Rules of the Road by Trais Pearson

The Thai phrase winai jarajon translates literally as “traffic discipline.” It basically means following the rules of the road when you are driving. I learned this term very early on in my stay in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai (this would have been circa late October 2001).

One of the things that first strikes visitors about Thailand is the utter chaos of its roads. Drivers of every kind of conveyance willfully—one might even say studiously—violate every restriction placed on the movement of motor vehicles.

Motorbikes zoom past you while you are innocently engaged in the pedestrian activity of walking on a sidewalk. They use the breakdown lanes of highways to travel against the flow of traffic.

It is ever-present. It boggles the mind. It defies explanation.

Even accustomed Thais seem to understand that there is a terrible fault in this fulsome flouting of traffic laws. And those Thais who have spent any time abroad are quick to offer their theories for explaining this most quintessentially Thai of phenomena.

Within days of arriving in Thailand, some helpful soul will inevitably take you aside and offer a preemptive apology on behalf of all Thai drivers. They will explain with a note of resigned sadness—often after having plucked you by the arm out of making a lethally bad decision to try your hand at crossing the road—the terrible recalcitrance of their countrymen.

In all honesty, I can’t remember who that person was for me. I suspect that it was some spry, kindly grandmother who tugged at my soggy shirt sleeve as I was about to cross a street, and bid me to wait a moment for the inevitable red-light scofflaws.

But while I can’t remember where I first learned the term, I know definitively the person who would help me to master it and fully understand its significance. That person was my first Thai boss, a man I called—at his insistence, though perhaps not entirely with merit—Ajarn (Professor) Somchai (not his real name).

Ajarn Somchai hired me to teach supplementary English classes at the middle and high school levels at a newly established private school not long after my arrival in Chiang Mai, as a 21-year-old fresh out of college. Ajarn Somchai himself had only recently—as in, a matter of days before—been installed as the Principal of the Upper School.

Immediately after hiring me—not moments after he had finished explaining to me, with a clucking of his tongue, a pitiful shake of his head, and an endearing lilt in his baritone voice, that Thailand was a poor country, and the school was a new one, and therefore he regretted that he was not able to offer me a single Baht more than the comically low salary he had initially offered (this in itself was a piece of impertinent dishonesty, as I would soon learn upon meeting some of the Upper School’s resident miscreants, who bragged about how many schools they had been kicked out of and how their family’s wealth would ensure they remained privileged no matter their missteps)—Ajarn Somchai asked me where I lived and how I planned to get to work each day.

I told him that I had just rented an apartment in the old quarter of the city and that I would likely have to take one of the irregular, privately owned taxi-buses (rot deng) that wandered the city streets in search of fares. In the longer term, though, I told him that I planned to purchase a motorbike.

At this, he perked up, knowing that he might be able to sweeten the disappointment of the salary negotiation that wasn’t with a low-cost perk. Ajarn Somchai generously offered me the use of his motorbike until I could get one of my own. He insisted that we depart, that very moment, to go to his house on the other side of the city, the western edge, to retrieve it. Problem solved.

“Oh, wait,” he paused, “do you have a helmet?”

Did I have a helmet for the imaginary motorbike that I one day hoped to procure? I did not.

“No matter,” he replied cheerfully, “I might have something in the garage, na.” (Ajarn Somchai spoke beautiful, precise, idiomatic English, which he often softened with the many imprecise but multifaceted particles that are so crucial to colloquial Thai).

Minutes later, we were seated in Ajarn Somchai’s massive and shimmering navy blue pick-up truck, passing under the umbrella of immense tamarind trees that shaded the narrow lanes of the quiet residential quarter of the city where the school was located. Before long, we turned left onto a busy highway, traveling only a short distance before we were forced to stop short at a red light. Immediately, the concrete spaces around us and in front of the truck started filling up with motorbikes.

In Thailand, it is a given that people driving motorbikes do not conform to the rules of the road. Lane lines do not apply. Turn signals are vestigial.

When traffic signals turn red, motorbikes use the median, breakdown lanes, and the spaces between cars in marked lanes to travel to the front of the traffic queue. This gives them a head start when the light turns green, at which point they tap their bikes into gear and speed out in front of the pursuing cars. Every light change feels like a mixture of a Formula One race and a scene from Mad Max.

That’s when I decided to impress Ajarn Somchai with my newest Thai expression. Looking around at the newly assembled gang of bikers that now surrounded his truck, I remarked, “mai mi winai jarajon” (they lack traffic discipline).

