Smiling in Asia is getting tougher!

I was eating breakfast today in a chinese restaurant and reading the newspaper, an article caught my attention…I dont remember the title of the article, but it was about the hard times and smiles…I went directly to my home and found part of the article on the internet…

BANGKOK — It is the latest version of the famous Thai smile — motorcycle policemen with a bright red goofy grin painted on their white anti-pollution masks.

For the first week of the year — and longer if people seem to be smiling back — highway policemen in Thailand will wear the masks “to lift the mood of motorists,” according to police officials.

“For our highway policemen, we have the policy that the police must be friendly and smiling all the time, but the problem is when we’re tired, it’s hard to keep smiling,” said Col. Somyos Promnim, commander of the highway police.

It has been a rough year in Thailand, with revolving governments, restless mobs and a weeklong takeover of Bangkok’s airports that frightened away tourists from the country that keeps calling itself the Land of Smiles.

“They have to put on a mask because a smile doesn’t come naturally anymore,” said Ammar Siamwalla, an economist who keeps a close eye on the mores of his countrymen. “Normally people smile. You don’t have to put on a smiley mask.

“But these past few years that smile has worn thin because we are all angry at each other and willing to show it.”

It is a complicated thing, the Thai smile, as varied, nuanced and eloquent as the bow in Japan, and apparently requiring just as many muscles.

Foreign visitors are charmed, but the truth is, it can often be as difficult to know what is behind the Thai smile as it is to guess the real expression of a policeman hiding behind a smiley mask.

Happiness or sadness, regret or anticipation, triumph or embarrassment, warmth or wickedness, the important thing — and apparently sometimes the hardest thing nowadays — is to keep on smiling.

Source: The New York times, Bangkok Journal

Thailand is not the only country with smiling problems…

In Japan, where people can sometimes get carried away by the seriousness of life, workers have been trained to hold a chopstick in their teeth to produce the living equivalent of a smiling emoticon.

Source: The New York times, Bangkok Journal

I wondered myself…how exactly I put a chopstick in my teeth to produce that “smiling” effect…It seems that with the financial crisis, domestic problems and hard times, it is difficult to do that, but guess that even when our problems are terrible, smiling is the best medicine…Like one crazy clown said once…”Why so serious??”

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