I spent three happy
years teaching pretty girls at Chiengmai University. It was a tough
job but someone has to stand on the "cutting edge of freedom."
The university was taking "extra" students and we were
paid under the table a little extra for teaching those students.
I bought a motorcycle with that money and explored every road in
Northern Thailand.
Hugh Leong and I and others met often and ate in open-air restaurants
in town (the university is located out of town, at the base of a
mountain).
Between the second and third year I went home to Boston traveling
with Hugh by way of Katmandu, New Delhi, Rome, and London. Returning
the other way, I visited Bart and Alina Butler and Skip Myner. Skip's
cabin in the mountains was not in range of mass communications and
I forgot about Daylight savings. When I arrived at the airport I
had two minutes to get on the airplane (whew!). On the way back
across the Pacific I stopped in Tokyo for 24 hours.
After that, not wanting to go home, I went to Laos (JFK pronounced
Laos to rhyme with Chaos---rightly so, perhaps) where I got a job
teaching English with IVS (International Volunteer Services) in
Vientiane. My high school French did not get me very far at the
College Technique, but fortunately Lao resembles Northern Thai and
I was able to pick up the language quickly. Two years of good times
followed. Laos was a strange place in the 70's. Both Noam Chomsky
and David Duke were there---at different times. It was officially
a neutral country because of some Geneva Agreement in the 50's so
there were oodles of embassies with officers with nothing to do
but eat in restaurants, so there were lots of good, cheap restaurants.
I ate every meal out for two years. One restaurant was run by Air
America (didn't Mel Gibson appear in a movie by that name?), which
was the CIAs airline. It supplied most of Laos with rice at that
time and ran "milk runs" between Lao cities and US bases
in Thailand.
Because I had a DoD ID card (why, I don't know---IVS was a contract
agency of the State Department), I could fly on Air America for
free. One day I needed tennis balls, so I went to airport, listed
for the flight to Udorn, got on the plane without a passport or
passing thru immigration, flew to Thailand, went to the base supermarket,
bought my tennis balls, had lunch, got back on the plane, and flew
back to Laos. Such was life in that part of the world. I could tell
you more stories but not in writing.
After leaving Laos (about 1974), I went to the University of Hawaii
and did an MA in TESL. As part of that degree I had to study a language
I had not studied before, so I chose Chinese, thinking I might go
to China. At that time, however, China was in political turmoil
so it was impossible. I was sort of in limbo and the bar was getting
lower (like that mixed metaphor?), and when an offer of a job in
Japan came thru the grapevine, I took it. I sold my car, rented
my apartment, dumped most of my property and was on a plane in two
weeks.
