Talking Tiny In Thailand

The first thing I realized about giving a talk about tiny houses in Thai was that there is no word for trailer. They are simply not widely used in Thailand. If you want to haul something you have an array of trucks to choose from, but none of them are equipped to pull a trailer. An expat living in Thailand told me that if you want one say for a boat you have to have it custom built.

The occasion of this talk was a presentation I offered to give at the women's adobe building workshop I attend annually in Northern Thailand. And as the building instruction was given in both Thai and English to accommodate the Thai women attending as well as our mud hut sisters from Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Europe, Australia and North America I opted to give my talk in both Thai and English rather than have it translated by one of the instructors. This also served to keep my talk short I explained since my Thai was not as proficient as my English. Luckily I had plenty of pictures to use in my power point to show what I couldn't manage to describe. But no picture of a trailer so in the end I called the tiny house a car house. A house built with wheels like a vehicle.

To give my story context I opened the talk by showing pictures of houses in the Bay Area and talking about how very expensive they were, all of them a million dollars or more. And how much rents were. So post divorce I knew I could not find housing in my budget so had opted to buy a tiny house on wheels. The picture of said tiny house evoked a round of "aww" at how cute it was. Then I explained how I needed a place to build the interior and had had to ask my stepmother, who was living in the house of my deceased father, if I could bring it to what was now her house to work on it. In my Thai translation this part of the story took up a lot of space and I later realized I was telling my story of how a high born Thai person such as I was managed to become nearly homeless, but by virtue of my building skills had averted such an outcome. The fee for the other Thai women for the course was half what it was for foreigners. (Some had their fee waived altogether.) This allowed for women of all classes to attend including a woman from a hilltribe village and a lesbian couple from Northeastern Thailand. Two cousins living in Bangkok had family land they wanted to turn into a permaculture food forest and a third had been offered land to farm that belonged to a friend. They were curious as to why I kept repeating this course. The concept of finding one's tribe was not a quest for them as it was for me. Thai people are much more rooted in family and childhood friends.

They were also accustomed to living in small houses or living communally so the experience of moving into a tiny house was not nearly as compelling a story as it is for Americans. In fact I didn't even call it a "tiny" house. But to show the size of it I arranged the tables in the hall to outline the floor space. This also gave the presentation a special stage set. Nor was the off-grid aspect of it unusual. Because of the many street food vendors Thai people are very familiar with using chest freezers for keeping food cool as I do.

But most of the country now has flush toilets and septic systems so everybody was interested in the off grid composting toilet aspect of tiny house living. And as builders of houses made from mud and straw they were interested in the details. We were after all staying on a farm commune that was off grid where the flush toilets drained into a pit where the contents sat composting. And the toilet we used at the building site was just a board laid across a pit. So no one was squeamish about a homemade system. Nor was the concept of Bokashi composting new to them. In fact one of the families that lived on the farm was so enamored of the technique that they had named their daughter Bokashi. Still not even the instructors of the workshop had used Bokashi composting to dispose of poop. And this had prompted me to offer to make my presentation in the first place.

I also wanted them to know how hard it was to find a place to park the "car house" and how draconian the laws are in the states about housing size. I gave lots of information about how much things cost too since that is a universal measurement especially in Asia. Best of all my presentation made them all laugh throughout because I used a lot of pantomime to make up for my lack of words. And there are some words in Thai that really convey a sense of comfort and ease that resonated with my Thai audience, while my Western audience marveled at the minimalist aspects of it. It was one of the most fun presentations I've given.

(This post has been backdated to keep a record of the timeline. Actual date of writing is 12/23/18).