Domestic / cross cultural issues - Thai / Foreigner concerns

Farang and their seemingly paradoxical ways

By Mr. Surin Province, Created on: 17/10/2008, Last updated on: 17/04/2010

» As a long-historied Farang resident myself, comfortable and understanding, I have to ask the age old question regarding Westerners that find it necessary to stay/live here while finding life so objectionable in many ways. Why is this so? I've experienced this throughout Asia {in particular the LOS}...

• HybridEm commented : to answer the point of this thread...why farangs live in this paradoxical land is the same as why marginalized asians, and latinos and whoever-else choose to live in America and suffer its indifference towards blatant/ institutional racism is because they're willing to tolerate it, and they themselves understand the indifference in life itself; and as Mr. Surin Province pointed out..the problems are just the same in any other country. On a side-note - to think that China, Malaysia, or India are non-racist countries is quite a nice illusion.

• Sean Moran commented : [quote="HybridEm":16cvdlc2]to answer the point of this thread...why farangs live in this paradoxical land is the same as why marginalized asians, and latinos and whoever-else choose to live in America and suffer its indifference towards blatant/ institutional racism is because they're willing to tolerate it, and they themselves understand the indifference in life itself; and as Mr. Surin Province pointed out..the problems are just the same in any other country. On a side-note - to think that China, Malaysia, or India are non-racist countries is quite a nice illusion. [/quote:16cvdlc2] That's an excellent contrast, and the invention of the web-forum really enables us to examine both sides of that same coin from the same terminal, like here. I just did 11 months on a forum mainly populated by ex-pats in Thailand, followed by another 11 months on another forum mainly populated by ex-pats in the USnA, and the ratio of sensible people to whingers was probably not all that different, considering that the ex-pats in Thailand averaged around 30 years older than the ex-pats in the US. Maturity has a way of adding a little more diplomacy to the way people speak about things that bother them, or perhaps angry young men don't live as long as the rest of us? On the whole, maybe all of us have some axe to grind about something that we feel unjust, whether that is because it truly is, or whether we just copped a bad run with something, or whether we simply don't understand the mechanisms behind it? That latter one seems to be the most annoying cause for gripes IMHO, because it's like crying wolf a bit. It's probably quite a normal experience when you first get off the boat in a new place, to not expect to understand everything about a place where you have less understanding than a local kindergarten student. However after a few years as an ex-pat, those sorts of mysteries might be overcome as one learns the reasons they are in place. Still, there will always be problems that we might encounter that cause us to perhaps regress back to those initial perceptions and rant away.

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