Sanisa Sriarj

Giving engenders happiness

Mothers are often among the most significant figure in a person’s life, along with fathers and partners of course. Motherhood has been Sanisa Plangsrisaku Sriarj’s greatest achievement, and listening to Noi, as she is usually known, talk about her mother and her mother’s skills and ambitions as a parent, it seems her mother has been an excellent parent as well. It will come as no surprise that Noi cites her mother, parent to four daughters, as her soulmate and the living person she most admires. Despite being a busy woman, Noi’s mother prioritised spending quality family time with her daughters each summer, and her father made the nightly dinner table a family sharing time.  The only gift he ever desired from his children was the precious gift of their time.

Noi is also a huge admirer of the late King of Thailand, His Majesty Rama IX.  Noi loves that this man was a true champion of his people and was constantly seeking ideas and ways to assist them in improving their lives, well-being and happiness through sustainability via his principles of self-sufficiency. Indeed, Noi has embraced the late King’s teachings and farms quite a few organic crops on land just behind her home and business, and genuinely feels there is nothing she could not live without, air, water and shelter notwithstanding! Noi is flexible, adaptable and could “make do” if something was not available.  She is well on the way to that self-sufficiency she so admires.

Noi is a forgiving, and “go-giving” woman of 55, in good health that may be attributable to the healthy lifestyle she chooses.  Noi practices meditation and yoga and eats an organic diet thanks to having her own organic produce.  Noi’s health has not always been so good.  In her 30s, she battled breast cancer and required surgery and chemotherapy to win the fight, now remaining cancer-free for heading towards 20 years. Genuine happiness is no doubt also playing its part in Noi’s health. It was in the aftermath of her cancer surgery that Noi, her husband and son, moved from Kuiburi to Hua Hin in 2009.  Noi’s father purchased a parcel of land with several old buildings on Soi 94, determined to provide Noi a home close to Bangkok Hospital during the rest of her treatment and recovery. This was the spark which began the Amara Resort. Noi finds Hua Hin a peaceful place to live, with ready access to the natural environment, including the beach and waterfalls. One bugbear for Noi is the lack of footpaths in Hua Hin, which she would like to see remedied by moving the electricity and telecommunication cabling underground.  Noi would also love to see free education, especially the opportunity to develop sound English language skills, become available nationwide.

Noi has not always been a resident of Hua Hin.  In fact, it is Kuiburi, known for its pineapple plantations and wild elephants, which Noi still gives as her home town, though she also spent time as a child, teenager then young woman living in Rachaburi and Bangkok. It is the Amara Resort, her home of some 18 years now, that is her favourite place on earth and it isn’t hard to work out why. Noi lived in Kuiburi for the first ten years of her life, her father operating a fruit cannery there that is still in family hands.  When each of the four sisters turned ten, they were sent to live for the final two years of primary school in the dormitory of the Nari Witthaya school in Rachaburi, a Catholic girls’ school, which is still the preferred school for the daughters of some of Hua Hin’s wealthy families.  Being the eldest, this move was the most challenging for Noi, who didn’t even get to return home for the holidays, and then easier for each successive sibling. Noi enjoyed her time with the nuns and for a while even flirted with the idea of becoming a teacher herself.  She was particularly fond of Sister Ched, a Filipina nun, who took Noi under her wing, found her special tasks to do, and even taught the young Noi skincare and nutrition skills she employs to this day.

Noi recalls that her mother faced criticism and gossip for her decision to educate her daughters in Rachaburi and then Bangkok, yet, looking back, Noi is thankful that her mother had the foresight to ensure a good education, and superior English skills for her daughters.  Noi studied in two separate faculties at university, in Business as well as Thai literature. She lived in a family home, with her younger sisters, and at her mother’s request took on the role of mother hen for them, staying home to supervise them when her friends were out dancing and partying.  When the time was right, Noi’s mum made sure to make it all up to her.  In addition to Noi becoming an accomplished business woman, the family’s other daughters all have good careers: one a police General, one a qualified engineer and pilot who now works in the Civil Aviation Authority, and the youngest as a nurse.

