Elephant Guide to Thailand
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Variations on a theme: Thai women and foreign husbands |
The main road leading through this village of 800 people in
Thailand's northeast mostly runs through a scene of rural
dishevelment, simple shacks with the ubiquitous rusted corrugated
roofs, ragged clumps of banana trees and palms, and, here and
there, a simple open-air restaurant or grocery store.
But next to the Ban Cao post office is a sort of anomaly: an
imposing iron gate leads to a spacious house with verandas, a
sloping tile roof, a garage, a well-tended garden with sculptures
and lawns. It is one of several like it in this otherwise
nondescript Thai town not far from Udon Thani, which was an
American air base during the Vietnam War.
Are these the weekend getaways of Bangkok businessmen who have
decided for some reason to build here, not far from the Mekong
River and the border with Laos, rather than on some island resort
like Phuket or Ko Samui? Not at all.
"Normally in the northeast when you see a big house, you know that
this house belongs to a foreigner who has married a Thai woman,"
Adul Khankeaw, Ban Cao's headman, explained. "And if you go to buy
a new motorbike or car and pay cash, the salesman will ask you if
you or one of your relatives is married to a foreigner."
Thailand, of course, has always attracted foreign men interested in
the local women, not least of course during the Vietnam War when
the country was the favored "rest and recreation" destination for
tens of thousands of GIs, as well as construction workers, Air
America pilots, diplomats and journalists.
And, while the GIs are long gone, this country has, almost ever
since the Vietnam War ended, been one of the chief sex tourism
capitals of the world. Even a relatively remote place like Udon
Thani, which is the local provincial capital, shows the marks of
this. "Great Food, Drinks, Pool, Girls" is the way one restaurant
advertises its offerings on the official map distributed by the
town's hotels.
But what those imposing houses in Ban Cao show is a variation on
the theme of Thai women and foreign men. They are the homes of men,
mostly middle-aged and older, who have married local women, in many
instances former bar girls whom they met in Bangkok or Pattaya, the
two major centers of the Thai sex trade, and settled down in
retirement in rural Thailand.
Usually an economic consideration has entered into these marriages
at the outset. Quite clearly, comely Thai women are marrying
European men, often 20 or 30 or even 40 years older than they are,
because of the economic advantage of it to them. And for the men,
they have companionship, an easy life in a country very cheap by
Western standards, and somebody to look after them as they get
older.
"At first it wasn't about love but for a better life,"
acknowledged one woman, Supee, 45 years old, who is married to a
retired German named Peter, aged 62. Peter was a tourist in
Thailand when they met 21 years ago and, after living in Germany
for most of the years since, they moved to Ban Cao, Supee's native
village.
"I didn't like him so much at first," another Thai married to a
European man said of her husband, a retired French oil engineer
named Jean-Claude. She gave her name as Boonyong, and she was
working as a waitress in Bangkok (she was not in the sex trade)
when Jean-Claude met her on a visit and asked her to live with him.
"I said, 'O.K.,' because I had just lost my father and now I
could go home and be with my mother, which is what I wanted,"
Boonyong said. In Ban Cao alone, out of 180 families, 30 local
women have married foreigners. There's a village in Roi Et
Province, the Thai press has reported, where 200 women are married
to foreigners, the majority of them German and Swiss. There are
only 500 families in the entire village.
About 15 percent of all marriages in the northeast, a study
published by Khon Kaen University found, are now between Thai women
and foreign men. Most of the men are Europeans, but there are
upwards of 300 or so Americans, many of them veterans of the
Vietnam War who were based in Udon Thani in the 1960s and early
1970s and are living here, most of them with Thai wives as well.
There is a sort of calculated redemption on both sides of these
marriages. Many of the women have painful stories, of working as
prostitutes, of abandonment by Thai husbands and boyfriends, of
children they couldn't afford to take care of. They make no secret
of the fact that marrying some nice, older foreign man saved both
them and their extended families from poverty and unhappiness.
And as for the men, many of them are divorced or unhappily married
back home. They came to Thailand for a brief touristic encounter
with the local sex-for-sale industry and ended up staying for life.
"In Vienna you have so many obligations," said a retired Austrian
international lawyer who gave his name as Christoph Killy. He has
been married for 14 years to a woman from Ban Cao. "There's so
much you have to do and so much you aren't allowed to do there.
Here you are free."
The truth is that deceit and tragedy, along with happy stories, are
part of the picture. Houses and land, by law, have to be owned by
Thais, and so there have been cases where Thai wives simply
expropriated the properties built for them by their foreign
husbands whom they expelled, and then invited their Thai boyfriends
to move in with them.
"I've seen terrible things here," Killy said. "Some women are
married to Thai men and they tell their foreign boyfriends that
they are their brothers. So they sit together and eat together, and
the foreigner even buys a motorbike for the Thai 'brother.' "
Still, it's easy to meet what seem like normally happy couples
here. According to that university study, marrying a foreigner not
so long ago carried a stigma. Now, asked what they want for their
daughters, 90 percent of the inhabitants of the Thai northeast
replied: "I want for them to marry a foreigner."
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