Book Reviews
Reviews Found on the Web
Review of Thai Girl on www.women24.com
by Lauren Scholtz 12 February 2008
A charming, intellectual read with a healthy dose of romance.
Thai Girl by Andrew Hicks
Recent university graduates, and long-term couple, Ben and Emma travel to Thailand to escape their mundane lifestyles in England. But they embark on this adventure despite the obvious flaws in their relationship. So it comes as no surprise that halfway through the trip, on the Island of Koh Samet, they have a huge argument and part ways. Ben chooses to stay on the Island and Emma decides to explore Chiang Mai and other parts of Thailand.
While moping about the argument, Ben is swept away by an enigmatic, local beauty named Fon. She is a traditional, rural Thai girl working on the beach at Koh Samet as a masseuse to support her family. Ben is blown away by her dedication to her family and her sunny outlook despite her poverty-stricken situation. During his stay on the island, he does his best to convince Fon that he is in love with her but, in broken English, the innocent Fon tries to explain that if they are seen together her people will think that she is a sex worker.
What follows is the charming story of how two strangers with vastly different backgrounds, and moral values, fall in love and desperately try to understand their respective cultures to make things work.
However, Thai Girl is more than just pure escapist romance and it’s not another clichéd story about a wide-eyed foreigner who discovers the sex trade in Thailand either. Instead, it cleverly uses the sub-plot of Ben’s encounters with international travellers to promote thought-provoking and controversial debate surrounding the concept of ethical travelling in Thailand.
Thai Girl presents some interesting insight into how traditional Thai girls feel about the sex trade and it challenges the perceptions of both foreigners and locals, without becoming too serious. The balance between romance, humour and serious debate makes it a story well worth reading.
A Reader’s Review of Thai Girl on www.amazon.com
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful: Surprisingly Good, September 28, 2007 By Chan Joon Yee "Dr Chan" (Singapore)
No, this is not one of those guilty pleasure books even though the title is pretty suggestive. It's a coherent, authentic and sometimes serious novel that tells a convincing story of an exotic cross-cultural romance.
Young and innocent UK graduate Ben is the protagonist here. He visits Thailand with his girlfriend Emma and the couple expect to have the time of their lives, but Thailand changes everything. The couple split up on the island of Koh Samet and Ben falls in love with a pretty Thai girl giving massage and braiding hair on the beach.
From language problems to culture shock and the narrow-mindedness of the Thai public, a field of obstacles lie before him. Even open friendship is a problem. Let alone an open display of courtship. Yet Ben finds himself irresistibly attracted to Fon. They go to the bank together, they go out for dinner, they even go dancing. But eveything remains platonic. Ben is a gentleman truly in love. But soon after Ben's second visit to Koh Samet, the story seems to lose much of its momentum. There is no "happy ending" here. In fact, there isn't even a proper ending. But it's still a beautiful story, albeit an incomplete one - just like many of such stories in real life.
Though many parts of the book have characters like Maca, Jack and others telling more than they are showing, much of the background information about Thailand is revealed quite subtly. The plot and setting are so plausible that it may pass off as a true story. The dialogue is also pretty truthful and convincing. Overall, the author has great writing style and my only complaint is that it doesn't quite read like fiction. The conclusion could have been a bit more satisfying. Still, this book stands way above almost any book on Thai-Farang relationship that I've read.
Review of Thai Girl on www.phuket-info.com
Harry Nicolaides' Weekly Column
The Last Shangri-La
When Columbus sailed centuries ago he discovered a new world. This created a tide of change in the affairs of all men reaching the shores of every continent as exploration, imperialism, trade and eventually tourism. Ever since, a long, venerable literary tradition has grown around the experiences of tourists and expatriates abroad.
Thai Girl, the acclaimed best-selling novel by Andrew Hicks is a looking glass into Thailand and its people as they come to terms with its bejeweled and bewitching images and symbols, the encroachment of Western materialism on traditional agrarian values and the birth of a new cultural identity conceived in the monsoon storms that flare up in purple and blue arcs in the Gulf of Siam and then carried north into the hinterland of Isaan with love and sacrifice.
Reviewed by a galaxy of newspapers and magazines including The Guardian UK, The Nation, Pattaya Mail and Big Chilli, smashing sales expectations while remaining the top-selling English language novel in Thailand and in its umpteenth reprinting, Thai Girl has beaten a shipwreck of other books to become the definitive novel about relationships between Thai nationals and foreigners. Asia Books proudly distributes the book to its flagship stores where it has proved to be consistently the strongest selling book written by an expatriate about Thailand.
