On one of my first evenings as an exchange student in Thailand, my Thai host aunt invited the rest of my host family over for an indoor barbecue. The idea was appealing because I had never seen a Thai barbecue before, and the purpose of the entire exchange was to meet new people and try different experiences. I also hadn’t had an embarrassing moment yet, so I eagerly and unknowingly stepped into an experience I would still cringe about years later.
I did not know anyone very well at the time, aside from my host sister, Ice, who had a fairly strong grasp of the English language. However, she would be joining us much later. It was difficult to understand anyone at the table because I did not speak Thai at the time and everyone else had a limited comprehension of English. Communication was so fruitless that nearly any successful interaction between another dinner guest and I caused great excitement around the table. Being a fairly withdrawn person in unfamiliar circumstances, I was near silent the majority of the evening.
The meal itself was delicious; my first experience with Thai barbecue. Flavourful meat slices of all kinds were clustered onto a metallic, freestanding cone with a small fire in its centre. The savoury odours of various meats cooking in the centre of the table combined with different herb-and-spice sauces wafted around the room. My host aunt excitedly chatted with everyone in the room as she blended watermelon slices into smoothies and distributed them around the table. “Anny, you want drink watermelon?” My host aunt asked. Her outstretched arm, holding a glass of watermelon smoothie toward me, revealed the meaning of her kind offer through the broken English. I graciously accepted the refreshment in hopes that it would somewhat relieve my tense composure and nervous sweating.
As the meat on the barbecue finished cooking, we began picking off various pieces to eat. My younger host brother realized I had difficulty peeling the thin, pink shells off the giant shrimp, so he generously stepped in to help. Scooting his chair across the wooden floor, he seated himself beside me and proceeded to peel the shrimp and place them on my plate for me. He definitely helped, and helped … and helped. My plate piled higher and higher with giant shrimp as I awkwardly kept eating them until a single touch would set off my stomach full of shrimpy dynamite.
It is important to note that, in Thai culture, finishing all the food on your plate signifies that you are so hungry that you want more. In most situations, others around you will politely add more to your plate. In trying my utmost not to be rude, I was acting under the North American belief that finishing everything on the plate is simply courtesy to the chef. This resulted in more and more shrimp landing on my plate, due to my host brother’s adherence to Thai cultural practices.
Under simpler, more relaxed circumstances, I may have had the wherewithal to realize that, had I stopped eating, the food would stop arriving on my plate. However, this was not a relaxed situation. Even as my stomach began to throb with such force that I was quite convinced I had eaten enough meat to recreate another animal that was now trying to escape, extreme awkwardness lead me to continue eating until I actually did gag when my body refused to consume any more meat. This imaginable discomfort may perhaps have been manageable had it not been for one important factor; the same rules of Thai courtesy applied to the watermelon shake, and it requires a lot of watermelon shake to wash down all that meat. This turned into one discomfort I would no longer be able to “grin and bear”.
I gracelessly rose from my seat in a manner that would upset my stomach as little as possible and asked my host aunt where the bathroom was. The room she directed me to had just two buckets of water: one large and one small. While I had heard about squat toilets, I had yet to use one. I forgot my multiple Google searches for “squat toilet” and assumed you were expected to manipulate the buckets somehow to go to the washroom. To me, however, they merely looked like two buckets of water. Not knowing what to do and afraid of doing it wrong, I self-consciously did the only thing I could think of that seemed reasonable at the time, but later proved to be extremely foolish. I stood in the room for the amount of time I assumed it would take to go to the washroom.
When I exited the room and retook my place at the table, still too full to eat and completely unrelieved, people looked at me slightly strangely, but said nothing. I thought nothing of this, since people had been looking at me strangely almost constantly for the entirety of the past week. Each of the next forty-five minutes I dragged myself through at the table was a miraculous sign that I had not yet succumbed to the food in my stomach threatening to resurface. It was fate’s ruthless revenge on my inability to communicate to anyone that I did not know how to use the washroom.
Salvation came upon the arrival of Ice, my host sister. With both my bladder and stomach about to explode, I clenched Ice’s arm and asked about the washroom situation. She laughed and rested her hand on my back in reassurance, unconsciously causing my stomach to lurch. Then she lead me to a different room that was beside the original room with the buckets. This new room contained a plastic box drilled into the floor and a bucket of water beside it, which looked much more similar to what my multiple Google searches had brought up. The putrid smell of rancid urine wallowing in the thick air also informed me that I had finally found the washroom.
Thanking her profusely, I closed the door and observed the situation before me with great optimism. The relief at finally arriving at the washroom after enduring the shame of confusing the washroom with another room both deflected the awful odour and eliminated all hesitations about never having used a squat toilet before. I hopped up onto the unfamiliar plastic contraption with completely renewed confidence.
The immense alleviation I felt at finally relieving myself enabled me to continue forcing both food and drink down my resistant throat upon returning to the table. The logic behind this decision to continue eating despite inevitable discomfort is clearly questionable. While I certainly acquired an immediate confidence with squat toilets and tolerance for the stench of Thai washrooms, interpersonal confidence would take quite some time afterward.
However, this experience did teach me a great deal more than simply how to use squat toilets or deal with the stench of Thai washrooms. Since I tend to be a fairly reserved person, I frequently shy away from awkward moments. Inevitably during a time of submersion into a new culture, there will be extremely uncomfortable moments, particularly for those who are naturally uncomfortable. The awkward experience with the squat toilets was a cornerstone to many similar experiences that were to come. It showed me that I could handle embarrassment and that, however terrible those experiences may be in the moment, they create some of the fondest memories and stories.
It would not be for several weeks that I learned enough essential Thai etiquette to stop eating when full. This discovery saved me many potentially uncomfortable evenings. It took several more months, however, to discover that the room I had first walked into was in fact the laundry room. Horrified at this realization, I never mentioned that barbecue to my host family again.
To this day, it remains highly possible that they still believe I went to the washroom in their laundry.
