Thoughts on a Major Cultural Difference

We are coming back to time to change the clocks back.  Penny keeps asking us if it’s time to change the clocks yet?  We keep saying not yet, but thankfully this weekend is the time.  She wants to see more sunlight, which I don’t entirely understand since she flatly refuses to sit in the sun at all. 

Last summer we tried taking her to swim at the community pool, but it was sunny so she sat under a tent.  She didn’t join the group at her birthday party after a while because it was sunny and so she moved to sit in the only shady spot in our yard, away from all her guests.  Recently, on sunny days, we watch her walking down the street with her coat held in front of her face, effectively making her blind.  All in an effort to stave off the sun.  She explains that in Thailand it is most desirable to have white skin.  She truly believes she can lighten her skin in a variety of questionable ways.  One of the most entertaining was watching a video of her and her friends on the beach in Thailand rubbing sand into their skin with a passion, convinced it would make them lighter! 

I am not sure if it is Penny and her friends or all of Thailand, but there is an obsession with physical beauty and perfection that makes us uncomfortable.  Penny wanders through our house with toothpaste dabbed all over her face to clear her complexion.  She refuses to paint her nails, convinced that they will turn yellow and fall off (mine have now been painted for 2 weeks with no apparently ill effect, but she declines to take any kind of chances with what she terms “chemicals”). 

And shockingly, Penny has endured what we would term rather stringent verbal abuse from her friends at home because she is not considered beautiful.  Almost since day 1, Penny has been killing herself to get skinny—eating very little, working out like crazy—since all her friends at home comment in both English and Thai on her pictures about how fat she is.  Before she came here, one of her friends informed her that her “laugh is as ugly as her face”.  Another informed her that of course she has no friends in America, she is too ugly for people to like.  I’ve consulted with other host families of Thai students who don’t have these issues with their kids, but Penny informs me that this is because their students are quite beautiful and she is quite ugly. 

In our family, this type of thing is beyond what we have been prepared to deal with.  As you all know, Penny’s host dad/my husband is totally blind. Physical appearance never enters into his consciousness.  As I was a person who was picked on mercilessly as a child for my appearance, I find it very, very painful to listen to these stories and try to put them down to “Thai teenage culture” or “Asian culture”.  We have tried a variety of ideas, including long discussions as a family about tolerating these types of things from our peers (particularly when Penny has a double standard about her American classmates—if they so much as look at her in a way she deems unfriendly, she sweeps home in tears for hours!), completely ignoring her behaviors, refusing to comment on anyone’s personal appearance even when Penny demands to know which Hollywood stars we think are the most beautiful, providing her with information about healthy living that is not extreme, telling her daily what a good and beautiful person she is on the inside and the outside, and refusing to comment on what she eats or what she looks like at all.

Penny is now starting to see the end point of her exchange and is excited to return home.  She is not as excited about seeing her family as she is about seeing her friends.  I have to admit, I struggle with this.  It is very difficult to hear her go on and on about having only three months until she can see these people again who we view as “mean” to say the least.  The other night we were discussing it again (Penny has been obsessed with missing her friends and seeing them again since she got here, and it caused some major issues for us in the beginning of the exchange when she would sneak behind our backs to contact them for as long and as often as possible), and I said to her, “You know, Penny, you always had an end date in mind for going back there.  But you may never again see any of the people you have become close with here.  And you are wasting the time you have with them on missing out on people you know you are going to see very soon.” 

She did not want to hear this.  We have talked about getting everything she can from her exchange year.  Penny worked extremely hard to get where she is.  She wanted to earn a scholarship from her mother’s job, and she wound up taking the tests and doing the interviews 3 times before winning a scholarship to come here.  But quite literally every minute she has been here, she has expressed her biggest desire is to just go home and see her friends.

There are kids in her school, kids right here on our street who want to be her friend, who she freely admits have never said a bad word to her, have only been friendly and open and polite and helpful.  As a host family, our number one stressor has been her refusal to work at spending time with these kids and enjoying their time together.  While we don’t let her, she would far rather spend 6 or 7 hours a day on Facebook and messenger with her friends in Thailand who send negative messages her way all the time.

Penny swears that she now wants to return to the US to go to college.  Her younger brother will come to the US next year to attend a private boarding school in Kentucky.  We have talked about having her brother here for the holidays, and I can tell that Penny is somewhat jealous of the fact that her brother will spend time her with us (she’s told us not to buy him Christmas presents!).  We find it very confusing that there are two sides to Penny—one that can’t wait to get out of the United States and another that is dying to stay. 

I can only imagine how confused she must be as well.

