It's actually not that simple

“Chike, who will you vote for?” Ajahn Benjamai asked me.

I looked up from my desk in the foreign language office at Warin Chamrab school. I had been teaching English there for about one week and it was day before the U.S. presidential election. All the foreign language teachers had a desk in that office along with Ajahn Benjamai. She was an older woman who taught social studies at the school and no one had ever explained to me why her desk was in the foreign language but there she was asking me who I was going to vote for. I looked up from my computer to meet her eyes, which lay behind thick glasses. It gave her the look of an owl, old, wise and all seeing. When the department had taken me out for dinner the week before to welcome, they told me to call her grandmother.

“Who will you vote for?” She asked again.

Now like most kids in the United States, my parents told to never discuss two things in public, particularly when you were around new people: religion and politics. Over my six weeks in Thailand thus far, that norm had gone out the window because this was at least the sixth time I had been asked. My sensibilities were just catching up. I told my colleague whom I had voted for and she smiled.

“So if he gets the most votes, he will be the president.” She said.

Now the farang in me that was absolutely unconfident in their Thai wanted to let this oversimplification of the complicated US electoral system pass. There’s no way I’m gonna be able to explain this. There are Americans who don’t understand and we speak the same language. This thought had come into my mind many times in many conversations with many Thais. The conversation would go to a question that I believed I did not have the Thai to completely answer. So instead of attempting, I would answer with something much simpler but that did not totally answer the question. Anything to get my interlocutor and I steered away from that potential ditch of misunderstanding. However, this time the political science major in me overwhelmed the farang.

“It’s not actually that simple…” I said.

Ajahn Benjamai’s owl eyes looked at me quizzically. OK, smart guy. Go ahead and explain the electoral college to this person who does not speak much English when I at the same time you do not speak much Thai.

Suddenly a thought entered in my head. I motioned for Ajahn to follow me and we headed over to one of the computers. I brought up a website that I knew and showed it to her. The website showed a map of the United States with each state colored red or blue for Democrat or Republican depended on who the polls said was going to win the state. The map also labeled each state with their number of electoral votes. And it was here I began. I explained that it was the person who won the most states who won the presidency. It was like a game, each state was worth a certain number of points. The bigger the state, the more points you get. Winning California was better than winning Rhode Island. Whoever got to 270 “points” first would become the president. I looked at Ajahn Benjamai to see if she understood. I sighed imperceptibly as I watched her nod. The ditch of misunderstanding had been averted but not by getting off the conversational road which is the easy way out which I had taken too many times in Thailand. Rather the ditch was averted by sticking with the conversation even if the way forward was unsure. Victories come in all sizes and this one was mine.