Post-trip Reflection

As I re-read my writing before the trip, I’m grateful for how things have turned out. Chiang Mai has shown me its many facets, and still I believe there are more if only we had more time to discover them all. I will miss the bustling night markets, the visits to magnificent temples which are central to public life in the country, and our adventures to the charming Old City, the Huay Kaew Waterfall, the unnamed reservoir near Chiang Mai University.

I am indebted to the help freely given by all the friendly local people who agreed to participate in our interviews, taste tests, and surveys, as well as Lukpong, Mhon, and Patt who helped us communicate to the Thais. Even before the trip, Mhon emailed us to say that he was available to help with whatever necessary for our project. And this he consistently did, even staying up late to help us translate our survey form into Thai. He stayed close to our group throughout the trip and was a tremendous help in our interviews and in translating the free responses given by Thai participants. In sports parlance, he was our MVP, our Most Valuable Player. When it was time for goodbye and we gave him our card on which was written our thanks and messages, he surprised us with personal handwritten postcards and pouches as gifts to us. I don’t think we did anything to merit help and gifts, but they really come from the hearts of our Thai friends. We did nothing for them, and depended on them for as crucial an aspect of our project as communication.

Our professors, Prof May and Prof Nat, were caring and involved in our research process. I know that at university level, we are considered adults and must be independent to a great extent. And our professors give a lot of space for us to think critically, independently, and to truly own the research project. But their valuable advice and guidance helped us to think more clearly and develop our ideas.

Nutrition in Chiang Mai is a topic that does not receive a lot of research attention, perhaps because like what Dr Jirayu Maneerat told us, the government has more pressing issues to tackle, and the people don’t seem to care so much about the impact of nutrition on their well-being. But it is precisely this apparent apathy that we seek to understand. The nutrition label is as ubiquitous as processed food and supermarkets in Chiang Mai. But many of them are there to satisfy a regulation that is not strictly enforced, rather than to be truly helpful to the ordinary consumer. The tiny size of some labels confounds the elderly and youths alike, the use of foreign language challenges most of the populace – who are monolingual in Thai, the Byzantine terminologies without the aid of educational campaign to boot are real challenges even to the educated. In the face of such difficulties, and absence awareness of the importance of nutrition, say, relative to taste and price, I can start to grasp why most people do not care to use nutrition labels in their purchasing decisions. Being in Chiang Mai’s supermarkets, markets, bazaars, and streets over the past few days gave me a first-hand account of the reality of nutrition here. Nonetheless, I feel there were limitations to my ability to observe. The language barrier means that I could not pick up how the use of specific words on nutrition labels would be conceived by Thai consumers. And as an outsider looking in, could there be background knowledge that I should have known if I were a Thai? I don’t mean the kind of knowledge found in research literature about nutrition in Thailand, which we have had plenty before the trip, but knowledge of how people might react to our questions. The fact that we depended on our translators for communication also means that we could not check if the nuances of our question could be a problem or if they remain the unchanged when passed from one person to another, or translated from English to Thai. This is a concern especially for questions intended to test our participants’ interpretation of nutrition information. Many participants reported having no difficulty reading nutrition labels, yet disagreed with the statement that nutrition labels are easy to understand. This is puzzling result, with multiple possible explanations, one of which is misunderstanding of the question. Perhaps this is an inevitable feature of doing research in a short time and in a foreign country. I hope that by looking at the rest of the data we might find a reasonable answer to reconcile these apparent contradictions.

As a linguistics major, I believe I would have learned a lot more about the topic of nutrition in Chiang Mai and other aspects of life from the people if I could talk to them in their language and understand things from the inside out. My understanding of the culture remains partial and fragmented, mostly gleaned from the Thais who speak English, who are only a minority. My expectation to understand Chiang Mai more deeply did not pan out in the way I meant. It is a reminder to me of the importance of language in culture and a lesson for me to moderate my expectation given the constraint.

Throughout this trip, my group mates have been a source of encouragement to me. Looking back on my daily reflections, I realize how many are the times I have used the word ‘we’ because so much of the trip revolves around us doing things together. It is strange now that we are back in Singapore, how few times we get to see one another in school with our conflicting schedules. I love that we worked together seamlessly during the trip, and now as we work on the report and media deliverable. Each one member has been accommodating and ready to listen, that we had very little ‘pain of adjustment’ when we first gathered as a group. The amount of work parsing through the data, shooting footages, editing is too much for any one or two to do on their own. So I could say necessity bound us together, but what kept us together is partnership and friendship, being in this together. In a larger sense, we belong together because we are all co-beneficiaries of this opportunity to study and research as scholars even in our freshman year. The trip has ended, but the community remains. For that, I am most grateful.