An article from the International Herald Tribune:
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Variations on a theme: Thai women and foreign husbands
By Richard Bernstein
Sunday, August 12, 2007

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. It is one of several like it in
this otherwise nondescript Thai town not far from Udon Thani, which was an
American air base during the Vietnam War.


Are these the weekend getaways of Bangkok businessmen who have decided for some
reason to build here, not far from the Mekong River and the border with Laos,
rather than on some island resort like Phuket or Ko Samui? Not at all.


"Normally in the northeast when you see a big house, you know that this house
belongs to a foreigner who has married a Thai woman," Adul Khankeaw, Ban Cao's
headman, explained. "And if you go to buy a new motorbike or car and pay cash,
the salesman will ask you if you or one of your relatives is married to a
foreigner."


Thailand, of course, has always attracted foreign men interested in the local
women, not least of course during the Vietnam War when the country was the
favored "rest and recreation" destination for tens of thousands of GIs, as well
as construction workers, Air America pilots, diplomats and journalists.


And, while the GIs are long gone, this country has, almost ever since the
Vietnam War ended, been one of the chief sex tourism capitals of the world.
Even a relatively remote place like Udon Thani, which is the local provincial
capital, shows the marks of this. "Great Food, Drinks, Pool, Girls" is the way
one restaurant advertises its offerings on the official map distributed by the
town's hotels.


But what those imposing houses in Ban Cao show is a variation on the theme of
Thai women and foreign men. 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.


"At first it wasn't about love but for a better life," acknowledged one woman,
Supee, 45 years old, who is married to a retired German named Peter, aged 62.
Peter was a tourist in Thailand when they met 21 years ago and, after living in
Germany for most of the years since, they moved to Ban Cao, Supee's native
village.


"I didn't like him so much at first," another Thai married to a European man
said of her husband, a retired French oil engineer named Jean-Claude. She gave
her name as Boonyong, and she was working as a waitress in Bangkok (she was not
in the sex trade) when Jean-Claude met her on a visit and asked her to live with
him.


"I said, 'O.K.,' because I had just lost my father and now I could go home and
be with my mother, which is what I wanted," Boonyong said. In Ban Cao alone, out
of 180 families, 30 local women have married foreigners. There's a village in
Roi Et Province, the Thai press has reported, where 200 women are married to
foreigners, the majority of them German and Swiss. There are only 500 families
in the entire village.


About 15 percent of all marriages in the northeast, a study published by Khon
Kaen University found, are now between Thai women and foreign men. Most of the
men are Europeans, but there are upwards of 300 or so Americans, many of them
veterans of the Vietnam War who were based in Udon Thani in the 1960s and early
1970s and are living here, most of them with Thai wives as well.


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.


"In Vienna you have so many obligations," said a retired Austrian international
lawyer who gave his name as Christoph Killy. He has been married for 14 years to
a woman from Ban Cao. "There's so much you have to do and so much you aren't
allowed to do there. Here you are free."


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.


"I've seen terrible things here," Killy said. "Some women are married to Thai
men and they tell their foreign boyfriends that they are their brothers. So
they sit together and eat together, and the foreigner even buys a motorbike for
the Thai 'brother.' "


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."


http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/12/ ... 113402.php

Boy what a year, I presonally know five farrangs that have divorced this year. All right here in Udon. Don't remember somehing like this before. Just must be timing.

Some it was about money, others about gambling and others it was just time to move on. One thing that seemed to be common was the lack of honesty. A few manged to salvage some of what they invested, others lost everything and are starting over.

The one that seemed to be the roughest was the one where his American countrymen decided that they had to help the poor little Thai wife. I didn't understand that then and still don't. At the very least you would think that staying out of anothers business would be the appropriate thing to do. In the end the exwife got exactly what was offered in the first place. But lots of hurt feelings and mis trust created. The other thing that seems to be very consistent is at times we are our own worst enemies. There certainly wasn't much loyality in that particular case.