Transport Office and Cakes for Mongkhoot

Today I went to the Chiangmai Land Transport office to obtain a replacement for my "lost" car registration book and to pay the car tax due for the coming year. Mongkhoot, my wife — excluded from an office party and left to work alone at Chiangmai's Ministry of Justice — came home angry and frustrated. 

Two events that seemed ordinary enough at the time, but which, seen through the culture of Thailand, unfold very differently from the way a Westerner would read them — and which turned out to be anything but ordinary. The anthropologist in me watched both, and came to see that neither was really about events. Both were about culture. 

Both Transport Office and "Cakes for Mongkhoot" will be explained below. 

Transport Office  

I recently had my car repaired and I left the car registration book with the repairer at their request. They now deny ever having the book.

Making a police report and asking them to investigate and get my book back would have been pointless. The Thai repairer would have continued their denial. Most police officers, in my experience over 20 odd years living here, would side with the Thai. In motor vehicle accident disputes, for example, they'll favour the Thai against the foreigner.

It's not only expats that see this. Visitors notice that the police stop and fine foreign riders not wearing crash helmets but let Thais go on their way. As one officer privately explained to me at a party, "They may not have a licence and insurance. Unlikely to have money for the fine. It's easier for us to just let them ride on. And it's common in Thai culture to avoid conflict whenever we can. Loss of Face is also avoided. We stop foreigners because we know they have money."

With that in mind, I chose to tell Transport I had "lost" the book and just needed a replacement together with an insurance certificate for the coming year.

Why My Car Needed Repair

The repair took a month because of an accident I'll write about separately. For readability in this blog post, I'll briefly explain.

I was driving slowly on my side of the road when a motorcyclist crossed into my lane and hit the car, causing extensive damage.

The bike somersaulted into a ditch; the pillion passenger was thrown off and killed instantly.

Witnesses said it was the rider's fault, and my insurance assessor later produced CCTV footage that the police reluctantly had to accept — and only after they had spent a morning stalling.

The investigating officer failed to turn up for a scheduled appointment, apparently hoping I would simply go away.

What matters here is that the car was off the road for a month, which is why the tax and insurance had expired, and why the repairer had the car registration book. They never gave it back, and still deny ever having it to this day.

My Day Didn't Start Well

Although Thailand boasts a "one-stop" service for many transactions, the reality in practice is you should allow a full day to achieve what you want to do. I had intended to get to Transport as soon as they opened at 8.30am. But my day didn't start well. My road was blocked and I had to follow a diversion sign.

Luckily, there were several motorists facing the same dilemma. I simply followed them, assuming they were going in the same direction I wanted. (In Thailand, you'll usually find just ONE diversion sign. No repeater signs. You have to guess which roads to take.)

Arriving at the Transport Office

It was 9 o'clock when I arrived at Transport's information desk and explained what I needed to do. The officer gave me some forms to fill in. They were completely in Thai. I filled in those boxes where it was obvious what was needed. For the boxes where what was required wasn't obvious, I had to pass the forms back to her several times. After much toing and froing, I completed the forms.

She directed me to the section issuing compulsory car insurance. One person in front of me. Two minutes, and I had the certificate in my hands. 

This officer then sent me to a counter to get a queue number. There were 15 people ahead of me and processing was taking 4 minutes per person. I returned to the Information desk. She then sent me to get my insurance certificate. That took about 1 minute. No queue. No problem.

Armed with my insurance certificate, I returned to the Information desk, and she directs me to the counter to obtain my car registration book and pay my car tax for the coming year. 

 Big Problem She'd Given Me the Wrong Forms

The forms related to another vehicle, apparently registered in Chiang Rai. The officer said I'd have to go to Chiang Rai — a drive of 4 hours over mountain roads.

His female colleague then added that I also needed to go to the local amphur (government office) near the Transport office to get a yellow book proving where I live. She gave me the necessary form.

