So now for something completely different. About a year ago, I remember speaking to some friends back home and the subject turned to Thai politics (because of the coup). I wrote a quick summary of Thai politics from the last 20 or so years, which I and a few other people thought was interesting. If you missed it, that entry is here.

A similar situation happened, where someone asked me if I had been eating a lot of Pad Thai recently. And actually... no I haven't. This may be a shock, but Pad Thai is pretty uncommon in Thailand. You may find it at a restaurant here and there, but those restaurants are almost exclusively around tourist areas to capitalize on its reputation. It's really uncommon as a street food, despite it being believed as such. There are no shortage of noodle stalls, but they're always boiled, not fried. So what the heck is going on?

It's actually an interesting piece of history, that started back in 1938. At the time, the country was still known as Siam. And this general, Phibunsongkram decided to overthrow the government via a coup. At the time, Thailand was surrounded by European colonies. Laos and Cambodia were French, while Myanmar and Malaysia were British. In the middle was Siam, which had really not changed at all despite the advances in technology. Most of the population was rural and uneducated, and Phibunsongkram was afraid (in retrospect, probably rightfully so) that Siam was going to become the next colony of some European nation. So to shake off this reputation as some cultural backwater, and to establish a sense of national identity, he came up with 12 Cultural Mandates. We'll come back to that in a sec.

Sidebar, military leaders in Thailand have had a really endearing, somewhat adorable sense of care for Thai people. Our current leader, Chanocha, used one of his news conferences to tell everyone how great this Korean soap opera he's been watching is, and we could really learn from the characters on it. (Seriously) And recently, he gave a speech about how we should let tourists do homestays on rice farms, because they'll love working and learning about how rice is made (Although honestly, I'd probably do that). So it's not totally out of line for a military leader to suggest something like this.

Anyway, these 12 Cultural Mandates are mostly what you'd expect. Honor the flag, help the elderly, choose domestic goods over foreign. Notably, one of them was to change the name of the country to Thailand. Some also got a little... personal. For example, immediately after work you were encouraged to play an hour of sports before going home. Also, in public men should always wear hats (yes!). Many of those have been ignored, but most of the nationalistic ones stuck, notably of course changing the name of the country. But lumped into those nationalistic mandates, was food. Thai people ate noodles of course, but they were usually wheat, and were sold by Chinese vendors. Thailand had a lot of rice. If people wanted noodles, why not make a dish with rice noodles?

And so, open source Pad Thai was born. Phibunsongkram gave everyone the recipe, and encouraged them to make it. The argument was, throw in some veggies and meat, boom, well balanced meal that was fast and delicious. But the name Pad Thai doesn't even really mean anything. "Pad" means "to stir fry", and Thai just means that - Thai style. The actual name of it is a shortened form of a local Chinese dialect, which includes the "noodle" part. Pad Thai was adopted by the people, especially this being the start of WWII. The cost of wheat had begun to shoot up, but rice was still cheap. This was also around the same time that foreigners started to come into Thailand, especially Axis powers. Pad Thai sort of got lumped into this time of "foreigness" And then after the war ended, people kinda just forgot about it. In class, I've often used Pad Thai as my stand in, "I need an example of a Thai food", but I'm learning my students are surprisingly unfamiliar with it. They usually claim it's not even a Thai dish at all - it's Chinese, or something foreigners made up. They're not exactly wrong, but nevertheless Pad Thai isn't really something Thai people eat very often. But it is sort of a Thai invention, albeit one that seems to be much more popular outside of Thailand rather than within.

Anyway, we'll be back next week with a regular blog entry, including some amazing stuff I've been up to recently.