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Notes -
An Indian Abroad in Thailand
After a pretty enjoyable time in Phuket and Pattaya, I find myself on the highway heading back to Bangkok, and ended up deciding to pen some of my observations along the way.
To wit, I visited Thailand while being quite ignorant about it. As a holiday destination, it's become quite cliché as a haunt for upper middle class Indians, and my residual snobbery kept me from really looking into the place or culture.
If I had been asked about my knowledge before the journey, I'd have scratched my head and gone, "Uh, ladyboys, beaches, Buddhist temples? Weren't they once conquered by some of the more entrepreneurial South Indian kings? (🇮🇳 Jai Hind!)"
Which isn't wrong, per se, but hardly comprehensive.
Since I don't want to bore you with the travelogues of a homebody, I'll stick to simply listing things that surprised my preconceived notions:
Firstly, I was taken aback by how fair Thai people tend to be. I thought they'd be swarthier, akin to Malaysians or Indonesians, but quite a large fraction could easily pass as Caucasian if not for their facial features. The ones who are really tanned seem to be people who work out under the sun, having skin tones I expect.
I find this rather perplexing, given that Thailand is at a latitude lower than the bulk of India, and their counterparts are unapologetically brown.
Secondly, they're piss poor at speaking English. In my entire time here, I have yet to encounter one person fluent in the language, even at places catering to tourists, including at the 5 star hotels I lounged at. The majority only understand a few words or key phrases, about enough to herd tourists or figure out if you want a taxi or a handjob.
I reckon this is due to colonialism, or rather a lack of it. Thailand is practically unique in SEA in never having been conquered by a European power, which usually inculcates more interest or tradition in speaking English or other tongues. Certainly the modal Indian speaks a great deal better English than the Thai do. I'd have expected to be doing somewhat better, but I guess they're getting by with tourists, so kudos to them.
On the topic of tourists, there are loads of Indians here. I mean tens of thousands at the minimum, while Phuket was more cosmopolitan, Pattaya's beaches are 50:50 Indian to local Thai. This translates to about 20 Indian restaurants in spitting distance of my hotel, and tour guides so used to wrangling Indians that they picked up some Hindi and play Bollywood playlists on boats.
Another fixture are the hordes of Russian tourists, to the extent that most of the signage in the cities include Cyrillic. I'm given to understand that a large fraction are draft dodgers laying low in a low COL locale, while sipping cocktails and getting good head. Plenty of families too, either in toto or just vacationing. (A question to @DaseindustriesLtd, what is it with Russian men and the most unflattering buzzcuts?)
Thailand is really clean. Now, as an Indian I admittedly have low standards, but I did spend a while in the UK, so I have a fresh benchmark to judge by. The streets are spotless, the beaches largely free of rubbish, which is a surprise because Indian tourists aren't known for their civic sense, at least back in India.
The roads are in great condition, to the extent that I need reminder that I'm not in a First World country. People keep their cars in great condition, and love ricing them out out too. Traffic is quite civil, and people are quite loathe to use their horns, whereas that's the microwave background radiation of Indian cities.
But the most perplexing thing is the sheer number of pickup trucks here. Seriously, I thought I ended up catching a flight to Texas, a quarter of the cars here are pickups, and I have yet to see the majority being used as utility vehicles. It's not like they're lugging anything of note around, most of them seem to be people carriers and nothing more. (One can argue that's the case back in the States too, at least I haven't seen any truck nuts!)
When it comes to culture, well, I've never seen a more permissive society in my life! Sex work is absolutely normalized, and I find myself scratching my head as to how this state of affairs arose when the country lies so close to significantly more conservative societies to the west and east.
