Day 1 // 4 Jan

While most of the other groups headed to Chiang Rai for a 2D1N trip, our group spent our official first day in Chiang Mai at Chiang Mai University (CMU). A professor from the Fine Arts Department, Dr Vithi Panichapan, brought us through a brief history of Chiang Mai.

To be honest, I wasn’t very looking forward to this lecture as I felt that it would be the usual boring history lesson. But I was wrong. Dr Vithi Panichapan was an engaging speaker and the way he brought us through Chiang Mai’s heritage evoked interest in me. I wanted to know why Thai girls would seat at the front porch of the house in the past. I wanted to know why guys would want to expose their legs to show off their tattoos. And I wanted to know the past of Chiang Mai that shaped the way it is now.

As we sat through the lecture, it also started to dawn on us that we may be heading in the wrong direction for our research. Before the trip, our group thought that heritage encompasses architecture, music, food, folktales etc, but never did we expect Chiang Mai’s heritage to stem from the awareness of their origins, and knowing that despite them coming from different backgrounds, they are one Chiang Mai.

It was also through this sharing session and subsequent focus group discussions with the CMU students that enlightened us on the amount of pride the citizens of Chiang Mai had in their heritage and culture. Chiang Mai may be similar to Singapore, in terms of the ethnic diversity and the size of the nation. Yet, the pride that the people in Chiang Mai had of their own heritage was something that we should learn from. Just like what the CMU students mentioned, we need to be taught about our heritage from young. And such education should not only take place in school, but also at home.

Upon realising that our research objectives may be flawed, we held an emergency discussion at the end of the day to decide on a new research direction. However, we kept going in circles on how to formulate the research objective such that both subgroups would not have much overlaps. This proved to be of much difficulty as heritage is often intertwined, and as much as we would like to head Prof Nat’s advice on splitting based on tangible and intangible, we realised that more often than not, a particular heritage site or object will have both tangible and intangible aspects we can explore.

Just when I thought we had reached a bottleneck, our seniors stepped in to provide valuable advice based on their experience. And thanks to them, we managed to find a direction to head in. We also decided on the different roles each of us should play while conducting the interviews, settled administrative works like writing out the consent forms, as well as coming up with a general list of interview questions, just to ensure that we do not repeat the mistakes we made today.

I still remembered how flustered we were when trying to get the professors and students to take part in our interview and focus group discussions, how unprepared we were in the questions that we asked, and how some of us did not know what we should be doing. This hindered the quality of interview and was something all of us did not wish to see.

I was glad that our seniors arranged for the lecture by Dr Vithi Panichapan to be on our first day in Chiang Mai. Not only was it engaging, it also provided a professional view of the heritage of Chiang Mai. And without it, we would not have known that our pre-perceptions of heritage was wrong all along. After finding new directions to our research objectives, I was able to rest well knowing that tomorrow would be a fresh start for us again.