“I want my daughter to marry a foreigner”?

Variations on a theme: Thai women and foreign husbands

Ban Cao, THAILAND: The main road leading through this village of 800 people in Thailand’s northeast mostly runs through a scene of rural dishevelment, simple shacks with the ubiquitous rusted corrugated roofs, ragged clumps of banana trees and palms, and, here and there, a simple open-air restaurant or grocery store. But next to the Ban Cao post office is a sort of anomaly: an imposing iron gate leads to a spacious house with verandas, a sloping tile roof, a garage, a well-tended garden with sculptures and lawns. They are the homes of men, mostly middle-aged and older, who have married local women, in many instances former bar girls whom they met in Bangkok or Pattaya, the two major centers of the Thai sex trade, and settled down in retirement in rural Thailand.

Usually an economic consideration has entered into these marriages at the outset. Quite clearly, comely Thai women are marrying European men, often 20 or 30 or even 40 years older than they are, because of the economic advantage of it to them. And for the men, they have companionship, an easy life in a country very cheap by Western standards, and somebody to look after them as they get older.

Stories outlining an influx of rich foreign men settling in a relatively poor country and marrying the locals are becoming more and more common. In nearby Korea and Japan, the opposite phenomenon is happening as more and more unmarried older men “import” Chinese and Southeast Asian wives.

I’m not sure if this is a positive step forward for international and interracial relations, or a phenomenon that will intice disaster as pissed off local men can’t get married. And it’s one thing for a country like the United States, which has a long history of immigration and settlement, to become a more integrated and interracial society. But for a quasi-peasant culture such as Northeast Thailand to suddenly see 15% of marriages between local women and (older) foreign men, and with 90% of the locals hoping their daughters will marry foreign men,

About 15 percent of all marriages in the northeast are now between Thai women and foreign men.

There is a sort of calculated redemption on both sides of these marriages. Many of the women have painful stories, of working as prostitutes, of abandonment by Thai husbands and boyfriends, of children they couldn’t afford to take care of. They make no secret of the fact that marrying some nice, older foreign man saved both them and their extended families from poverty and unhappiness. And as for the men, many of them are divorced or unhappily married back home. They came to Thailand for a brief touristic encounter with the local sex-for-sale industry and ended up staying for life.

The truth is that deceit and tragedy, along with happy stories, are part of the picture. Houses and land, by law, have to be owned by Thais, and so there have been cases where Thai wives simply expropriated the properties built for them by their foreign husbands whom they expelled, and then invited their Thai boyfriends to move in with them.

Still, it’s easy to meet what seem like normally happy couples here. According to that university study, marrying a foreigner not so long ago carried a stigma. Now, asked what they want for their daughters, 90 percent of the inhabitants of the Thai northeast replied: “I want for them to marry a foreigner.”