Summer Solstice Memes

Happy Father's Day!

A recent comment made by a Thai woman has had me contemplating the role of men and specifically fathers. It also inadvertantly caused the Christian in me to come roaring back to life.

The comment itself was fairly standard, as a variation of your husband does not support you, therefore you should leave him. Now any Western man who has spent time in Thailand has probably come across this idea that financial support is paramount in a relationship and been burnt to varying degrees by it. Relationships are more transactional in Thailand and fidelity is purchased. The stereotype is that once the money runs out so does the commitment.

Of course this runs counter to Western and Christian concepts of commitment, perhaps best personified by somewhat standard wedding vows (based on Biblical verses in Corinthians and other places) of:

“Do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part?"

Happy Father’s Day!

In looking for building ideas on the Isaan land I joined about a dozen farang focused expat groups on Facebook including Building in Issan, Pattaya Unfiltered, American Expats in Thailand, Farming in Thailand and others. Based on the usually AI generated vignettes there is one consistent story. The poor Isaan farm girl turns eighteen and needs to support her family, so she becomes a bar girl. Her own father was non-existent in her life growing up: if he is mentioned at all he is characterized as an abusive, addicted alcoholic who ultimately abandoned the family. She eventually settles in with a Western expat, usually nearing retirement age, who can provide for her at which point she wants him to build a house for her family in Isaan. Usually, in the expat telling of this story, this does not end in happily ever after. The Thai wife grows bored and cheats with a local Thai man who can understand her, or her money demands become too great for the Western man to meet. She keeps the house, any children stay with grandma, she goes back to the bar and the cycle starts anew.

Is that really the only story out there? Uncle Sukwan has been married to his wife for decades. They run a shop in That Phanom and have one daughter who is now 22. Sister Pla has been with her husband for as long as I’ve ever known her and they have a now 18 year old daughter. The next door neighbors from where we stayed in Isaan seemed to be bucking the low fertility trend in Thailand: they have four children, three girls and one boy, all under the age of 10. The husband works as an administrator somewhere and seems doting and attentive to his wife and children.

So are all Thais like the traditional Pattaya bar girl story? Or does something about her background and perhaps the absence of a father figure contribute to her joining the nightlife industry? And are all Thais really that unfaithful? According to self reports, they do seem more likely to say so:

Perhaps screwing around when things get tough is part of the problem, not the solution. If my mother (a former Catholic nun) had held the “You should leave your husband because he isn’t supporting you” financial standard, I would have probably never known my father at all. But Catholics, alas, are famous for sticking with even the most abusive, alcoholic, unemployable wretches the world has ever known. My Father was not abusive or alcoholic, but he had health problems and only worked odd jobs with my Mom the breadwinner as I was growing up. He was quite the eccentric whose statement was “I want the US government to think I’m dead.” Dad talked about George Orwell’s book 1984 in the year 1984, and was warning about the creeping police state when I was still a young girl. In retrospect he was decades ahead of his time.

Happy Father’s day in Heaven, Dad.

The Thai bar girl story seemed to be an AI assisted echo chamber after awhile, but it brought out many comments from seemingly real expats. It was implied that the girls who stayed behind in Isaan (apparently girls in this industry come from nowhere else), or who worked in the industry for a short time and then opened a noodle stand instead, say, were just not as pretty. The bar girl always just magically turned 18, conveniently avoiding thorny matters of childhood exploitation, and began having sex with men for money. How did she lose her virginity and when?

Perhaps the greatest danger of the algorithm each of us are fed on those glowing screens is that it is uniquely curated to you. We each get this narrow slice of reality that we assume is the entire picture. Then we are baffled when we come across people in the real world who were fed an entirely different set of lies by their glowing box.

Happy Solstice! These are the summer rules:

Now bamboo is very fast growing and all but considering some of these proposed data center locations are the size of entire cities I’m not sure how much damage it could do. It’s the thought that counts!

Trump is still trying to do a victory lap on the ceasefire proposal but there is still the thorny issue of Israel in Lebanon. Is escalation the only response? And why should American lives and treasure be spent over this never ending doom spiral?

Sigh. It’s time to take a walk on the beach.

I’ll try to keep the weight off without prescription shots

I haven’t noticed a wandering eye thus far. Even the bar girls and ladyboys on Soi Cowboy tell me how much my husband loves me. Perhaps it’s time to flip the tables on the old script.

Buy me a ko-fi