Kindness And Generosity In Thailand

[weary]

posted it a while back. but it seems to be relevant again....

...The heart of Dharma, as Zen Master Nishijima teaches , is that this confusion - between Reality as it is and reality as we perceive it through our mind or feel it through our senses - is the source of most people’s unhappiness.

and some of ourmembers are truley not happy.

I agree with this. Very valid points.

so I understand that some members are very unhappy that thailand is not according to the reality they had invisioned it as farrangs in thailand. thailand is so sorry to have its own culture that so many of the members find it compulsory to put down and criticise mostly based on ignorent false superioty complex.

but thailand is the land of the thais. not the land of unhappy farrangs.

So incase you are not happy and you find yourself within a group of over arrogant, patronising,thai bashing farrangs who think that the sole existance of thailand is to be a playground for farrang..... please go back to where you came from.

However, your next statement seems to contradict the valid points you made in the first parts of your posts. How? Let's see:

thailand is so sorry to have its own culture that so many of the members find it compulsory to put down and criticise mostly based on ignorent false superioty complex.

Now it looks as if you are doing something quite similar to what you just criticized: making a value judgement, in this case of farang who complain about Thailand. Is this 'ignorant false superiority complex' something you perceive, or the truth as the zen master discussed? Do you know what actually motivates them writing these things? What about your own reactions when you see these things?

but thailand is the land of the thais. not the land of unhappy farrangs.

If you think about it, 'Thailand' is just an idea, too, as are all nations. The borders are not 'real' - the forest, water and animals look the same on the other side - a country exists only in people's heads. Countries are conquered, the borders change, disappear, the people and their culture change with the times.

If we could travel back 2000 years in time, nobody living within the borders of what we call 'Thailand' would understand what we said, nor would they understand what 'prathed Thai' is... Who knows what it will be called and look like in another 10, 20, 100, 1000 years?

So incase you are not happy and you find yourself within a group of over arrogant, patronising,thai bashing farrangs who think that the sole existance of thailand is to be a playground for farrang..... please go back to where you came from.

Personally I don't think that way, and I avoid people who are arrogant, patronising and bashing, in general. No matter what group they belong to.

I am not sure of course, but I believe your Zen master might agree that Dhamma is not about throwing verbal rocks and accusations at others, or telling them to go home. Rather, compassion, acceptance and understanding is what will actually help ourselves and others move forward...

And that's my Sunday sermon.

Peace

[Sanpatong]

a very lovely couple from melbourne came to visit (a couple of years in a row) and fell in love with the beach where i live. they hung out and partied every night with some beach boys at a bar. finally, they decided to ditch their lives in melbourne and move to thailand permanently (knowing nothing at all about thai culture, business rules, land deals etc.). part of this plan was to rent land and invest a couple of million baht into a new bar which they would give to these beach boys to run.

That's sad and I'm not disagreeing with you that this happens. However then someone else said basically that everyone who ISNT as stupid as the couple you discribe BUT who still likes Thailand and Thai people is therefore guilty of seeing the world through rose tinted glasses.

I don't agree with that.

The reason that your example CAN happen as much as it does is that some people indeed seem to get intoxicated with Thailand for whatever that magical factor is and throw all common sense out of the window and/or vastly overrate their own ability to run a business / make investments while underestimating those lovely simple islanders/locals. Add to that the fact that Thailand basically has the legal system of a banana anarchy, and guess what happens.

And then after that lovely couple gets robbed blind, they turn into people like JimmyCA and start ranting at the sensible-section of the Thaivisa readership (both of them) and accuse them of seeing the world through rose tinted glasses.

Oh well.

Edited August 19, 2007 by Sanpatong

[a2396]

Most of the sods with the rose colored glasses are the ones being taken the most but are too dumb to know.

in my experience this is true a lot of the time. an example- a very lovely couple from melbourne came to visit (a couple of years in a row) and fell in love with the beach where i live. they hung out and partied every night with some beach boys at a bar. finally, they decided to ditch their lives in melbourne and move to thailand permanently (knowing nothing at all about thai culture, business rules, land deals etc.). part of this plan was to rent land and invest a couple of million baht into a new bar which they would give to these beach boys to run. it will be opening in the next day or so. they are paying the boys quite large salaries and giving them a couple of days off a week, plus they can run the new bar however they choose. basically they have just fronted the money.

