Sharing A Smile On The Train To Isaan

I have shared this story before but it’s long been a favorite of mine, along with the photo of the boy in it. Here it is in a revised form:

On my very first trip to Thailand I took a butt-numbing 10-hour train ride from Bangkok to the far Northeastern part of the country to visit a pen-pal I’d been communicating with for about four months. After emailing and chatting online with him I’d convinced myself I’d be fine in what I’d imagined were The Wilds if I could just stay on the train and look for him when I arrived in Udon Thani. As is often the case my fears were groundless and the trip – while somewhat tedious for a person too spooked to leave his seat other than to pee a couple of times – was a fine story in itself that I’ll post another time.

On the train with me that day was a couple in their mid-twenties, their female friend and their six-year-old son, seated across the aisle from his parents, three rows ahead of me in our second-class car. Halfway through the trip the father took his son to the toilet, and when the returned to our car the little tyke came back sobbing.

As close as I could figure out he’d gotten his hand pinched in one of the sliding doors coming back and was obviously hurting and unhappy. He’d been so good the first four or five hours of our journey – without the usual bag of junk you see kids at home traveling with – that I tried to think if there wasn’t something I had along with me that would entertain him. Suddenly I remembered that I still had one of the small, rainbow colored beanbag teddy bears I’d brought from home as gifts for a few of my new Thai friends. One friend was adamant that he could never take it home without having to explain more about his personal life than he wanted to, so I still had his with me in the suitcase, riding in the netting above my seat. I took the bag down and dug around until I found the extra one and took it up to him.

At first he shrank down into his chair, naturally overwhelmed by my size and foreign look, but after I smiled and danced the bear around some I sat it down on the edge of the seat next to him and backed away a bit. He finally picked it up and hugged it to him with a shy smile. His mother and father acted so surprised that I as a “newbie” to the country and culture worried briefly I’d overstepped a social line, but I soon understood they were just good people, pleased that their boy was happy and occupied. They remained seated but both bowed and “wai”-ed me, and the woman kept saying “kup koon kah, kup koon kah!” which is the female way to say “thank you” in Thai.

A few minutes after I went back to my spot three rows behind his he began peeking up over his seat, doing a little puppet-type show with the bear and playing peek-a-boo with me, laughing and smiling. When I got the camera out a little while later and took a couple of pictures he giggled and laughed, and when I actually went back up and showed him himself on the viewing screen he was just as tickled as a kid would be most anywhere else in the world, as were his parents. We couldn’t really chat, but we could all smile and share in his excitement. It was the first of many reminders that trip that a smile is indeed the universal language.