There’s nothing new about this. The first Thai head of state to travel outside the region, Rama V (Chulalongkorn) visited Europe in 1897 and returned wearing a top hat and tails. He brought back Waterford crystal from Ireland, Severes porcelain and Baccarat goblets from France, Italian Murano glass, Royal Crown Derby plates from England, and introduced Western architecture to Thailand.
Which is not to be construed as negative comment on my part, so long as the preference for Western things and ways is genuine and unaccompanied by slurs against their origins. Like many farangs living in the Thailand, I’ve crossed over, too. I have a Thai family and a house upcountry, most of my diet is Thai (even including insects), I drink Chang beer and have a respectable library of books about Thailand, assembled in a so-far futile attempt to understand the country and culture that I choose to call mine for however long the Department of Immigration renews my annual visa.
I’m also trying to understand my peers and have pushed them into what I hope will become, for the reader, helpful groups:
Tourists from Europe, the Americas and what the TAT calls “Oceania,” meaning Australia and New Zealand, comprise what probably is the most visable alliance or class, although their representation in the total visitor numbers is small. In 2001, only twenty five percent of those who presented their passports on entering the Land of Smiles were from Europe, under seven percent were from North and South America, just over four percent from Oceania. More than fifty seven percent, on the other hand, came from East Asia. Maybe all those Japanese, Taiwanese, and Koreans blended in more easily. Or, as Mont Redmond noted, they were not so tall or loud and thus not so noticeable. And probably the male of the Asian species wore slacks and a nice shirt, instead of a tank top with a lewd slogan, baggy shorts, running shoes, a baseball cap, and a belly pack belted over a barrel of flesh. I shudder when I see such creatures. In any case, the word farang usually is applied only to Caucasians. In 2001, they totaled a third of the country’s ten million visitors. That’s about ten thousand new farangs a day, enough to give one pause. [See “Tourism,” page 197.]
Businessmen may comprise the next largest group of farangs in Thailand. These are the investors and minority partners in many Thai companies that probably wouldn’t exist if the foreigners didn’t want to invest. Many are two-year “package” businessmen given a salary far larger than his or her Thai partner, a cushy housing allowance, a car and a driver, and private school tuition for the kids. When I moved to Thailand, my prospective landlady asked what sort of “package” I had. I said I was self-unemployed. The rent fell twenty five percent.
Many of the package men, and their wives—who are banned from taking jobs for pay and thus turn to charitable work and, often, alcohol—rarely exit their Western bubble while here. Aside from the reserved and polite Thais in their offices, their only regular contact with the local population may be limited to household help, their drivers, merchants in the neighborhood, and, dare I say it, bar girls. Many marriages don’t survive the stress attached to the latter.
Leisure activity frequently is planned for these farangs, by the American Chamber of Commerce or the more socially inclined embassies, most notably those from Australia and the U.K., and for the wives various women’s clubs. Some join local rugby teams and participate in other contests where a majority are expats, too. For those from the U.K., there are plenty of Irish and British pubs. For all there are numerous jazz and blues venues. Most of their holiday hotels are run by Germans and Swiss. The hyper-markets are owned by the Europeans, too, and there are hundreds of McDonald’s, 7-Elevens, Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks, KFCs and Pizza Huts.
In Thailand, because numerous jobs are proscribed for foreigners, non-Thai lawyers, accountants, architects and other professionals work as “consultants,” a line on the subsequent resume that the job-holder may have trouble explaining in the next job interview back home. No matter. When the interviewer sees the word “Bangkok,” the two-year hole in the guy’s career will be forgiven with a knowing wink and a question about the Thai women.
It should be noted that there also are many long-time farang businessmen in Thailand. These include, for example, Bill Heinecke, head of the Minor group of companies, an American who was born in Thailand (when his father headed up the Voice of America) and now is a Thai citizen; Denis Gray, who helped cover the final days of the war in Vietnam for the Associated Press and is now the bureau chief for the same wire service, a job he’s held for more than thirty years; Patrick “Shrimp” Gauvain, best-known for his bar girl calendars but head of his own advertising company; Father Joe Maier, an American Catholic priest who’s worked with the poor for thirty-plus years; and Tim Young, father and manager of Thailand’s most popular singer, Tata Young. Most in this category have Thai families and are here for life.
Embassy People may be the hardest group to peg, because it’s so diverse. Virtually every Western country has a diplomatic mission in Bangkok, more than sixty in all, from Albania to the Holy See. Given the small number of expats from some of the countries in residence in Thailand, and a limited number of visitors, many of the embassies and consular offices are quite small. Understandably, it is others, notably those of the United States, Australia and various European nations that dominate the embassy scene. The largest diplomatic community is the one from America. It surprises people when they’re told that the Bangkok embassy is the second or third largest embassy in the world (behind Cairo and the Philippines). The embassy grounds and ambassador’s compound sprawl across Wireless Road in Bangkok, covering an area almost the size of a small country, but the reason is no secret. From the time of the war in Vietnam, the Drug Enforcement Agency and other American surveillance organizations have based their operations in Bangkok, helping justify the construction of a new building in 1999 that is now a model for embassies everywhere, impregnable even to rocket attack.
