Prachuap Khiri Khan
When you look at it on Google Maps, Prachuap Khiri Khan looks as if it’s about half-way between Bangkok and where I needed to be: Ranong province. Averse to extremely long bus rides, I thought this place would make for a suitable stop over. I caught a bus bound south, and on the way a kid vomited, but it was cheap, and I survived by cracking a window and strategically curling my body away from the stench. The city is sort of a sea side fishing hub in the narrowest part of the country, where Myanamar sits about an 11 km drive to the west. I checked into my hostel where I had a 4-bed room to myself for three nights; with air-conditioning. This is not a big tourist town. But it is, I was to discover, host to a big expat community. Aside from the gorgeous national park located a 30 km motorbike-ride to the north, the incredible old-style architecture, and the seafood that was quite literally wasted on me, I found this the most remarkable part of the town.
I spent my first night at a bar and restaurant next door to the hostel. The place is run by Ted, surprisingly one of the few Aussie’s I’ve met on this journey. We had a great chat about teaching in Thailand as he’d been doing this for years, and I picked his brain about classroom management and curriculum. Riveting.
‘I’d teach in Vietnam though, if I were you.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, you’re less likely to have a class of 40 or 50, and the pay is great.’
Food for thought. We were then joined by Ted’s mate Keith, another expat around the same age. His contribution to the conversation was something along the lines of: ‘Back in my day, we used to get the cane. They should be doing that now, what with the bullying epidemic.’
‘Did this stop the bullies?’
Keith struggled to answer this.
‘Stopped you from getting yourself in trouble though,’ he reasoned, edging around the glaringly obvious fact that, no, beating the children did not stop them from being cruel to one another. ‘No body wanted to get the cane.’
‘So, you didn’t get it much?’
‘Oh no, all the time. In fact, look at this,’ he said, turning his hand over and revealing a lump of scar tissue. ‘That was a really bad one. I should sue.’
Evidently, it wasn’t as much of a deterrent as it was intended, and he understood the injustice on some level. I didn’t bother pointing this contradiction out; belligerence and a lack of logic seem to be two defining personality traits of this demographic, and I didn’t want them to spoil the buzz I had going from my second Mojito.
The following day, after an awesome self-guided motorbike tour through the nearby national park, I stopped for a late lunch in another sea side town. I was the only person in the restaurant until a sleek black truck pulled up out front and a stunning young Thai woman, all legs in jean shorts and a cascade of silky hair emerged from the passenger side. She was the kind of woman who commanded attention, and she had caught mine in the way I might admire an artwork, or the ladies who walk the red carpet at the Brownlows. I was far less captivated by the driver, a man in his 40s, pale and sunburnt, belly refusing to be contained by the board shorts and tee-shirt ensemble he’d donned, hunched and walking self-consciously and unsmiling behind her to the restaurant. Under the guise of reading, which I had been doing moments before, I stole glances at the pair. I tried my very best not to be judgemental. Maybe they weren’t the ‘old white guy, young Thai wife’ flavour of which this town seemed particularly fond; with its sprinklings of power imbalance and misogyny. And maybe I was wrong about this dynamic in general. But as I watched, and they ate in (what I perceived as) miserable silence, staring at their phones, I would be less surprised if you told me these two humans were perfect strangers, not wedded companions. Silent meals spent phone-trawling occur in plenty of relationships, but this felt related to one of my complaints with the ‘OWG-YTW’ dynamic; essentially that she can’t speak English, he won’t learn Thai. I fail to understand how a relationship- how any relationship- can exist and thrive without communication. Many of the expats I met had these wives, and were living in Thailand for upwards of 30 or 40 years, and yet could speak-
“No Thai?’
‘None. Well, I mean I can say hello.’
This was an English man I’d met, Steve, who was joining his friend- also named Steve, for a beer after their afternoon of golf. Both men were in their 60s. Both Steve’s had younger Thai wives. Both knew next to no Thai.
‘And how long have you lived here?’
‘Since 1991.’ In response to my raised eyebrow, he added with an indulgent laugh, ‘I’m just lazy.’
‘Do you miss England?’
‘No. I mean, you’d hardly recognise it now.’ This was Steve 2.
‘Oh? Why?’ I asked, bracing myself for the inevitable-
‘The immigrants.’ Ah. Of course. The immigrants! The fact of their being immigrants had apparently never occurred to either Steve.
