MEMOIR

Playing the Name Game on an Island in Thailand

Celebrity is relative — it took a bottle of Mekhong whiskey and a journey of several thousand miles for me to realise this

In 1990 I spent a week in a five-dollar-a-night beach hut on the island of Koh Samet in Thailand. I was 25 years old and this was part of my first big trip outside Canada. Most of the trip so far had been in the company of friends, but I was now on my own.

The place had an open-air restaurant called “Bo’s.” There was a bar and kitchen at one end, and walls along two of the remaining sides. The side facing the sea was open to the beach with just a few pillars holding up a roof covered in palm fronds.

I sat by myself the first night. There were a few other tables with couples or small groups of three or four people at them. Along the open side of the bar was one long table with about a dozen people sitting at it. They were loud and boisterous and I watched them with envy as I ate my Pad Thai.

One of them caught my eye. He was about thirty with a ragged goatee and a pony tail. He was caucasian but with the kind of deep tan that suggested he’d been living on the beach for a while. He wore a baggy peach-colored shirt and a pair of purple knee-length shorts. He came over to my table and introduced himself.

“Salud!” he said. “I am called Gabriel.” He held out his hand.

“Chris,” I said.

“Are you on your own? You are welcome to join us!” He gestured at his table. A woman at the table beckoned me over. She was about ten years older than he was and wore a man’s denim shirt over a sarong she was wearing as a skirt.

“Thank you,” I said. “Yes. I’m on my own. I don’t know anyone here.”

He laughed. “You soon will,” he said.

Almost everyone at the table was a solo traveller. Two Swedish sisters, Astrid and Marit, were travelling together. Everyone else was on their own.

Gabriel was from France. The woman in the denim shirt was Irish. Her name was Siobhan. There were a couple of Aussies named Brendan and Sandy. They hadn’t known each other before joining the table, but they were now on their way to becoming a couple.

I can’t remember the names of anyone else. There was a Japanese guy. An Indian guy. A Dutch girl. An Italian girl. And a few others. People came and went. Except for Siobhan, everyone was in their twenties and thirties.

We ate together every night. Then the whiskey came out and we talked and laughed until the early hours. Those were some of the best nights of my life. I felt part of a family.

Most nights we played something called “The Rizla Game.” Rizlas are a popular brand of rolling papers. We would each write the name of a famous person on a rolling paper and hand it to someone else in the group. That person would lick the rolling paper and stick it to their forehead so everyone could see the name but they could not.

We would then go around the table and each person would ask “yes” or “no” questions about the person on their forehead. They would keep asking questions until they got a “no” or until they guessed who the person was. It’s also known as “The Name Game.” You may have played it yourself.

What surprised me about the game — what surprised most of us, I think — was how often someone would come up with a name they assumed would be obvious but that would stump the rest of the group.

The shocker for me was Wayne Gretzky — the greatest ice hockey player ever born. I wrote his name on Gabriel’s Rizla and Gabriel was completely stumped. He had no idea.

It wasn’t just he was unable to guess the name. Even when the name was revealed, he still had no clue. And he wasn’t the only one. The only people in our group, aside from myself, who had ever heard of him were the Swedish sisters. No one else.

As a Canadian who grew up surrounded by ice hockey, this was inconceivable.

“No,” said Gabriel. “I don’t know this name at all.”

The Swedes and I looked at each other in disbelief.

“Impossible,” I said. “Everyone knows who Gretzky is!”

I looked around the table. Blank looks and shrugs from everyone but the Swedes. Astrid tried to back me up.

“You must know him! He is the greatest hockey player in the world. It would be like not knowing who Gunde Svan is.”

“Who is that?” asked Gabriel.

Astrid rolled her eyes, then turned and said to me, “You must know Svan.”

“Um, no. Sorry.

“Really?!?”

I squirmed a little. “Really,” I said. “Is he a Swedish hockey player?”

“He’s a skier!” said Marit. “The best in the world!”

“He won two gold medals in Calgary!” added Astrid. “That was only a couple of years ago! And it was in your country!”

“Sorry,” I said.

It seems silly, but that night opened my mind up to other cultures more than any other experience I had while travelling.

How could all these people not know who Gretzky was? And how could I never have heard of someone who was obviously as famous to the Swedes as Gretzky was to me?

I thought we were all part of the common community of backpack travellers. How could we not know this stuff about each other? We all knew Bob Marley. We all knew the words to Buffalo Soldier. How could we not know each other’s sports stars? Maybe we didn’t live in such a global village after all.

This little crack grew wider over the ensuing evenings. I realised I knew nothing about Thai pop stars. About Italian actors. About Japanese artists.

I expected the historical and religious stuff to be different for each of us. But wasn’t pop culture the same everywhere? Apparently, it wasn’t. This was a subtle but important shift in my thinking.

If I could be wrong about Gretzky — that he was the most famous sports star in the world — what else might I be wrong about? Maybe I only believed this because it was what I had been taught in my own particular nation-sized bubble.

Maybe some of the other beliefs I held in some of my other bubbles might not be as universal as I thought. Maybe other people who had been raised in different bubbles might have contradictory beliefs that were just as valid as mine, at least within their own bubbles.

Ever since that night, I tend to doubt not only what other people believe, but what I believe.

Except, of course, that there will ever be a better hockey player than Gretzky. Some things are irrefutable.