Don’t even ask me about my CDs. I’m guilty, guilty, guilty, along with what may be a majority of the urban population.
It’s a part of living in Thailand. In the slums, nearly everyone wears designer clothing and you know where it came from. (Ironically, Nike donates a lot of the Real Thing to the Bangkok poor.) The rich keep the legitimate stores going—to be caught wearing a Gucci shirt with imperfect button alignment would be to lose face, after all—but it is that Thai upper class, along with some of the wealthier tourists, who provide a majority of the customers. We poorer folks go for the ersatz goods every time, even if one leg in a pair of “Wrangler” jeans is shorter than the other.
So ingrained is the consumption of fraudulent goods in Thailand that the Bangkok Post published a story by two of its reporters (in June 2001) that told readers what to look for in determining not a real thing from a fake, but how to spot the most convincing counterfeits.
“Selecting the best fake requires a keen eye,” the reporters said.
Bi-Racial Cool
It wasn’t so long ago when inter-racial sex was scorned in Southeast Asia and children from such pairings were ostracized. No more. Today, offspring with genes from both east and west are frequently lionized, sometimes winning a spot at the top of their chosen fields, becoming role models as well as celebrities. It is no surprise that this is being exploited commercially, but what isn’t admitted so freely is: why?
Until fairly recently, Southeast Asia had an unpleasant history of racial bias. Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand… every nation in the region experienced horrific conflict between various ethnic groups. In some areas, prejudice persists today.
Illegitimate children left behind following war were spurned almost everywhere, notably in Vietnam, Thailand, Laos and the Philippines—wherever the U.S. sent its military. As colonies became nations, mixed-race children were reminders of a Western-dominated past. The most that many could expect was a mean life on the street. So grim was the situation in Vietnam, any mixed-blood youngster who could in any way establish American parentage was given a pass to the United States in order to escape the prejudice; sometimes little more than a western nose or black skin seemed enough to qualify for America’s Orderly Departure Program. In Thailand, children of racially mixed parents could not become citizens until the early 1990s.
This prejudice was not exclusively Asian; even in the United States, the last of the miscegenation laws were not overturned until 1965.
Nowadays, the picture has changed, most remarkably in Thailand, where it is no surprise to see headlines in Bangkok’s English language dailies that read, “Mixed-race superstars most popular artists” and “Best of Both Worlds.” The best example may be Amita Tata Young, the recording and movie star daughter of a Thai woman and her American husband, who serves as Tata’s manager. She’s been a star since she was eleven, when she won a Thailand Junior Singing Contest. A recording contract and film career followed and in 1998, at age seventeen, she was named by Asiaweek as one of Asia’s twenty-five most influential personalities and two years later became the first Thai singer to sign a contract with a major American recording company, Sony Columbia. She’s also had her face on the world’s biggest billboard as Panasonic’s Thai spokesperson and in 2004 was linked romantically (but briefly) with an internationally ranked tennis superstar, Paradorn Srichaphan; was castigated by the Thai government’s uptight Culture Ministry for a single called “Sexy Naughty Bitchy;” then saw her new CD go platinum within six hours of hitting the stores.
Another, far bigger name whose heritage is split between Thailand and America is Tiger Woods, although to be fair to the son of a Thai woman and a black American ex-soldier, he is a fair golfer whose mixed parentage merely gave his story an added commercial spin. It might be mentioned that Tiger is no favorite in Thailand, thanks to his refusal to leave his five-star hotel to receive an honorary degree from a local university—he had it brought to him!—and lack of interest in anything Thai: not the food, nor the sights, nor the people. This, despite the fact that he was paid a million U.S. dollars to come to Thailand and all he had to do in return was play eighteen holes of a game he was alleged to enjoy.
There are many more who are lesser known outside the region. Nicole Theriault and Peter Corp Dyrendal, topped “The Global Sex Survey 1999—A Youth Perspective” in Thailand, conducted by London’s condom manufacturer, Durex. Nicole has an American father, too, and Peter’s dad is from Denmark. Another new star, appearing in two films in Thailand, is Ananda Everingham, using the professional name Ananda Eve; mom is from Laos, dad is from Australia, and Ananda grew up in Bangkok, where his father runs a successful magazine publishing company.
There are so many, in fact—in modeling as well as in television, music, and film—that a phrase, luuk khrung (literally meaning “half-children”), was added to the language to describe them. When Time magazine put what it called the “Eurasian Invasion” (and Tata Young) on its cover Apr. 23, 2001, it said the once-despised offspring controlled an estimated sixty percent of Thailand’s entertainment industry, and informed readers that the country once had sent a blue-eyed woman to the Miss World competition, when Sirinya Winsiri, also known a Cynthia Carmen Burbridge, beat out another half-Thai, half-American for the coveted Miss Thailand title.
Of course there’s nothing new about this. The “Eurasian” look has been a niche entertainment staple for decades, coming into and going out of fashion several times, not just in Asia but worldwide. France Nuyen, born France Nguyen Vannga of French and Vietnamese-Chinese parents in Marseille, France, starred in Broadway’s The World of Suzie Wong (1958), for instance, and when Hollywood made the movie two years later, it was another Eurasian, Nancy Kwan, trained as a dancer in the British Royal Ballet, who got the part.
Yet, they were the exception rather than the rule and it wasn’t until fairly recently that Asians and part-Asians were considered first for Asian roles; remember the Swedish born Warner Oland as the inscrutable Chinese detective Charlie Chan (in the 1930s), Marlon Brando as an obsequious Japanese servant in Sayonara (1957), and Yul Brynner as the strutting King of Siam in The King and I (1956)?
It’s not been explained satisfactorily why the Eurasian “look” works. When asked, many spout clichés about the meeting of East and West or, may the gods help us, “globalization.” Time magazine said Channel V, the Asia-wide music television channel, was one of the first to broadcast the message of “homogenized hybridism,” quoting one of the channel’s marketing managers as saying, “We needed a messenger that would fit from Tokyo to the Middle East.”
The word “exotic” gets mentioned a lot as well, although the meaning of that word is seldom if ever made clear (even in dictionaries). It’s further explained that when Asians have some western features, they are more readily accepted by westerners, who are known, historically, for assigning second class status to people with darker skin. As for the Asians, it’s easy to say that it’s just a part of a global shift toward western style as demonstrated by their avid acceptance of rock music, Hollywood movies, blue jeans, European clothes and cars, Scotch whisky and French wines, KFC and Haagen Dazs. Thailand is famous for embracing western influence and material goods, during its boom years becoming the largest market outside Germany for the Mercedes-Benz, and consuming more Johnny Walker black label than any country other than the United States.