June 15 2005

Luk khrung: Mixed-race, mixed fortunes

Tiger Woods, Tata Young (See Tata Young: Sexy, naughty, bitchy) and Thongchai "Bird" McIntyre are perhaps the best known offspring of Thai mothers and foreign fathers.

Known locally as luk khrung, they're a small but highly visible minority in Thailand. If you're married to a Thai girl, you'll most likely end up fathering a few of your own.

Much admired for their pale skin and good looks, some famously end up working in TV and the music business. Life for the luk khrung isn't all romantic ballads and complementary finger buffets, however.

Unless I'm a fucken golf star, actor, or a fucken singer most Thais consider me a son of a hooker whose dad has left the bitch after the Vietnam War. I'm so sick of these people asking where my mother is from or how she met my dad. The same old fucken story over and over again.

This reader's mother actually came from a privileged background but the insinuations of his fellow Thais became so oppressive that he eventually quit the country.

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Tiger Woods has also had to suffer persistent innuendo about his Thai mother. Not surprisingly, he prefers to stress his African heritage. Tiger can cheer himself up by counting his money but, unfortunately, this option isn't available to everyone.

Mixed-race children expensively educated in the international schools and foreign universities can look forward to a privileged life but the Buriram-raised sons and daughters of retired sheet-metal workers from Stuttgart face a more uncertain future.

The Thai state education system is pretty dreadful. Struggling with oversized classes, teachers often resort to punishing children who ask questions. Rote-learning is still in vogue and many pupils fail to progress beyond the level of basic literacy.

Only the wealthy can afford to send their children to a decent private school. For everyone else, it's a straight choice between settling for a second-rate education or relocating your whole family back to the West.

If Tiger Woods hadn't been brought up in the US, he might have ended up as a Bangkok tuk-tuk driver. Instead of dominating the world of professional golf, Tiger could have found himself bothering foreign tourists with unsolicited offers of "lady massage."

The failure of your child to become a doctor or lawyer might turn out to be the least of your worries, however.

There are plenty of horror stories about mixed-race children who are abused and exploited by their bargirl mothers. Unloved and conceived as a bargaining chip to extract money from their farang father - perhaps unsuccessfully - these children get the worst possible start in life.

Some girls enter the same profession as their mothers - typically as high-class freelancers. (See Bar girl bum-love in Thailand). A few even end up working in the same go-go bars where their parents got together.

Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed a half-African girl working at Suzy Wong's on Soi Cowboy. She's got a figure like the maid from Tom and Jerry so she generally keeps her clothes on.

One night, she mistook my scientific curiosity for sexual attraction and hurried over to give me a quote. She must have mistaken me for a Japanese businessman because it was higher than the average dowry.

The attention that mixed-race children attract can create other problems. I recently met a Thailand-based farang journalist whose daughter was abducted from their rural village by a young Thai woman who had been employed as a babysitter.

The local police were unwilling to help so, when it became clear that the woman and her boyfriend had taken the girl out of the district, her father contacted a Thai newspaper and asked them to print a photograph. The editor agreed - but only in return for a large bribe.

When the kidnappers saw the photo, they panicked and abandoned the child at a railway station where she was later found.

Fortunately, the kidnapping of youngsters is a fairly rare occurrence in Thailand. With so many poverty-stricken parents willing to sell their offspring to human traffickers for the price of a second-hand TV set, abductions are quite unnecessary.

On a Sukhumvit road bridge last month, I saw a sun-blackened old crone rattling a paper cup with a heavily-drugged baby in her arms and a puppy at her side. The whole area is a police and mafia-controlled begging pitch so this, in itself, isn't an unusual sight.

The puppy had been borrowed from the ranks of the local street dogs and, from time to time, its mother would trot over to check that everything was ok. In contrast, the child's mother was nowhere to be seen. Having hired or sold her baby to human traffickers, she obviously couldn't give a flying fuck about its welfare.

I only mention the story because the child possessed a rather striking feature - a shock of blonde hair.

[Posted to Farang Life by David]

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