Textiles, Cultural Center, and the UN

We had a very busy next day that started early with a visit to the Jim Thompson Textile Museum. Located at his historical home, Jim Thompson is famous for having put Thailand on the map for textiles and fabric production. His home was just as innovative as his business, as it linked the traditional Thai houses together to make a larger house where one used hallways to walk from room to room without having to go outside. The whole area was beautiful and showed the fusion between the traditional Eastern styles and Western influences that are common in Thailand. I loved to see all the old art pieces, especially the intricately detailed porcelain dish collection. Another highlight was a demonstration on extracting the silk threads from the cocoons of silk worms.

We then walked over the the Bangkok Art Cultural Center, which is a multileveled modern building that caters to all needs of the art community. There are coffee and clothing shops that draw the artistic crowd, a theater for live performances and films, and large galleries for the current art exhibits. There was one that featured the use of recycled materials - I loved walking through loops of newspapers attached together and draped from ceiling to floor. There was also a really neat sculpture that was a mosaic of mirrored cubes that were so large and stacked in a way that you could walk underneath them, to see an alcove where a pile of dirt and your own image was reflected back at you a thousand times.

I loved the peace and quiet of the art museum compared to the hustle and bustle of Bangkok traffic outside. Since the food was a little pricey inside the culture center, we walked right across the street to the shopping center where we went the day before. I sprung for Subway, though, and it was great to have a little taste of home in the form of a tuna sandwich and a double chocolate chip cookie!

In the afternoon we got the special opportunity to be guests at the United Nations in Bangkok. After going through security, we got our own name badges and were escorted to a conference room to talk about the state of human trafficking in Southeast Asia with a UN representative who does field research. It was an interesting talk that really helped me understand how international policies break down to the national level and even the regional level. The image that the phrase "human trafficking" brings up is often one of women and even children being sold into slavery for sex work, but that is not really an accurate picture. The majority of trafficking cases are for the labor industry, such as fisheries, but that doesn't have the same emotional draw as "sex trafficking" so less people know about it. In reality, sex work is often the best-paying kind of work some people, often migrants, can find and so is seen as an unsavory option but an option nonetheless. 

I think the real problem is the demand for sex work from the clientele and that a true solution will only be found when we can find a way to change the culture and reduce the demand for sexual services. The criminalization should be placed on the clients, not the workers. When sex workers get busted, no one is offering viable employment to replace their jobs. Plus, as long as it's illegal, it's unregulated, which can be dangerous for all parties involved. That's why groups like Empower, an organization of sex workers in Chiang Mai, have arisen to change the way we look at the sex industry. They have even started their own bar (which I have visited) to show that they refuse to be victimized and that their employment should be legitimate, even if it is viewed as socially taboo.

As you can see, our trip to the UN gave me a lot to think about in conjunction with what we had been learning in my Institutions of Thai Society class. The remainder of our trip was just as politically focused, but I'll save that for another day and give you a little break! Until then!