Even if we don’t seriously believe in the equality of man, we should at least pretend to, says Nat.
I love doing my own laundry. Or at least I did. Living most of my life in the west taught me the joy of washing my own clothes. Sometimes the only quiet time I had in an entire week was the two hours I spent at the laundrette reading a good book while leaning against a warm clothes dryer. During the winter months, it was probably the warmest place I could be and the steady, rhythmic hum of the machines was a soothing alternative to the sound of traffic outside. In a quiet, unspectacular way, nothing could match the satisfaction of starting out with a hamper full of dirty clothes and, at the end of a few hours, having a closet full of clean ones.
But then I moved back to Bangkok. Not only is quiet time an unknown concept here but people find it perverse that I would want to do my own laundry. Besides, the climate here doesn’t really encourage snuggling up to a warm dryer, does it? Laundry is relegated to the realm of drudgery and is generally considered something you pay others to do. In Thailand, laundry is servants’ work.
Servants. In the west, people never use that term. One says something euphemistic like ‘staff’. Sometimes they are ennobled to ‘cleaning lady’ but never, never, in a modern, politically correct world, does one call another human being a ‘servant’ or a ‘maid’. Terms designating others as socially inferior beings defy modern, egalitarian ideals.
When I first came back to Thailand after a 25 year absence, I found the concept of servants a difficult one not only for political reasons — the thought of using others to perform menial tasks preyed on my westernised, democratic qualms — but for personal ones. Many of my friends, actually, embraced the concept with unbridled glee. But why should I tolerate the loss of privacy and the petty annoyance of household chores unsatisfactorily done?
I hated having someone in every room who would invariably listen in on my phone conversations or note that my bed sheets are soiled and then gossip about it among their colleagues. All this in exchange for doing my laundry, a job I can do perfectly well on my own. I won’t presume to say that I am better at doing laundry than anyone in the whole world but I do it well enough to please myself and that’s all I really need anyway. I could easily live without servants.
Live without servants? My parents, nay many of my friends, were aghast. Many people I know consider themselves liberal because, unlike their grandparents, they had no need for a servant to kneel in the corner of every room they walked into. That, of course, would be an invasion of privacy. The solution, of course, is to have a bell. If you need anything like a glass of water, just ring. After all, if you don’t have a servant, who will wash your clothes? More importantly, who will clean your toilets?
Oh. Cleaning toilets. Well, there is that. Well, I can compromise. I can allow these people into my home when I’m not there. And, yes, they do the most unsavoury of tasks like cleaning the bathroom and mopping the floor. So I got used to the concept with a lot more ease than I care to admit. But I have adapted my use of servants.
If I am having guests for dinner, they help serve but, in general, I do my own cooking. I make my own bed and wash my own dishes. I put my clothes into the washing machine and then the dryer, folding them and ironing them when they are finished. I do my own grocery shopping, put away my own junk, get my messages from an answering machine and walk and feed my own dog.
And my servants, er staff, are absolutely delighted. They positively love working for me. In fact, I am the only person I know with a waiting list of people who want to become my servants.
Whole days go by and my staff have nothing to do. One of them even got an education. In her spare time, she finished secretarial school, went on to study at university and, soon, she expects to receive a degree in accountancy. When she is finished, she has no plans other than to continue being my servant. Another has indicated a preference for watching television in the afternoons. That is when she isn’t taking naps.
I suppose the most galling thing about this is that, rather than appreciating my generosity, my servants seem to feel I am easily duped. In other words, I am not a nice boss but a stupid one.
Now I’m not about to blame tradition for my own domestic crises but the Sakdina system, which used to be in place here to give, quite literally, a numerical value to a human being according to his status in society, is more to blame than anything else. While it may have helped to maintain social order and national integration in the face of Burmese and western incursions of the past, the Sakdina system is out-dated in the modern world. Even if we don’t seriously believe in the equality of man, we should at least pretend to.
And maybe that’s the point: pretending. In spite of our best efforts, society tends to resist change with more vehemence than we could ever imagine. The Sakdina system gave a numerical value to a human being but we can’t ignore the fact that such a quantification was a reflection of that person’s power in society. That is not an ideal, it is a fact. Not everyone can be leaders. We may be telling people that they are social equals to everyone else but until they truly have that power, nothing is going to change. To proclaim that everyone is equal without actually having them be equal is tantamount to pretending. The idea that they see themselves in this position, accept it and anyone who doesn’t adhere to it is ready to be taken advantage of.
Besides, Thais have their own ways of exerting power. Passive resistance through being uncooperative. This is the way a Thai in the lower order of society exerts his power.
Furthermore, according to friends who are more comfortable with traditional household management (meaning those who, if they could, would hire someone to brush their teeth for them), I am a hypocrite. I wipe my tears of sorrow for menial labourers with one hand and drink champagne with the other. My discomfort with having servants, my friends say, has less to do with true sympathy with people of lower economic means than it does a wish for privacy which, when faced honestly, is a form of personal comfort.
So if my servants take advantage of me, it serves me right.
So am I being hypocritical? I am perfectly happy to admit that I enjoy not having to mop the floor or, most importantly, scrub the loo. By being relieved that a servant will do all that for me, am I betraying the egalitarian, democratic ideals that I brought home with me? To many of my friends in the west, the definition of ‘capitalist pig’ is someone who pays others to do unsavoury work.
In any business, there is a pecking order. A junior member of a company understands that he is not in management.
And so that has been my solution to the servant dilemma.