Don’t Judge A Book By Its Cover

I’ve been reading a number of the “stories” (for want of a better word) on this website and I’ve found it very interesting! It seems that there is a three-way divide between people who go to Thailand and get with some hooker (whether or not they planned to originally), people who go to Thailand for other purposes but get prostitution shoved down their throats because it’s (as far as what I’ve read) everywhere in Thailand, and finally people who are from Thailand complaining about foreigners coming to Thailand for sex and criticizing them for giving bad “feedback” to the rest of the outside world (i.e. on this site). I apologize if this piece does not refer to Thailand in the initial stages but please keep reading to get the full picture.

I have to make an initial admission that I have never been to Thailand in my life. I honestly don’t have any reason to. I don’t dislike the culture at all but I just find other cultures in the Asia-Oceania region more interesting (e.g. Japan and Korea). As I’m going to talk a little bit about Thai girls and perhaps Asian girls in general, I want to first give an insight into my personal life and study so that nobody can catch me out and tell me that I simply don’t know what I’m talking about.

I study Business with Japanese in a UK university and with that comes two separate student communities as the two disciplines are not connected in terms of modules etc. Firstly, there is the Business School community: as far as I’m concerned a large chunk of those people are privileged, stuck up rich kids who are just studying business because they have nothing that they really want to do and their parents will give them some kind of job when (whether or not) they graduate anyway (but that could easily apply to students on any degree programme!). Of course there are many British and international students on the course from so many different nations (I don’t care to list them) who are perfectly nice and are not what I would categorize as “stuck up” but rather quite friendly!. The biggest problem is that there are so many of us (around 500) that it’s difficult to create close knit groups and I’ve only got 6 (what I would call close) friends in my Business lectures.

The other half (or rather the other 2/5) of my degree is Japanese. The Japanese class is a very small, cosy class of 13 students. As we are studying a foreign language, we are consistently encouraged to engage with the Japanese exchange students who study here each year. Additionally, the “Japan Society” run by our University is held every other Friday which is populated by many Japanese people as well as other nationalities (mostly British or Asian). For this reason I am in contact with many “Asian” girls on a daily basis (although I would have preferred to list them by nationality, I’m too lazy).

At the beginning of Second Year, I met a Japanese girl who had just arrived from Japan as an exchange student and she seemed to be really bubbly (as well as attractive) so I decided to ask for her Skype (yes we live in the digital age, phone number can come later) and we had a very long, interesting and hilarious chat that night for about 7 hours. It seemed like we had immediately hit it off, and although we didn’t have anything strictly in common (interests etc.), we seemed to be quite a match! So, after about 3 or 4 days, she had invited me to her apartment and one thing led to another (I won’t go into any detail) and we ended up going out for around 5 months! Of course there were a few cultural differences like her feeling uncomfortable holding hands in public or acting like a girlfriend in public, and my other Japanese friends (thankfully) confirmed that such behaviour was not uncommon in their culture – i.e. it wasn’t because she was embarrassed to be my girlfriend. Unfortunately it all came to a head when she was returning to Japan and the very confusing and conflicting reasons that she gave me for breaking up were probably just because she didn’t have the heart to tell me it was because she’s leaving (not sure why but I didn’t hold any grudges!).

Anyway, fast forward to two months later and somehow I’ve met a friend of my Chinese business course mate at Japan Society and we start going to the cinema together every week (on my Orange Wednesday deal, if you’re not British, you won’t know and I’m too lazy to explain it) and although I found her extremely attractive, I told myself I should stay friends with her because I didn’t really NEED another girlfriend. Unfortunately, nature and my feelings got the better of me and I (to my credit, quite bravely) kissed her after inviting her to my house for dinner. There was a week in limbo and then we started a relationship. I have to say that If I were to strike some differences between my Japanese ex and my Chinese girlfriend I would say that the latter is more “traditional” in the sense that she seems to do a lot of things for me (as if she’s already my wife) for example she will take the 10 minute train to University to meet me just to give me some sandwiches that she’s made for me! How sweet! In contrast, my Japanese ex never really made any efforts over the odds (but to be fair neither did I) and although the night time antics were always good, we did start to run out of conversation topics towards the end.

Now let me move this submission a bit more towards Thailand! So I have 10 Thai friends in University, 7 of them girls and 3 guys. I have to say that these girls are much more outgoing than my ex or my Chinese girlfriend. They don’t seem to mind about being “rude” cursing and shouting etc. whereas the others are more “reserved”. My Thai friends are all rich (I doubt anybody from Thailand could afford to pay £10,000 / year for tuition fees if they weren’t either from a rich family or had already worked up a large sum of money through a job. None of them seemed to be “slutty” in any way and, as far as I’m aware, some of them had never kissed a guy, let alone done anything untoward.

It’s very interesting to see men (maybe women also?) complaining about Thai women who have taken them for a ride (not the good kind) in some way, shape or form and they seem to all think they didn’t deserve anything. Now let me say that of course there are people who go looking for a relationship in Thailand and they wanted a nice wholesome girl but ended up with some cheating whore who tried to hack their cereal box or whatever the story is. Of course that’s a big shame if you find yourself in such a predicament.

I would say the reason that this appears to happen so much is because men are going to Thailand to look for a Thai girl. That one sentence says it all. They are not looking for somebody they like; they’re looking for a girl of a certain ethnicity/nationality/race however you want to describe it. I think it all comes back to people saying personality is more important than appearance and I really would agree.

Although I have had a Japanese girlfriend and currently have a Chinese girlfriend, I did have 3 English girlfriends before going to University. It’s not a case of me just preferring Asian girls. I would say it’s a combination of 1) the only English girl that I thought was attractive and had a funny personality didn’t rate me the same and 2) as I’m exposed to such a large community of Asian girls (and a comparatively small amount of British/western girls), it’s almost due to sheer statistics that I would eventually get with an Asian girl of some kind.

I want to conclude by just saying don’t judge a book by its cover. Just because you think you like Asian girls (and just because you’ve heard something about how westerners are better “endowed” than Asian men) don’t think you’re going to find the girl of your dreams in Thailand (or indeed any other country including your own). As I’ve tried to illustrate, girls from various Asian countries are strikingly different and should not be grouped together. I only use the word “Asian” for convenience. Don’t knock the girls where you are before you go elsewhere, you’re more likely to find a keeper, and less likely to be taken for a ride!

Peace!