the guys who are working for them are murderers. they spent time in prison. one is a rapist who took part in a gang bang of a farang girl i know well, 2 years ago. they have been known to do a lot of drugs, womanize, and have instigated some pretty vicious fights with tourists. yet if any of the people who have lived in this area for a long time and know these guys mentions anything of the sort to this couple, their ears slam shut and they don't hear anything. they are constantly going on about how great these thai guys are and how kind and trustworthy the culture is. it is plain to everyone else that these boys have been on their best behavior in order to get this free bar out of them. but they have also managed to get everything in their name! i give it a couple of years before my friends are screwed, and i find that quite sad as they are very genuinely nice people who wanted to help these guys out.

there is story after story like this, and it is not restricted to just the beach boys or bar girls. there are countless land deals that have gone bad. there is the woman who married a guy who was a monk for 11 years after 3 months of knowing him, and starting building 5 houses on his land, after which he became seriously abusive to her. there are the married women who swear their husbands are faithful when i know that whenever i find myself in a position alone with them they try to pick me up, or they are seen down at "horny mile" with a bar girl. and there are the tourists musing about how friendly and smiley the thais are as they take their money, having charged them triple the usual price.

i suppose there are people like this everywhere in the world. i do not make the mistake of labelling the entire culture as being "bad". it is quite different from the west though, and thus it is easy to get confused by reactions here and be taken advantage of by those who are so inclined. thais do have culturally different ways of thinking regarding personal relations- friendships do not hold the same meaning here as they do in the west, whereas family holds a lot more meaning. most interaction the average westerner will get with thais initially will be transactional, and as such, quite superficialy friendly and nice. thais also do not prioritize truth and sincerity as we do in our culture (ie. they don't show emotions and try to keep "face"). what they look at as keeping the peace we, culturally, look at as deception. and it seems to me, that unless you do marry into a family here, thais absolutely will not accept you as anything other than a foreigner, and if you try to get involved with them beyond an acquaintanceship, they will see it as an opportunity to milk you for all you are worth, and will think you quite silly for trying to get involved in the first place. i am sure there are some exceptions to this rule, but i rarely meet them, and i started this topic to hear about people who do and can give more insight on living long term amongst the thais without being seen as a sucker for being open and generous.

you are all free to flame away, but i have been coming here 8 years and lived here for a total of 4, and i think my opinion is just as valid as any.

I would say your observations have a considerable degree of accuracy and reflect to some extent the nature of my experiences after living here for 3 years. I think the beach boy story is fraught with some hazards from the start, no mater what country it might have been. I don't know what clear thinking couple would be partying with beach boys every night, let alone investing in a business with them. Maybe they were all smoking the same "hayseed". I thinkit is difficult to "crack the ice" here as a foreigner, but that is not unique to Thailand. I lived in Malaysia for one year and felt a much stronger anti foreign undercurrent there, although I think their ethical standards were considerably higher than Thailand. Racial and ethnic groups pretty much stuck to their own there. For my own interests, I would not invest major money in a foreign country, where I had no protection, rights of ownership or longevity. Such is a rather foolish move. Romantic opportunities are great in Thailand, better than many places, but it requires considerable diligence to keep from being "taken". I hope you may be able to readjust your location to have a better environment next time around, wherever it may be. As for another poster here yapping on and on about reality, reality is reality. Expectations are another matter. Some people's expectations may have been set to high and they are therefore disappointed with life here.

[Sheryl]

There is a wide middle ground between the rose colored glasses and Thailand-bashing. It is possible to simply accept it as a place, a country, imperfect and continually changing as are all places, with pluses and minuses relative to wherever one came from...and, presumably, with the pluses on the whole outweighing the minuses or else why still stay here?

Girlx...as I said before, it is very possible without being married to a Thai to have Thai friends and acquaintances who are decent, reliable, won't in any way rip you off and will be there for you if you ever need them to be. I haven't found it especially hard to acquire them, either, it just takes being open and ready to relate to decent people who are willing to relate to you in return. And of course to invest a little in nourishing those relationships, which may mean putting up with some boring moments, being gracious at unwanted drop-in visits, patiently letting people practice their English on you, etc etc. But it's well worth it.

Of course, you have to scrutinize people a bit and be cautious and alert to any signs of bad character or ulterior motives, and steer clear of such folk. There are plenty of decent ordinary Thai people out there and while some of them aren't interested in relating to a farang, many of them are either quite interested or even (and yes, this does exist in Thailand) inclined to view you as an individual rather thana "farang" and relate to you accordingly.

Tourist-ridden areas and Bangkok are both harder to make real friends in than ordinary upcountry places.

Either you are just in the wrong places, or running with the wrong circles, or doing something wrong in how you relate to people.