In the age of the ubiquitous internet and the neon glow of computerized, digitized video images beaming out into the dark skies of Bangkok, the city of angels, Andrew Hicks has shown that a tale told with honesty and insight where every word pushes the story forward to a conclusion that is poignant and profound is still compelling after all these years. What begins as a story about the intoxication of romantic love between a British tourist and a Thai girl working in the service industry ends by making a statement about the impact of globalization on the shores of the Third World.
Thai Girl is fleshed out in the deftly-crafted dialogue between the key characters of Ben, Fon and Emma. The eternal themes of love, identity and conflict are explored with sensitivity and insight while the rich and intricate rural landscape of Fon’s village in Buriram is rendered with impressionistic sensibility. This is a land where harvest cycles are constantly disrupted by the vicissitudes of nature but also homage to the triumph of raw-boned peasant tenacity in the face of great adversity.
This is the story of the mass migration of a generation of young girls from the rural north of Thailand to the tourist zones of the south. This is an account of their struggle, journey and discovery of new worlds from across the seas. This is the story of Ben, Emma and Fon.
This may be your story. It was mine.
Review of Thai Girl on www.thai-blogs.com
By Steve Cleary, 11 December 2006
Not so long ago, I received a mail from one of thai-blogs’ regular readers – Mr Andrew, concerning a blog/article I had written up about the one-and-only Thai Soap Opera. I spotted the name I realized that the guy was Andrew Hicks himself, the author of the best-selling novel – ‘Thai Girl’.
Soon after, Andrew wrote me a mail and said that he was off to post through a copy of his book. At first I was rather apprehensive as, what with the title of the book, I automatically preconceived it to be just another book about a Thai bar-girl. "A typically boring tale re-told in a market already saturated by such glorification."
A couple of chapters however, into the book, I soon gathered that my preconceptions were completely misguided and thought “Now, this is novel truly worth reading”
Even though I found some parts of the book rather ‘unbelievable’ – that is not really the point. Andrew Hicks, with his 40 years experience in The Land of Smiles, affords the reader a topsy-turvy, back-seated roller coaster adventure into the dreaded Bangkok traffic jam; motorbike-taxi rides; Khao Sarn Road; fixed Thai boxing bouts; rangy go-go dancers; edible Isarn insects and rural life in the sticks. Most though, he manages to delve into the psyche of the average young village Thai girl, her Isarn culture and all the predicaments of cross-culture relationships and misunderstandings between her and the Western mentality.
First and foremost, the thing I liked most about this novel was that it was completely devoid of the usual hanky-panky, raunchy dribble which is found in most romantic novels set in Thailand. Andrew instead, doesn’t waste his space with intimate bedroom secrets but writes, with passion, the real goings-on of – Thailand.
The novel starts off with Ben and Emma a couple of typically naïve, young freshie backpacking graduates from England, tripping across to Thailand for their first Asian adventure. Just from the first few pages, the reader already knows their relationship is in severe jeopardy after Ben manages to coax Emma into a vacation, which she doesn’t want. At first, Ben reads like a spunky young sex-tourist wanna-be, who is just waiting for the opportunity to take a dive into the seedy-sultry sinful night-life. It turns out later however that he is, in stark contrast – a humanitarian out on a mormon-like mission, to rescue the poverty-ridden pitiful Thai girl from a life of suffering in a materialistic world.
After arriving and fighting in Bangkok, the young couple soon head for the island of Koh Samet. Ben with his head in heaven is applauding the Thais, but for Emma she is consistently bickering about all things Siamese and comparing ever fault to the perfection of mighty wonderful England. The reader will almost breathe a huge sigh of relief when the author writes Emma off – and she goes flouncing off in her own direction leaving Ben in a pool of remorse.
" He (Ben) sat and read a novel about Thailand, 'The Beach' by Alex Garland, hoping to learn something about the country from it. But it told him nothing."
The novel really takes off when Ben meets Fon. Just simply a masseuse girl on a Koh Samet beach, she unintentionally sweeps Ben off his feet with her stories of the reality of rural life and the responsibilities and hardships involved. Quite obviously, Ben falls in puppy-love with the exoticness of a rural Thai girl. Naïve as he is, he continually compares her financial status, to that which is the norm back - in the green-green grass of home.