Updates Long Overdue!

I am waaaaaaaaay overdue for updating this blog, and I do apologize.  It has been over a month, but my gosh, I can’t believe how busy we’ve been!

I am learning not to make plans any more.  We make plans and then everything changes.  We have planned to go back to DC since our first trip back in August and guess what?  We haven’t made it yet!  Sheesh!!!

November was an absolute whirlwind.  I honestly can’t believe it has been and gone, and I have no idea where it went!!!  The only thing that really stuck in my head when I sat down to write this update is our Thanksgiving vacation.  I looked back through our photos and I think perhaps it’s possible that I’ve even been too busy to take pictures!  I am extremely thankful that I had in mind to keep a paper journal for Penny.  I found an awesome journal at the local bookstore and every night with only one exception so far (the night we arrived at my mother’s house at 2AM), I have written in it daily.  I will make a bound photocopy of it before I give it to Penny at the end of the year.

Anyway, here’s what I can tell you for sure we did:

November 9, Penny performed in her first concert at school.  She sang with her choir class.  The class is divided into men and women and at the time, Penny was singing second soprano.  The women’s choir sang 3 or 4 songs and we proudly waved to her from our seats in the back of the auditorium—as close as we could get unfortunately by the time we got over there!  We were very grateful that our friend Sherry Harrison came to the concert to support Penny and afterwards we all gave her flowers and met her friend, Stephanie, for the first time.

 

November 11 was Veteran’s Day and we took Penny up to Ikea to meet up with my friend Emily.  Penny had never been to Ikea before, so we went over there and had lunch and wandered around.  Penny liked the chocolate cake a lot!

Somewhere in there, Penny also auditioned for the district choir.  She was not ultimately selected, but we were so proud of her for having the guts to even try.  Her choir teacher ultimately decided to move her to the alto section, where I think she is a lot more comfortable singing as well.  She is such a songbird.  She loves to sing here all the time and has music on a lot.  She has taken a particular shine to Wham! so if we hear that there is a resurgence in Wham!’s popularity in Thailand next year, George Michael can send me a cut of the royalties.

November also marks a major holiday in Thailand, that being Loy Krathong.  Loy Krathong is a festival in Thailand in which the Thai people create beautiful boats out of banana leaves and send them floating down the river hoping to have the sins of their year absolved.  You can read more about it by clicking here.  Penny decided to teach us how to make our own krathongs and we would float them here locally to celebrate her customs.  Penny had a lot of leftover tissue paper from her birthday paper, and cut it into strips to fashion a rough equivalent of the leaves that would typically be in a krathong.  She taught me the folding method, which I struggled with quite a bit at first, but after folding 40 or 50 of them, I quickly got the hang of it and we made a krathong for each member of the family.  I sent Penny’s mom a picture and she suggested we fill them with flowers as would be traditional, so on the day we were due to set them off, November 21, I went and picked up carnations at the local grocery store.  We filled them and sent them down the river at a local park here in Fredericksburg.  It was a very lovely moment.

 

My friend Jacalyn of Emerald Lens Photography came with us to take family photos for our Christmas cards and she photographed the occasion as well.  There are some pictures on her photo blog if you are interested.

Photo credit:  Jacalyn Stanley, EmeraldLens.info

On November 23rd, all our company began arriving for Thanksgiving.  My father was here and our best friends Mike and Lesley flew up from Atlanta.  We had an awesome Thanksgiving together and Penny enjoyed making a big meal with us and she really loved the turkey!  We put her to work in the kitchen and she was into everything up to her elbows, from making pie to making gravy to setting our table just beautifully.

 

Post-Thanksgiving we took our annual trip up to the Christmas Attic in Alexandria.  Afterwards, we started decorating the house for Christmas, most notably putting up Christmas lights, which Penny also enjoyed helping with.

  

(Yes, she was insane enough to be wearing shorts!)

Once everyone left and we took a deep breath, we started getting ready for Christmas.  I perform with a local choir, so I have been running back and forth to choir practice as well as my regular book club meeting.  Penny has had a ton of tests and papers and projects she’s had to do.  We got out all our decorations for Christmas except the tree, which we will put up the weekend of December 18th.  We have started baking cookies and we attended a free concert by the US Marine Corps Band at Wolf Trap Performing Arts Center.  Penny has never experienced cold weather like we have here in Virginia (and I have to say, it’s been an exceptionally cold winter so far!), so we talked her into buying a coat, explaining that her yellow sweatshirt was not going to cut it.  I had gotten Leah a little lamb hat to keep her warm and Penny fell madly in love with it and looked all over for a “cute” hat like that, but couldn’t find one.  Fortunately, I found one at JC Penney’s and bought it for her and we gave it to her as an early Christmas present.  She and Leah looked adorable at Wolf Trap.

