Almost all of it is forgiven

Every guide to Thai etiquette is written from the same seat: a foreigner, reporting what he was told off for. So the list is always the same. Feet, heads, the wai, what to wear to a temple.

Here is what that list gets wrong: almost all of it is forgiven.

We can see you’re trying, and trying is most of it. The rules in the guides are the ones people correct you on, and a rule you get corrected on is a rule you get forgiven for.

The things that actually register are the ones nobody corrects. Nobody says a word. People quietly adjust their opinion of you, and you never find out it happened.

That asymmetry is the whole of this article. What follows is one Thai’s list, from this side: what you worry about that we don’t mind, what registers without a word, and, because it would be dishonest to leave it out, what we get wrong about you.

What you worry about that we don’t mind

The wai. Wrong height, wrong moment, waiing the waiter. It doesn’t matter. What people see is somebody making an effort with our customs, and the effort is what counts.

Your Thai. Mangle the tones and people will laugh. It’s delight, not mockery. Any attempt at the language earns goodwill out of all proportion to how well it goes.

How you eat. A fork in your mouth instead of pushing food onto the spoon, chopsticks for a plate of rice, asking for less chilli. Nobody minds.

Two things you might expect to find here are left out on purpose: tipping and splitting the bill. Both depend too much on the people and the place to make a rule of, either way.

What registers without a word

For each of these the question is not only what it looks like from here. It’s also whether we have a point, or whether it’s something we should get over.

Losing your temper. Raising your voice at a waiter, a clerk or another driver. Nobody will react, and that is the problem. Everyone who saw it has quietly decided you can’t handle yourself. Here the person who shouts is the one who loses face, not the person being shouted at, and keeping a cool heart, ใจเย็น, reads as competence rather than temperament. Article 49 Kreng jai: the one rule underneath all the others explains the mechanism: confrontation is the largest cost you can put on somebody in public, and everyone watching counts it. Do we have a point? Mostly. But a real complaint made calmly can be mistaken for no complaint at all, and there foreigners are right to be frustrated.

Haggling over small change. Bargaining is normal; we do it to each other, and article 8 The foreigner price: a Thai explanation is right that a market’s opening price is an opening position. What registers is the size of the fight against the size of the sum. Grinding a street vendor down by ฿20 on something already cheap reads as mean, not savvy, because the ฿20 matters far more to her than to you. Fair? Yes. Bargain for the thing, not for the principle.

Pushing for a straight no. You ask whether something can be done, and the answer is “maybe”, or “I’ll try”, or a smile. That was the no. Asking again, and again, until somebody says it outright forces them to refuse you to your face, which is exactly what the soft answer was built to spare you both. Article 49 Kreng jai: the one rule underneath all the others is the long version. Fair? Only half. The indirect no costs foreigners real time, and we should admit it. More on that below.

Dressing down everywhere. Vests and beach shorts in a bank, a hospital or a government office. The guides tell you to cover up at temples, which makes it sound like a religious rule. It isn’t. It’s about the place. Dressing for somewhere shows you know where you are. Dressing down tells the people who work there that their workplace doesn’t count. Fair? Yes.

Being loud in shared spaces. A loud conversation on the BTS, or a restaurant table everyone else can hear. Public space here is kept quiet by everybody together, and the only thing enforcing it is other people. It’s the same quiet system that article 134 Nobody hears you speed found behind a country that almost never honks. Volume reads as not noticing that anyone else is there. Fair? Yes, and it’s the one on this list that costs you nothing to fix.

Ignoring who’s senior. Greeting the grandmother the way you greet her grandson, or talking to your friend before their parents when you walk into the family home. Thai builds seniority into the grammar, so that nearly every sentence places the speaker above or below the listener; article 54 The org chart is in the grammar sets out how far that goes. So a greeting that treats everyone the same doesn’t read as equal. It reads as not having noticed. Fair? Partly. Nobody can be expected to read a hierarchy that no one has explained, and the fix is simple: greet the oldest person first.

Where we’re the unfair ones

A list of what foreigners get wrong with nothing about what we get wrong is a complaint, not an explanation. So here is our side of it.

We assume you’re rich. Every Westerner is taken to have money. That assumption sits behind the hard sell and behind the informal foreigner price at a market stall. It does not explain the published two-tier fee at a national park, which has a better defence (article 8 The foreigner price: a Thai explanation). Plenty of foreigners here are not rich at all, and being quoted more because of your face is not a compliment.

We judge mixed couples. A Western man with a Thai partner meets a set of assumptions about how they met, and she meets worse ones, chiefly that she must be with him for money. Plenty of those couples met the way anyone meets anyone. The assumption is lazy, and it lands hardest on the Thai woman, who is judged by her own country.

We rank foreigners by skin. Our everyday word for a foreigner, ฝรั่ง, means a white Westerner, and it shows in how everyone else is treated. South Asian and African visitors are treated differently, and not better. So are the migrant workers from Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos who make up more than a tenth of our labour force (article 40 The other foreigners). It’s real, it’s rarely said out loud, and it shouldn’t take a foreigner to say it.

The one that’s nobody’s fault

Directness against saving face. It’s the obvious one, and it’s obvious because it’s real.

A foreigner who says plainly that a plan won’t work is being honest, and where they come from that is a courtesy: it saves time. A Thai colleague who says nothing, or says “it might be difficult”, is protecting the relationship, and here that is a courtesy too: it saves face. Both are reasonable. Put them in one room and each reads the other as the problem, the foreigner as rude and the Thai as evasive.

And the cost falls on both sides. The foreigner loses weeks to problems nobody flagged. The Thai colleague absorbs a directness that lands like an attack, and sometimes sits through a meeting in which they were right and could not say so. Article 49 Kreng jai: the one rule underneath all the others argues that เกรงใจ has real costs for us too, and this is where they show. There’s no villain in it. There are two sensible systems with different defaults, and the cheapest fix is for each side to know the other’s.

Being the one who’s asked

Every Thai person who spends time around foreigners gets asked the same question sooner or later: was that rude?

It’s an odd seat. You’re being asked to answer for a whole country, and the country wouldn’t agree with itself: about the wai, about noise, about any of it. The honest answer is usually “it depends who saw it”.

So read this as one Thai’s answer, not the Thai answer. These are the ones I’d stand behind. Somebody else would give you a different list, and about their own corner of the country they’d be right.

Common misconceptions

“If nobody said anything, it was fine.” Silence is the normal response to something that registered. The things people correct you on are the things they have already decided to forgive.

“Thais are offended by the rules in the guides.” Mostly not. The guides list what gets corrected, and what gets corrected gets forgiven.

“ฝรั่ง is an insult.” Usually it’s just the word: it means a Westerner, and it is also the word for guava. It becomes an insult the way any word does, through tone.

“Thai politeness means Thais don’t judge.” Politeness governs what gets said, not what gets noticed.