I managed to ditch my parents back at the hotel, and went on a walking tour of the red light district literally next door to where we were staying (an upscale place mind you). There was a street about 300 meters long jam packed with titty bars, strip clubs and miscellaneous hangouts for ladies of the night. Far from the bars being a front for prostitution, the prostitution was a front for the bars. It was like a buffet table of women beckoning you over to grab a slice of ass, they're just sitting on bar stools and trying to outdo each other, or taking turns dancing (rather shittily) on the streets. Now, my parents would probably disown me if I took a hooker back to my hotel room next to theirs, not to mention I have a girlfriend, so it was all look and don't touch for me. I did get a hoot out of seeing several pairs of Russian women scrambling to get through the street, probably on the way back to their hotel. They were blushing so hard you could grill a steak on their cheeks.
Funnier still were the morbidly obese Western sexpats trying to hire a bike to drive them back, when they got on the back behind the tiny Thai drivers, the vehicles often threatened to rear up in fright.
Weed's been legalized here since 2019, but apparently smoking it anywhere in public is a crime. Given that I can never be arsed to roll joints myself, and I could get bhaang for about a hundredth the price of edibles there, I didn't really bother.
If you check my post history, you'll find my tale of attending a cabaret show, one run by ladyboys. And I genuinely couldn't tell that they weren't real women, despite straining my eyes trying. Is there something about the Asian physiognomy that makes it easier for them to pass? The closest thing I found to a tell was the waists, but even then they were well within the range for natal women. The railway community in the West take note, that's how you pass with flying colors.
A lot of the country seems really familiar to Indians. The vegetation is largely the same, albeit we haven't been graced with durian (which doesn't smell nearly as bad as I've heard, not that I tried it). It's funny to see Westerners fawn over elephants, monkeys and sedated tigers, when I was yawning hard at the idea. It was supremely funny to have a tour guide stop our boat to show off mudskippers, as if "walking fish" were a big deal. You can get some mild deja vu from seeing the clear influence of Indian culture in Thailand, though the vocabulary has diverged so far from the old Pali and Sanskrit roots that it's not really legible. Their Buddhist and Hindu syncretic religion is recognizable at the least, but they don't really seem all that religious.
Overall, I've been quite impressed with the place, and I can only hope that Indian cities resemble their Thai cousins. That's still quite an ask, since Thailand is nowhere near as crowded as India, there's room to breathe. But they're far better positioned to appeal to tourists, and I wager that it's only the massive injections of cash into their economy that allow them to have such a higher standard of living.
I'd be tempted to live here, if there was anything to do outside cater to tourists, and it wasn't abominably hot and muggy throughout the year, not to mention that you can't really get by with English alone. Still, I see why it's so popular with Western expats, and Chang beer is certainly everything /r/5555555 hyped it up to be.
This is due to large Chinese immigration (especially in the north) as well as fairer skin being seen as higher class especially among women who generally cover their skin and wear sunscreen to keep from tanning.
I found everyone to speak pretty good english when I was there. It's much easier to get around in Thailand knowing no Thai than it is to get around France knowing no French or Japan knowing no Japanese.
...I can't agree but I've never been to India so my comparisons are mostly with first world countries
I was surprised by this too, specifically the giant US style trucks
Based on nothing but my own observations, there is less sexual divergence in the phenotypes between East and SE Asian men and women than between men and women in other groups of people.
Fairer skin is strongly fetishized in India too, which is why I wasn't considering sun avoidance to be the defining factor. It makes sense that they'd be fairer if there were large numbers of ethnic Chinese mixed in, so I presume that's it.
There is that, but the ethnic Tai (of which the Thailand-majority Thai are part) are also relatively new to the region compared to other austronesian groups in Southeast Asia, having settled in southern China in prehistory rather than in Southeast Asia directly. The Tai had a period of massive migration out of southern China in the late first millennium CE as Chinese dynasties, especially the Tang, consolidated and integrated its southern provinces into the empire.
There are still ethnic Tai in China that are still genetically and culturally very similar iirc, and they look much the same as well.
That isn’t to discount immigration from China into Thailand and southeast China in general, as is well known for the latter half of the second millennium; one of their kings and national heroes was half-Chinese!