After we had been there ten minutes, however, Penny exclaimed, “I have changed my mind about seeing snow!”

Penny also made a new friend in a missionary, Jon, who has just returned from a couple of years living in Thailand and was looking for someone to experience Thailand and Thai culture and language with as he adjusts to life back in the US.  They met up at the mall and spent a couple of hours together chatting and whatnot.  Penny also had an amazing time spending a night at her liaison’s house with 2 of the other exchange students.  They went to the theater to see Tangled in 3D, Penny’s first American cinematic experience.  Now she wants to find someone to go see Narnia with her, as she is a great fan of it.  Hopefully she will find a friend to go with her!

We have introduced Penny to the tradition of the Advent wreath and have been teaching her how to light a match and then she can light the candles.  (I was a regular firebird by the time I was 10, probably due to the Girl Scouts and their evil camping influence, so the idea she could be 18 and not know how to light a match struck me as very strange!)  We do a reading each week, which I think she feels a bit more relaxed about since it is not overly religious in tone. 

Penny also helped us with our traditional “stuffing of the Christmas cards”—something she cannot believe we did.  We mailed out 73 of our 74 cards so far, and she couldn’t believe that many Americans send out that quantity at the holidays.  I explained that Christmas is a time to remember and celebrate the love we have for our family and friends and that while it is time consuming, it is so nice to give and receive cards to those we love.  I don’t know if she was convinced or not, but she IS enjoying when we receive cards.  My mom sent her a special Christmas card to commemorate her trip to Disney and Penny was so touched!

 

She is now in the spirit of the whole present thing.  Last night she helped me wrap Leah’s presents, as well as gifts for my niece and nephew.  She snooped around a bit since there were a few presents for her in the pile downstairs, but she didn’t gather much from her reconnaissance.  Most of her presents are wrapped and stashed elsewhere because I suspect she is a bit of a spy, just like I was!  Patience, Penny, only 16 more days till you get your loot! :)

Of course, we have crammed in tons of Skip Bo and Yahtzee and yesterday Penny and I finally, finally, finally finished Super Mario Bros. for Wii.  Now we are trying to decide what to do to fill our time since we have been sweating that game for months!

This weekend we will have dinner with friends tomorrow evening, attend a Christmas pageant at my friend’s house on Saturday and hopefully take a quick trip into DC to have a peek at the national Christmas tree.  Sunday our neighbor has invited us to see her son in the church Christmas pageant.  We will also probably start baking serious quantities of cookies soon, which is something Penny is extremely excited about.  She will be performing in another choir concert on the 16th and she has offered to babysit Leah and the neighbor’s little boy so Lisa and I can go Christmas shopping this week and I can finish it off!  Then my friend Joe will arrive on the 17th for the weekend that will include putting up our tree, my concert, my father’s arrival, taking cookies to the neighbors, and last minute preparations before the big day.  I hope to sneak in a trip to the mall to get a picture with Santa Claus too.

Hopefully it won’t take me 6 weeks to update from Christmas and New Year!!!  It’s hard to believe we are coming up on 4 months since the kids arrived, and only 6 months of this wonderful experience left.  Impossible to believe!

A Tour of DC

Recently in reading other families’ and students’ blogs, I’ve been kinda bummed about the fact that I don’t have cool pictures of us running on windswept beaches, enjoying the natural beauty of deserts or pristine forests, or of Penny surrounded by hordes of adoring fellow teens.  She is gamely following along with whatever game plan I come up with, which frankly most of the time is the spur of the moment, but I felt like I needed to do more somehow, because although 3 weeks is a long time for her to be here before school starts, it is slipping away, and I knew I would look back and think, “I wish I had done X, Y, and Z” those first weeks.

So yesterday I got up and we were sitting around and I told Penny to prepare herself for a little trip that evening.  I am famous for my trips around the DC monuments at night, and I decided we needed pictures of Penny in front of imposing memorials and breath-taking fountains, with her unhip host mom if nothing else! :-D

We left home around 8:30 last night and got to DC around 9:15.  Driving around in the dark, I got slightly lost and we wound up on the opposite side of the Capitol as I intended us to be.  However, we were actually on the front, I think, so it worked out well.  As we pulled up, I thought she would be blown away by the nearly supernatural glow of the white dome of the Capitol in the DC darkness, but instead, she was giddily squealing over our proximity to the Library of Congress.  I was thinking, “Really?” and she begged me to pull over so she could take a picture.  I couldn’t stop where we were, so I pulled around the corner and we were lucky to find a parking space literally right in front of the Capitol and right next to the LOC.  We got out and I had to fairly sprint to keep up with her as she exclaimed how excited she was to see it.  I said, “The Library of Congress?!” and she said, “Yes!  You ever see the movie The Day After Tomorrow?”  I guess it is prominently featured, I haven’t seen it! 

