I AM A COFFEE ADDICT. Ever since I was introduced to coffee I have never bee able to live a full day without it. Well, I can, but I wouldn't want to. Thailand in the 80s and 90s where I grew up, coffee had yet to be a big part of Thai society's cultural life. My father, for example, also brewed a flask of tea for himself to take to work.
He would consume the entire flask (also known as, a hot water thermos) bit by bit through out the day (the flask he used was one of those that the cap of which also worked as a cup). In my vivid childhood memory, he always returned home with an empty flask. The habit of consuming tea made the world goes round for him. He was a hardworking man, and he was obsessed with getting his work done.
He got up early, never late for work, spent all his time at his desk getting his job done, took only little time to eat, returned home right afterwards and never went out to socialize, tucked in early in order to get ready for the next day. His work ethics (except the not going out to socialize part) have always been the model of my very own. Actually, I am not being very fair to my dad.
Maybe he liked to go out drinking with his friends, but because he's married and had two kids to take care of, he could only have so much fun with his friends. My father was not perfect, but he was a role model for me and for many people who learned how to be determined, clear, and extremely frank to his own heart, in many ways, but his true essence was probably his honesty and dignity.
He honestly loved his job and he never allowed anything to get in the way, including the temptation of corruption. Drinking tea was my father's ritual, but I am sure the caffeine in the strong tea that he consumed (the brand was Three Horses, which is still available in any supermarket today) also played a role in his pathological addiction. In the 2000s, even after he had retired, he still brewed his own tea everyday.
He would brew a small pot and drink it at home since there was no need to go to work and therefore no need to make a flask of tea to carry with him. But whenever we got on the car, I could always get there would be a small flask of tea in the storage compartment between his seat and the shotgun seat.
As a child until when my father passed away a couple years after his retirement, I thought it was funny that every time we stopped in the traffic, he would ask me to pour him a cup of tea so that he could have a sip while waiting for the car to move. "Dad, drinking tea ain't gonna make the car go faster," I told him.
Although there's a small cup holder on the right hand side of the wheel, he always trusted me more to hold the cup for him when he had to operate the moving car. The aroma and the light smoke that came out of the top of the tubular flask was the evidence that the tea he drank was always hot.
I didn't like tea that much because as a child growing up in Thailand during the era of global imperialism, I was completely obsessed with the "cool beverages" such as soda water and carbonated lemonade which were always served cold. So, the thought of consuming the very hot water didn't even cross my mind. That said, whenever my father asked me to pour a cup for him, I couldn't resist having a sip. It's also our ritual. It is also something that bond us father and son.
What makes my father such a great father isn't just his unconditional love for s family, but his true devotion to create a better environment for his children - the one that would be much much much better than what he has to live in as a child. This was the stance that both of my parents never once disagreed about. They both loved me and my brother so much that they'd do everything to make sure that we wouldn't have to build everything from scratch.
My father's childhood life, as he told me, wasn't all that painful, but he knew, from the deepest part of his heart, that he could be in a much better place had he been provided with better schooling and constructive guidance from someone who really knew how it's to be a Thai citizen. I wholehearted believe that he had done a great job for himself.
It's almost unimaginable that a son of an uneducated Chinese migrant who would barely spoke Thai could hold one of the most important posts in the Thai government. It took him decades to arrive at his place in the government, and I am sure tea was a part of it. I never understood why my father liked tea that much, but he was not the only one.
Coffee culture came to Thailand, I believe, with the rise of hyper-corporatism such as the arrival of many international chain cafes (i.e., Starbucks) in the early 2000s. I left Thailand in the late 1990s, and whatever happened during the last few years of millennium was pretty much what made me an outsider to Thai culture when I returned. Thai culture had, always been in a large part influenced by the culture of South China from which most of the Chinese immigrants who later neutralized as Thai citizens came.
Both of my father's and mother's families came from that part of China. Therefore, coffee, then, was petty much a quick fix rather than a beverage to be enjoyed (the same way my father enjoyed his tea). Like Japan, there is an impression that coffee is a highly industrious drink that could get you up in the morning, put you to work long-hour, and give you the "push" that you need to get you to arrive at the very end of the production line.
I am sure some of those are psychological but the undeniable fact here is that coffee does have the substance that makes our heart beat and our blood flow. So, every time my father needed to stay awake (sometimes to work, sometimes to watch a soccer match) he would resort to the infamous "instant coffee," which, I thought, tasted awful. It's bitter, first of all, and it didn't have the aroma (of brewed coffee, which I later felt in love with).
Maybe it was that reason, that 99% of coffee available in Thailand when I was growing up was all instant coffee, I never liked drinking it. In fact, there's also a saying that "coffee is not for kids; it is only for adults," for reasons that I haven't seemed to be able to figure out, there wasn't even a small little space in my heart for the beverage that decades after would become something that I can't live without.
When I was in architecture school in Thailand, I resorted to both canned coffee and Red Bull to keep myself awake at night. But to be honest, I never thought that any of them worked. I consumed them because they gave me the impression that they "might work." It could have been the case that my body was caffeine resistance, but whatever the reason was, all I always knew was that I could never resist sleeping.