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I'm in that large category of russians who don't give a flying fuck what's on their heads right now, as long as it's clean and not getting in a way. To be honest i always was puzzled of why a man should care about anything more. My whole life is a testament to that popular opinion that a man shouldn't be any more pretty than an ape, was working just fine for me. Now my genes gave me surprisingly non-balding hair, so my haircuts are usually longer that buzzcuts, but the reason for them i guess is exactly that - it's just practical.
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Are you talking about the Chola campaigns in Southeast Asia? I don’t think the Cholas touched Thailand then; they even had the Khmer, who controlled the relevant parts of modern-day Thailand at the time, as allies.
I don’t think Thailand was ever conquered by an Indian kingdom. Indianized kingdoms, yeah (that describes much of Southeast Asia), but not Indian ones.
This shouldn’t be too surprising, given that the Tai people were driven from southern China by the Chinese only a thousand and some years ago.
Given the genetic evidence I think it's certainly possible that most of mainland Southeast Asia was ruled by South Indian kings who brought in an appreciable number of settlers in the hazy period before recorded history proper began in that part of the world, but I agree that it wasn't the Medieval Chola state that did that.
Given the well-known history of Indianization of SEA states in the early first millennium and long-standing contact between SEA and the subcontinent, I think the genetic evidence is less likely due to a conquest than just results of the above.
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Your dismissal of the English abilities of Thai people in Bangkok is a surprise to me. I was there in February at the Landmark (a relatively nice hotel) and it wasn't at all difficult to find completely fluent English speakers. Later near Krabi I stopped at a pharmacy for a cough suppressant and not only was the young woman completely fluent but was able to explain to me quite clearly when and how to take the medicine and field questions about dosage. Generally I found people in Thailand who were in a position to speak to non-Thais were very competent English-speakers, though I am probably comparing to Japan.
Edit： Is there a culture war angle I am not getting?
I have no vested interest in downplaying the English speaking skills of the Thai people, so perhaps you lucked out in that regard.
I did meet a tour organizer in Bangkok who was passably fluent, but that was before I wrote my post. The majority don't speak it well from what I can still tell.
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Feels like home. Does India have issues with blocks of flats belonging and not belonging to the owners of the flats at the same time? Russia allowed residents to privatize their Soviet-built flats, and technically this comes with the ownership of the proportional share of the common areas, but the remaining flats and common areas belong to the municipality, the land the building stands on usually belongs to the municipality too, so the final result is a far cry from a proper condominium. Most people treat the building maintenance as someone else's problem, and even if you want to change how your building is managed, it's an uphill struggle against people either indifferent to or deeply suspicious of your plans.
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That seems quite insightful, thank you. I did finally reach Bangkok after writing my initial post, and it's a boring normal Asian city, without any freaks and geeks I could make a point of pointing out.
I could shed some light on the behavior of the rich in India. In living memory, my immediate family broke through from from upper middle class to lower upper class, if that's a sensible delineation. That means that we could afford BMWs or a million dollar house if we wanted them (the housing market in India is absolutely fucked in larger cities like Mumbai, so the idea of a million dollar house isn't even that big of a deal). Hell, we're staying at 5 star hotels now, which wasn't something we really did when I grew up. While I don't quite move in the strata of the uber wealthy, I can more or less make a decent assessment:
Wealthy Indians are accustomed to tragedy of the commons in every sphere of public life. Immense wealth will buy you a lovely mansion, but nothing will get you a clean city outside.
As such, we're calibrated in a manner such that when considering our relative social standing, we simply don't put much weight on the exterior of our residence, while lavishly decking out the interiors is something we can all agree upon and enjoy.
It's so ingrained in our culture that it takes a culture shock on the order of moving out of the country, where such things are taken seriously, for us to really change.
Have y'all tried home owners associations for general upkeep, and getting a specifically funded unit of local cops to fine anyone littering or otherwise dirtying the place? (or mob to harass...)