Neither officer suggested an alternative solution. I asked to speak to a manager. Her senior assistant confirmed I didn't require a yellow book, but would still need to go to Chiang Rai.

I was getting nowhere. I went to the car park, took my old tax disc from the windscreen, and showed them.

Their errors were now solved. The girl at the information desk had put the wrong car registration number on the forms. Both officers at the counter I was standing at had input that number on their screens.

They input the number from my old tax disc and my correct details were now shown.

No apology—and I was told I'd have to join the queue to begin the process of obtaining my book yet again. I refused and waited for the manager. And waited and waited.

Thinking Outside The Box

The only person who was "thinking outside the box" and with a solution-oriented attitude of mind was the lady who so efficiently gave me my insurance certificate. I decided to elicit her help.

She left her desk and came with me to the main counter. Within minutes, she told them I didn't need to queue again. This time, the manager came over and her staff produced my book in 10 minutes.

I had been in the building for 3 hours for a job that took 10 minutes.

A Complaint

There were now FIVE people at the desk dealing with issuing my new car registration book. Me, the manager, the lady from the Insurance company, the manager's senior assistant, and the officer who had initially told me I would have to go to to Chiang Rai. That officer was now looking very glum. His incompetence and non-cooperation was on display in front of the section manager. Face was being lost.

The female colleague who had insisted I obtain a yellow book at the amphur in which the Transport office was situated was nowhere to be seen.

The book wasn't needed anyway, and yellow books are issued only at the amphur  where one lives.

I told the manager I wanted to make a formal complaint. I mentioned referring the matter to head office in Bangkok.

The initial reaction was for the manager's senior staff to apologise: this wouldn't happen again, I was now free to go. In other words, let's all forget about complaining.

I had asked for the form for obtaining a yellow book, given me by the female officer, to be given to me as evidence for my complaint. She refused and threw it in the waste bin.

The young guy who had insisted on my joining a queue for a second time continued to look glum. He knew he'd persistently given me wrong information. He now had to organise, whether he wanted to or not, the printing of my new car registration book.

The manager retrieved the crumpled yellow book form from the waste bin. But, by this time, the girl had long since disappeared.

The manager agreed to follow up on the errors and attitudes of her staff. She invited me out to lunch next time I was in the building.

Some Observations on Thai Culture

The morning at the Transport office is, on the surface, a story of bureaucratic incompetence. But the anthropologist in me kept noticing something else: the way each failure was managed, deflected, or absorbed without anyone ever quite saying "I was wrong." Consider the moment the error was discovered. Two counter officers and the information desk girl had all been working from the same wrong registration number. Once the tax disc revealed the mistake, the correct details appeared instantly on their screens.

A Westerner might expect a brief acknowledgment: a "sorry about that," a "thank you for your patience." What I got was silence, followed by an instruction to rejoin the queue. The absence of an apology was not, I think, mere rudeness.

In Thai culture, an apology is a formal admission that Face has been lost—not just for the person apologising, but for the institution they represent. To say "I was wrong" is to hand the other party a weapon they may choose to use. Silence, and a swift redirection of the conversation toward the next procedural step, is the safer move. The same logic explains the female officer's reaction to my request for the yellow book form as evidence. She did not argue. She did not explain. She simply refused, and when I persisted, she threw the form in the bin.

To hand me that piece of paper would be to hand me a written record of her error—a material admission of fault. Better to make it disappear.

Of course, the manager later retrieved the crumpled form, which was itself a delicate manoeuvre: she could acknowledge the error without anyone having to apologise for it directly. The paper was evidence, but it was also a Face-saving prop that could be produced or discarded as the situation required.

This is not to say Thais never apologise. They do—but usually in ways that preserve Thailand's social fabric — implying the matter was not serious (mai pen rai), always ensuring nobody loses Face, and never be seen to be criticising someone higher in the hierarchy, your boss or an older person.

The manager's invitation to lunch is a perfect example. She did not say, "My staff were wrong, and I am sorry." She said, in effect, "I'll treat you to a lunch."

