Thai girls
I was keen to move down to the beach having finished fasting. Tall palm trees, golden sand and warm shallow water make this a tropical idyll. Cruising down the beach road I chose Lamai Coconut Resort, a series of appealing but modestly priced bungalows on the water’s edge.
Once I’d checked in and unpacked, however, I became uncomfortable. Around two-thirds of the guests were not happy young couples or backpacking friends, but western men and Thai girls. My first reaction was to think ’sex tourists’; my second, to feel uneasy in their company. (Yes, I know they’re women, but they look so young as to be girls.)
It’s low season on the Gulf of Thailand as the monsoon clouds the sky and drops a torrential shower most days. Hotels are half empty but this ugly breed remains. Typically older (and often overweight), but sometimes the same age as me, they tear up and down the roads on motorbikes with a much younger Thai girl in revealing dress on the back.
It’s the blatant commercialism of the relationship, the lack of attraction and focus on money for love, that I dislike. To me, it’s the expoitation of Thai women by western men and I don’t like what that says about me and my culture as well as those who take part in it.
A few years ago Lamai was a quiet village with attractive, simple bungalows lining the beach. (The Lonely Planet delights in telling us that the first two tourists arrived from Bangkok on a banana boat in 1971.) Now, several hundred metres of the town centre are wall-to-wall bars with loud western music, English football and girls touting for trade. It’s the Costa del Sol with sex, a complete contrast to the island calm I’d expected. Other towns on Samui are no different, although by many accounts this is nothing compared with Pattaya or Phuket.
Being a well-off middle class Englishman I cannot understand why these men need to travel 6,000 miles to spend a few weeks with a Thai – or rather, I understand why but cannot see how it gives long term satisfaction. Moreover, I feel sad to see these pretty young women selling their bodies for money, away from their families and traditional Thai lives. Andrew Hicks, in his novel Thai Girl, tries to place this in the context of needing to raise money and hopefully improve the lives of themselves and their families.
Few are natives of Samui, many coming from the Isan region near the border with Cambodia and Laos, their darker skin and slim faces contrasting with the Polynesian look of the native chao samui. Yet their presence is changing the island.
But who’s exploiting whom? During one lengthy thunderstorm I had a long conversation with Joy, the owner of an internet cafe. “Lamai has changed much in past few years”, she said, “it’s sad. These girls come from far away and change our town”. “And I suppose they are sad, too?”, I asked. “No! They are happy because they have money and can spend on things like clothes and drinks. Why do sex and drink always go together? Many men send money from abroad, lots have Thai boyfriend too. Money from Western boyfriend go to Thai boyfriend”. Even if this were just half true, this raises myriad questions about the position of these women in Thai society and the financial purpose of the sex trade. There’s a thesis in it, for sure.
In my snobbish way I refuse to talk to the men and find out more about them and why they do it, but my mind goes back to my first days in Nepal, meeting two Burnley lads on a rafting trip. They talked without bravado about who they worked a few months a year in the construction industry, then spend the rest of the time living like kings in Pattaya with cheap apartments and Thai girlfriends. Not monsters, they seemed like two blokes who’d get out of the cold of northern England and were trying to make a better life for themselves in Thailand, at least for a couple of years.
And then I’m challenged again when I meet Danes and Brits more like me, with families or partners living in Europe, where the wife happens to be Thai. Look at the company director and his wife I met on a Thai cookery course, or the hypnotherapist and his girlfriend working at Spa Samui.
So what is going on? It reminds me there is no black and white. I’m not looking to find an answer, a holisitic explanation, just trying to explain what’s running through my untaxed mind. Still don’t like the old westerners – young Thai – girlie bar thing, though. And I checked into a different hotel.
6 Responses to “Thai girls”
1 andrew hicks 24 November 2004 @ 4:53 am
How can a book be dire but informative?
Happily your view is unique. The book is a bestseller, receives overwhelmingly favourable comments (see http://www.thaigirl2004.com), and has been quickly reprinted as the first print has sold out.
Andrew Hicks
2 Andrew Hicks 30 November 2004 @ 4:20 am
I have for the first time just read the whole of your piece which is for some reason placed under the heading, “Thai Girl”, a rubbish read. I too am middle class and British and had exactly the same reaction to the sex trade when I went to Lamai on Koh Samui. My response was to write my novel, Thai Girl’. Indeed my character, Maca specifically mentions the ‘lady boxing’ on Lamai where bar girls are dragged into the ring to bloody each others’ faces. I feel angry about that and if Maca expresses my anger that is all I can do. Your unexplained negativity towards my book does not help, however.
You say there could be a thesis on why Thai farmers daughters flock to sell their bodies. My novel is that thesis in popular form. From descriptions of the go go bars to Ben’s long discussions with Jack Russell, the more acceptable face of sex tourism, to Ben’s visit to Isaan with Fon to discover the crisis in the rice fields, the story takes the reader through many aspects of modern Thai culture and leaves them to reach their own conclusions about commercil sex. Almost universally readers have found the novel engaging and interesting, both in seeing Ben’s adverse impact on Fon at the same time as he achieves a more mature attitude to the exploitation of Thai women by western visitors.