Throughout the book, I never really accepted Ben to be much of a ‘nice-guy’. He is too muddled-up and immature in the head to realize that any kind of relationship he should desire, would be only a chemical one, a one-night-stand leading to a near- future of tears – for the Thai girl. Falling in love with Fon, the first Thai girl he gets to befriend, he is head-over-heels in love with her beauty, charm and perhaps most importantly - her frankness. Ben may claim to Fon that he is a moral man of genetic wisdom, but the reader may feel instead that he is a youngster bloated with libido, just fantasizing about having it off with an Eastern exotic. Then, while he is promising the world to Fon, he is still secretly contacting Emma – planning to meet her, and even missing her. Ben reads like a bit of hypocrite.
I may not have loved Ben’s character, but he does have his positives and he is lovable. He also has quite a bitta sense too, he begins to see through the poverty and realize that the Thai smile, truly is quite a happy one - and that perhaps those down-and-out weather-beaten colored upcountry Thais are more content at heart than the average wealthy Kensington stock-trader.
While Ben pleads his love, fantasizing about her body – Fon is having absolutely nothing to do with such sudden Western intimacies. She continually resists all his advances and lets him know that she is just not a cheap lady-of-the-night, she is a traditional Thai girl. There, Andrew Hicks really manages to give the reader a great insight into the mentality of the traditional Thai girl and how she tries to explain the differences in culture and attitude to the naïve European.
We never really know whether Fon actually falls in love for Ben too, but she does have her feelings. She is smart. She knows about the way foreigners talk and talk and promise and promise to their newly-met Thai darlings about rescuing them from Asian poverty and carrying them off the beauty of the Western world.
Perhaps my fave part of the book is when Fon takes Ben to her home in Buriram province. This is when the author, with his experience of Isarn, manages to afford the reader a delightfully giddy adventure into the realities of everyday north-eastern life. Written well, you can almost hear for yourself the clackety-clack of the morning chickens, the quack-quack of the village ducks and the cries of the tokay-gecko. It is there that Ben witnesses for himself the true qualities of Thai village life.
The book also allows the reader an understanding of the social stigma facing Thai girls and any closeness with the white guy. Fon constantly tries to explain to Ben that many others will see her as prostitute - if the couple appear too close, outside of marriage. Again, Ben with his Western conditioning, never really accepts this and you can almost feel him whisper “So what, why care!”
Anyway, I guess that’s all I’ll say. If you want more details on this really decent novel, then check out Andrew’s website at: www.thaigirl2004.com
Review of “Thai Girl” on www.chiangmai-mail.com
by Lang Reid
This week’s book is from author Andrew Hicks, who appears to be an interesting sort of cove. An ex UK corporate lawyer and university lecturer, Thai Girl (TYS Books, 2004, ISBN 974-92003-4-9) is his first novel, with his characters young backpackers, something Andrew Hicks is not. In fact Hicks is honest enough to say that he wanted to challenge Alec Garland’s bestseller, The Beach, in writing about young backpackers.
The novel revolves around the exploits of a young man on his first trip to Thailand and its effect upon him. It begins with his introduction to the ‘scene’, beginning with a go-go in Bangkok’s Patpong, where the young Englishman has never seen anything in his life like the flesh display put on by the uninterested chrome pole hugging females. Undergraduate revues at English universities not being quite as titillating, if you’ll pardon the pun.
From there he finds the other flesh pit of Nana Plaza, which for some inexplicable reason Hicks refers to in the book as Naga Plaza. I have always believed that if you want to introduce some ‘realism’ to the manuscript, then use the ‘real’ name, especially place names. We know where you are at, author Hicks! Be brave and give the place its correct name!
The next port of call for the tyro Thailand traveller is Ban Phe, the jumping off point for Koh Samet. There, Ben’s English girlfriend Emma and he split up, with irreconcilable differences. He has, by this stage met some seasoned backpackers, with most availing themselves of the commodities that come cheap in this country, going the full gamut from A to A - alcohol and available women.
By now the reader has a good insight into Ben’s character, who is the archetypal immature young university graduate and author Hicks does well in showing just how crass and self centered young men can be. The other main players are Fon, a young Thai girl and Emma, his English university girlfriend. The other characters, to me at least, were a little superfluous, as they did not lend enough to the story to keep bringing them back, or in the case of the middle aged businessman in Bangkok, being used only to provide a kind of Lonely Planet Guide to the flesh pits for lonely males.