Noi’s family has a history of entrepreneurship. Noi’s paternal grandparents were Chinese immigrants from Hainan, who came to Thailand in search of business opportunities, which they found in kapok, a plant underutilised here at the time but prized in the manufacture of pillows and mattresses. Noi’s relatives made a good start by recognising the commercial value of kapok, processing it and then exporting the material to Taiwan.  It was planned that Noi’s father would continue his entrepreneurial heritage by emigrating to America to seek his fortune.  It was a chance encounter with big river prawns in a canal in Bangkok which convinced him to ask his parent’s permission to stay in Thailand, and so eventually meet his wife, Noi’s mother. Noi remembers her father repeatedly telling his daughters that he was very grateful Thailand gave his parents the opportunity to settle and become humble business operators.  From this, Noi draws her determination to always be respectful of others, wherever they come from, whatever their background or social standing.  Noi’s mother also encouraged her daughters’ independence by ensuring they learnt to ride a bicycle, a motor scooter and then a car, all by 15 years of age.

Noi’s favourite childhood memories are of summer time when the family of six all travelled together.  Noi knows she first came to Hua Hin in her very early childhood: she has the obligatory photo of herself horseback on Hua Hin beach to prove it.  Noi remained close to her father throughout his life, but was devastated and felt betrayed by him in her teens when her parents separated and then divorced.  At the time she was not fully able to understand why he had been so cruel to her mother or why her mother was so upset, but now realises her father was serially unfaithful to her mother.  Her parent’s divorce had such a strong impact on the teenage Noi that when she met her now husband of 28 years, she was not interested in marrying him lest he be like her father, with womanising ways. Fortunately, Thanadej has always been a committed and dutiful husband, as well as father to Noi’s only son, Tiger. Perhaps as a result of his awareness of his own deficiencies as a husband, Noi’s father had set a condition for his agreement that Noi and Thanadej could marry, and that was that Thanadej would be required to join his new wife’s family business, which he readily agreed to do.

To say Tiger was, and still is, the apple of his mother and grandmother’s eyes is no overstatement.  Noi found her mother a fair but tough parent, who was not overly materially indulgent with her daughters.  Yet with Tiger, she became the quintessential doting grandmother, prepared to purchase what seemed like half the toy store.  Tiger is currently studying his Master’s degree in Architecture in Milan, Italy, and Noi couldn’t be prouder.  Tiger is also displaying entrepreneurial skills and has some innovative ideas for the family fruit canning business, to take advantage of the probiotic properties of the pineapple crops it purchases. Noi and Thanadej are both happy to see their son continue to the highest levels of tertiary education, as they both travelled to Sydney, Australia in 1999, with their infant son in tow, to complete Master’s degrees in Business at the University of Western Sydney.  When opportunity presents itself to this family, they pounce.

It seems Noi has her fingers in a lot of pies.  She acknowledges that she is prone to overcommitting herself, what with her management of Amara Resort, her ongoing oversight and involvement in the cannery, which has to maintain high sanitation standards and pass stringent monthly government inspections to stay in operation, and her charity work.  Noi is quite reticent to discuss the breadth of her charity fund-raising but mentioned a Scandinavian woman with ovarian cancer she raised over 30,000 baht for recently.  Also very dear to Noi’s heart is her work with a small charity school in Kuiburi. Noi had experience in teaching English to Thai children as well as Thai to Korean and Japanese children as a casual job while at university, so is an adept educator herself. Now, she co-ordinates a program where a handful of westerners teach English through games and activities each Friday during term time. Many of the school’s students are the children of employees of the cannery, rural workers from Laos, Myanmar or Cambodian who do not have paperwork for their children to be schooled in government schools in Thailand. It is a mark of Noi’s respect for her employees that she is ensuring their children receive an education, particularly in English, which may well be life-changing for them, growing like a snowball to benefit entire communities.

Noi is a woman of many hopes and desires for her future.  She has set 60 as her retirement age and will be looking to more international travel with her husband.  Noi wants to develop more charity partnerships, she wants to learn to paint, to be able to spend more time dancing in live music venues and to see her son blossom into his full adult-independence. Noi hopes to see the day of true democratic government in Thailand, with justice and honesty forefront in both politics and society. Noi would like to see humankind work as one to overcome our current climate and environmental woes. But paramount for Noi is to see people finding their happiness.  Noi makes a great friend and confidante because she will listen without judgement and let others unburden themselves, sure of her discretion. Being seen by others as an average person is important to Noi, who desires a low profile but an enormously high happiness index. Even the people who believe they know Noi well, a truly social and welcoming woman, probably never suspect the depths of her Buddhist beliefs. Noi loves her temple visits just as much as the disco, because for Noi, happiness is not only the key to life, it is also the purpose.