Chiang Mai (Northern Thailand) Tourist Guide


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Fact and Fiction

Text : Martha Berner
Images : Apirak

Quick change!

In 2002, a young backpacker came to Southeast Asia and spent about a week in Chiang Mai. It wasn’t love at first sight and the young traveler carried on. But unbeknownst to the twenty-eight-year-old Brit, fate had different plans. Chiang Mai was in fact destined to be his home, but “as the crow flies” was not the sort of path to take him there.

Matt’s Yoxall is a teacher. But not the kind you’d find putting together a high school play or the village Christmas pageant. He’s a teacher of a different sort, altogether. After a disappointing stint in South Korea teaching English and training home tutors, young Yoxall took a position in Phnom Penh teaching community theater. “I ended up staying in Cambodia for about a year in the end, doing various types of drama projects. But mainly I was working with children in shelters who had been victims of trafficking. After about a year of that I ended up in Bangkok.”

“It’s [drama] a wonderful teaching tool, particularly if people can’t read and write. You can use drama and participatory activities to build people’s confidence and encourage them to share their thoughts and their feelings, and ideas and their experiences, but also to learn new information, new skills - and perhaps change people’s attitudes at the same time. So, I have these four very simple key concepts I work with. One is working together as a group. The second is building confidence. The third is developing trust. And the fourth is communicating and sharing ideas. I think if you can do all of those four things in any project, in any team, in any training room, in any outreach program that your doing, if you can pay attention to those things [four concepts] and enable them to happen, that is great. They’re also absolutely fundamental in terms of building relationships with one another. And I think that that is the most equalizing property about drama - that it does enable us to build relationships with each other, even when we can’t speak a language. You can absolutely know that you can trust somebody in the present moment when they’re leading you around the room with your eyes closed, because you can feel that you can trust them. And it doesn’t matter that you come from different countries, or different parts of a country, or different factions of different political groups, or whatever. Just for a moment, you become present. And drama and performance, that’s what it’s all about – it’s the act of being present in the moment. Somehow it makes us awake, it opens our eyes in a way that perhaps in normal life our eyes … they stay partially shut. Everything becomes dilated, and clearer as a result.”

Matt has had the opportunity to apply these principles, not only in Thailand and Cambodia, but also in Laos, and in trainings and dramas used to help prepare refugees for resettlement. “I was asked to make a theater project with some actors from the refugee camp; to make a piece of theater about a Karen family moving to America and using it as a way to give information about what it might be like and what the system is and what people could expect to happen; and what they might not expect to happen. We used it as a way to help people consider coping strategies and their cultural identity, and what makes them strong and what’s important to them, before they leave. And [consider] perhaps what the community needed to celebrate together before this sort of great departure of all these people.”

But it was during his work in Bangkok that Matt returned to Chiang Mai to conduct drama training for about thirty social workers at the Queen Sirikit Botanical Garden resort. “In that time I started to realize that there were lots of things in Chiang Mai that I was perhaps looking for. And I loved living in Bangkok but it was very expensive. And I was thinking about staying here long term and I was starting to think about, ‘Well, maybe I need to try and find somewhere to live more permanently.’”

Fate began to unveil her master plan. “About that time I met my partner. I met him in Bangkok. The day I met him I said ‘Where are you from?’ and he said, ‘Oh, I’m from Chiang Mai.’ And, I knew immediately that I was leaving [Bangkok]. So within three months I was moving and I was living with his family, initially, while we looked for a place to live. I went into a coffee shop and I asked a girl, ‘If you were young and creative and you lived in Chiang Mai, where would you choose to live?’ And she circled two places on a map. One was Wat Umong and the other one was Wat Rampoeng. So I just came over here in a tuk tuk one day and walked around and I knew that I had found the place that I wanted to live for a really long time.

“There’s also something about Chiang Mai, it’s got its own identity. It’s got this beautiful sort of lovely, charming, Northern Thai persona that you still find when you go to the market. Everywhere I’ve lived [in Chiang Mai] I’ve been surrounded by it. With my neighbors as well, I’ve felt it. And the service you get here at times is very special. People do have a great capacity for nam jai, for kindness.”

At the age of twenty-three, Matt got his first tattoo. It was of the Japanese symbol for virtue and at the time was just the fashionable thing to do. But in the span of five years, as the transient continued to discover his own identity, the message that runs down the center of his spine reveals so much more than just dépêche mode.

“Essentially - because it’s the elements, and male and female, virtue, and it’s down the center of my spine - it’s about balance, and about harmony, in life, in the world. You know, you use your spine. That’s your center of gravity. It’s how you balance. And in performance, particularly if you learn different kinds of Asian dance performance forms, the position of your hips and your spine, your awareness of your spine, everything centers around that so it’s incredibly important.”

“So far, what I’ve found is that drama is very useful. I’d say more than anything, that’s what I think it is. Drama is useful.”