While all my colleagues were working over night to get their projects done, almost always the case was that I would be in my bed sleeping like a log because I prioritized sleeping over getting my work done (and that coffee didn't really work on me). Laying my personal story out this way, I can't he but to feel that I have always indeed been an existentialist! So, if coffee doesn't help me getting up in the morning and be industrious, why do I like it?
Well, I like the taste of it. I also like the smell of it. Recently, there are research showing that the smell of coffee makes me happier and the taste of coffee makes us appreciate things around us more. Among many, there are also many scientific research that show the benefits of coffee. But really, apart from the taste, what do I like about it? Actually, I have been surprised by the fact that not many people have mentioned how coffee helps your stomach.
Yes, I consume coffee in the morning partly so that I would have a much easier time in the bathroom. I am not sure if this is just me, but a cup of morning coffee helps me a great deal in removing the night soil from my physical body (AKA, makes me shit well). I don't put crime in my coffee because I never like it. Only black coffee, or coffee with soy milk, works for me. I like my coffee also to be very hot.
Lately I just found out another way of making coffee called the cold brewed method. Basically, instead of using heat to brew, the method rely on the fully immersion of coffee ground in cold water for the full 24-hour circle. By doing so, not only the coffee becomes much less acid, but it also tastes much smoother.
All I have to do is to store the brewed coffee in the fridge and everything,e I want to drink it I just have to use about 1/3 of it in a cup mixed with hot water. If you haven't tried, I challenge you to:-) post Day 20: My Cousin, Or on Education Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 I have been observing my little cousin over the past few days that we'd gotten to spend time together. She came over to spend a couple of nights with us, during which we swam, exercised, went shopping, ate together, and so on. It's great to have these two days with her, which was mainly because her break coincided with my visit to Bangkok.
Because ever since she was born almost a decade ago, I have always been abroad. So, we only got to spend less than a month every year together during my summer and/or my winter holidays which I always returned home. This time, because we had spent so much time together, from the morning all the way to the evening when I tucked her in, I began to realize that there're so much I could learn about life from observing someone more than 23 years younger than me.
It's somewhat painful to observe her. I love her because I have seen her since she was zero-year-old, and that she has been a part of my life in the past decade. So, my "partiality" toward her is what makes me feel conflicted whenever I feel that I shouldn't be giving her the preferential treatment just because she's my cousin. But how can I not? She's my cousin! In a way, she represents an immature state of human being.
We were all like her when we were her age (well, maybe not everyone, but, in general). Needless to say, for someone so young in a family, she constantly receives all the attention from all of us. Both of her siblings are at least 13 years older than her. We're all helicopter family members to her, so to speak. I didn't have that privilege when I was young.
It's true that I called my parents from time to time, and thought of them also as my best friends on top of being my most revered role models, but when it came to decision-making I was left to do it alone. I did not grow up being hovered over by my parents suggesting to me what I should do. They were busy, and that was one of the reasons why they could not possibly be hovering over me.
The real reason, however, I believe, is that my parents themselves were raised as mature decision-makers, therefore they saw the true merit in urging me to make my own decision — and, more importantly, be responsible for the consequences of my own decision. Looking back, I feel that which is pretty tough for a young (and cute) boy!
Jokes aside, my parents were not hand-off, but they would help — and they did, countless times in fact — whenever they realized that I could no longer manage the situation by myself. But the lesson that I learned from being granted the complete freedom to make my own choice, and the complete responsibility to accept the mistake, admit the false, and come up with a way to solve my own problems when such decisions lead me astray, essentially made me an existentialist even before I knew of the term.
Back to my cousin again. Although all of our family members are now used to having this young little girl in the house with them, they still surrender to her drama whenever she wants it to portray her desire for us to buy her things.
Long story short, we have been incessantly and brutally spoiling her (and I truly believe that, as much as I love her almost to death, she wouldn't be spoiled at all if she's living with me full-time) and that my cousin is, by any standards, is a spoiled kid.
Again, back to my earlier point about the contradicting feeling that I have been having about whether or not I should love my cousin more than any other kids, or should I treat her as a special one because she's my cousin and that I know her more than I know other people.
This task is specially difficult for me since I am a teacher by profession, and therefore, on a daily basis, I encounter this sort of question regarding partiality: how shall I treat the students I know very well?
I wholeheartedly believe that my little cousin is, deeply, a kindhearted person because she has been growing up among and with us who love her, but the modern world has trained her to be calculating, to know which roles to play in which situation, and to use other people's sympathy to benefit her.
Not only is she interested in playing games that she know she would win, but she also, quite often in fact, tampers the rules of the games, or makes her own rules so that she could make sure that she would win. This is, somehow, human nature. We calculate, and we make moves that not only would benefit us materially, but also make us feel that we have figured out the way to get more from the labor that we've put into the process.
We strive to find a better way to live ourselves. Evolutionally, this makes us calculating mammals, who see cheating, tricking, and tampering the system not much as a sin, but a product of our own ingenuity — the same way we cherish those who know the rules so well and therefore could break them in style. My little cousin was not interested in winning per se, but in winning and taking all, and being able to bully those who lose.
