It should be noted that there also are many long-time farang businessmen in Thailand. These include, for example, Bill Heinecke, head of the Minor group of companies, an American who was born in Thailand (when his father headed up the Voice of America) and now is a Thai citizen; Denis Gray, who helped cover the final days of the war in Vietnam for the Associated Press and is now the bureau chief for the same wire service, a job he’s held for more than thirty years; Patrick “Shrimp” Gauvain, best-known for his bar girl calendars but head of his own advertising company; Father Joe Maier, an American Catholic priest who’s worked with the poor for thirty-plus years; and Tim Young, father and manager of Thailand’s most popular singer, Tata Young. Most in this category have Thai families and are here for life.
3. Embassy People may be the hardest group to peg, because it’s so diverse. Virtually every Western country has a diplomatic mission in Bangkok, more than sixty in all, from Albania to the Holy See. Given the small number of expats from some of the countries in residence in Thailand, and a limited number of visitors, many of the embassies and consular offices are quite small. Understandably, it is others, notably those of the United States, Australia and various European nations that dominate the embassy scene.
The largest diplomatic community is the one from America. It surprises people when they’re told that the Bangkok embassy is the second or third largest embassy in the world (behind Cairo and the Philippines). The embassy grounds and ambassador’s compound sprawl across Wireless Road in Bangkok, covering an area almost the size of a small country, but the reason is no secret. From the time of the war in Vietnam, the Drug Enforcement Agency and other American surveillance organizations have based their operations in Bangkok, helping justify the construction of a new building in 1999 that is now a model for embassies everywhere, impregnable even to rocket attack.
Other western embassies, notably the British, the Australian, the Dutch, the Danish, the French and the German, occupy similar compounds with fences and walls behind which gardeners tend lush gardens with canals and lakes, creating park-like retreats in one of the noisiest and ill-planned cities in Asia. Those who report for work here each day are nearly as diverse as tourists in their backgrounds, jobs, and personal pursuits, but their lives resemble the “package” businessmen. They, too, come and go, and while here they are wrapped in a legal cloak and offered the comforts and steady contact with “home,” thus they also are distanced in many ways from their host country, even when it may be their job to decide whether or not Thai citizens are worthy of a visa or the subject of an investigation.
4. Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) are both a more diverse and a more heterogeneous group, defined by their variant do-gooder causes. One organization tries to help bar girls learn enough English to avoid being taken advantage of by their customers. Many want to save the elephant. ECPAT, the organization dedicated to End Child Pornography in Asian Tourism, has its headquarters in Bangkok, too. The United Nations has hordes of people in the same city writing reports on human rights and ways to increase rice production.
Generally, this foreign group interacts with Thais better, or at least more consistently, than the previous three farang categories, and many are more strident of voice. Surely their contributions have been great, from the time of the arrival of the first Christian missionaries three hundred years ago, accelerating in an almost runaway manner since the first Peace Corps volunteers from America started showing rural farmers how to dig wells in the 1960s.
5. Bar hounds are the easiest to identify. They’re in the same place almost every night, or in a variety of similar places, all of them serving booze and companionship at an affordable price. Sex may not be the only reason these farangs came to Thailand, but it surely is one of the most important ones. And it’s the reason they stay, although many actually marry girls they meet in the bars and retire somewhat from the scene. A survey conducted by the Thai government in 2003 turned up fifteen hundred farang husbands of Thai women in the Northeast alone, among them, sadly, three of the men who were taken hostage in 2004 in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and beheaded.
Many of these men are retired, living on pensions. Others teach English, do whatever they can to earn just enough to pay at least one bar fine a week. Many are alcoholic.
6. The most intriguing farangs may be the Runaways, the bandits, social outcasts and disgruntled won’t-go-home-againers who back where they came from are called “tax-dodgers” or “deadbeat dads” or, in many cases, bail-jumpers and convicted criminals. At a Fourth of July party a few years ago—one of the great annual farang events— I met a man who works as a fraud buster for western insurance companies, tracking down people who faked their deaths, then came to Southeast Asia to hide. And hardly a month goes by without a story in one of the newspapers about a farang being sent home to face an outstanding arrest warrant.
In the same group, more or less, are the ex-spooks and Vietnam veterans who stayed. Three members of the Vietnam Helicopter Association bought a bar at Nana Plaza and the guy who was the Bangkok bureau chief of the CIA during the same conflict for many years owned a popular expat bar in Patpong. A third set himself up in Thailand with money earned smuggling people into Thailand from Laos and later nearly lost his residency when caught smuggling marijuana. Still another, the legendary Tony Poe, who trained and led the Hmong army in Laos and paid a dollar for every set of Vietnamese ears brought to him (some of which he stapled to his CIA reports), and was reputed to have been the model for Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, returned to the States with his hilltribe wife only because the Thai government got tired of his boozy fights.
There are other, smaller groups. Farangs who come to Thailand to study Buddhism (some have become monks) or massage or aromatherapy. Journalists assigned by their bosses to cover the region, who make the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand a frequent stop following work to sup, sip and diss the country in which they work, and tell each other how they’d run Thailand if they had the chance.
It’s possible to belong to more than one group. Many of us do. I’m part journalist, part barhound (with a Thai family and house in the Northeast) and I contribute part of almost every week to Father Joe Maier’s efforts in the slums.
Do we share anything in common, other than our big bodies, pale pigment and lack of manners and humility? Surely. I think most male farangs, visitor or resident, have at some time thought of themselves as a sort of “target,” someone perceived as having money, or at least enough to share, causing some Thais to go after them like a heat-seeking missile. In his paranoia, probably rooted in reality, he also may think Thai men don’t like him because of this wealth and advantage, but also because he takes so many Thai women away so easily. Many farang males, in turn, condemn Thai men when they hear how frequently they have deserted their wives and children, or have taken second wives.
Another shared trait is a changed, or changing, regard for the countries of our birth. Living abroad alters anyone’s point of view, if only to sharpen one’s previously held beliefs, and many go home with a repertoire of wonderful stories to tell, but are glad to be back where everything more or less works all the time, and life is more comfortably familiar. Others feel more estranged from the lands of their origins and complain about where they came from as much as about where they are. These are the ones who stay.