The book does show how Thailand provides the maturation of Emma, and just how much ‘older’ than Ben is the young Thai girl, Fon. Each player has his or her own agenda, and Hicks has done very well in his pen-sketch of the Thai psyche of the Isaan girl, who can be both open and closed, loving and stand-offish, all at the same time. Same-same but different, as any resident here can tell you!
The story reminded me of the book Billy Liar, written by Keith Waterhouse in 1959 (and a movie released in 1963) - but without the inimitable Waterhouse humour. The endings of the two books are very similar. Young immature British males have not changed much in the intervening 40 years!
Distributed by Asia Books it has an RRP of B. 395. A good first book.
Review of Thai Girl on www.thingsasian.com
by Kenneth Champeon 22 January 2007
This much at least can be said of Thai Girl, packaged as the "new" novel by to-me-unknown author Andrew Hicks: the Thai girl in question is not a prostitute, and the English boy who courts her is not a lecher but is earnest if a bit obtuse. Unfortunately the novel's title is misleading, as the novel is more about Western men in Thailand than about Thai girls, who remain by novel's end as mysterious and (to be frank) as insignificant as they are to most Westerners. The novel is a deeply sympathetic portrait, but an incomplete and incoherent one, part Beach and part Prince and the Pauper, and it even contains a protracted and thoroughly irrelevant discourse upon American foreign policy post-9/11.
The Thai girl's name is Fon, a common enough nickname meaning "rain". She is a masseuse, a "good" girl who probably had a bad Thai boyfriend who in turn gave her a son, though she (probably) lies about this to English boy Ben. Fon works the beach on Ko Samet, and she sends the proceeds to her poor, rice-farming family in Buriram, located in Thailand's poorest region and the source of most of its migrant laborers: Isaan.
Ben has come to Thailand with his peevish girlfriend Emma, and no sooner are they off the plane than Ben has dragged poor Emma to a Bangkok go-go bar, where with appalling tactlessness Ben becomes a wide-eyed, panting mess. Ben's transformation is as swift as it is common. Enter Fon, and soon enough Emma is so disgusted by Ben's adoration of Thai women that she leaves him and scurries off to Chiang Mai, where a foreigner can still be considered respectable. Ben falls for Fon, and though he will not admit it to himself or her, he wants to sleep with her so badly that he does everything short of clubbing her and dragging her off to a cave.
But Fon is no dummy. She repeatedly accuses Ben of being a pahk wahn, a flatterer or "sweet mouth", and she knows that if she is seen with him in public she will be scorned. She also knows that he is probably a transient; he will neither marry her and stay in Thailand nor face the daunting and even impossible task of getting her a visa to England. Her feelings for him appear to be genuine rather than mercenary; but she's not about to abandon her only livelihood to satisfy his whims. But neither is Ben prepared to marry a woman whose affection for him is so indeterminate. Like many Thai girls, Fon expresses her affection in terms of highly variable percentage points, as if Ben had a stock price. Objectification goes both ways.
Much of the novel concerns the ins-and-outs, so to speak, of sex tourism, and though Ben is subjected to several defenses of the industry he manages to escape Thailand with his opposition to it intact. But in part thanks to Fon, who resists the world's oldest profession but understands its allure, Ben begins to get an inkling of how significant a role money plays even in "proper" Thai relationships. Thai men (and Western men for that matter) have more earning potential than Thai women. So the women need money from the men, and the men need whatever it is they want from the women. Opposition to this is fine, so long as one is prepared to oppose the commodification of human beings, which needless to say is already quite well advanced (the neologism "human resources" perhaps epitomizes this fact.) The real problem Westerners have with the whole business is that they romanticize the sexual act, whose sanctity is compromised whenever money comes into play.
The author does a fair job addressing the issues involved but he does so at the risk of reducing his novel to a panel discussion. The novel has no characters to speak of except Ben and Fon; the rest are mere mouthpieces for this or that stance, whether it concern George W. Bush or the environmental degradation resulting from unchecked tourism. And when Hicks is not passing the microphone to the latest expert, he is explaining aspects of Thai culture that can be found in any guidebook, and no longer have the capacity to shock. Thais eat bugs. They tell you what you want to hear. That sort of thing.
But the novel is mostly about farang culture, where a farang is that special and unrepresentative breed of Westerner, usually male, who fritters his life away in Thailand by drinking and whoring, traveling and cursing work. These people are not stupid, nor are all of them moochers; one of Hicks' characters is an American named Chuck, invariably described as "vacant", but who is clever enough to realize that he can do computer work in America until he has enough money to go back to Thailand and actually enjoy his life. Another explains that there is nothing at all unnatural about life as a beach bum. To the contrary: "[Y]ou pick up a book, a bottle of water and sunglasses and you find a deckchair. You sit on it and read the book. Get too hot, you walk to the sea and throw yourself in. Get too hungry, you eat food." One might add: "Get too broke, you find work." Perhaps the only disadvantage to such a life is boredom; the average person desires complications.