The lunch is an apology, but it is an apology that cannot be quoted, cannot be filed, cannot be referred to head office in Bangkok. It is a gesture that repairs the relationship without leaving a trace.

To a Westerner, this can feel like an evasion. To a Thai, it is a more complete repair than a formal apology, because it restores the relationship rather than merely assigning blame.

The young man who had insisted I rejoin the queue sat looking glum throughout the complaint. He knew he had given me wrong information—persistently, not just once. But he said nothing.

To challenge his colleague's earlier instructions, or to volunteer that he had been wrong, would have been to undermine that part of the Transport Department's section that dealt with registration books, and which was the responsibility of the manager.

That had to be protected for the good of the section, and the image of the whole Transport department. Indeed, in a wider sense, protecting Thailand's image.

His silence was not indifference. It was the behaviour of someone who has been trained, from childhood, to avoid direct confrontation and to let hierarchies absorb individual errors. The manager would handle it; that was her role.

There is also the matter of time. The people in the queue ahead of me waited an hour—gossiping, playing games on their phones, occasionally glancing at the counter but never visibly frustrated.

In Thailand, waiting is not experienced as a waste of time in the way it is in the West. The queue is a social space, not a void. To complain about the wait would be to treat time as something to be respected. Thais don't keep to schedules or timetables, they don't observe deadlines to complete a task. To do so would break the unwritten rule that time is your servant not your master. The Spanish concept of Mañana is rigourously followed in Thailand, though some would say with much less conviction.

Finally, there's the question of challenging a superior. That's simply never done in Thailand. 

None of this is meant as a criticism. The system worked, eventually — my book was produced, my tax paid, my complaint heard — after a fashion. But it worked in a way a Westerner struggles to read: through Face, through gesture, through the quiet deflection of error away from anyone in particular.

The three hours I spent in that building were not, from the Thai perspective, a failure of efficiency.

They were a successful performance of social equilibrium, in which no one lost Face, no one was blamed, and everyone went home with their dignity intact—except, perhaps, the foreigner who kept asking why no one would say sorry.

Cakes for Mongkhoot     

My wife, Mongkhoot, was angry and frustrated  when she came home from work today. As you've seen, I'd had a pretty disheartening time at the Transport office too. 

Mongkhoot works for the prison service section of the Ministry of Justice in Chiangmai, which controls all prisons in the province. She is currently holding down two jobs, hers and that of another government officer. When requested to go to a tambun at a local wat (temple) she refused.

She would have had to get up at 5am to travel to the wat, and her present heavy workload would not get lighter.

All other administration staff and other senior officers went to the tambun. Mongkhoot was working alone.

The rites would last just an hour or so, they would get a free meal, and be allowed to go home for the rest of the day.

I've attended such functions before. Few people listen or participate in the rites. They talk, gossip, and take selfies on their phones. They obtain merit just by turning up.

My wife worked as hard as she could but, because her colleagues were at the tambun or had gone home, there was nobody in the office she could contact to obtain the data she needed to complete her work.

So, why the reference to "Cakes for Mongkhoot".

A Colleague Brings Mongkhoot Cakes

My Thai wife was visibly angry, frustrated, and in a very bad mood. Annoyed because, through no fault of her own, she'd been unable to complete the tasks she had set herself. As everyone else was at the tambun, she couldn't get the data she needed. 

Then, just before she was about to leave for home, a friend she had always respected brought her some cakes and a soft drink.

Maw Ning, although a retired senior nurse who had been responsible for the medical care of all the junior prisoners in Chiangmai province, had been invited to the tambun. It was she who brought the cakes to Mongkhoot just before she left for home. 

A Change of Mood

What surprised me was how a gift of three cakes and a soft drink could remove the anger she had felt. However, I was pleased that the cakes had resulted in my not being the target of her previous pent-up anger.

This is a typical of how Thais, and others from the Far East, avoid losing Face and use displacement and scapegoating.

