STOP TEEN MOM. The billboard screamed at me not far from the Bang Na intersection as I drove home one evening. Accompanying the billboard was a sketch of a pregnant lady in a red circle with a slash right through her belly.
The word “teen” emanated from her belly too, just in case I wasn’t aware from the silhouette that the woman in question was a teenager. I nearly swerved.
That would have been a tragic thing to do, since there was a gaggle of international school students crossing the road in front of me at the time, and I would have knocked the cigarettes right out of their innocent teen hands had I crashed into them. Those butts could have ignited my fuel tank and god knows what damage that may have done to my car.
But back to the sign. I was intrigued, and not just because it was a case of déjà vu, which I will explain to you a little further into this column.
STOP TEEN MOM.
My first thought was: Why? What did she do?
My mind immediately went to Ma Barker, the gun-toting American gangster from early last century who with her four sons cut a swathe of violence through the American Midwest before being shot down herself by the FBI. Who is this Teen Mom we must stop at all costs and what has she done?
Do we need to stop her children too? I had a good mind to call the Bang Na cops to see if I could be of any help in tracking her down.
Thank goodness I didn’t. That night I did some checking on the net. It is a campaign to reduce teenage pregnancy run by a group called the “Funds For The Prevention Of Unplaned (sic) Pregnancy,” which makes me assume pregnancy once on board a plane is permitted.
What a timely campaign. Nothing stops a bright future more in its tracks than an unplanned pregnancy, and I congratulate the effort to reduce its incidence. I just wish they’d called me before printing up those big posters that presented such a hazard to jaywalking international school students.
Thais, for all their friendliness and good manners, have an allergy to plural nouns. This was cute in the past, but not any longer. Failure to add an S to MOM not only changes the entire meaning of the campaign, but would have put egg all over my face had I indeed called the Bang Na police that evening offering my assistance.
(And what’s it in English for anyway? Are they targeting foreign pregnant teenagers? As if the authorities here could care about them!)
Something big is going to happen to Thailand in exactly 355 days’ time; on Dec 31, 2015, this country is going to join hands with nine others in the region and form the Asean Economic Community, whereby borders will come down both economically and socially. And the official language of communication for the AEC is English.
This should not be a major problem for Thailand, providing it makes English a priority, rather than the millstone it is perceived to be now.
Every Thai student knows how to say “hello” in the 10 different languages of the Asean countries, as well as recite interesting facts and figures such as populations, flag colours and national flowers. It’s almost as if we are skirting around the elephant, not the Teen Mom, in the room, which is the country needs to get good at English.
We don’t want to look silly in the eyes of those other nine nations, do we? With the AEC’s impending arrival it means Thailand has exactly 355 days to cease and desist with signs like STOP TEEN MOM and start thinking a little more along the lines of NO MORE TEEN PREGNANCIES or, if PREGNANCIES is too long a word, NO MORE TEEN MOMS.
I don’t mean to be flippant, but the gaping chasm between STOP TEEN MOM and NO MORE TEEN MOMS doesn’t have to be a chasm at all. It can be a mere stepping stone — if we employ a little common sense, not to mention native English speakers.
Oh, I have other quibbles about the campaign, such as the fact it targets mothers and features no circle and red slash through the fathers, as if the girls are to blame.
One way to stop teen pregnancies is to stop boys having sex with girls, but this is as likely to happen as happiness is likely to be returned to the Thai people before the next election. If we really want to stamp out unwanted pregnancies, we need to teach Thai kids what to do to stop getting pregnant; namely, how to put on, or demand someone put on, a condom.
And that, it appears, is what the STOP TEEN MOM campaign is really all about. It is a sex education campaign in schools. See? It is very beneficial after all! Why ruin it with poor English?
The sign did bring back memories of a New Year holiday I celebrated almost two decades ago in Railay Bay, Krabi.
Back then Railay was the domain of backpackers and shoestring world travellers, who by the way the friendly Thais refer to as “bird s**t foreigners” (farang khee nok) in a disparaging albeit quiet voice. There was only one five-star resort and the rest of the place was scattered with two-star hotels and bars made out of bamboo and other flammables.
I was staying in one such two-star establishment. One morning I woke up, threw some water on my face, brushed my teeth and stumbled out of my thatched hut on a quest to meet Mary, of the bloodied type, to kick-start my day.
A short while down the track I came across the most peculiar drinking hole.
Outside an otherwise indistinguishable makeshift bar was a big neon sign with a red circle and a line through it, exactly like the STOP TEEN MOM one that would so startle me and threaten the lives of that gaggle of Benson & Hedges kids two decades later. Because inside that red slashed circle was a pregnant lady.
There was no accompanying name either in English or Thai. I hereby dubbed it the No Pregnant Ladies Bar … but why? Why were pregnant ladies not allowed? Had misogyny arrived at Railay? Was it a lesbian bar?
It perplexed me for a good two or three days until finally, on my last night, I decided to go have a drink at the place.
The owner was a youngish Thai man with straggly long hair and eyes as red as my Bloody Mary. He wore a T-shirt with a giant green leaf on it. He spoke perfect English thanks to his five years of “Robin Hood” in the States, as he explained. When I asked him about the sign, his face went soft and ethereal.
“Oh man,” he said, waving his hands around like an Italian. “I was, like, flipping through a book of signs one day and saw it. I thought — oh wow, how beautiful!”
“The sign?”
“No, a pregnant lady! She’s carrying, like, a brand new life inside her! Is there anything more beautiful? It’s such a concept. A bar serving alcohol was no place for something that amazing, so I decided to make a copy of the sign and use it for my own bar! You know what I mean?”
At the time I nodded sagely, but figuring I was under the effects of alcohol, honestly I had no idea what he was talking about. Twenty years later, sober and writing this column, I still don’t. n