“Mai mi winai jarajon lue,” he mimicked bemusedly in that unmistakable baritone that seemed to emerge from some hidden depth of his otherwise tiny but lean frame.

After he had fixed my tones and pronunciation, Ajarn Somchai laughed with a note of irritation and admitted, “Yes, it’s not like in the U.S.A.”

Ajarn Somchai had spent a few years in the United States pursuing his postgraduate education, earning a Master’s degree in the administration of education. He had then stuck around for an extra semester to teach a class on Asian religions as an adjunct professor—a job for which his only credentials were the fact of his having been born in Thailand, his physical presence on campus, and his eagerness to have his student visa extended for as long as possible.

But Ajarn Somchai heard something else in my joke. He heard that peculiar farang (meaning foreign, Western) intonation of ironic judgement: an expression of “that’s so Thai” that is at once infused with endearment but also subtle disparagement.

He was not having it. Instead, he offered an impromptu disquisition on comparative civilization that was meant to upend everything I thought I understood about the differences between Thailand and my home country.

“Your country was started in 1776, na?” he demanded my assent.

“You had a Constitution before you even had a country!” he continued. “That means that there were laws even before there were people living there!”

I was not in a position to argue, and the misstatements seemed trivial enough, so instead I nodded, profoundly.

“Well, people have been living here forever—long before we had laws or a country. So, people here are freer, na. They don’t like to be told what to do. They do what they want. That’s why we call it Thailand, you know? You know what thaimeans?”

I did not, though I supposed it was a reference to the majority ethnic group from which the country and the language got their name.

“It means free,” he offered definitively. “Thailand: it means Land of the Free.”

With that settled, Ajarn Somchai made me promise to drive safely on the motorbike.

I needed no convincing. I assured him that I would not partake in the red-light shenanigans and would obey the official rules of the road. I would stay in my lane.

We continued to drive towards Ajarn Somchai’s home, which was located in a quiet neighborhood off the ring road on the way to the base of Doi Suthep, the steaming, hulking green mountain that hovers over Chiang Mai to the west. Dotted with golden pagodas and old-growth teak trees, the mountain is, in fact, a diminutive cousin of its distant Himalayan relations.

Ajarn Somchai pulled off the main road, put the truck in park, and then jumped out to open the metal gate that barred the driveway. A phalanx of flea-bitten dogs appeared out of nowhere and howled in a noncommittal way. He got back in the truck, and we pulled through, herded by the dogs.

Once inside the gate, he parked the car under the shade of a tamarind tree, long brown beans hanging from dropping branches with cherry red flowers. He motioned to me to remain seated in the truck while he dismounted again and went to open the garage door. He shushed the dogs and gave a pretend pat on the head to the lead dog. His hand never actually made contact with the thinning fur on the dog’s head, but the gesture seemed to placate the dog nevertheless, and the pack scuttled back to their shady slumbers.

As the electronic garage door rose, Ajarn Somchai summoned me over with an inviting wave. There, at the back of Ajarn Somchai’s garage, was the worst-looking motorbike I had ever seen. It was perched at a precariously low angle on a bent footstand, seemingly begging the earth to reach up and lick it with the faintest breath of gravity and invite it to its welcome demise.

On the drive over, I had anticipated something like an older model of the ubiquitous Honda Dream motorbikes that sped around town so gracefully. Instead, I got a relic of the pre-Dream era, the time before Japanese manufacturers had moved their production to Thailand to make bikes for the local market. This bike, however, did not appear to be a Japanese-made model. It was probably made in Taiwan for export during the time of fantastic political and social repression that had made the island into an industrial exporting powerhouse by keeping wages low and human and environmental protections light.

It was clearly gonna take some doing to get that old bike running again.

Ajarn Somchai wheeled it out of the garage and into the blazing midday sun, where he kicked the kickstand closed. He demonstrated for me how to kick down on the starter bar with your right foot and give the engine some gas by twisting back the throttle on the handlebars at the same time.

He bucked on that old bike like a jockey until he was breathless. I had never—and would never—see Ajarn Somchai actually break a sweat under any circumstances. And to be clear, I’m not sure I did that day. But it was close.

He then gestured to me that it was my turn, and reasoned that I would need to know how to start if I was going to ride it. Plus, he gasped, “I did the hard work already, na.”

