Why foreigners can’t speak Thai

For 12 years now I have been learning Thai from my maid, Pi Nong, who has been employed in our building for decades. It’s a much misunderstood relationship. Here the maid is an obligatory fixture, integrated into daily life for foreigners and Thais over the age of 45 and over a fairly modest income level. For foreigners the maid is a linguistic go-between, a bridge between two worlds, a portal into a new language. While she is making me dinner she gaily informs me that farangs cannot eat Thai food even though she is making it for me now and that, even more mysteriously, they cannot speak Thai – even though we are speaking it now. Her explanation is that our mouths are different and that we are malevolent.

For example, she says calmly, I insist on mispronouncing basic words to make them sound like bad words. Case in point: the Thai word for ‘leave’, which is fark. All day long deliveries call me when they arrive at the lobby of our monstrous building, the Glass Kingdom, and when I pick up to answer them I invariably say ‘Fark tii lobby’. Leave it at the lobby. At this Pi Nong frowns if she is in the room. ‘You say like bad word.’

‘No, I say fark just like you.’

‘Not like me. No. You say bad word.’

I ask her how it’s pronounced correctly. Putting down her iron, she opens her mouth wide and uses, it is true, a different tone.

‘Fuk.’

I repeat it a few times and we are reconciled. The matter is settled and I change the pronunciation with the Fedex guys, who say: ‘OK, fuk here boss.’ This ritual between Nong and I, however, has no ultimate resolution because a language is fathomless, bottomless, and in one sense it can never be completely learned.