In the last year, art and professional artists have eluded me, much to my own surprise. I was reminded myself of this yesterday when I was asked to assist a documentary team from the United States to interpret and translate an interview of one of our kindergartener’s families. For me, this is funny for a few reasons.

First and foremost, I am not fluent in Thai. This makes me rather unqualified for this position of relaying potentially important information between the interviewers and the interviewees. For me, translating Thai into English into a microphone is like playing a live and oral version of that game, Madlibs…except you have to try to fill in the blanks with the words that would make sense in context…and you have to at least pretend that you know exactly what you’re doing and that you understand every last word out of the interviewees mouth. After all, you’re on camera. People might start to question your credibility if you start biting your fingernails, cock your head to the side or scratch your head with blaringly obvious uncertainty.

To make this even better, these questions didn’t just need to be translated from English to Thai. The family’s grandmother and grandfather don’t speak Thai. They speak the Tai Yai hilltribe language. All of these questions and answers needed to be filtered through two different translators; the head of the education department and myself.

When we arrived outside little KhemNewan’s house, the camera man started filming a chicken running around a basket. He spent 3 minutes chasing around that stupid chicken. KhemNewan innocently asked, “Did they come here to interview my family or the chicken?” “Exactly,” was my response to her.

The camera man wanted to film her walking through the narrow alley leading to her home. Khemnewan was ready to do this while the cameraman was filming the chicken, but by the time he was finished, two little cherubic 4 year olds appeared out of the small shop next door to play with Khemnewan. The shot was suddenly obstructed. “Tell them to get out of the way.” They said to me. I was paralyzed. I opened my mouth but nothing would come out. “Come on, tell them. We don’t have all day ya know.” and I needed to explain to them, “This is the front of their house. They don’t even go to the organization’s school. I don’t feel comfortable giving them orders.” Eyes rolled and an indignant “ugh” fell out of the director’s mouth. Finally they decided it was ok if she walked down the alley with her friends from next door. But they made her walk down the alley four times so they could get every angle.

We then walked into the house where the grandfather was making brooms. It occurred to the director then, not before hand, that she should probably give him an offering of fruit before starting off this interview. She put 100 baht into Pi Sak’s hand (the Thai –Tai Yai translator) and sent him off to buy fruit from the market down the street. She didn’t exactly realize that by sending him off, we lost our ability to communicate with the interviewee, unless we wanted his 6 year old granddaughter to act as our translator. There was some awkward silence as we waited for Pi Sak to come back and I was very relieved when he did come back a few minutes later.

For the most part, the translation actually went ok. I think it was approximately 90% accurate. The questions were unobtrusive until the very end when the final question came about, “Are you worried about the threat of your granddaughter entering the sex trade, willingly or unwillingly?” I looked at them blankly for a few seconds, “um….I don’t really feel comfortable asking that. His granddaughter’s right in front of him and it’s also way too direct.” And the interviewer insisted, “Well, if there’s a way you can get this question answered without asking it directly, it would be really great. This is really what we want to know most about and this is the most compelling part of the documentary” And so the question came out phrased in some way through Pi Sak. I don’t how, because I don’t understand Tai Yai, but the grandfather was taken aback. He answered anyway though and conveyed that he had strict rules for his granddaughter and so long as he was alive, he’d watch out for her and make sure her safety was tended to.

When the interview was over, the camera man started filming the layout of the house. He had the grandfather and grandmother move all over the place, pretending to do various chores over and over again. And of course, all of this direction needed to be translated through me. At the end of the day, it’s not them that ended up looking like jerks. It was me. After he made the grandmother move up and down the stairs, from one wing of the bamboo tree house to the other, I finally said “You know, she’s really struggling with all of this moving.” She moved approximately 0.1 mph and had a hunch in her back. Her face was folded in layers and layers of wrinkles and her hands looked like they had not seen a day’s rest in her entire life.

The camera man then wanted me to tell little Newan to watch television and to pretend to start flipping through the channels. The “angle” this team was going for in their documentary on prostitution is that the media plays a large role in convincing people to be materialistic. Through this materialism, people make concessions in their value systems and will willingly enter the sex trade if it is a quick and easy means of obtaining the best clothes, cell phones, knick knacks, etc, etc… The words “angle” and “compelling” fell out of these peoples’ mouths approximately 300 times in 4 hours. Every time they used one of the two, I wanted to punch them in the face.

We had outworn our welcome waaaay before we had actually left. Pi Sak was poking and prodding at me to get them to finish and I kept trying to bring it to their attention delicately. Finally, as they were making Khemnewan pretend to fold laundry, making her shift into the correct lighting for the camera, it took my refusing to translate for them to stop and leave. Maybe it was a little too frank and maybe I had hurt their feelings but it wasn’t any worse than what they had been doing to the family for the previous 4 hours.

What makes me mad about this is that while the point of making the documentary might have been to educate western society about human trafficking and prevention methods, they also exploited the generosity of that family. They also turned real people into actors and actresses; set them up to look like victims of media when they weren’t. When asked “What kind of television shows do you like to watch?” Khemnewan responded, “The news." The filmmakers could not have looked more disappointed.

And that is my frustrated and long-winded tangent on art.