I was like that too, to a degree, when I was her age because of my ignorance and because I didn't know much about sympathy. I surely would not want my little cousin to be like me (although there's so much I could do since I am not her parents). Growing up with the curious mindset, I wasn't the most incident kid in town neither, and I knew how painful it was to be dismissed, hated, and outcasted by my classmates.
My little cousin doesn't know what she wants in life yet, and therefore she's like a sponge who absorbs everything — to her, there's no difference between good and bad influence, as they're all things with the capacity to have an effect on her. Although I don't completely believe in John Locke's theory of "blank slate-ness," I seem to see his point her.
This "blank slate-ness" (latin, tabula rasa ) is the idea that babies are born as though they are completely, clean, blank, and empty plains with no preconditions, no preconceptions, and/or pre-destinations. They "become" what the parents make them become. I tend to go with the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius (mengzi) that we may not be born with a lot of ideas, but we definitely ain't blank slates.
According to Mencius, we're all born a set of "pre-ideas" about the world, which has been built into our system, our DNA, and our modular unit of being. Central to what is built into us, among other things, is the "sense of humanity," which includes the paradoxical presets of self-interest versus sympathy for others, the desire for to be powerful versus the desire to be modest and live just adequately but not beyond, and so on.
An enlightenment thinker such as Adam Smith has shown us that self-interest and sympathy for others don't have to always be staged at the two opposite sides of the ring, but can co-exist well under the pretext of the shared goal of "moral sentiments." The best way to turn our sympathy into something meaningful to the whole community is for all of us to work hard, and simply let the products of our labor compete fiercely in the market, which would not only give the consumers the chance to decide which is a superior product, but also drive down the price, which would benefit the underprivileged in the society as a whole.
In addition, this sense of self-interest is also about letting our goodwill materialize in forms of positive externalities to make the society a sympathetic terrain for human beings who have sentiments for each other, and for all. That is, what we're trying our best to do is to make sure that our offsprings chose what is right for them.
I once found myself arguing with my little cousin over something, and it all happened was simply because she wanted to show that she could "engage in an argument" with someone older. For instance, her response to my question "who do you think live in that house?" as I was pointing my hand at a house across the street which looked a bit different from where we lived was, "who do you think?
a dog, perhaps?" At first, it was interesting to see how her brain worked, but after a while, I got very annoyed, which was mainly because I thought we were having a conversation when we weren't. Without a real sense of collective goal, our independent monologue seemed utterly pointless. Surely, she was not interested in engaging in a conversation, but to show that she could come up with something to argue with me. I later found out that she didn't even come with those responses by herself.
She heard them on television, from her classmates, and from people on the street. This particular incident reminds me of so many conversations I have had with so many people.
Our conversations, though seemed fine on the surface, led us no where because while either one of us was hoping to arrive at some solutions of a problem we had agreed to be discussing, the other person's goal was usually something else: to prove the point that he/she knew things, to deliver a statement that he/she was capable of maintaining a long conversation (in the case of my cousin), and sometimes simply to make a point that he/she wanted to make with or without the pretext of the conversation (aren't these people so annoying?) The bottom line is, and this is how I have been living my life, I would never start a conversation with someone, let alone engaging in one, if I think we don't share the same collective goal.
It's a total waste of time. At the end of the day, the purpose of this post is to get myself to think about the role of education. The title of this post owes its origin to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile, Or On Education. My cousin follows her parents, her teachers, and whatever the media tell her. Because she's born in this generation, she's equipped with the knowledge of digital culture, information technology, and cutting- edge sensory understanding of the world around her.
The drawback of all of these is that, especially ever since her parents gave her a green light on using the computer and tablet at home whenever she pleases, her attention span has been observably truncated. Online informational pages, games, and electronic media are aiming at delivering the data (and usually with some forms of entertainment) using the least amount of time as possible, and by doing so they need to internationally leave out some core ideas, which could be very important, as they make things to complicated.
By the time the readers get to the core ideas, they would have lost their attention already. Online media, with its focus on arriving at the point they want to make as quick as possible, makes us feel that which are too complicated (when sometimes they aren't complicated at all, it's just that we need to see them, also, from a variety of perspectives to understand the clearer picture) are probably not worth reading.
There's been so many times that I encounter some negative comments on the internet made by people who have all the ability to understand complicated things, but make mindless comments simply because they lack the patience to think through using both of their emotional and reasoning sides of their brains. My cousin, born as a Generation-Z, is someone who can't spend more than a few minutes on one thing.
Constantly aroused by all forms of interactivities in the virtual reality provided to her by the massive spread of the internet, she feels the urge to want to move on to the next things once she finds out that what she is currently reading is too hard.
Although I have tried to read it with her to give her some good ideas so that she wouldn't think that the important contents that she's reading is too hard, once her mind has set on the impression that it's hard, she simply stops paying attention to anything — to me, to the information, and to everything around her.
On Duty