Once a Kiwi, a Yank, an Aussie, Always a Kiwi, a Yank, an Aussie

Stick’s most recent weekly essay Once A Farang, Always A Farang? is deeply telling, a real think piece, one rather that ought to give anyone pause who seriously contemplates living in Thailand. What he has concluded after more than a decade of living in Thailand, and being fluent in the language, and being married to a Thai woman, is that he finds himself cocooned in a small capsule that is not just thoroughly Western but one that is even biased toward his homeland of New Zealand. Whereas in the first years in Thailand he ate Thai food, now his diet is almost exclusively Western. Whereas in the early years he would go to the temples and stop by the roadside to contemplate a landscape unlike what he would see at home, now he has little or no interest in temple visits or roadside stops. Whereas he once had an interest in watching Thai TV, and one can imagine while cuddled up with his girlfriend or wife, now he goes to his computer for amusement while his wife watches Thai soaps and eats Thai food.

And then there is the revealing reassessment of the value of all that investment he made in learning Thai. And I’d be the last one to downplay that investment, breaking my ass in my late twenties to become really fluent in Spanish, and then two decades later to get fluent in Brazilian Portuguese. The message from Stick seems to be: that investment in Thai was largely a waste of time. He has few Thai friends, he does not circulate in Thai circles, and he is not, to my knowledge, doing an anthropology on some segment of Thai society where his fluency would be absolutely necessary. His initial motive for learning Thai was spot-on; the conclusion a decade and a year or so on is another matter.

Equally revealing is that just about all the expats resident in Thailand that Stick knows find themselves with a similar Western lifestyle, as cocooned, by choice, from Thai society as Stick is. Habits learned early on die hard, if they die at all; and it is on this account that so many men make a mistake when they get involved in a relationship and think that they’ll be able to change their Thai or Filipina or Kiwi or American wife. It rarely happens, and so it is with all of us in trying to adopt the ways of a new country and a new culture.

These are quite fascinating revelations by Stick, and they raise numerous questions. One is this: Why then stay in Thailand is your lifestyle remains so thoroughly Western, or, more pointedly in Stick’s case, Kiwi? The cost of a great many goods and services has risen noticeably in recent years in Thailand, to resemble those in the West. The rule of law in Thailand is a loosey-goosey affair, which might at times work to your advantage; but then who wants to be caught in that bind when you have to prove that you’re innocent, a vastly different matter than someone proving beyond a reasonable doubt that you’re guilty. There are all kinds of property ownership and visa issues that make Thailand a dicey place to live, especially given the mind-set of so many Thai women. Bangkok, if one is resident there, has as much a problem with pollution and traffic congestion as any major city in the West, arguably more than all but a few. If one has children, the schools, including the universities, are inferior to even somewhat below average schooling in the West; and the children will, with few exceptions, not be given the kind of education that make them analytical and competitive in the international marketplace. And unlike most countries in the West, there is no retirement system provided by the government, not a small issue when age begins to take its toll and you wake up one morning and realize that you simply can no longer work as you once did.

What, then, is the rationale for staying in Thailand, for decades, perhaps for the rest of one’s life? Two reasons quickly come to mind.

One, and perhaps the most obvious one, is the night life, a night life—largely meaning going with hookers for about a hundred dollars a night—that is simply not available in the West, or where it is found it is much more expensive, and the offerings (in terms of young women and their attractiveness) are nowhere similar. But what becomes clear is that people like Stick, virtually all expats in fact it seems, quickly tire of the night life. They find someone special, and they settle down to married life, just as they would have done in New Zealand or the U.S. or Australia. Are their “settled” married lives any better than they would have been in the West? Probably for the first year or two they’re better—if you’ve got a much younger and more attractive partner than you could get in the West, and if you’ve still got plenty of testosterone, and if the young woman doesn’t decide that being married means she can shut down the sex life—which I suspect happens fairly frequently, just as it does it in the West. Still, all marriages are relatively bright in the beginning. After the first couple of years, however, the premium initially placed on the young Thai body and face has largely evaporated, I’d bet. Evaporated not because the young woman still doesn’t look good, but because all the other traits that are so “Thai” have come to mean so much more than they did in the beginning. The farang husband , in a way he could not in the first year or so, begins to face reality with an uncommonly rational rawness. He sees clearly the importance of the Thai extended family, one that becomes more than a bit much when the demands for money and “loans” never really cease. The lack of analytical abilities in the gorgeous young Thai wife, who hasn’t got a clue what geopolitics in the Near East is all about, or if there are two or ten main islands in New Zealand, or whether Hitler is a new kind of designer jean or the mass killer and madman all of learn about from a fairly early age in the West. Then there is the priority given by the woman to children, if there are children—putting one another notch down the ladder on her list of who matters (also, of course, a problem in the West, and the reason more than a few men want to take their wives and drop them down the nearest well after kids come). And the list goes on.