‘But these ones, the gangs, the ones from Pakistan, they’re going around raping young girls. Grooming them and then forcing them into sex.’ I fixed my expression with the same raised eyebrow I’d given Steve 1 before and said, after some consideration-
‘You seem very outraged by this, very passionate about women’s safety.’
‘What? You’re not outraged by it? It’s disgusting! It’s a disgrace! They’ve raped 1400 girls!’
‘I am outraged by rape,’ I replied, trying to keep my voice even. ‘It’s never mattered to me the colour of the skin of the perpetrator. It’s always been a man, or men, exerting absolute power over a woman or child. It’s terrorism. It’s abhorrent. It has always been abhorrent.’ Okay, Steph, don’t get political, don’t get political, don’t get-
‘And you think it’s only immigrants who commit this type of crime? I presume you are just as passionate and outraged about the subject when it’s white men who are committing acts of rape? Do you realise how common this is? Are you aware of those statistics like you are of the ones where brown men have been the perpetrators?’ Damn.
Thunderstruck, would be a fitting word to describe the looks on their faces.
‘You don’t get it,’ Steve 2 said finally. ‘This is much, much worse. It’s calculated. Pre-meditated.’
‘What rape isn’t?’
‘Forget it.’
I laughed uneasily and thanked the men for the beer they had bought me, and for the stimulating discussion. I had to admit, I hadn’t felt the burn of white hot, righteous anger for some time, and the occasional verbal take down feels great. Fuck those dickheads. Again, I only speak from my own experience, but if there’s one demographic of people who cannot, will not, hear reason, who are so emotional in their opinions, so set in them; it’s old white men.
Side note: Sometimes I wonder if I’ve become too set in my own opinions. Maybe there’s some irony in the fact that I too refuse to budge on certain issues and get extremely fired up over things I care about. In our presentation, I suppose there’s not much difference. But in our values…
I thought about this as I wandered back to the hostel down a street whose old-world architecture transported me to Kyoto; all scrubbed, dark wood and warm light. When I arrived, there were a mass of Harley Davidson motorbikes parked on the curb. Oh, did I mention that my hostel was run by the leader of a notorious Thai bikey gang? His wife had ‘let this slip’ to me the night before, although, casting my eyes over the leather-clad crew and the mass of bikes, I reckon I could have put two and two together. I’d never spent any time with bikies before. If I had to imagine what it would be like, I probably wouldn’t have thought it’d be a bunch of friendly guys barbequing over a small hot-plate on the sidewalk, listening to early 2000s crud-rock, laughing with one another, encouraging me to try some local seafood, then sending me off with a chorus of goodnights when I decided it was time for bed at 10 pm. One guy told me the ‘gang’ gives him a sense of community he hadn’t found anywhere before. I felt a surge of understanding, of recognition.
This brief layover had unearthed a dichotomy between assumptions confirmed, and ones that needed to be rethought and challenged.
Eating dinner on my last night in Prachuap Khiri Khan, it struck me suddenly that people in Thailand never really eat alone. Across from me, an extended family of about 15 people had sat down for dinner, talking incessantly, sporadically dishing up food from the multitude of plates splayed out on the table. The kids sat at their own table, gazing into phones but pausing frequently to talk and laugh with one another. I realised that I’ve been observing this ritual for the past two months without consciously registering it. At the bar in Koh Mook, even the uber cool reggae-loving bartenders stopped service to sit together and eat a fish someone had barbequed with the rice someone else was bound to have prepared earlier. And they would offer for guests to join them without expectation of their payment or of their participation in the ritual. It was the offering, the sharing that mattered. It is ingrained, a reflection of the way things are, and a nod to the way things have always have been. It speaks to something very special, and notably absent from Western civilisation as I have experienced it. My reality of a meal was sometimes eating as a family, (immediate family only), recounting the obligatory anecdotes that we’d respectively accrued from days spent at boring school or boring work. We’d eat quickly, purposefully, to return, as soon as possible, to whatever TV shows we were watching. As I got older, this tokenistic family meal business suffered a slow and painless death as we abandoned the pretence of enjoying each other’s company over food, and simply dished up dinner, relishing in our private solitudes. I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with eating how you damn well want, but the feeling in that little restaurant in the middle of Thailand was…nice. Communal. There was a closeness, a warmth. While I could only understand snatches of conversation, the tone of the voices suggested the content of these conversations was interesting, funny, scandalous. Easy conversation.