It's a country of 1.4 billion people, I'm sure someone somewhere has tried everything under the sun!
That being said, HOAs aren't common for privately owned detached houses, they are however, a thing in apartment complexes, and such gated complexes are usually significantly cleaner.
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Not him, but the answer is simple: styling your hair is gay. It's different with urbane zoomers and younger millenials, but everyone else consider combing their hair to be the pinnacle of personal grooming.
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Thailand is too hot in this season for them to make the answer obvious with the complementary garb.
I have some acquaintances in Thailand, could ask later.
My take is, basically there are two things to it. One is a rather dumb post-Soviet prison-informed culture of masculinity that is summed up in the saying «a Man must be not much prettier than an ape», and the suspicion that anyone who tries to look better is an anus-bleaching sissy faggot prison bitch. Thankfully this is a passing sentiment (passing away together with heteronormativity, some would lament) but it still holds sway over older, provincial and lower-class Russians. You don't wear bright colors you don't style your hair you double don't use cosmetics and you go for the most utilitarian, anti-aesthetic, no fucks given look possible. Perplexingly, you also don't have to work out, so this is actually the easy life.
Plus short buzzcuts can be maintained on your own with a trimmer, and feel nice. Many acquire the habit in the army, I gather.
Another is that many among us age ungracefully. Probably mostly alcohol, smoking, climate and stress, but must be some irreducible genetic contribution too. Russians, particularly men, die early, develop chronic age-associated diseases early and start to go bald early, or so it seems. Though statistics point to Caucasians being hard-hit by alopecia in general, with many of our socioeconomic betters being worse off. Not sure if this accounts for age and dynamics. Anyway, buzzcut – with the above justification – is the natural coping strategy when you see hair on your pillow and Norwood in the mirror.
Summed up and polished with some soy sausages and phytoestrogen-heavy beer, those pressures, I surmise, produce the Skuf phenotype and what I call Skufization syndrome – the rapid onset physical deterioration that hits Russian men in their late 20s. It's on us to research this malady and develop countermeasures.
Relatedly, one of the things that surprised me in Turkey was massive numbers of men with freshly done hair transplants, their scalps peppered with red dots, back of their heads clad in bandages (is it supposed to look so crude?).
@orthoxerox may have a better idea.
(self_made_human does not, in fact, have a better idea, because I'm the one who tried to invoke you before the quoting feature broke haha)
On the other hand, if you meant the hair transplants, it's not a pleasant process by any means, one of the few images that makes me squeamish is a picture of a scalp fresh after surgery.
Since transplants are usually charged by the follicle, most people get the minimum viable product, which is why they can look a bit odd until the hair grows back to a decent length and the wounds heal over. From what I understand, it's not pretty no matter where you get it done, and Turkey is quite advanced at the whole cosmetic surgery thing.
One of my stranger brainfarts. Never knew your embeddings are so similar.
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In addition to selection effects (non-passing ladyboys wouldn't attract much clientele), you've probably been less exposed to Thai faces and so have less practice distinguishing males and females. Funnily enough, it goes both ways; I'm a trans woman and when I visited Asian countries (e.g. Malaysia, not known for its wokeness) I got called ma'am a lot more than back home in the West.
I already speculated about selection effects in a previous comment, but I still find the notion dubious.
Firstly, I'm not aware of any similar performance in the West (or India for the matter) where a large number of trans performers pass so convincingly. Even the transwomen touted as passing do so largely in posed photos, with the number that can get away with video dropping precipitously, and the number passing up close in person vanishingly low.
Certainly I wouldn't expect to be fooled if I was in boob-grabbing distance, as was the case when these performers lined up outside for photoshoots if you were willing to pay.
Also, the issue with claims that I'm simply not astute enough to spot trans people outside ethnicities I'm familiar with is that I think I can still convincingly distinguish European, African and Indian transwomen with ease. It's only the Thai that give me serious pause.
