Pissing Contest
After spending many of the last 12 years visiting Thailand, I have found my experiences over time changing the way I approach many Westerners. I first visited back in the year 2000 as a backpacker new to the Land of Smiles and its many charms, and as my time and money ran out I found myself in the fortunate position of being offered a job in Thailand and ended up working here for the next six years.
During those first six years I would spend my weekdays working with and surrounded by Thais who helped me learn the language, and on the weekends I would visit the western areas for a taste of home food and English conversation. Towards the end of my time working here I started to find myself getting depressed with the constant complaining by westerners about Thailand, and I'm not talking about the small observations and complaints that we all have from time to time. I'm referring to the guys that sit in the bars, restaurants and guesthouses, who do nothing but moan for hours on end about how Thailand has got everything so wrong.
After moving back to the UK, I would return to Thailand as a tourist every five months for a 4-week holiday, and I enjoyed my time a whole lot more. Maybe because as a tourist I had more money to spend and wasn't visiting a lot of the cheaper expat places, I wouldn't hear so much of the negative stuff. I really enjoyed these visits and made a lot of friends, both western and Thai.
My main observations on meeting quite a few westerners is how many conversations can quickly turn in to a "pissing contest". It seems like there's a competition on who's been here the longest, who can speak the best Thai and whose country is the greatest.
A good example of this happened to me last night. I was sitting in a bar with the Thai owner who happens to speak English very well, when two western gentlemen came and joined us. The first man spoke very good Thai and was very pleasant. His friend on the other hand sat there telling me how good his friend was, how long they had both been here, and if I wanted to know anything about Thailand I should ask him. When I pointed out that I have been coming here for the last 12 years and could speak a bit of the language myself, it seemed to put his nose out of joint and he replied in an aggressive tone "So what! I've been coming here since 1973", at which point I lost all interest in any conversation with this guy as I knew we were heading into "pissing contest" territory.
Another situation occurred when visiting Khon Kaen. I was having a beer and minding my own business when a fellow European picked up on the fact that I was English and decided to take out all of the sins of my countrymen out on me. He accused English people of being aggressive, arrogant, thinking they still had the British empire and ruled the world. As I sat there quietly listening, the irony of the fact that he was the one acting in the way in which he described the English was lost on him, but if it makes him feel more superior then so be it. His tribe is obviously better and more advanced than mine, a tribal "pissing contest" so to speak.
It seems to be that some people have a very tribal mentality and it reminds me of going to a football match with the opposing sets of fans chanting and signing songs about each other.
My tribe is better than yours, we are bigger, our country is richer, we have a stronger army, be it the English tribe, American tribe, Australian tribe, etc.
Maybe it's a part of human nature to try to place ourselves above others and look down on them. One of my friends once said to me "If you always look down, you'll never see the stars."
Many of the most important opportunities in my life have arisen from meeting complete strangers, be it getting my first job in engineering when I met a guy in my local video shop, to being offered a job in Thailand whilst I was in a local Thai restaurant. These offers of employment would never have happened had I started telling these people how much better I was than them, and if I had not met these people I would never have had all the interesting experiences in my life so far.
When I go out I want to meet new people and hear the stories they have to tell, the adventures they have been on and the mistakes they have made. I don't want to hear how much better they are than someone else or how their tribe is the greatest.
So my advice should you chose to take it or not, is to treat anyone you meet as an equal, and try to see things as "My glass is half full and not half empty, you will generally have a better time."
Stickman's thoughts:
There's so much truth in what you say. Sadly Thailand has not always attracted the cream of Western society and as such some of the behaviour of Westerners here as well as some of the crap they go on about is not typically what you find in mainstream society in the West.
