Thai women and foreign husbands

[Isaan Rollie]

Not a new article nevertheless interesting:

Variations on a theme: Thai women and foreign husbands

By Richard Bernstein
Sunday, August 12, 2007
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 aforeigner."

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 getolder.

"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."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/12/ ... 113402.php

[mcmurphy]

And what's the reaction of thai men to that?

Happened two days ago at the restaurant of Makro:

Foreigner with his wife and two related teenagers was eating there. At a neighbouring table two man and two women were sitting, well dressed, presumably teachers from a nearby college or school on their lunchbreak. There was no communication or interaction between the foreigner and them at all.

When the foreigner's group had finished eating, the teenagers went outside to get a shopping cart, his wife was still looking at the VCDs next to the restaurant and the foreigner already went inside. Reportedly now one of the men from the teachers group approached the foreigner's wife, yelling at her loudly for everybody to hear in very rude language: "And where does your hoodlum come from (อีนาง ผัวมืงมาจากไหน)? She was too stunned by this sudden exposure of the guy's rudeness to document the guy's personality by taking a photograph with her cameraphone but just went away.

What can we foreigners do to protect our wives' dignity from ***** like that showing off in public. Things like that are reported more often now. Those guy's pictures should be taken and the incidents reported to the managers of the shops so they can ban them from entering the shops.

[Isaan Rollie]

I must admit that sounds very harsh, extremely unusual. Did you give that group reason in any way, like for example the way you were dressed or behaved in the restaurant?

[mcmurphy]

Rollie! I protest! That wasn't me. Friday evening the old Aussie from the next village was here with his wife. He told me that happened the day before. And his wife confirmed it. She was very upset about that teacher treating her like a dumb and low woman from the profession. They're married more than 20 years, have an adult child. Though she does not look her age. He does.

When he comes over here he always looks ok and well dressed though casually. But out here in the village it's overkill to dress with silk and nice ironed trousers and good shoes just for a visit of neighbours. Jeans, clean short-sleeved shirt and slippers are fine. I cannot imagine that this guy goes shabbily dressed to town. As I understood there was nothing between him and that teacher. It was just an isolated incident where that teacher wanted to show off. My wife reports similar situations with thai men in The Mall, just not as harsh.

mc

[KoratCat]

From our discussion on the german section we got to the conclusion that there is just nothing you can do besides getting your wife to understand that she is above these idiots and ignore them.

[KoratCat]

Thai country girls dump their foreign husbands

Bangkok - Thai girls in the middle of rural north-east Thailand are dumping their foreign husbands by the score, a senior judge said Saturday.

Of the 142 divorce cases filed in Khon Kaen Civil Court in the last three months most involved local girls seeking to split from their foreign spouses, Patikorn Khonpipat, chief justice of the Juvenile and Family Court told the Nation daily.

The judge could give no reason for the recent turning away from foreign husbands who have been sought after by women from this relatively deprived region for the last several decades.

He speculated that Thai girls had unreasonable expectations of a superior lifestyle and high incomes when they married foreign men - only to become sharply disillusioned quite quickly. Few Thais nowadays live in abject poverty.

There are no reliable statistics for the number of Thai women marrying foreigners with many marriages not registered in Thailand, but it seems likely to be quite high. Many of the single men who visit Thailand's notoriously raunchy nightlife zones come away with a girl in tow.

More respectable women are finding it easy to link up with lonely foreigners thanks to a plenitude of internet dating sites where girls who can hardly speak English can connect with men hoping to find an 'exotic' Thai partner.

In Roi Et province, next to Khon Kaen, there is a 'Swiss Village' so called because more than 100 women there have married foreign men, with already married girls introducing others.

A couple of years ago the National Economic and Social Development Board discovered that 15,284 women in the sprawling north-eastern region were married to foreigners and live overseas, which prompted the economic think tank to promote the idea that foreign-married girls could help channel investment back to Thailand.

The latest news suggests either that many country girls think they have already received sufficient investment or are no longer prepared to pay the price of an unsatisfactory marriage.

Monsters & Critics Dec. 8, 2007

I cannot see any of this "increased trend" asserted in the above article. Maybe in the english-speaking community?