Kicking It Off

If you had asked me four years ago what I thought I would be doing after college with my 120 thousand dollar education, the last thing I would have said was living back at home with my parents, unemployed in Bangkok. Yes I feel like a degenerate. But luckily my brother set the president by doing the same thing three years before me.

In certain respects, I think my parents actually wanted it to happen this way. They had three children, all of whom went to Ivy League schools and all of whom ended up unemployed and living at home after college. It's hard for me to believe that that's just a coincidence.

My older brother, the eldest child in the family, moved back to Bangkok to become a jazz saxophonist. I know Bangkok doesn't seem like the most obvious place to try to break into the jazz scene, but with my parents living here, food and housing were free and that meant my brother could spend 8 hours a day practicing instead of working a 9 to 5 job. Surprisingly enough he was also able to find a an excellent teacher - a Russian trumpet player who studied classical music growing up but switched to jazz in conservatory.

The deal my parents made with my brother was that they would let him live at home and pay for his food if he was willing to work to pay for his saxophone lessons. So my brother started teaching English to college age Thais at a language school down the street. They payed him 200 baht an hour, and asked him to start teaching the same day he applied.

He began his first class by asking everyone to introduce themselves. In Thailand everyone has a nickname in addition to the name their parents give them, and in Bangkok the nicknames are usually monosyllabic words chosen carefully from the English language. One of my brother's students was named Pump. My brother, who had never lived in Thailand (he started college the same year my family moved to Bangkok), was somewhat surprised by the name and inquired how it had been selected. In broken English Pump explained that his parents, just around the time when he was born, were planning to invest their savings in a chain of gas stations and decided to nickname him, their first son, Pump, as in gasoline pump, because they thought it would bring good luck to their new business. The deal fell through, and his parents never owned any gas stations, but 18 years later Pump still went by Pump and still introduced himself that way to everyone he met.

For an entire year, at 200 baht an hour, my brother taught Pump, Chain, Ink and a whole cohort of other strange nouns how to speak English, and unless I find a job in the next three weeks it is very likely that I'll be following in his footsteps.