on cultural cringe
Uninformed and through a heatwave, I ask: Justified or baseless?
There was a heatwave today, so did the day before and the days to come. I couldn’t bother checking the forecast as numbers never prompted immediacy in me ever since high school mathematics (rest in peace, Ms. Anandhi). Instead, I decided to gauge the severity of our ‘global climate collapse’ by taking a shower — a first degree burn bordering on second degree if I so desire to adorn my amorphous blob of a body with blisters. At the mercy of my air conditioner, I groveled beneath, before it, of course, gave out. Nothing new. Nothing I’m not used to in my twenty two years of life. I suppose it is an essence of living in Thailand: If you’re not the one percent, you must, in a strange way, grow into a vegetative state of perpetual exhaustion as you tumble from inconvenience to inconvenience because it is easier to numb the fall than to make any change. I couldn’t help, but question: When doomers and climate activists describe the end of the world, do they know it might just happen here before anywhere else?
A soon-to-graduate friend from Imperial put her civil engineering degree to use over our annual convention. She tactfully posits over cold pizza that the only way the heatwave can be mitigated is through city-wide water sprays, then she chucked it off as an impossible daydream. “Nothing’s ever changing. The next forty years is pre-planned to never change,” she said. This would be my ‘last supper’ with her and her final pitstop in the land of sweltering heat before she is set to work in London for years to come. I couldn’t blame her. In my German class, I was paired with a well-kept thirty-something to ask her why she’s studying German. As a female-lover (not a feminist, just a faggot), I assumed she was going to land some high-powered deal for her firm or strengthen whatever bilateralism the land of ladyboys and ‘pseudoprogressivism’ have with the land of sausages and ‘neoprogressivism’. Her response was a swift and clean “I’m looking for a husband and a passport”. When it was her turn to ask, I said “I need a passport, spare me the husband”. This wasn’t far from a lie. Three years into medical school, I began to experience the claustrophobia of Thailand’s medical system — a minefield of red tapes, inefficiencies, and tendencies to avoid any iota of truth to sate any given superior. Before these three years, when I was questioned for my intentions in pursuing medicine, despite the potential detest from the affluent academic board, I stick whole-heartedly to my truth: Financial stability. Given my ‘unpredictable temperament’, my current advisor suggested I keep my options open (hence, why I aimlessly dabble in German). Through the heat, there is something droning in the background. Perhaps an innate need to get out if you’re not privileged enough to stay.
The term ‘cultural cringe’ was coined by A.A. Phillips in post-second-world-war Australia. It describes ‘an internalized inferiority complex that prompts people of a country to dismiss their own culture as inferior relative to other countries’. An experience I am inevitably guilty of at times and a burgeoning phenomena I have took note of constantly, but never articulated. Cultural cringe is primarily suspected to be due to an instilled colonial mentality — an explanation that is only relevant if you have been colonized. On the other hand, Thailand takes pride in its historical bravado as it has never been colonized (according to my loose memory of history class). Arguably, Thailand doesn’t have to be colonized to be subjected to the whims of colonialism when international relations is founded on colonial preconceptions (ie. the global north & the global south), but I will pretend this doesn’t exist today for the sake of my sanity, typing this out in an incinerator. If so, then what gives? Well, I believe it is simply due to an insufficiency of the glorious, chauvinistic, patriotic pride and an excess in shame that runs deep in Thai culture. Off the top of my half-functioning mind, I could not muster points in time where Thailand is recognized for its cultural fervor (maybe sex tourism, but that is for another article), yet I could recall with clarity moments of cultural shame: A prime minister who (1) is a real estate tycoon elected simply as a figurehead for greater political forces and (2) did not get the memo of what formal wear means, a labyrinthian medical system that prompts people to opt for private treatment that would bankrupt them than go through three public hospitals to appoint for ‘subsidized’ care a year later, a media industry predicated on pandering to Thailand’s queer majority by televising soft-core porn and exporting indistinguishable industry plants into the global talent arena, a military industrial complex so self-serious with its conscription and enforcement it has spawned generations of the fiercest divas and drag queens down the line. The list could go on. Point is, in my twenty two years of life, I have numbed the fall to the point of comatose, but if I may ask: when does the fall end?
