Day 2 (5th Jan)

Once again, the day started early with the bus trip back to Chiang Mai, but not before a stopover at yet another eye-feasting tourist site, the white temple. It was lined with tons of mirror that caused the mirror to sparkle in sunlight, a sight that no photo can ever do justice to.

The main highlight of the day was a monk chat session as well as street interviews. Interestingly, these monks studied at a university just for monks, Mahamakut Buddhist University. Hence, in our interviews with them, they were able to give us educated opinions and some insights into Buddhism in Thailand, a large part of Thai culture, and their role in the whole political scene in Thailand (or the lack thereof).

To me, the most interesting part of the interview was when we started asking our monk if he (or any other monks) will use social media as a platform for sharing political/social issues related articles or express their opinions. Expectedly, the response was no, since monks are not allowed to participate in elections, it is likely that they are removed from the political scene as well. The interesting part was that the monk noticeably got quite defensive and showed discomfort in his body language. This highlighted quite a fundamental cultural differences, but even as we tried to understand his motivation for being a monk, it only yielded a very general and inconclusive response. I wished we could have found out more information, not only for the project, but also for a greater understanding of Thai culture in general. However, it would be very insensitive to continue probing under that circumstance.

After that, we proceeded to do street interviews near the CMU compound. It started out a little awkwardly as I wondered, ‘how do we approach people?’ Eventually we still have to get our survey respondents so I have to try and do it and learn on the fly. Pleasantly enough, the Thai youths we approached are generally very nice and quite a high percentage of them did not turn down our request to help do the survey, despite some difficulties in communication. Thankfully, we had a Thai version of the survey and all we needed to do was to show it to them, and they would understand our request, despite the language barrier. A very memorable event I had was meeting a pair of Chinese speaking CMU students who have limited mastery of the Thai language, but agreed to help us do the survey anyway(with the help of myself as a translator). Overall, this street interview was a very meaningful one, and I really appreciated the politeness of Thai youths, making me feel kind of guilty for turning down requests to do surveys back in Singapore.

Today was overall quite a productive day, as we managed to conduct 2 interviews and get about 50 responses for our survey. So far, the survey responses seem to tie in with what Professor Chirada said about Thai youths being more reserved about political view, but a trend we are starting to see is that CMU students who study other majors are generally more apathetic towards such political issue, while our CMU exchange students, who were political-science students, have a lot more opinions. I am looking forward to our focus-group discussion on Thursday with CMU political-science students already!