Other western embassies, notably the British, the Australian, the Dutch, the Danish, the French and the German, occupy similar compounds with fences and walls behind which gardeners tend lush gardens with canals and lakes, creating park-like retreats in one of the noisiest and ill-planned cities in Asia. Those who report for work here each day are nearly as diverse as tourists in their backgrounds, jobs, and personal pursuits, but their lives resemble the “package” businessmen. They, too, come and go, and while here they are wrapped in a legal cloak and offered the comforts and steady contact with “home,” thus they also are distanced in many ways from their host country, even when it may be their job to decide whether or not Thai citizens are worthy of a visa or the subject of an investigation.
Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) are both a more diverse and a more heterogeneous group, defined by their variant do-gooder causes. One organization tries to help bar girls learn enough English to avoid being taken advantage of by their customers. Many want to save the elephant. ECPAT, the organization dedicated to End Child Pornography in Asian Tourism, has its headquarters in Bangkok, too. The United Nations has hordes of people in the same city writing reports on human rights and ways to increase rice production. Generally, this foreign group interacts with Thais better, or at least more consistently, than the previous three farang categories, and many are more strident of voice. Surely their contributions have been great, from the time of the arrival of the first Christian missionaries three hundred years ago, accelerating in an almost runaway manner since the first Peace Corps volunteers from America started showing rural farmers how to dig wells in the 1960s.
Bar hounds are the easiest to identify. They’re in the same place almost every night, or in a variety of similar places, all of them serving booze and companionship at an affordable price. Sex may not be the only reason these farangs came to Thailand, but it surely is one of the most important ones. And it’s the reason they stay, although many actually marry girls they meet in the bars and retire somewhat from the scene. A survey conducted by the Thai government in 2003 turned up fifteen hundred farang husbands of Thai women in
the Northeast alone, among them, sadly, three of the men who were taken hostage in 2004 in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and beheaded.
Many of these men are retired, living on pensions. Others teach English, do whatever they can to earn just enough to pay at least one bar fine a week. Many are alcoholic.
The most intriguing farangs may be the Runaways, the bandits, social outcasts and disgruntled won’t-go-home-againers who back where they came from are called “tax-dodgers” or “deadbeat dads” or, in many cases, bail-jumpers and convicted criminals. At a Fourth of July party a few years ago—one of the great annual farang events— I met a man who works as a fraud buster for western insurance companies, tracking down people who faked their deaths, then came to Southeast Asia to hide. And hardly a month goes by without a story in one of the newspapers about a farang being sent home to face an outstanding arrest warrant. In the same group, more or less, are the ex-spooks and Vietnam veterans who stayed. Three members of the Vietnam Helicopter Association bought a bar at Nana Plaza and the guy who was the Bangkok bureau chief of the CIA during the same conflict for many years owned a popular expat bar in Patpong. A third set himself up in Thailand with money earned smuggling people into Thailand from Laos and later nearly lost his residency when caught smuggling marijuana. Still another, the legendary Tony Poe, who trained and led the Hmong army in Laos and paid a dollar for every set of Vietnamese ears brought to him (some of which he stapled to his CIA reports), and was reputed to have been the model for Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, returned to the States with his hilltribe wife only because the Thai government got tired of his boozy fights.
There are other, smaller groups. Farangs who come to Thailand to study Buddhism (some have become monks) or massage or aromatherapy. Journalists assigned by their bosses to cover the region, who make the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand a frequent stop following work to sup, sip and diss the country in which they work, and tell each other how they’d run Thailand if they had the chance.
It’s possible to belong to more than one group. Many of us do. I’m part journalist, part barhound (with a Thai family and house in the Northeast) and I contribute part of almost every week to Father Joe Maier’s efforts in the slums.
Do we share anything in common, other than our big bodies, pale pigment and lack of manners and humility? Surely. I think most male farangs, visitor or resident, have at some time thought of themselves as a sort of “target,” someone perceived as having money, or at least enough to share, causing some Thais to go after them like a heat-seeking missile. In his paranoia, probably rooted in reality, he also may think Thai men don’t like him because of this wealth and advantage, but also because he takes so many Thai women away so easily. Many farang males, in turn, condemn Thai men when they hear how frequently they have deserted their wives and children, or have taken second wives.
Another shared trait is a changed, or changing, regard for the countries of our birth. Living abroad alters anyone’s point of view, if only to sharpen one’s previously held beliefs, and many go home with a repertoire of wonderful stories to tell, but are glad to be back where everything more or less works all the time, and life is more comfortably familiar. Others feel more estranged from the lands of their origins and complain about where they came from as much as about where they are. These are the ones who stay.
