she walks like a woman and talks like a man

Lo-lo-lo-lo-lola....

Gender roles are a little different here in Thailand than they are in the United States. Painted broadly, there are a lot of similarities and Thai culture could be seen as conservative in terms of gender equality.

For example, at the university, my female students defer to my male students. Before the first student concert I organized here, I asked the students what they'd like to wear. The men decided what they were going to wear, then told the women what they should wear! Being at the same time aghast and very concerned about my cultural sensitivity (because how big a deal is this, really?), I timidly asked the women if this was OK with them. They said yes.

But in other ways, women have just as much of a chance to succeed as men. For example, again at the university, there is a pretty good mix of women and men among both the farang and the Thai teachers. And this university, at least, I think things are actually better organized for family life (read: women not having to quit their jobs to have kids) than at some universities in the U.S.

All of this is just a preface, though, to what I really want to talk about, which are those little, day-to-day differences. They start with the language.

In English, we have one first-person pronoun for both sexes, but we differentiate male and female ("he" and "she") in the third person. We also have only one second-person pronoun, having done away even with the familiar "thou."

In Thai, though, things are different. Men and women speak differently about themselves. A woman might say,

"Di-chan choop ni nang-suu ka."

A man, on the other hand, would say,

"Pom choop ni nang-suu krup."

"Pom" and "Di-chan" would both translate in English as "I." "Krup and "ka" wouldn't translate at all--they're polite words that get tacked on to the ends of things, and they vary by sex. The rest of the sentence is inane, like most of the things I say in Thai: "I like this book."

But to talk about someone else, in English we've got to know what sex the person is:

"He likes this book." "She likes this book."

In Thai, both of these sentences translate to

"Kao choop ni nang-suu (ka/krup)." (The word at the end still varies with the sex of the speaker.)

I won't get into Thai second-person pronouns, except to say that there are a lot of them, that they vary according to the status of the speaker and the listener, and that (thankfully) there is one that is always appropriate for conversations between farang and Thais.

Anyway, the lack of differentiation for other people means that Thai people, even those who speak very good English, sometimes get tripped up on "he" and "she." "Mr.," "Ms./Mrs./Miss," "Sir," and "ma'am" also all translate to the same word in Thai: "Khun," which also means "you" and is the second-person pronoun used by farang. This means that when Thai people speak English, titles like the ones I've listed get confused. Everybody is "sir." Everybody is "Mr."

There are also some differences in what is considered to be socially acceptable behavior.

In Bangkok you'll see teenage couples holding hands, but this is a new trend and is still considered to be a little trashy. What's completely acceptable, though, is same-sex friends holding hands or walking with their arms around each other. Imagine two teenage boys walking down the street with their arms around each other in the United States! "Friends" isn't the assumption we'd make.

There is also a much wider range of adornments and tchotchkes acceptable for Thai boys and men than to Americans. It's not unheard of to see male students at the university wearing makeup, for example. Thai men aren't afraid of the color pink, or of cute little cartoon characters: one of my male students wears a huge Hello Kitty watch, and many of them carry pink pencils with little charms dangling from the ends. And while it's not so uncommon for American men to have long hair, their range is styling options is very limited compared to Thai men. Thai men wear plastic hair bands, barrettes, ponytails, pigtails, French braids; essentially all of the styles that women use to keep long hair out of their faces are available to men as well. And this is just for regular guys.

Going a little farther are the katoey ("ladyboys"). These are men who dress like women. Shaved legs, tiny little miniskirts, lots of makeup. And at least to my farang eyes, they're a lot better at it than American drag queens. For one thing, it's a wardrobe choice and not theater (though they have that here too), so there's nothing over the top. A katoey and his female friends will look very much the same. Also, again to my farang eyes, there's less difference to make up in terms of body shape between Thai men and Thai women than there is between American men and American women. More than once I've been surprised by the deep voice that comes out of who I thought was a teenage girl.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, though--after all, the Thai language teaches us that others' (people we'd talk about in the third person) gender is none of our business, and that it's our job to articulate our own.