Can I therefore suggest you do two things. Reread the book (if indeed you have already read it) and remove the offensive headline from the top of your article. It is irrelevant to what you have written which I found an interesting read. Otherwise you should review the book more fully and say why the book can be both dire and informative.
Andrew
3 Joel 1 December 2004 @ 9:48 am
Originally I described Andrew Hick’s novel Thai Girl as ‘dire but informative’, a lazy comment that he rightly criticised, and I used a picture of the title of his book to bring some life to my ramblings. Mr Hick’s biography suggests an engaging character and a remarkably varied career, of which this book is another step.
Following his feedback (see above), I’ve flicked through the book again and realise why I was in two minds about it. I think my original comment was in reaction to the review on the cover that this was ’surely the best backpacker novel so far’. For me, Thai Girl is not a ‘backpacker novel’, since many of the backpackers I meet spend much of the bloody day fucking swearing, getting pissed, getting stoned and working out where the next easy shag is going to come from. Even (or especially) the 18 year old gap year students. In this sense, the characters of Ben and Emma are perhaps unrealistic and the this aspect of the novel not completely successful. Indeed, I remember being relieved to finish the book as I’d become frustrated by this element of the story. (Bear in mind I’d not eaten for four days at this time in Cell Block Samui Spa!). Alex Garland or Emily Barr paint a ‘truer’ picture of this scene.
But the book is (to cite other comments) ‘not just another rehash of the Bangkok bar scene, this is a serious book’, ‘[a] vivid portrayal of commercial sex’. In this respect, it is an engaging (and informative) book. A month later, this is what stays in my mind.
If the book were on sale at Amazon, here’s what I’d say in a customer review.
‘Alex Garland’s enormously successful ‘The Beach’ painted an idealised view of life for backpackers in the Gulf of Thailand, but did little to illustrate the complexities of tourism’s impact on the ‘land of smiles’. Andrew Hicks has challenged this in ‘Thai Girl’, a book documenting the growing relationship between a young western man and a local woman.
Do not buy this and expect ‘The Beach’ or ‘Backpacker’, with hard drinking, soft drugs and shark bites on every page. The westerners here seem too clean cut, they don’t swear and they don’t smoke, although Hicks captures the easy-going life when travelling and illustrates the diverse characters to be found at the travellers’ end of the beach. I found the relationship between the English couple somewhat unrealistic, a combination of the story, dialogue and behaviour.
However, the novel is unique in depicting life beyond the beach and exploring the different reasons why Thais come to the beach to sell themselves or their services to Westerners. By the end of the book you’ll have a better understanding of the geography and history of Thailand, be able to spot an Isan woman from a caho samui, and perhaps reflect more deeply on your effect on Thailand, both good and bad.
The book contains a handful of errors that can jar. Every backpacker, whether beer monster or anti-globalisation protester, knows it’s McDonalds not Macdonalds. But if you are sitting on the beach in Thailand and want to know more about who those girls are and why some of them are sitting on a fat old white man’s lap – the questions that you can never ask – then this book is an engaging starting point.’
So, Mr Hicks, my apologies and I hope this is a more comprehensive response to your book. Kudos for completing something that I could never even begin, and then becoming an Asia Books bestseller. Serves me right for writing without thinking, and a warning about the power of Google!
4 Nic 1 December 2004 @ 3:50 pm
Well, there you go Joel. “Publish and be damned” as they say.
To make up my middle class and British mind (and a cheap Brummie), can I borrow your copy of the book?
5 Jim 5 January 2005 @ 1:08 am
Being a Brit married to a “Thai girl” I picked up the novel a couple of weeks ago whilst at BKK airport and read it on the flight home. It made a good read. My wife and I met under similar circumstances as Ben and Fon whilst we were both in our early twenties and living in Thailand a few years ago. She was at the time a reflexologist (although not practacing on the beach) and I was a naive traveling type who had decided to stay on in Thailand and teach. We went on to spend a little over a year in her rural NE Thai village with the family. The observations made in the book are for the most part very accurate as they stand. Although I think there is a novel waiting to be written by a Westerner that can stay for any long period of time in the North East and try and get inside the way she really ticks. The observations made by the western cast are interesting, however are clearly the author’s own being as they are a bit above the average Mekong chit chat. But that’s not the point as the book seems to me to be really about educating the sex tourist. I think they should make you buy this book at Bangkok arrivals, might make a few Westerners think twice before getting involved with the commercial sex scene.
6 Andrew Hicks 7 January 2005 @ 11:08 am
Jim.
Thanks for the nice things you’ve said about my novel, “Thai Girl”. Your response is exactly what an author hopes and longs for.
On my website http://www.thaigirl2004.com, there’s a Readers Forum which is collecting some interesting comments and starting a good debate. I’d love to add your comment to the Forum on the site. Would that be okay by you? I am on andrew@thaigirl2004.com.
Andrew
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