Here's recent example from a friend's post on Facebook.

Some Nasty Man Hit My Dog

I was surprised when I read on Suda's Facebook page, just under a picture of her son's pet:

"Some nasty man hit my dog"

She told me what had actually happened. Her husband had hit Lamyai for misbehaving. Whether it was appropriate or not is questionable. Shaking the dog immediately after the event and saying "no" in a firm voice would probably have been better.

But I now understood her comment on Facebook. She was blaming someone else and not criticising her husband.

It is the Thai way of taking out one's frustrations and anger without involving the person you are really annoyed with. You may notice it a great deal in Thailand.

A Thai person is not directing his venom against the person who has wronged him. He is letting him know what he really wants to tell him, if culture allowed such openness face to face. One's rage is redirected at another person, animal or an inanimate object. The person, animal, or object is being made the scapegoat in place of the real target for anger.

It is a means of staying friends with someone by not directly chastising the person who is the real object of your displeasure.

Suda was blaming the "nasty man" but not her husband. In psychology this is called displacement — redirecting anger from its real target onto a substitute — and the substitute is a scapegoat. Thais also use something similar when referring contemptuously to someone. Instead of using the person's name, they may say, "farang insists on talking to the manager" or "kwai (buffalo or stupid person) is late for work again."

A Cultural Interpretation of Events

Mongkhoot's reaction to receiving some cakes, and her mood and attitude change, is a sound parallel to what happened with me and the staff at the Transport department. You may like to refresh your memory by taking another look at Some Observations of Thai Culture in the Transport section above.

In both situations, there were no apologies. No-one fully or openly accepted the errors that occured. The organisers of the tambun at the wat couldn't admit that they had created the problem in the first place by giving my wife more work than she could handle — while ensuring the absence of colleagues at the office meant she couldn't finish that work.

The Transport manager's offer of a free lunch accurately compares with the senior nurse offering cakes. Were these attempts at managing Face or avoiding Face loss? I'd like to know what readers think and welcome their comments. How would you interpret these events. Was I seeing two examples of inconsistency in Transport and Mongkhoot's office? Or simply seeing the same events through a different set of priorities?

As a Westerner, I was thinking of Efficiency, Deliberate Exclusion, and Unfairness.

The Thai saw it as Thoughtfulness, Belonging, Bonding, and Consideration for others.

I was seeing cultural values at work. I'm interested in what was driving the behaviour and attitudes of the Thais around me. 

A long time ago, I learned not to trust my first impressions of an event. More often than not, what looks important to me is not important to the Thais involved.

Some Nasty Man Hit My Dog

I was surprised when I read on Suda's Facebook page, just under a picture of her son's pet:

"Some nasty man hit my dog"

She told me what had actually happened. Her husband had hit Lamyai for misbehaving. Whether it was appropriate or not is questionable. Shaking the dog immediately after the event and saying "no" in a firm voice would probably have been better.

But I now understood her comment on Facebook. She was blaming someone else and not criticising her husband.

It is the Thai way of taking out one's frustrations and anger without involving the person you are really annoyed with. You may notice it a great deal in Thailand. It is called prachut in Thai.

The Thai is actually directing his venom against the person who has wronged him. He is letting him know what he really wants to tell him if culture allowed such openness face to face. One's rage is projected at another person, animal or an inanimate object. The person, animal, or object is being made the scapegoat in place of the real target for anger. It is a means of staying friends with someone by not directly chastising the person who is the real object of your displeasure.

Suda was blaming the "nasty man" but not her husband. In psychology this is called displacement — redirecting anger from its real target onto a substitute — and the substitute is a scapegoat. Thais also use something similar when referring contemptuously to someone. Instead of using the person's name, they may say, "farang insists on talking to the manager" or "kwai (buffalo or stupid person) is late for work again."

About Me

https://www.understanding-thailand.com/Blog/admin/edit-content/about-me

An Independent View of Thai Culture

https://www.britannica.com/place/Thailand/The-arts