in the Realm of Adolescence: 5 Thai Coming-of-Age Films

Jeab, receives word that his best friend from childhood, Noi-Naa is to be married While driving back to his hometown, the memories of his friendship with her come flooding back

A kind of film you keep coming back to no matter how old you get Beloved by generations of Thais for its memorable casts and pop culture references to early 80s rural Thailand 'My girl' is sweetly nostalgic through its portrayal an idyllic age of innocence and bonds of friendship shared between the protagonist and his childhood friends Not only revolve around the story of childhood, the film highlights common shared human experiences, from reenacting soaps you see on tv to the petty rivalry between girls and boys, somehow this is guaranteed to fill anyone’s heart. A complete classic and a great introduction to the genre.

2.

(The Tin Mine), 2005 Dir. Jira Maligool

A failed engineering student from Bangkok gets the unexpected education of a lifetime by working for four years in a remote tin mine in the south of Thailand .

Based on the autobiographical stories of Ajin Panjapan's time working in a mining camp in the Kapong District of Phang Nga Province from 1949 to 1953. Despite discussion of heavy topics, the film does so with tenderness via the beautiful cinematography, which captures a certain charm regardless of the seemingly endless downpours and laborious work. A ‘school of life’ approach to appreciating growth and change, the film brings to the table a lot of heart, a lot of humour and realistic portrayal of a young man's journey.

written by bambi thammongkol my girl (2003)

เวลาในขวดเเกว (Time in a Bottle), 1991

Dir. Anukul Jarotok, Prayoon Wongchuen, Amornsri Yensamran

The life story of Nat, Pom and Jom who walk and face ordinary life, one with family problems, social problems, love problems and political problems

An adaptation from the novel of the same name from the author Prapassorn Sevikul The film explores aspects of life beyond ourselves, people, environment and the movement around us, with all the themes you've come to expect from a coming-of-age: tackling teenage urges to love, to have a belief set, to resist, to mend the things around us Creating a larger than life story whilst still being smoothly digestible to family friendly demographics

4 Mary is happy, Mary is happy (2014)

Dir. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit

A teenage girl's Twitter postings reveal the story of her daily life and her new headmaster's attempt to squash her dream of creating a beautiful yearbook for the school.

Seamlessly combining intimate issues with those of the digital age, 'Mary is happy, Mary is happy' was created from 410 tweets from @marylony, an actual anonymous teenage girl. These tweets chronologically weave through Mary’s Journey as she navigates her senior year, confronting sudden changes and the struggles, confusion and fear of embracing adulthood. The concept is not a shallow gimmick but rather drives the story in a much more creative direction: the contemporary interaction between teens and a constructed online background. A unique and whimsical spin on the genre.

5. ผเสอเเละดอกไม (Butterfly and Flowers) , 1985

Dir.

Highlights the hardships faced by a boy who works selling popsicles at and later forced by economic circumstance to smuggle rice across the Thai-Malaysian border.

An odyssey of adventures embarked on both the metaphorical and literal train Huyan gets on as the film follows the thought of what it means to be good. The protagonist's internal ideas are challenged by the difficulty of his circumstances (political and economic); perhaps the name 'Butterfly and Flowers' reflects too optimistically. Nonetheless, within the journeys Huyan takes between the Thai-Malaysian border lays the beautiful scene of southern Thailand and the camaraderie built in the community through social and political hardships. A bittersweet and humane view on the coming-of-age experience and insight into a very difficult region in modern day Thailand, fraught with violent religious conflict between muslim and buddhist Thais.

lLately I've been having fever dreams. I’m not a person who has fever dreams; le, in any sense, but I was a sickly child. Not a great start the world's splitting in two outside my bedroom window. nal. Falling apart in the streets and inside my television otesting and white men prowling the red-lit alleys. I'm not At the peak of my life, and completely estranged. Like, protest to go to no one ever thinks to tell me. ddha amulet when I come to. My eyes fix on my feet. What arth muttering to me in a haze was just the shudder of the n the corner of our bedroom. It’s our bedroom, because not ere here together. Sleeping afternoons away in this room urniture shop. The geckos up in the teak paneled ceiling yes to say they sense the change.

t, I can’t remember anything about your face. I can’t face, not the kids from high school that I’d known all my I’d call, but now it’s over forever and they all seem so far g to all go to the beach and drink shitty beer. Our whole bians. I love them but fuck them all. Especially the ones iversity after this miserable hot season is over. The worst re at my uncle’s isn’t even the work, or my uncle, or they all know this is all that I am. Miu, Thai-Chinese, known-known, shopkeeper or some other superficial thing awn me off to a slightly more enterprising Thai Chinese Miu since she was born”, says everyone.