Shockingly (to me anyway), Penny had no idea what the Capitol Building was.  I explained that it’s the seat of American government where the senators and representatives meet to set policy and make laws, blah blah blah, and then I realized that I wouldn’t recognize whatever the most famous government building in Bangkok was if I fell over it.  So I guess we’re even on that score!  To her credit, Penny was impressed by the building as judged by the number of “Oh!”’s and “Very nice!”’s she uttered while wandering around in front of the building.  Her primary concern however, was getting pictures and in the dark, neither of our cameras was doing a good job!  UGH! 

This was as good as it got!!! 

We went over to the other side of the street and got a picture of what I guess is the Supreme Court building, but honestly, I have no idea, it was late, we didn’t see signs, and I took a guess.  It looked like the Supreme Court to me.  Then we hopped back in the car and drove to the other side of the Capitol to try and get more pictures, but none of those came out either, so we gave up and made our way to the Mall. 

Our first stop was the World War II Memorial, one of my two favorite places in Washington DC.  On the way we saw The White House and drove past the Washington Monument.  Penny is afraid of heights but feels confident that she will someday before she leaves go to the top of the monument anyway.  We walked all over the WWII Memorial and Penny snapped a zillion pictures.

Penny, a proud new Virginian!

A self-portrait in the lights of the Memorial

  

Penny poses like this last picture constantly.  Recently, a host mom posted a blog called "Sign Language" on her blog about what different hand signs mean in different countries.  So I decided to ask Penny if she knew what this two fingered salute meant in the US and if it meant something in Thailand.  She said in Thailand, it just means, “Don’t I look cute?”  I explained in the US it means “Peace” in a kind of hippie context.  She didn’t much care about that. Haha!

After that, I told her we would walk to the Lincoln Memorial.  It is a bit of a hike, but she is young and skinny and I am old and fat, so I figured it wouldn’t be a problem for her.  Of course, this is the kid who asked me how she was going to get to the bus stop, which is at the top of the street, exactly 2 houses from here, and when I suggested she was going to walk, her eyes got as big as saucers and she said, “Oooooh!”  But there’s really nowhere to park near the Lincoln Memorial any more, even for those of us cool enough to sport handicapped tags, so walk we must!  We walked along a semi-lighted pathway, which was lined with Porta-Potties for the upcoming tea party rally this weekend.  As we finally got close to the Lincoln Memorial, we saw all the pavilions up for Glenn-Beck-A-Thon 2010, and Penny made the mistake of asking, “This is for some kind of rally?”  Only on account of the fact that Asians really do switch their R’s and L’s when they speak, I had to ponder for a second what she meant by “This is for some kind of Larry?”  But I realized what she meant and then it popped into my head what was going on, and so I said that it was and she was interested to know more.  Without putting too fine a point on it, I think Glenn Beck is a gas bag, so I attempted to indicate my feelings about the whole thing without being disrespectful in case Penny is quite conservative, which I doubt that she is really anything based on the conversations we’ve had about politics thus far (when we picked her up, she was wearing a shirt that read “Political Minded”.  I asked her if that was true and she asked me what it meant.  I explained and she said, “Oh no, I just like this shirt.”).  The whole thing seemed a little over her head, which was fine with me and if you want to know what I told her it was, you’ll have to look on my Facebook album in the comments section :-D  And don’t say you weren’t warned if you happen to be a great lover of the tea parties and Fox News.

Anyway, as we were walking up to the Memorial, which was drawing Penny in like a moth to the flame, two men stopped us and asked if we’d like our picture taken together.  Of course!  They snapped two for sure, and we were just thrilled to have a mother-daughter shot on our big night out.

Penny announced that she wanted to climb the steps, not take the wimpy elevator up to the top, and I am proud to say I made it! Once we got inside, she was so impressed by the statue of Abraham Lincoln.  We had tried showing her the battlefields in Fredericksburg and explaining the Civil War, but let’s face it people, if you were 17 and not an American, would you be all that interested in an internal conflict that went down 150 years ago?  So we are educating her little by little about American history, but since she is about to take both US history AND government in school, she will come out well educated.  Heck, I might even read the books just for fun.  It’s been a while!