One of the more interesting aspects of farang culture that the author addresses is the animosity often obtaining between farang men and women in Thailand; the two groups may be said to inhabit two subcultures all their own. The women despise the men because the men ignore them, mistreat or idealize Thai women, and drink too much. The men, on the other hand, see the women consumed by envy of Thai women, an envy they conceal by trying to save Thai women from all manner of male maltreatment. Each farang gender sees the other as having forgotten how the one should be treated, and so unless the destabilizing presence of Thai women is absent the two groups wage a kind of cold war. Ben and Emma are more or less cordial (in their snappy, mean-spirited English way) only when they are not in Thailand.
But of Thai women, the novel's cover asks, "is it she who is the victim?" It's a good, if also melodramatic question, for the fact is that - drum roll, please - sex is power. Of the two lovebirds Ben and Fon, Ben is clearly the more pathetic, because he fails to realize his real motive in pursuing Fon (impregnating her) and speaks of love instead, whereas Fon knows she just wants a good man who will marry and support her. Ben's earnestness is his main liability; short of betraying his sexual desires he tells her everything, whereas Fon's every word seems only to confuse Ben further. Both are vulnerable, but Fon retains a certain dignity that Ben squanders whenever he wonders, openly or to himself, whether Fon is finally going to share his bed. Had Fon been a prostitute and extracted Ben's money, then he would look even more the fool for falling in love with her; as Pico Iyer wrote in his review of the novel Bangkok 8, Western men too often leave Thailand with a "dull ache" and an "empty wallet".
Thai Girl is one of a rapidly growing genre of books that treat Thai women as if they were some newly discovered species of animal that only the author fully understands, and I suppose this is because Thai girls are among the world's most conspicuous. One doesn't see books called Slovenian Girl, for example. Unfortunately most of these books are as sloppily written as this one, as unoriginal, as lamely self-congratulatory (one almost expects the book to carry the headline "THAI GIRL EXPLAINED".) For example, when Ben and Emma disembark at Don Muang airport in Bangkok, they are astonished to discover that there are "Thai faces everywhere" - just as, I suppose, a recent arrival to Heathrow would find English faces everywhere. Ben later tells his taxi driver to take them to "the bar area off Sukhumwit Road", which is rather like asking a New York cabbie to go to the theatre on Broadway. The author makes the interesting decision to call Bangkok's Nana Plaza (a bar area off Sukhumwit road) by the name of Naga Plaza, but still refers to Patpong (a bar area off Silom Road) as Patpong. Tuk-tuk drivers say things like "two o'crock" and "no probrem". Once upon a time this was funny.
And it's difficult to tell whether the author's heart is in the right place or not. The novel is dedicated to Isaan's migrant laborers, and on several occasions a character will defend the Thais against charges of laziness or attribute rampant prostitution to desperate poverty rather than to moral inadequacy. One suggests that nothing a bar girl does is voluntary - a rebuttal of the commonly held belief that many are bar girls by choice, but it begs the question whether anything anyone, anywhere, does is voluntary. The problem with almost any book dealing with Thailand's olive underbelly is that the author must get some enjoyment out of its contours in order to stay there long enough to understand it, and in that case he can't then pronounce it a tragedy. There are one too many chuckles in this book over some of the more ridiculous sexual phenomena to be observed in places like "Naga" Plaza, and one soon tires of authors believing themselves to be the first to witness them and thereby enlighten an innocent world. Girls "gyrating mindlessly around chromium poles", as the author puts it, are not news, yet the phrase appears on the book's first page.
Still, the author has done his homework regarding some of the more mystifying - to a Westerner - aspects of the "Thai personality", such as it is. Thais can be, as one character Samantha puts it, "totally offhand", to which an Australian replies, "You mustn't demand or complain...and don't ever expect an apology from a Thai." Or, as a mentor of mine once put it, in Thailand you are always wrong and the Thais are always right. The Australian goes on to say: "It can be frustrating, but it's better than confrontation, American-style." As an American I of course disagree. But then America is a cultural anomaly.
