Jaundiced Farang In The Land Of Plenty

You heard it all before. The farang who came to Thailand and understood everything and soon lost everything. The farang who came to Thailand and felt being treated like a king while in reality being laughed at. The farang finally with that funny hairstyle and face – a comic figure really who looks oversized everywhere and evaporates those odors of unfridged cheese.

Farangs come as businessmen, families, hippies, playboys, narcists, sex maniacs, beach bums – and all those foreign criminals! Whereas there’s only one Thai, namely the person wearing freshly ironed trousers, a clean shirt and sporting a hairdo that never messes up.

It can be a particularly tough life in Thailand as a curly-haired, pot-bellied, beet-red or even simply ordinary, polite, low-key farang. As you may not find your cloth sizes, sweat is ubiquitous, you turn red when trying to eat real Thai food – and who as a farang in Thailand has never lost control when a phu yai cut the queue and gave you that look as if you’re not even worth a grain of rice back in the forgotten village where Siam’s ancestors were born. As if you should be grateful that Thailand even let you enter the kingdom’s chosen shores.

True, you’re willing to compromise. You as a farang love to pay a multiple entrance fee whereas the chosen Thais can enter a National Park for basically nothing or even for free. Your overpriced ticket though serves a good cause. Reminding you that you’re visiting or living in a developing country that is eager to spend each additional satang for the well-being of its people.

Which is why no sane Western nation would ever confront an honorable visitor from Thailand with a double pricing system punishing the Thai for being Thai. Hell would brake lose if you’d dare to overcharge the visitor from Siam because he’s no farang. As – remember – the visitor traveled a long way from a developing country that is eager to spend each satang carefully and wisely for its people.

But most often you as a farang won’t even have a clue that you’re overcharged. Who can read the Thai alphabet, who knows what is actually fair and true. To be treated like a Thai requires you to pass a not too short rite of passage. After that a knowing look itself will suffice to let the taxi driver know to switch on that darn meter. Once you come to realize that you can actually achieve much more in Thailand by saying nothing, you’re a whole big step nearer to not being ridiculed anymore.

If so, you’ve just made the step from an alien to an upscale migrant. But somehow you always remain an alien. Even farangs who achieve the highly sought-after status of Permanent Residency receive a booklet calling them the xenophobic “alien.”

If it wouldn’t be for our so strangely shaped noses and faces and motley features, we’d be welcomed more easily into Thai society. Which is why a Korean or Japanese can live here largely unobserved.

The staggering physical differences of farangs and Asians though call for a whole different approach, as if those extraordinarily large foreigners from the West obey to other laws of nature.

Everything’s strange about those farangs – which leads us to the etymological root of the very word: The word farang is NOT slang of the word “farangset,” which denotes France and is not necessarily derogatory. Farang simply means foreigner. Current linguistic theory suggests its root is in the word “ferengi,” an ancient Persian word for foreigner – being used disrespectfully? Naw. Thai people have difficulties with Western names.

The generic word farang makes life so much easier for Thais to speak to those pale beings that could pass as ghosts and walk so clumsy because their pockets are full of rich heavy cash. Why should a Thai believe that a farang struggles back home to make ends meet, not to speak of the costs for the plane ticket and the overpriced hotel and all sorts of necessary pleasures over here in LOS.

Which is why farangs are called stingy because they don’t empty their full pockets out in the open. A Thai would give you his last pair of socks. A farang even dares to save up a satang for tomorrow. As he’s afraid of the tomorrow. As no tattoos nor tamboon give him peace of mind to be protected against all sorts of ills. No clan will scratch together the last money and pay for the bills if something should happen.

A farang is all by himself, not aware of the deeply Buddhist concept that whatever happens happens anyway – a carte blanche for Thais to do what they want to do. A farang still believes in the might of the self, the ego and the free will. He most likely may even have a regular job and a stable family life with no mia noi or mia yai to take care of and lie for.

Which is why the individualistic farang may be a loner because he feels obliged to so many and needs rather many timeouts. Which means that he can do something by himself. An impossibility for a Thai, because it goes against the Thai respect for family and social cohesion ethnocentric superior society.

If a Thai really alone and cannot bear it, just crank up the TV. Which is why TVs are running all the time in Thailand. Deep down people are, but can’t bear to feel lonely.

The Thai concept of morality therefore is profoundly liberating. Friedrich Nietzsche would have been a great Thai with his legendary “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” Whatever you want to do, even if you can’t afford it: Just go for it – as long as you’re staying out of jail. As Thais are immune to getting fucked up.

Proof is everywhere. Just take Thailand’s food. What other folk is able to mix up the sweet and the sour and the salty and the spicy and invariably get something delicious? Thailand is a chosen land of plenty of biblical proportions where the rivers run with honey and manna lures and pampers everywhere.

There’s enough of everything for everyone.

It takes some time for a farang to grasp this quintessential Thai way of life; to realize that due to their inherent and institutionalized unconcern Thais to have reached a completely relaxed resilience if not indestructibility.

Thais can build shopping centers of sizes no Western city is able to build and the word luxury doesn’t suffice anymore in Thailand to describe the pleasures awaiting you in one of the new VVVIP condos along Sukhumvit – whereas farangs are able to do things Thais are never capable to.

Take sunbathing in the nude. Naturism. Imagine Spencer Tunick, the photographer who is known for his installations in places around the world that feature large numbers of nude people posed in artistic formations. Imagine Spencer having a gig in Thailand and asking for the participation of the people. What a roar.

Thailand would become a place of pilgrimage.

The farang and the Thais are prudish in their very own ways. Whereas a Thai feels free to do anything – as long as nobody’s really aware of it -, the farang feels annoyingly bound by deeply entrenched moral values. But the farang is able to pose for Spenger Tunick. If that doesn’t tell you something.

But the smile of those farangs, as if they’d never learned how to smile. Thais know a thousand smiles to express a thousand things – things mostly that are not even remotely related to the naive simple smile of a farang.

A Thai can cry and smile.

A Thai can lie and smile.

A Thai can die and smile.

The farang’s smile, in contrast, is a so much more limited expression of happiness.

The misreading of the Thai smile in part explains why so many farang men end up attracted to Thai women. Living in a reactionary world back home where all pleasures are deemed as a waste of efficiency, the farang does not need much to find true womanhood in a woman who knows little more than to smile.




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April 17, 2008 | Filed Under Being Farang, Seriously, Not ..., Society, The Thai Mind 

Comments

2 Responses to “Jaundiced Farang In The Land Of Plenty”

  1. gonzobrains on April 25th, 2008 9.50 am

    I really hope this was written (at least partly) tongue-in-cheek.

  2. BangkokDan on April 25th, 2008 9.57 am

    Check the categories …

    BangkokDan

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