There is, of course, what might be called the available-young-pussy-at-all-hours, and at a very reasonable cost, issue. When you’re married or in a serious relationship in Thailand, and if you don’t have any moral or other hang-ups about cheating, you don’t have to move a mountain or walk more than a couple of blocks to find yourself in bed with a gorgeous twenty-something Thai woman that will make your dick sing like you were in heaven and in bed with horny angels. Every marriage gets boring, and every man in the West who’s not a liar, or in denial, would love to occasionally go down the street and find himself with some lovely young bird for a couple of hours, or all night, and for little more than the cost of a decent meal for two.

The other reason I can imagine for staying in Thailand is that I’m able to make not just good money, but a fair bit more than I could make by returning to my own country in the West. However, unless I’m working for a transnational, or have the good luck and unusual acumen of identifying and exploiting a lucrative legal market, I’m not likely to do very well economically in Thailand, not anything like what I can do in the West if I’ve got my marbles decently packaged: a big home with four or five bedrooms and three baths and several TVs and computers; a new Lexus or Mercedes every couple of years; the ability to accumulate a sizeable fund for retirement; and the income to travel the world at will (buy a good dozen or more plane tickets each year when I’m in Southeast Asia for three months—to spend time in Indonesia, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, India, and not even bother to add up how much it’s costing me or worry about a problem with my bank account.) So how would I get this kind of lifestyle in Thailand? More often than not by doing “business” that is either quasi-legal or illegal, and be willing to pay the penalty if caught. Would I do this in Thailand? I wouldn’t in my current predicament. There are simply not enough short-run or long-run payoffs from living there, or for that matter in any of the countries of Southeast Asia, giving up what I’ve got, the great money I get for hardly working. And I’m hardly alone on this score in the West.

It goes without saying that each of us has our own history, and own particular needs, and peculiar ways of assessing what we have; still, what Stick makes so abundantly clear in this essay is that after a mere four years he began finding himself living in a small world that resembles his homeland. I say small for reasons that he points to, and doesn’t. He has a small group of expats from which to choose his friends, and expat groups everywhere in the world are a skewed lot, to include some genuinely dysfunctional and fucked up individuals that sane person would never associate with at home. Living in Bangkok for more than a decade, Stick has his homeland in the small in Thailand too because there are all of those people and places that he grew up with in New Zealand that are at best memories, now and again e-mail correspondents, not people and places he can touch bases with more or less at will were he living in New Zealand.

As a final note, I see a parallel between long-time residence in a place, as with Stick in Thailand, and no doubt many expats in Thailand, and what happens in relationships, whether in the West or in the East. All of us in middle age—Stick now in early middle age--would love nothing better than to be in a loving and satisfying relationship with a young and attractive woman. And of course this is what so much of Southeast Asia offers to the foreigner from the West. But the reality is that however good such relationships may be for a couple of years, there will be change, and in most cases, I’d bet, those changes are no different than what occurs in a relationship in the West. And indeed they may be worse. The young Thai wife just can’t resist coupling with someone more her age, or fucking anyone that winks at her if she was a former bargirl. The young Thai wife will lose her good looks, and may well get just as fat and uncomely as so many Western women, and may even look worse than many fat Western women, as arguably small women don’t carry fat as well as larger women do. The young Thai wife will continue to use Thailand and Thai society as her reference points—all of these young and beautiful and charming women are every bit as likely as Stick and his expat friends to cocoon themselves in their old habits and cultural ways of seeing and engaging the world.

I’m not Stick, that’s obvious. But what would I do in his shoes, given what he has revealed in this quite revealing weekly essay. I’d return to New Zealand. He’s still relatively young and can get a business going there, and accumulate a retirement nest egg, which I’d bet will be a lot harder in Thailand. Need I say more? No: this is just my cheap throwaway opinion, worth little because I know no more than the tip of an iceberg about who Stick really is, and what his real needs are all about. Ditto he would say about me.

This final note: I once had an opportunity to settle permanently in Australia, and I thought I might do so. I had lived for more than a year in Melbourne, and for several months in two different places in the Northern Territory. But when the time came to make the hard decision, and as much as I liked Oz and its people, I chose to return to the U.S. With no offense meant, Australia was just too small for me. It didn’t, and still doesn’t, offer me, any more than Thailand does, the variety of stimulation and the opportunities that the U.S., for all its shortcomings, offers. And stimulation and opportunity are issues apart from questions of where I grew up and where my friends and family live, and the fact that through and through I’m an American.