Shame isn’t the only force behind cultural cringe when performative progressivism in politics and industry is right up there. Thai culture has always been more about virtue signaling than fostering any individualistic voice that may, god forbid, remotely resemble critical thinking or an ounce of transgressive originality. I can say this: When there is a constant need to perform to the world, you would rather starve and die on stage being perceived as a substantive actor than take five to think twice on why you’re doing it in the first place. When everything is a performance, I couldn’t help but cringe when it is bad. The recently semi-legalized bill for same-sex marriage spurred global perceptions towards Thailand as being the forefront of progressivism. Parsing through pop-up ads and redundant articles, I realized the bill was simply a few term changes on a marriage certificate to be ‘gender neutral’. Another instance was the overnight legalization of marijuana and the product lines with CBD launched by Thailand’s industrial monopoly, CP group, barely a week later. Yes, it appealed to folks below the middle-income line who needed to be sedated to soften the blows of their reality. And yes, elementary school children began hotboxing their rural school bathrooms (can’t be that bad since e-cigs and vapes are still illegal!). The election was allowed to appease the masses’ appetite for democracy, only for the seats of power to be ultimately filled by taxidermized staffers pre-plucked and pre-coordinated from the safety of secret meetings. The worst part about it all is not the emptiness of the acts, not how it sates the masses who is hooked on nothing but polarization, but how the acting couldn’t even earn anyone a single Razzie.
Loosely quoting Anna Khachiyan (most know her as a steadfast contrarian from Red Scare podcast, I just think she’s a really cool thirty-something): It is easy to blame others, it is less easy to cope and accept the truths of mundanity. As I walked through the busy metropolis of Bangkok, I saw an explosion of malls populated with big brands and heavily-modern cafés (think: beige walls, hipster light fixtures, sterile iron paneling detail over corner) replacing cheap local stores that have pre-dated me by centuries; I saw gentrification in action. The strange thing about this is there was no foreign force or outsider gentrifying these spaces. Thais were gentrifying themselves. If I was in a conducive mood, I could rationalize this with the great economic divide that seeks to persist. If I was being grossly reductive (as I am today), I would chalk it up to the innate cultural cringe in all of us — an intrinsic bias where we look towards richer cultures and countries with more affluence than our own, not born out of nefarious and bashful intensions, but born out of simply the desire for a better, more pristine and convenient life where one can learn to feel something and live rather than pre-occupying oneself with ‘numbing the fall’. Over a call with a long-time friend (political science degree, now modeling), she complains of the amount of documents needed for a visa to enter the UK, while lamenting over how nice it must feel to not have to be scrutinized and suspected to be some ‘lowly clandestine global south labor’ every time she has to travel anywhere. Back in German class, I asked my partner if she felt selfish or was shamed for her decision in securing herself security in the form of a husband and a passport. She said “Why would you ever be ashamed or shamed of wanting a better life? Who doesn’t want a better life?”. I guess the grass could be greener on our side if we all stopped using organophosphates, but why stop when (1) it’s all we’ve been doing for god knows how long and (2) you could just look towards the prospects of a greater green across the globe.
A.A. Phillips was right about cultural cringe being an ‘internalized inferiority complex’ as there could be no perception of a greater quality of life if there is no perception of a horrible quality of life. As Thais seek to exit for a greater promise, they willingly or passively sacrifice their culture as the expense of absorbing the new. All in all, there’s much to be said, but not much to be done. In the midst of heat, I find that there is a strange, selfish, and innate justification for cultural cringe. An undeniable pull towards things of convenience and great promise at the expense of one’s perception of insufficiency. Regardless of whether it is a justified argument or baseless impulse, cultural cringe is a manifestation of cope.
My thoughts jumbled from the heat, I cool myself down reading my friend’s poetry:
.As I look out my window, pushing an ice cube around my mouth, I still think we could all rot in the sun no matter where we are.