Sticky Rice

Snake Snake Fish Fish is an ongoing series based around Thai idioms/phrases/colloquialisms written about and illustrated by Cloé Fortier-King and guest contributors.

GUEST EDITION: This week, Teresa Derr is the contributing author/illustrator of the Snake Snake Fish Fish column

Teresa Derr, 134 YinD

I was sitting at the table, scrolling on my phone, absent-mindedly blowing on my som-tam to cool it off. My tongue had registered “Hot! Hot!” and sent those signals to my brain, and my soup-conditioned response automatically came out. It took me a minute before I realized what I was doing and why it wasn’t working: I was blowing on cold food. The heat my brain was registering was, of course, the spicy type of heat.

“Gin pet mai?” is the first question everyone has for you in Thailand. “Do you eat spicy food?” Now, in the States, my answer would be, “I can handle some spice.” It isn’t necessarily my favorite flavoring (because I’m a wimp about pain) but there are some dishes that aren’t complete without a bit of kick. When Thai people tell me food isn’t spicy, there’s a fifty-fifty chance that I’ll be smiling through tears as I tell them it is, in fact, a little spicy. I see Thai people reaching for the tissues and hear their sinuses clearing, but they still say it is “only a little spicy”. I’ll be honest, there’s some people that I don’t even want to know what it would take for them to think food is “very spicy”!

So, when I hear that fated question, I say “Gin pet dai nid noi” (only a very little spicy) – emphasis on the ‘nid’ being very important – and hope for the best. When I make som-tam (papaya salad – Isan’s signature food) with my family or coworkers, I ask for “preek met diaow!” (only one chili). When we get goiy-tiaow (noodles) to go, I hand over my spice packets to my sister. When I go out to eat with friends, I carefully pick all the chilis I see out of my food before eating. Still, even with all these precautions, there have been many meals that I have to stop eating before I’m quite full, simply because I cannot handle the heat. And any time that happens, or any time I stare at my sister in amazement at the amount of chili she is adding to her noodles, or gawk at the redness of a plate of som-tam, the most common phrase I hear is: “ถ้าไม่เผ็ด ไม่อร่อย” – taa mai pet, mai aroi. If food isn’t spicy, it isn’t delicious.

This mindset around food certainly explains to me why the Thai Scale of Spiciness starts so much higher than this American’s does. Food being delicious is obviously going to be important in any culture, but Thai culture (whose small talk revolves around what you eat) seems to place it higher on a list of priorities than American culture. Delicious meaning spicy means that Thai people start building their spice tolerance from a very young age – I’ve seen a five-year-old wolf down food that I could only handle a few bites of.

Of course, that same importance on food and deliciousness had everyone at site very concerned about my eating habits, especially when I told them I couldn’t handle spice quite as well as they could. For the first few months here, I ate kai jiaow (omelet) for at least one meal (if not two) a day because that is the first non-spicy (on my scale) food they can easily cook. Now, the people at site better understand how much spice I can handle, and when they prepare for lunches (at all my schools and อบต (SAO) we all eat together, sharing dishes of different types of food) there is always at least one less spicy dish that isn’t just kai jiaow so I can eat with them, which has made me feel so welcome – even when they also have me try the spicier dishes to build up my tolerance.

Who knows, maybe by the end of my service here, my stance on spicy foods will have changed. I’ve heard if you say something enough times, eventually you come to believe it – and I definitely tell everyone, when they watch me pant, chug water, blow on cold food, sniffle, and wipe tears of pain out of my eyes: “Pet – spicy! Aroi – delicious!”

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Read Teresa’s previous articles and contributions.