Heartfelt Talk

If you ask my brother if he can speak Thai, there is one phrase he definitely knows: "My Cow jai krap" ("I dont understand").

This summer, my brother was kind enough to let me listen to some thai language on a road trip back home. I was impressed that he tried to learn a bit too. We even practiced a bit together: I would say a sentence and he would reply My Cow jai. Cow jai means to understand, but recentyl I learned it is not a perfect translation. Jai means heart, so a better translation would be to understand with your heart. As a Thai professor told our group, the line between the heart and mind's functions sometime blur. So, it is no surprise that understanding is directly connected with the heart.

Once in Thailand, I started hearing jai all the time. Jai dee (literally heart good) refers, unsurprisingly, to a good -hearted person. But flip the words to dee jai and it means glad. There are dozens of other examples including:

• Jai dam (lit.: heart black) => bad person
• Som jai (lit.: take into your heart) => interested
• Nam jai (lit.: Water heart) => generious

Whenever I now hear the word, cow jai or even jai, it takes me back to the chit-chatting on that bro-bro road trip. But only now in retrospect, do I realize how heartfelt our conversation was:)