“We expected that of her.”

There have been boys who have wanted to marry me. The ones from school. They'd make me so sick I'd think I had stomach ulcers. I hate all their mothers; I hate the frail, hungry kid that them competing with their commune of relatives makes them. The fucking enterprising. Maybe I have some internalised ill-will from all the things that the students say about us being 'bourgeoisie'. You'll hear that, but go to the other side and you'll hear the junta saying we're CCP plants. There's a whole Chinese Question. There's American propaganda about the Tai race puttering on down from China. Something about the Chinese oppressing Tais 300 million billion years ago and how if we let Mr. Nixon build his airbases in the Northeast we can show them how we got ours. I wish I could believe something. It’s so fun to pick sides.

In turn, there has only been one boy who I wanted back like that, but I’ve gone and made myself blue again. I take a drink of warm water with my legs over the bed and picture the Mekong flowing into Laos, then Vietnam. I picture her flowing softly for him. There are eyes in the jungle trees, but they hear my whispering carried on the languid June air. I’m asking you to be merciful. No, because he didn’t choose it for the wrong reasons. A mercenary for the money. Who wouldn’t want four times the wage you could get by ignoring the war and living your life like normal? Nothing is normal. Why are we still pretending?

My aunties always thought he was a bum though. A native, dark-skinned, motorcycle taxi bum, and they probably wish he’d die so he’d never come throw rocks at my window again. They preferred this boy whose family was in the ice business. That is, supplying ice.

Nat knew how to live. He was also a musician, and he’d play guitar for this pretty Cambodian girl with her silky, ink black hair done up in a beehive at this bar near Yaowarat. Lots of Thai kids in there, and some Americans on their 'rest and recreation' too. I really hope he doesn’t die. I wouldn’t want him to come back to me as an obsessed ghost. A violent death usually creates some spiritual hang-ups. Obsessed men are easy to stave off, but you have to deploy the monks to get rid of the dead ones.

I put my white skirt on again and comb my hair back in the mirror in time for my shift. The water tank must be boiling in the sun because the faucet doesn’t run cooler than my sweat. The flush in my face runs down over my collarbones and teases a rash across my chest. I shut the door behind me. The stuffy darkness lining the staircase to the showroom eats me and spits me out under the fluorescents on the shop floor.

The next hour or three pass me by unwaveringly. I end up with my head on the glass counter like usual, shop fan shuddering on swing. The place is creepy, but I get around that by not walking the aisles. We’re selling antiques. Real antiques with real dead people living in them. I don’t know what got into my uncle when he came up with this place. Nobody wants dead people things. You don’t know what kind of fucked up lives they lived. And now that my uncle has all their bad energy, he’s completely sealed the deal on being the family fuck-up too.

But the shop bell rings sharply through the neon drawl. When I look up, I feel something in me stop for a second. I pinch my nose, blink, and blink again.

“Afternoon.” this white guy says.

I only see them near hotels and brothels. Maybe sometimes buying heroin from taxi drivers. No, that’s only the kids, bored sons and daughters of American army officers, and he looked older. I usually understand situations quite well in my own way, but I couldn’t quite piece together a story about him in 3 seconds. White, overcast afternoon sunlight marries the sickly blue fluorescent shine, and mosquitos buzz in and out through the door left ajar. His hair was so yellow, I could see through it to the other side at the very top and tips where the sun hit.

“Why are you here?” I'm think maybe he'll ask for directions, but where is his driver? He's dressed far too office-like to not be busked around by an embassy-paid driver.

“Is this not a furniture shop?” He let the glass door shut and came very close to me at the counter, hands in his pockets and squinty eyes investigating me like we hadn’t paid our protection money yet this month. Was he trying to get at this funny tax thing uncle does that he tells me not to tell anyone? I felt like we were in trouble. I peered feverishly at the clock on the wall. I was truly in the no-man’s land of my shift.

I thought about how they have panic buttons in banks to signal when robbers come. My English is better than a lot of peoples, because I’m somewhat of a connoisseur when it comes to western films and music and all that, but I can't feel my feet now.

“I wanna look at some furniture.”