Ultimately the main problem with Thai Girl is that the Thai girls to whom the author has access are likely to come from the lower classes, because few Thai girls from the higher classes would have much reason to interact with a Westerner with such an intimate knowledge of Naga Plaza. The misrepresentations will no doubt continue, however, and the world will therefore continue to believe that Thai girls are lined up on the beaches and in the bars, waiting for their White Knight in Shining Armor, when most of them are probably wondering what the Westerners think they are doing here in the first place.
Blog Review of Thai Girl
By Amanda, 24 July 2007
I found the novel Thai Girl by Andrew Hicks in a used bookshop a week ago, and I have been completely absorbed in it since the moment I picked it up (and because I have been spending most of my free time reading the book, it has taken me a while to finish writing this journal entry). But I just finished the novel last night, so now I am ready to write about what has been happening.
I don’t think Thai Girl is an amazingly written piece of literature, and I probably wouldn’t have been interested in it at all if I wasn’t in Thailand. But being that I am in Thailand, the book is so relevant to my life here because it is about a young couple from England who just graduated from college and decide to take a month long romantic vacation together in Thailand.
In Thai Girl, the two main characters go to Thailand expecting it to be a tropical paradise and then become disillusioned with Thailand’s reality of suffering and poverty. Many of the things that happen to the characters are similar to the experiences my friends and I have had here, and we have been to many of the places where the characters in the story go.
I really like the book because I was able to see how the opinions of the characters slowly evolve as they gain more experiences and become more informed about what Thailand is like.
And I really love that the book clearly shows the different perspectives and realities of different groups of people here (including both those of the foreign tourists and those of the Thais themselves). The author has spent a lot of time in Thailand doing research for this book, and he paints a very accurate picture of what life here is like.
Review of Thai Girl
By The Tragic Comedy 14 May 2007
Having finished reading Thai Girl by Andrew Hicks two weeks ago, which took me about a month, a major feat for my reading speed, I was left with a lingering feeling of loss and a 'what's next...' syndrome, thanks in no small way to the unresolved ending of the book. Thanks, Andrew! You took me for a wild ride, hit the brakes in the middle of nowhere, got off the bus with the engine still running and ran off to who knows where.
One thing's for sure, though. This is not your typical love story where the guy ALWAYS gets the girl in the end, however much they twist and contort the plot that leads up to that ending. No Mills-and-Boons-book-jackets kind of humping anywhere in the book, but lots of dialogues between the two main characters during massage sessions about the female lead's life, and in the process, giving us more than a glimpse into the life of the Thais of different parts, particularly the plight of village girls who were sent out to work in the cities. You can find the synopsis of the book, as well as other information by clicking on the heading. There's no need for me to repeat what has been done to death already, i.e. book reviews and synopses, available everywhere else with a Google search.
Of course, there are the expected expose on subjects like poverty and sex tourism in Thailand, as seen through the eyes of the people the main character, Ben, met during his adventure in Thailand. Beneath that layer, however, as I discovered, lies an understated, silent narrative about reaching for something within our sight but not within our grasp, of frustration and a certain sense of helplessness. Oh, how frustrating Ben must have felt in his pursuit of Fon, the charming and innocent but strong-willed masseuse who works on a beach resort. Then there's the tension of how certain trades are seen as a taboo in society in general, yet accepted as a mean to avert the highly undesirable effects of poverty. The girls who ply them are often cast in an unholy duality of being the financial pillars of their poor families and the stereotypical sex-off-the-shelf, much to their resignation and that of the people dear to them. One of the many backlashes of such 'sacrifices' is, according to what Fon told Ben, that being seen around a farang alone raises the suspicion that the girl in question is a bar girl (typically from Pattaya, so implies Fon), or someone who's tagging along the farang for the money.
On the flip side, would that imply that a foreigner scooting around a Thai girl is necessarily a sex tourist of some sort? Could there not be a more benign relationship between a Thai girl and a non-Thai man? With this comes also the eternal struggle between supply and demand, each trying to make the other the root of all their following evils. You will discover, weaved in the story, many of these really grey tales snaking across what's not wrong, what's justifiable and what's tolerated like a tuk-tuk driver through the Bangkok streets, with nary a judgment being made. Most probably because no one has the answer.
Hey, perhaps Andrew Hicks didn't intend to make such a ballyhoo of a philosophical statement in his book. Maybe it's more borne out of the empathy I had for Ben through real experiences in Thailand. Perhaps it's also a reflection of the way life is, that there are simply no answers to certain things that challenge our thirst for a justification in whatever befall us. Who knows?