We left the Memorial and I took her to the Korean War Veterans Memorial which I think freaked her out a little bit and then the Vietnam Wall.  She was starting to fade out a bit (by now it was well past 11), but she did gamely cross the little bridge onto Independence Island and then we finally made it back to the WWII.  She was starting to sniffle and shuffle and I asked her if she was OK and did she have it in her to have one more visit to my ultimate favorite spot in DC?  She said, “No” but she said it laughingly, and I really didn’t know what to make of her response.  She said, “I cannot walk in a straight line.  How far is it?”  So I told her it was across the park and we would drive there.  She didn’t disagree, so I went for it.

Once we got there, though, I realized I had pushed her a bit too far.  Disappointingly, none of the fountains was turned on, so it was a bunch of rocks and statues in near darkness.  I took her down to the Tidal Basin to see the city, and she walked through the memorial, but her heart was not in it.  Oddly, though, on the way back, she perked right up and wanted to take pictures with all the statues!

She was interested to know who Eleanor Roosevelt was although she didn’t care too much about who FDR was.  I got her back to the car, and almost immediately, she was out cold. She perked up when I put the radio on and Katy Perry came out of the speakers, but other than that, she was the kind of tired when your head flops forward and scares you, but you just keep putting your head back and sleeping anyway.  We got home at about 12:45AM, and I think she was asleep before she hit the top of the stairs.  I, on the other hand, had to pack lunch for the mister and check in on the wee one before bed.  I may be old, but apparently, I’ve still got boundless energy! ;-D  Penny did make me promise that I would take her back to DC this week, particularly to take pictures of the LOC, so we are hoping to get up there on Wednesday.

Taking Penny around DC was a special time for me.  Not only did I get to see the delight in her eyes as she took in our beautiful and historic landmarks, but I realized in walking around and thinking about my feelings about what was going on around me (the rally, people stopping to ask me for directions, watching other people enjoy the sights, strangers saying “good evening!” [which Penny finds hilarious, by the way]), that I am really proud of my country and to be living here.  I disagree with a lot of crap going on this country right now and I have a lot of issues with the way it’s being run and the way it has been run, but I don’t live in fear of saying so, and we enjoy great freedoms.  It is truly a beautiful place to live and visit and I look forward to loving our country even more as I travel with Penny this year!

Keeping Lines of Communication Open

I have been brainstorming ideas to keep Penny busy while she settles in here and starts to meet people.  She is very shy of trying to meet new friends, so we are going slowly in that arena, and I understand her misgivings, I would feel the same!  She says Americans talk very fast and she does not understand us half the time.  So we are trying to slow down as much as we can and not talk over each other, which I suddenly am aware of us doing.

Today, I decided we would go to the pool.  Our neighbor, Lisa, is a member of a local pool and she gets us guest passes to use.  So I called her and asked if we could go today and we decided to have a picnic lunch and go use the pool.  I got Leah ready and Penny said she was ready too, but that she was not going swimming.  I said, “you aren’t!?” kind of surprised and she said, “No, it is too hot.” 

This did not make any sense to me.  If I were able to get in the pool right now, I would be living in it, but the local pool has no stairs, only ladders, and since I am recovering from a dislocated elbow, I have no way of getting myself out of the pool once I am in it.  But I just let it go and she said she would like to come and have lunch anyway, so we decided to go and let Leah swim.

However, I figured there was more to the story and I was right.

While Leah, Lisa, and Daniel were in the pool, I sat with Penny, who told me that in Thailand, no one starts swimming until 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon at the earliest, and often not until the evenings.  It is considered far too hot to be outside, so they do not swim until later in the day.  I explained that here, we consider the water to be the best way to cool off during the hottest part of the day, and so most people start swimming in the morning and spend their evenings inside because it is considered too dark to swim at night.

Penny also mentioned that Thai people like to have very white/pale skin, as pale as can be.  When we were watching the DVD of her classmates at home, one of the girls was sitting in the sand where the waves were washing up on shore, rubbing her legs vigorously with sand.  Soon, another girl followed.  Then Penny came into view and did the same thing.  She explained that they all believed it would lighten their skin.

I explained that in America, many people spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to achieve perfect tan status, the darker the better.  I told her that this year, with spending more time outside with Leah, I am the tannest I have ever been and am proud of my color.  So we decided to compare arms.  And guess what?  Penny is still darker than I am!!!  We were cracking up. 

Penny is a great sport.  I’m glad we can share our country’s opinions about things like this.  I am learning a lot from her and I hope she is learning a lot from us.  This is what I pictured our exchange experience to be.