respond as intensely as her co-workerthat is, my successful navigation of this small bureaucratic obstacle did not cause her any physical painrather she reacted like a small child competing with her sibling, having just been one-upped, and preparing to knock me down a peg.
I saw what was coming and, armed with the product of knowledge gleaned from the bureaus website the day before (a site without a single word of English, and from which, incidentally, and in Thai, the mention of a passport copy was completely absent), pre-empted her next move. As she took a sharp inhale, preparing to launch into the spiel that would surely result in her victory, I pulled out the letter I had paid for this morning at the clinic near work.
Here, I said, sliding it through the half-opened diner-style window, is my doctors letter too. To explain: the website said that a note no more than 1 month old from a doctor was required to apply for a drivers license. When I went to the clinic, explaining I was in the process of getting my drivers license, instead of being met with confusion, a form appeared and I was asked for my passport (luckily not a copy of it), and 50 Baht.
As far as I can understand the doctors note is a testament to the fact that I (or at least whomever brought my passport in) am, in fact, medically speaking, alive. And perhaps it also takes the form of some sort of highly sensitive cognitive examination based on my capability to explain where I live.
Another explanation I could come up with, is that a doctor, having completed rigorouswhile entirely irrelevanttraining and testing, was better able to transcribe the information on my passport, and of the address I told her, than anyone else, including those employed by the Bureau of Transportation. Doctors in Thailand, as in the world over, are not necessarily lauded on the clarity of their penmanship, and as she filled in the form it looked less like the construction of letters and words than the feverish crossing out of the blanks in the form. Additionally, it is perhaps important to note that she copied down my first and middle names correctly (as best as I could tell) from my passport, but did not, at any point, write my last name.
Back at to the Bureau, the fact that not only had I known to get a doctors note before applying for a license, and had stood up to the rigorous scrutiny of a health professional, but I had placed this document in front of her before her even asking, combined to form some sort of triple whammy, which was almost to much for this young bureaucrat. I have no doubt that such a development would not have made the slightest breach of her superiors malaise, but having only hated her job for, at most, a few years, hers had not permeated so deep into her soul, and she instead responded quite out of character for a bureaucrat, that is, humanly.
Her fist clenched (the polar opposite of the Tiger fist-pump), and she let out a uhh that reminded me of a lottery player finding out her numbers failed to come up again, and simultaneously cursing her daughter for being born a week early. This small revelation of defeat, transferred to a small victory for me, and gave me hope that I may succeed, which, incidentally made my eminent failure that much more devastating. Could it be her whole script, clench and all, was carefully crafted to make my fall more satisfyingly soul-crushing. Maybe she wasnt a novice at all, but a savant, a young master.
More likely it was just inexperience, a soul yet to have been crushed by tedium. I could almost pity her. What would the higher-ups think about a young white kid coming in and succeeding on his first try; shed be finished. As if nudged by the invisible guardian angel of bureaucrats, she regained composure, and, sounding much like the man to her left, asked to see my passport.
I held my breath. I wasnt worried for myself, but instead appreciated the potential magnitude of this event: was she daring to suggest that a mere bureaucrat could possess greater passport interpretation skills than a licensed clinician? After eventually finding my personal information page, deviously stowed just inside the front cover, on page 1, she ascertained that it was indeed a passport and mumbled something to the extent of America under her breath. She fluttered dexterously through the passport, soon coming upon my Thailand visa page-cum-chapter, and either through divination or else an uncanny display of bureaucratic fortitude, determined that I was indeed not Thai, and was thus in possession of a visa or at least had been at one point.
A smile started to crack.
This wasnt an out and out smile, it wasnt even a home-safe-content smile, this was a smile that Ive only seen once before, and it was upon a green animated face as it peered down upon the unsuspecting Whos down in Whoville.
I knew I was done.
I barely heard her words through my disappointment; something about a supplementary formwhat I eventually ascertained to be an affidavitissued and signed by an official at the American consulate (located conveniently on the complete opposite side of the city). I had known this was possibleeven thought there was no mention of such a process on the Bureaus websitebut I couldnt help but wonder: what could the consulate possibly add with regard to the official-ness of my identity? Do they even employ any doctors?
I quietly packed up my various documents, and asked about the specifics of my test, Knowing that I was not to succeed this day, my adversary retired to her chair, and her superior to his staring, while a third individual appeared from a back office. She, who I can only imagine doesnt normally interact with the public at all, smiled, spoke perfect English, made polite small talk, and answered a few follow-up clarifications helpfully and conscientiously.
I was then sent on my way, to drive all the way across town to the consulate, and to return another day.
If you want to take both the car and motorcycle driving test, a feat I was boldly considering due to my marginal success this first day, then you need to bring your car and your motorbike. The driving class is from 9 to 11, and the tests start at 11.
Whose car could I borrow? I wondered, and for that matter, How am I supposed to come down here in both a car and motorbike? Questions I kept internal, not wanting to give them further satisfaction at my confusion.
So there I was, marginally successful in progressing towards trying to get a license to drive my motorbike, yet rightfully thwarted by the power of the bureaucracy, and sent away to drive all over town and return another day on the same motorbike for which I was refused a license. And told to bring a car too, for which, also, clearly, I was not licensed to drive; one in which, hopefully, I could place a motorbike.