Inevitably, the latter disdain western media and the way it reports the world’s news, because the coverage is so Euro-centric. Why, we wonder, do so many western countries give Asia and Asians so little regard? Living in Thailand offers an alternative take on many things and in time some of us embrace the Asian ways, rejecting at least some of the western ones.
In any case, most farangs tend to flock together. We wheel our psychological wagons in a circle, and hang out with other farangs most of the time, constantly comparing notes, praising and criticizing our hosts by turn, going home and coming back again, always shaking our heads in amazement; some are so bold as to write books. And however many conclusions we reach, in the end we likely haven’t a clue.
Acknowledgments
“It’s Not Whisky,” “The Rubber Barons,” “Sleeping with Conrad,” “A Buffalo Named Toey,” “Fun & Games in the Slums,” and “Thailand—-Superlative!” previously appeared in Sawasdee magazine (Thailand).
“Greasing the Reels” appeared in Manager magazine (Thailand).
“The King Swings” appeared in Asia Times (Thailand) and Winds magazine (Japan).
“Venus Envy” appeared in Metro magazine (Thailand) and HQ magazine (Australia).
“The Country Club” appeared in Arena magazine (U.K.). “The Bodysnatchers of Bangkok” appeared in Maxim magazine (U.K.).
“Country Music, Thai Style” appeared in Wire magazine (U.K.).
“Visa Dash” appeared in the Asian Wall Street Journal (Hong Kong).
“Thai Aphrodisiacs: Food That Makes You Strong” appeared in Fah Thai (Thailand).
Another version of “On the Eat-a-Bug Trail” appeared in Ego magazine (U.S.).
Part of “Bangkok Heart Attack” appeared on a web page published by Hakuhodo, the Japanese advertising agency.
Selected Bibliography
Bishop, Ryan and Robinson, Lillian S., Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle, Routledge (New York and London), 1998
Hollinger, Carol, Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind, John Wetherhill Inc. (Tokyo), 1965; Asia Books (Bangkok), 2000.
Hoskin, John, The Supernatural in Thai Life, Tamarind Press (Bangkok), 1993.
Klausner, William J., Reflections on Thai Culture, The Siam Society (Bangkok), 1981.
McVey, Ruth, editor, Money & Power in Provincial Thailand, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Singapore) & Silkworm Books (Chiang Mai), 2000.
Moore, Christopher G., Heart Talk, Heaven Lake Press, (Bangkok), 1998.
Pasuk Phongpaichit and Chris Baker, Thaksin: The Business of Politics in Thailand, Silkworm Books (Chiang Mai), 2004.
Pasuk Phongpaichit and Sungsidh Piriyarangsan, Corruption & Democracy in Thailand, The Political Economy Center (Bangkok) & Silkworm Books (Chiang Mai), 1994.
Pasuk Phongpaichit and Sungsidh Piriyarangsan and Nualnoi Treerat, Guns, Girls, Gambling, Ganja, Silkworm Books (Chiang Mai), 1998.
Redmond, Mont, Wondering into Thai Culture, Redmondian Insight Enterprises Co. (Bangkok), 1998.
Wyatt, David K., Thailand: A Short History, Silkworm Books (Chiang Mai), 1982.
Table of Contents
Cover
Contents
INTRODUCTION Confessions of a Grumpy Old Expat
Behind the Smiles
Talking Thai, Understanding Englit
Kreng Jai
May the Force Be With You
Thai Time
Where a Dildo Means Good Luck
A Cool Heart in a Hot Climate
Fun & Games in the Slum
The King Swings
The Name Says It All
Love for Sale
Shadow Wives
Venus Envy
The Country Club
Acquired Tastes
Rotten Fish, Yum Yum!
Thai Aphrodisiacs: Food That Makes You “Strong”
Gourmet Dining on the Cheap
Country Cookin’
On the Eat-a-Bug Trail in Bangkok
Thai Fire
It’s Not Whisky
Life is Cheap, Mai Pen Rai
Piss in a Cup
Violence
The Hustlers
The Bodysnatchers of Bangkok
It Didn’t Happen Because I Wasn’t There
Wild Thailand
The Ugly Truth About Elephants
A Buffalo Named Toey
The World’s Fastest Elephant
Funny Business
The Rubber Barons
Thailand’s Beer Wars
Faking It
Bi-Racial Cool
Thailand—Superlative!
Tourism
Country Music, Th
ai Style
Greasing the Reels
Going Troppo
Sleeping With Conrad
The Backpackers
Bangkok Heart Attack
The Visa Dash
Going Troppo
The Farangs
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
Back Cover
Thailand Confidential Page 21