Sandy Does Southeast Asia

“I don’t enjoy the gender relations in this country.” I recently overheard this said with an ironic laugh by a young American woman who works for the Peace Corps in an outlying village. The laugh was thrown in to emphasize that she was vastly understating her case. Despite that, I admired her restraint.

If you really want to see a Western female get riled up, ask her about relationships between older Western men and Thai women. You won’t get too far into your question before eyes start rolling.

“Disgusting,” said my friend Caroline, dismissing an entire demographic in her typically pithy style.

“But why is it disgusting,” I asked. “Isn’t that a little strong?”

The most popular argument goes like this: it’s disgusting because these pretty young women can’t possibly be attracted to these unappealing older men. I’ve heard this from both Western women and young Western men.

I find this argument hypocritical at best, given how acceptable it is for young Western women to partner with older men. Take Caroline for instance – she is twenty-one and has a strong preference for dating men at least ten years her elder. So it’s okay for a twenty-something Western girl to date a forty-something Western man but disgusting if the girl happens to be Thai? ‘Yes,’ seems to be the answer.

I honestly don’t see what makes the dynamic of these cross-cultural couples so much different from the dynamic of your typical Western couple. The women are using the men for emotional stability, financial security and social status? The men are using the woman for companionship, sex and ego stroking? Wait, and how is that different?

Yesterday I was at the German bakery having a pastry and a coffee for breakfast. I was also writing in my journal. One of the regulars, a pale overweight American man of a certain age, made a joking comment to me about “the ubiquitous journal.” When he lumbered by again, he said that he hoped I was enjoying Nong Khai. I smiled and replied that yes I was, very much so, and thanked him. He seemed pleased. Pleased and also terribly eager to please. There was something so touching about it that I wanted to give him a hug and dote on him.

As I watched this man interacting with the young Thai women who work in the restaurant, I saw their flirtatious, attentive kindness toward him. I saw it and it made me very, very happy.

Could it be that young Westerners believe these men somehow don’t deserve the care and companionship of an attractive young woman because they haven’t properly earned it? They certainly aren’t bartering anything that we think of as having acceptable exchange value for an older man – wealth, fame, or power. They are not playing by the rules and that is always threatening. Some might even say it’s disgusting.

The front window of my house looks out onto a temple complex. Sitting at my desk, I can watch monks working in their yard. Right now, for example, one of them is using a hoe to turn over dirt and move it around. He is also engaging in one of the more popular pastimes in Southeast Asia – burning piles of stuff. He stops in the shade of a building and rests, leaning on the hoe. The scene is pure eye candy – blue smoke drifting across a backdrop of palm trees, iridescent roosters strutting in the dusty foreground, and in the middle of it all a saffron robed monk – perfectly composed to play into my Western conception of The Serene Spirituality of the East.

When my friend Jessica heard I was moving into this house she congratulated me, then said, “Just watch out for the monks.”

“Watch out for them how?” I asked.

“Oh, you know how they are. And that temple has an especially bad reputation.” Before I could tell her that no, I did not know how they are, she got distracted and we never had a chance to finish the conversation. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the word ‘especially.’ An especially bad reputation.

Thailand is reputed to be a very spiritual place. On the other hand, it is also hailed as a one-stop shop for sex and drug tourism. I have not seen either go-go bars or recreational drugs on the streets of Nong Khai but you would be hard-pressed to throw a rock on those same streets without hitting a monk. This would seem to make a case for the Spiritual Thailand side of the debate. You could take it further and say that maybe the sex and drugs are primarily for tourists while Thais themselves are devout, spiritual people.

You could say that but you’d be wrong. The fact is that monasteries in Thailand are something like bible camp in the States. Young men don’t go because they have any interest in spirituality. They are simply packed off to do their time so their families can feel pious and earn the approving nods of their neighbors. Luckily for the boys, they don’t have to stay for too long, a few months at the outside. Just long enough to say they’ve done it and then get back to their regularly scheduled program of clubbing, buying motorbikes and – since 95% of the sex industry is for domestic consumption and the average single Thai male avails himself on a surprisingly regular basis – visiting prostitutes.

“They won’t actually do anything,” said another long-time resident, reassuring me. Since the warning to watch out for the monks, I’d questioned every person I could, both about how the religious system works here and the potential dangers of living next to a monastery. “They’re not going to hurt you. They’ll just stare and maybe try to chat you up. It’s an annoyance more than anything. Don’t worry about it.”

The truth is, I wasn’t worried about it. I was more curious than anything else. I was curious about why Thailand has a reputation for being Spiritual with a capital S in the first place, when all signs so far have pointed to superstitious and status-conscious. In other words, it looks an awful lot like what we’d call plain old religious at home.

One day recently, I found myself swept up in a wave of expats fleeing our neighborhood just ahead of the mosquito extermination truck that sprays poison liberally over these streets every couple of months. It was a group I’ve never spent any time with – The Nong Khai New Agers. I don’t hang out with them not because I have anything against them but only because they are an exclusive clique, and try as I may I can’t seem to make inroads with them. There I was though, finally included in an outing.

As we sat and drank Thai iced teas, the two look-through-you-like-you-don’t-exist women sat on the opposite side of the table pretending I wasn’t there, while on my side of the table – with the man and the one woman I’ve managed to get on speaking terms with – the subject turned to my writing. I chatted about it a little and asked their advice in a friendly conversation way, since the man is an artist and the woman is very interested in literature, but the topic was soon exhausted.

I was also having some difficulty focusing since I’d noticed that the woman sitting directly across from me – the New Age Alpha Female of Nong Khai – had drawn in her eyebrows using a dark purple pencil. Now, I’d noticed before that she always wears head to toe purple including a particularly striking little turban but this…well, this was taking it a bit far. I was of course fascinated and began to really look at her. I saw how the blankly disinterested look beneath those purple eyebrows could easily be mistaken for calmness or even serenity. And then when I looked closer, it dawned on me that, exactly like one of the monks across the street from my house, when viewed with just the right lack of cultural information, one might automatically assume she was emanating a deep spirituality.

It strikes me that one of the real draws of foreign travel and even more, of living abroad, is that it is so much easier to see what you want to see, to be seen as you choose to see yourself, and to discard the rest. You can go about your daily life without all those messy details that can be so difficult to ignore at home, like ordained spiritual leaders who are more interested in sex than God. Even if you’re aware of them, it’s not your culture and therefore not your problem. You can create communities that reinforce your pet ideas about things like spirituality while vigorously insulating yourself from the reality of the culture in which you live. And that, I suspect, is the greatest luxury of being an expat.