I hadn’t ridden on a motorbike since I was 14 or 15 years old, when my neighbor had bought a moped that was not so different from Ajarn Somchai’s relic. I mounted the bike, felt its unexpected and unremembered weight, and shifted it onto my left leg so that I could pump down on the kick-starter.

The first kick was a little too exuberant, and Ajarn Somchai had to step in to warn me to take a little bit off next time or else risk breaking it.

With his assurance, I settled into a more relaxed stroke. After about nine or ten kicks, I started to feel the pores of my sweat glands opening up just as the engine started to turn reluctantly.

“You almost got it!” Ajarn Somchai yelled over the clunk-clunk rattle of the sluggish engine.

A few more kicks and the engine engaged, racing furiously inside the dull crab apple belly. Ajarn Somchai jumped around a bit, then locked his heels together, straight-legged, and threw his arm up in a strangely off-putting militaristic victory salute. I heard unexpected cheering.

Looking to my left, I saw that a few of his neighbors had gathered at their gates, curiously watching Ajarn Somchai and his farang friend try to revive the ancient beast. I glanced in the other direction to find a suffocating cloud of black smoke spewing from the tailpipe. Ajarn Somchai rushed over to make sure that I didn’t trip the bike into gear by accident while it was sucking down all that half-evaporated gas from its rusty tank.

He took the reins and rested it back on the rickety stand, the bike slouching back towards perdition.

Along with this ancient bike that had once boasted candy-red paint that now appeared a pale pink after years in the tropical sun, Ajarn Somchai bestowed upon me a helmet.

It was pink. Undeniably, irrevocably pink. And not in the sense of tropical sun-bleached red, like the motorbike. No, this helmet was committedly, ontologically pink, with a black chin strap and a cracked ancient plastic chin guard that reeked of mildew.

I have no idea when or if Ajarn Somchai would have thought it was a good idea for him to be seen sporting around town with a pink helmet, but he seemed to think that it would be fine for me.

And sport it I did. I cinched that too-small pink helmet on like it was a magical protective talisman as I first learned to navigate those treacherous city roads. In time, that helmet would provoke the most bemused expressions I would ever see out of the otherwise stolid guards at the school’s front gate, who would grin and gesture manically at their heads when they opened the gate to let me through after the ritual pledge of allegiance to king and country in the courtyard had concluded. (I couldn’t help but notice how they seemed much less keen to welcome my tardy arrival after I had returned the helmet and bought my own used Honda Dream some time later).

Back at Ajarn Somchai’s concrete abode, the smiling neighbors waved me off as the bike shuddered and jerked me out of the gate and onto the highway.

That motorbike seemed to take a special relish in helping me perfect my safe driving skills. From time to time, at red lights, it would spontaneously drop into gear, pitching me forward unexpectedly and uncontrollably as I lurched forward to grip down fiercely on the handlebar brakes and then cycle through the gears on the toe-bar to get back to neutral, all while giving apologetic and embarrassed lip-pursed smiles to the surrounding bikers.

When it wasn’t lurching forward and trying to drive me into the rush of traffic, Ajarn Somchai’s little red devil also had the habit of quitting without warning. This usually happened just as the light turned green and everyone around me thrust their bikes into gear to get the jump on the cars behind. Just then, as the freedom-loving Thai people bolted upright in frantic anticipation of escaping the unjust reign of the imperious red light after minutes of constrained movement, my bike would quit. I would jump up and furiously kick at the starter to get it running again as the motorbikes behind flashed by like schooling fish, and the cars beeped and honked. On more than a few occasions, I had to wave meekly to the bikes and cars behind me and push my stallion to the curb, letting the gawking motorists pass and the flooded engine recover. The frustrated car drivers would pull even with an angry grimace that would relax into a bemused smile when they saw the farang in the tiny pink helmet bowing his head in apology.

Ajarn Somchai didn’t last long as Principal. A few months after he had hired me, and after he had negotiated down my starting salary by pleading the poverty of this new school in a poor country, he was quietly and unceremoniously fired.

I found out later, as I slowly gained access to the school’s formidable gossip mill, that he had gotten a little too comfortable with a young administrative assistant in the Upper School office.

She was tall and had striking, thick black hair, lovely paisley-shaped dark eyes, and a good figure. Whatever her immense front incisors and gummy smile detracted from her beauty, she more than made up for it in a warm and innocent air.

Ajarn Somchai evidently thought so too. Despite the fact that he was a married man.

He loved his freedom, but he lacked winai jarajon.