I think it's just that there are substantial numbers of Asians who are less sexually dimorphic or appear feminine, if Korean boy bands are anything to go by. Not the majority of course, but still enough that with enough pruning and picking you can get a few to pass even under scrutiny. I'm not 100% sold on that hypothesis, but it's the best I can come up with.
I grew up in a majority-Asian city so I'm not sure I'd agree with the "Asians are more naturally feminine" hypothesis, as opposed to other factors such as estrogen being available without a prescription, and Thai trans women DIY'ing from a young age (the younger you start HRT, the easier it is to pass). I think it's more to do with the fact that there's no similar visible "kathoey culture" in the West so trans women are much more dispersed; you won't find a high concentration of them in any one location as easily as you would in Thailand. But there's plenty of passing trans women, e.g. famous actresses like Indya Moore, Hunter Schafer, Valentina Sampaio (a number of Euphoria viewers didn't even cop on to the fact that she was trans, despite playing a trans character in the show), and a number of models, sex workers, and OnlyFans performers that anyone who's sufficiently terminally online can discover.
I looked up the people you specifically mentioned (I've already watched Euphoria, courtesy of my girlfriend!) and I will concede that Valentina wasn't obvious, she has that overly sharp look that's common enough in natal women that I wouldn't think twice, while the other two are clearly trans.
I honestly don't know much about the availability of estrogen etc in Thailand, but it is possible that very early starts combined with strong selection effects could explain what I've seen!
It’s also possible your “trans detector” has high sensitivity but low specificity, giving you a high false positive rate. One could correctly identify most trans women as trans due to their masculine traits, but could also identify many cis women as trans.
Nowadays with the growing trans hysteria you have many masculine cis women being harassed or even assaulted when using the women’s bathroom, due to getting “clocked” by their wide shoulders or being over 6’ or just having the wrong shape. You also have “transvestigators” who take it to an extreme and think a huge amount of celebrities or random people in the street are secretly trans - they think that Elon Musk is a trans man because of the curvature of his spine, or that some female celebrity is a trans woman because she has straight clavicles and a prominent jaw.
India doesn't really have any substantial number of trans folk, at least not in the Western sense. The closest we've got in any numbers are hijras, and they have a vested interest in being obvious, since their primary means of subsistence is being so fucking creepy and insistent that you're willing to slip them a few bucks to fuck off. They'll insult your manhood, grope you, spit on you or threaten to lay curses upon you and yours if you don't comply.
So it's hard for me to evaluate the accuracy of my trans detector when the base rate for people even attempting to pass is so low around these parts.
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@DaseindustriesLtd
Inquiring minds want to know!
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I've started thinking that civic sense is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a large enough critical mass around you maintains the environment in a certain way, then even the least-cultured person starts spontaneously behaving in a "cultured" manner. It's why ghettos are so toxic to nations that seek eventual integration.
Despite being the least unexpected of all the things that surprised me on this thread, something about this is rather disgusting.
To be fair, only a few of them were ridiculously fat, the majority were otherwise unremarkable balding middle aged gents out to live their dreams now they have more money than hair.
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I mean they've had literal generations of work on the practice + generally there's less curvature to SEA girls + I'd imagine if you were Thai born you'd probably be able to pick up on a host of micro-indicators that aren't evident as a foreigner.
On the latter, I don't have any difficulty in identifying transwomen of any other race or ethnicity. Black, white, Indian, all glaringly obvious to me.
It's possible that there's selection effects at at, with the less passing ladyboys not making the cut, but I still doubt it.
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(Hi mods, if you're reading this, I'd like to say that the spoiler tags don't work on my device, namely Chrome for Android. It seems the tagging features aren't working either)
You might want to open a bug report on the github project or something. That's the best way I can think of to get attention on the issue. That or ping Zorba, but I doubt he wants that to become the normal way to report issues. 😉
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