What follows is a (mostly) unedited, exclusive excerpt from my recently re-published expat memoir, Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (now available in paperback):
Nigel was a surly old sailor and I hope he still is, wherever he is these days. He was wearied cynicism personified, wrapped in saggy flesh and droopy eyes, both exhausted and on-the-ball at the same time.
The British Navy pensioner, committed alcoholic, and longtime BangkokThonburi University English professor mumbled profanity to himself as his Hotel California ringtone went off in the office and he fumbled it his hands to find the green answer button.
Another colleague in the foreign language department, Bryan, his longtime friend and part-time caretaker, had tried to teach Nigel about his smartphone and the stuff it does — but the instruction hadn't quite taken.
My grandpa (a "Boomer Zoomer,” as he sometimes refers to himself ironically) is the same way with online Zoom™ video chats.
The Hotel California ringtone went off because Nigel's Thai wife was calling to berate him in Thai — a language Nigel had wondrously managed to learn literally not a single word of in the sixteen years he had resided in Thailand.
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Nigel handed the phone to Bryan, who spoke Thai fluently and often played the role of translator between Nigel and his wife.
"I don’t know what the bloody hell she wants."
Bryan sighed audibly, dutifully took the phone, and pressed it to his ear.
“Sawasdee khrup,” Bryan answered with the standard Thai greeting.
After two minutes of exchange, Bryan hung up and handed the phone back to Nigel.
"You left a beer in the freezer and it exploded."
A look of wonderfully careless recollection dawned on Nigel’s face.
"Oh, that's right, mate. That I did."
"She wants you home by four. And she needs more denture solution."
Nigel's aversion to learning Thai, I theorized to myself, had got something with the shattered British Empire, which, in a bygone age, he had served in the Queen's Navy; its glorious memory still smolders quietly in the hearts of patriotic British baby boomers.
Older Brits, the ones I've met, tend to cling to quaint unspoken notions that everywhere is more or less Britain — and if it's less British, it will soon be more British once the ethnics are gifted with Protestant work ethics and King James Bibles and civilized to speak English.
The sun never sets on the British Empire.
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Once, before I arrived at the university to begin my career molding the minds of future leaders, on a faculty-wide retreat to the beach resort Hua Hin involving the entirety of the foreign language staff, Nigel drank excessively, fell down the stairs at the hotel, and messed his back up something fierce — an old injury from the Queen’s navy.
Bryan had discovered him at the bottom of the staircase, and the burden fell upon him as usual, as Nigel’s unofficial translator and cultural liaison, to call his wife and explain why her farang husband was cutting his vacation early.
Suffice it to say, Bryan had become intimately, painfully acquainted with the enraged-Thai-wife-vs.-Nigel-translation routine.
Available in ebook or paperback format wherever fine books are sold (actually, currently just on Amazon):
Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile
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