"Those Funny Farangs"

Among a lot of Thai-lamenting websites out there, I have found one website which gives Farangs a bit of the medicine they so often dish out against Thais. The website FunnyFarangs.com is basically an all-out attack on Farangs and their presence in Thailand.

The website is most probably a joke by some Farang living in Farangland (either the UK or the US) as the ownership of the site can only be traced to those countries.

The website will have us believe that the author of the site is actually a Thai waitress, who just happens to have an excellent English vocabulary and a sarcastic and scathing writing style:

One complaint I often hear from farangs in restaurants who think I am too stupid to understand them is that Thai people do everything too slowly. They say it’s as if we don’t like living - as if we don’t grasp the splendour and beauty of life like farangs do. As if we, somehow enveloped by our own latent hegemony, we ‘cannot look beyond ourselves’.

Cannot look beyond ourselves? You imbeciles! Firstly, it’s a hot country (you know, all that sweat dripping from your eyes..) and secondly, Buddha didn’t reach enlightenment by flapping his arms all day, wearing neck ties and running to catch taxis/buses/friends/nothing. What has running about the place done for your cultures? Hmm.. we’ve got higher rates of heart disease, we’ve got increased levels of work-related stress, we’ve got higher suicide rates..need I go on.

I was in Orielly’s pub the other day and put on my usual ‘I can’t understand English’ face to lull the unsuspecting farangs around me into a false sense of security. Minutes into my fried rice and the fat German to the left of me had decided it was safe to begin what is commonly known as ‘Moaning like a little baby’. The poor girl sitting next to him, a 5ft Esarn girl carrying an expression not dissimilar to someone who has just been forced to read Satre’s ‘Being and Nothing’ against their will, had to listen to why her people and her country had not quite yet ‘developed’ enough to be called a ‘democracy’.

I wanted to educate the guy but I expect I would only have had an invitation to the next annual shit-on-a-bargirl competition that those Germans seem so keen on.

When Thai people forgive you for royally cocking up some perfectly simple custom of ours, we do so because we do not think our culture is somehow above or better than yours. More often than not we seek to emulate Western culture. Frankly, I have no idea why.

Hardly believable that a Thai waitress would include Buddha so casually in this sort of scathing commentary or that she would have such an in-depth knowledge of Western society, but nonetheless the Farang who probably wrote this is holding up a welcome mirror to the sort of Westerner who likes to speak of Thais and their culture in a similar manner. It shows a great deal about the difference in our cultures that imagining a Thai writing about Farangs in such terms seems so bizarre. At the same time, forums on the net abound in similar diatribes by Farangs against Thais. I hope the Thais never catch on . . . and that some Farangs would get better manners.