[SusanSazzios]

We recently had a discussion in the Thai Relationships area that touched on the issue of how Thai people and families deal with things that they find unacceptable. I don't want to focus on that particular issue, but I would like to share some thoughts based on my own rather limited experience of Thai people and Thai families.

One of wonderful things about Thai culture is the strength of the families. However, it is obvious that the families would not be this strong unless there was strong "cultural pressure" to "do the right thing" and ways of enforcing it when things go wrong. This pressure may not be particularly obvious to foreign visitors such as myself but it is there if you look carefully.

My perceptions, based on western experience, often make it difficult for me to work out what is really going on. I've personally witnessed conversations that on the surface seemed very polite and civilized (admittedly my grasp of Thai was not good enough to understand much of what was being said). Afterwards I learned that, in fact, one of the parties was quite annoyed and the other was deparately trying to apologise.

Now, my naive reaction to this would be "Oh, it's nice how polite these Thai people are, even when they are annoyed." But I think that reaction is based on my western perception. I suspect that a Thai person being "told off politely" actually feels roughly the same emotions as a western person being yelled at for messing up. I.e., shocked and dismayed.

Perhaps westerners are somewhere in the middle range. I've also had perception problems in
China, where I've witnessed exchanges that I thought were going to turn into fist fights, but turned out to be good-natured negotiation!

At either extreme, I think that it is perilous to use your own cultural perception of the body language and voice tone to try to understand the situation.