Of Walls, Wives, Caves and Gates

So what's the deal, this funny experience of ending up happily entangled with a ‘Thai girl' young enough to be your own daughter? How does it work exactly?

Well, first of all she clubs you down with her consummate charm, then she grabs you by what remains of your greying hair and she drags you off to her cave. But having got there and having decided to stay, your obligation is then to go a-hunting…
to provide the means of survival in a harsh environment for your lady and all those near to her.

That's how marriage always used to be before the days of Germaine Greer, the condom and equal earnings for guys and dolls, and that's very much how it still is here in rural Thailand. And there's nothing so extraordinary about
that. She's not with you for your intellectual ability and you can't expect to discuss Nietsche or the romantic poets over the som tam and soda. It's not necessarily that she isn’t your intellectual equal, but there
are big barriers of culture and language.

Whenever I meet some poor farang guy alone and palely loitering through the lofty aisles of Big C in Surin and I ask him what he's doing in these parts, invariably he'll say he's building himself a house. By which he means
of course that he's building a house for his Thai girlfriend and her family!

Is it going to be expensive I ask him and here he glazes over. Frankly he simply doesn't know.

What I daren't tell him is that although there are no lawyers' fees for buying the land (so nothing to prove ownership), there’ll be a number of other substantial and unexpected expenses. First, come the rains, lest the house
ends up knee deep in water, he'll have to spend good money bringing in hundreds of tons of soil to displace the monsoon floods onto his neighbours' land. Next he'll have to provide the rice farmers doing the hard slog of construction
with iced water during the day and something much stronger such as lao khao at night. Then when it's finished he'll have to throw a three day house warming party during which he'll keep half the province fed and happily
inebriated for at least three days, accompanied by ear-splitting music starting at four in the morning.

And last and certainly not least of the costs, he'll have to build a big, big wall all the way round the 'garden'. This will be unnecessarily high, made of cement rendered blocks and usually painted a pale colour so that it
discolours with the rains and has to be repainted every year. It will probably be built even before the house is started because it's so very important, and it could cost as much or even more than the house itself. Often the poor farang gives
up on the whole affair after only building the wall, having run out of money and romantic endurance. Or he starts building the house but runs out of cash having only completed the roof. (At this point, note that while in most normal places the
roof is put on last, in Thailand it’s common to do it first.)

A final shock expense is that at the front of the house, as the ultimate statement of vulgar opulence there must be erected a deeply embarrassing wrought iron gate of Buck House proportions. It’ll be a tall and elaborate confection
of uprights and twiddly bits with little gold arrows on top that is totally unrelated to any concept of reasonable utility. Not least of the problems, it'll later need constant repair and repainting which, true to tradition will never be
done… Thais just don't do maintenance… and accordingly it'll degenerate into a dusty, rusty mess in a matter of months.

People ask me what are the biggest stresses in this my marriage and I always answer the same… it's 'the wall', or to be more correct the absence of one.

A few years back, after finishing our house, I was digging my toes in about not building a wall and Cat was threatening to look for a less mean and unreasonable farang. (I think she was joking!). Finally we compromised on a fig leaf of a
wall at the front only and concrete posts and chicken wire around the back and I, at least, think it works very well indeed. I thus thought the matter was settled once and for all, but in our most warm and intimate moments, Cat cannot restrain
herself from gazing into my eyes and sweetly saying, 'Teerak, I want one more thing to make me happy jing jing.' I block my ears and turn a stony face. Not the wall again! Don’t mention the wall!

Is it possible though for the farang husband outnumbered as he is by his Thai family, ever to win in the long term? Well, I admit I gave in cravenly on the big issue of the gate and there it now is in all its glory at the front of the house.
For a dusty soi in a poor rice village in Surin, it really is a bit outrageous when others around us are living in hovels. Nor is it very functional. It's pretty difficult to open it as it's so heavy, bits keep falling off and have to
be welded back on and, Forth Bridge-like, it needs constant repainting. I'm determined to keep it decent though, just to show the locals you should… and I've even been known to wield a paint brush myself.

There's one thing though I forgot to mention about this and other Isaan palace gates, namely that it's customary always to leave them wide open! To do otherwise would make it look as if your massive walls and gates are intended
to exclude old friends who’ve been used to freely wandering in since time immemorial. Burglars don’t even have to bother to jump over the top… they just walk in. Nobody could thus possibly suggest that these walls and gates serve
any useful function at all.

So do I mind this extravagant madness that allows more than a little of my farang money to trickle down, should I say cascade, into the local community where I now live? Of course I don't, perish the thought! If I did they'd call
me kee nieow… which means I'd be 'as mean as sticky shit', and for the sole resident farang of this village, that would be the end, a social fate worse than death.

Stickman's thoughts:

You have to chuckle, don't you! Nice story.

I still wonder why people just don't rent. Renting in the Thai countryside is so ridiculously cheap…but then I guess, so is building.