Silently, I gestured behind him. Permission to look is a bit much. I actually don’t really begin conversations with people when I don’t know how they’ll end. I don’t do it intentionally, rather I can’t get away from people who are all the same, and they can’t get away from me Not much has surprised me since I learned how to ride a bike That rush-feeling I can’t remember the last time I cried No, on the 20th anniversary of Rama, the 8th’s death I remember hollering through tears, I was crying so hard, but I still can’t even recall why I think it might’ve been the mass hysteria of it all Everyone in the room screaming

I sort of went away and let his outline blur against the mauvish-browns, let the shuddering shop fan soothe his mutterings He’s saying something he thinks deserves a girlish giggle, maybe Sometimes when you don’t see the joke, you can tell it was meant to be funny by the way people look at you The suffocating, expectant eyes Or if they think themselves comedians sometimes, after a pause, with an affected apathy

"I wanna get something um, deep and symbolic for my mom. What's this one mean?”

My eyes danced around the room while I did my penitentiary shuffle over to mommy's boy in the vice grip of his stare. “That’s a couch.”

“What’s the carving symbolize? What’s this symbol here mean in Chinese, or whatever?” “Something like, love and relaxation.” I bullshitted.

He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the horizon, where the furniture stopped, and the drywall was white in the long distance. “Yeah some bigshot at the embassy got stuff from here and now my dad wants something too, for dinne the edge of a cabinet.

“So, you..."

“Skipping school.”

He looks old to me, and I’m no he shopping. International school kid;

“You don’t know anyone in Bangko “No one wanted to skip. Hey, how c I shrug. I like to pretend it all just

“What’s your name?” His finger sto “Miu.”

“Jim.”

We looked at each other, and our f It beat having to explain hinges a really didn’t know what he would s

Jim

Over cereal we were talking abou summer, I’ve been taller than him that other political prostration sh don’t fuck with them the way I did that I would do. I don't have any o life. At least I got that motorbike wish Jake and Seb were here with m

So, when I skipped class today, I ju dump me off in Chinatown instead her hot mom, but from the way she to get her to start saying ‘No’ to m me back in, but I sort of needed so I was strolling in the morning glar beat road was this glass storefron something about one-upping his e just stand around and talk about embassy issued houses and pentho like performing. My parents’ friend suit looking them in the eye, makes them feel like the world’s not gone by them yet.

Anyways, daddy was self-flagellating in the kitchen the other day, saying “Well, why is it that Wiseman gets this rep at the embassy for throwing a good party? Why can’t we have nice, cultured, oriental furniture, Katherine? His wife goes to Chinatown She picks it out at Chinatown Come on, Kat What the hell do you do all day?”

I’m smiling to myself and my dart is burning down to my fingers I throw it down and crush it under my heel before I cross the street and push inside the store There’s this Thai chick napping at the register Glancing out, dust is dancing in the space, and no one’s around The world is empty, and she wakes up and looks at me This old fan blows her inky hair out of her tan visage, and 'hey' catches in my lungs right now. I’m trying to give myself a paper cut on her uncle’s business the money and that I'm not buying shit. When I got home mom tried to l, but all she could do was scream about how “Your dad has enough to ry herself down over the oven for so long I could picture her as Sylvia e time. Hot, burning tides all the time. edge-of-rainy-season season fuzz, but no monsoon, just thunderstorms end of the world. A gecko clicks in the corner of my blue room. There is mb out onto the fire escape in my boxers. My parents’ window is open, the humid blue dark. I don’t want to hear anything they’re saying. The for a moment more before I put on my headset and start a tape. Chet pecial guy like that. Not everyone’s so sentimental, I know. I can’t help ing to my legs. I try to think about something, but there’s nothing to teachers and what they think about me, girls and what they think about to anything. Doesn't change wherever you take yourself. The tropics when I realized I was stuck with the same fifty people. We're like freeer. A city is so small when you can't go see a fucking ball game. So, I’m s some time. ore and more, it makes sense why every other embassy wife is dope sick.

I barely remember the words, but what's burned in is how it felt to just say something to someone I didn’t know again. Her english was bizarre good. Hanging over everything were these sad, black, malingering eyes, and I got kind of lost standing there in the void wondering what she was thinking about me. You look in the eyes of so many Thai people and not feel bothered about whether they're really there. Why would you be, when we're not even on the same planet? Not a word we can say to each other after "Hello". What's the point? She talked to me like she hated me a little, and I really liked her more than I’ve ever liked a Thai. She real person.