Mikael Gets Married

I was seated at a barstool at an open-air bar on Soi Four making good use of the 28-300 telephoto lenses on my digital camera, trying to get full head shots of people moving up and down the street. My attention at the time was on a woman across the street who was standing on her tiptoes with her back to me, putting a small candle on a tiny concrete ledge. I'd taken eight or ten shots of her when this hefty Caucasian man with a huge round face and closely shaven head and wearing sloppy tan chinos and black square-toed dress shoes said, You're being unfair to those people with that big zoom. He laughed. He was obviously joking.

He then said, I had one with a $2,500 professional lenses on it that my wife of one-week smashed all up.

And thus began my long conversation with Mikael, who three weeks earlier had married a thirty-three-year-old Thai woman in her native village 120 kilometers from the Mekong River. Mikael is forty-one and from Helsinki.

A week after their marriage, they had come to Bangkok to get papers that would allow Mikael to take his wife, Gung, to Finland. On their arrival in Bangkok, they had checked into a hotel that they were both personally familiar with. In the bar late that evening, Mikael saw a Thai woman with whom he'd had a fling two years ago. He had told his wife about the affair, which had occurred when they were not romantically involved. He said he wanted to go over and say hello, and Gung said okay. Not long after he began talking with the woman, Gung came to his side and said she was tired and was going up to the hotel room to sleep. Mikael said he would join her shortly.

The woman had had several drinks when Mikael greeted her, and as they chatted she had several more. She was depressed about the fact that a relationship that she'd had for more than year with a German had recently been broken off. As the night wore on, the woman had several more drinks, so many that she literally could not stand, Mikael said. Knowing that she was in trouble and could not make it to her own room, in a hotel in another part of Bangkok, he picked her up, carried her to a taxi, put her to bed, and left. He said that other than carry her to the taxi he did not touch her. And he certainly didn’t kiss her. That he just wouldn't do that now that he was married. His womanizing days were over.

The following day, eager to pursue the principle that he would be completely honest with his new Thai wife on everything big and small, which was a first marriage for both of them, he told Gung in considerable detail what had happened the night before. She got enraged and said that having touched the woman was tantamount to having slept with her. What made the touching inappropriate in her mind was the fact that he'd previously had an affair with the woman.

Gung got angrier as Mikael tried to explain and convince her that she was making much ado about nothing. Finally, it reached the point where she needed to destroy something to make her point, and the closest object within reach was Mikael's Nikon camera with a very expensive lens. She took the camera and slammed it onto a tile floor. The impact broke the lens and the camera. The very expensive lens could not be repaired.

At this point, Mikael said he went crazy, and with one of his large hands, and large they are--he's about six-two and weighs about 250 pounds--he squeezed Gung by the neck with his middle finger and thumb, which no doubt was painful, particularly for a relatively small Thai woman. She responded by hitting him as hard as she could in the face. He in turn reacted by hitting her very hard. Blood flowed from her mouth. He'd said he felt like killing her when this happened.

Thai women can be very "hot", Mikael said. They are not like Finnish women who work within a set of rules. When a Thai woman loses her temper there are no rules. She will take you apart if she can.

He said that despite this terrible fight, and only a week into their marriage, he loved Gung "one-hundred percent" and was positive the marriage would work out beautifully for both of them.

Mikael had met Gung in 1994 at Pattaya when she was working as a bargirl. He had seen her on the beach and immediately fell in love with her. He was with her for five straight days, and then asked her if she wanted to stop selling her services to the first farang that met her price. She said she hated doing what she was doing. He bought a couple of bus tickets, they went north to her home village, he stayed there for two months (not speaking Thai and not learning any during this time), and then wrote to his mother and asked her to send two plane tickets, Bangkok to Helsinki, one for each of them. His mother said she was not all happy that he was bringing home a dark-skinned Thai girl who was full of diseases. Mikael said to his mother, Accept it and send the two tickets or you will never see your son again. She sent them. Mikael said that at this time Finland was about as racist a country as you find anywhere. His mother expressed a national sentiment.

Gung spent three months in Finland and absolutely hated it. She made no friends, and she spent her days inside Mikael's home with the lights out and the windows covered, sleeping most days until Mikael got home from work. Mikael finally saw the futility of Gung trying to live in Helsinki, and he sent her home.

A year later, he decided he wanted to be with Gung. He just couldn't get her out of his mind. He still had that strong feeling for her that he'd had the first time he saw her on the beach at Pattaya. The following year, or almost two years since he'd sent Gung home, Mikael returned to Pattaya and found Gung and said he wanted to get back together with her. She said that it was too late, she was now with an Italian man who was living more or less permanently in Pattaya. Mikael returned four more times in the next six years, and each time he looked up Gung, and each time he found that she was still living with the Italian. They had not married, though they had made several trips to Italy, each one for a month or two at a time. How serious the Italian and Gung were Mikael never knew.

In early 2004, Mikael said he would give it one last try. He went to Pattaya, found Gung without much difficulty, and to his happy surprise found that he had come at a good time. Gung and her live-in Italian boyfriend of long standing had just broken up. A couple of weeks later, Mikael asked Gung if she would marry him. She immediately said yes.

They made arrangements to have a Buddhist wedding in her home village. They spent six weeks there. He still spoke no more than a couple of dozen words of Thai, but somehow managed to get by with sign language and the few words he knew. It was all familiar, remembering what it had been like years earlier. During this period of time, there were preparations that had to be made for the wedding, and invitations to the seventy people that would attend, and then there would be the three days of partying, days of constant drinking and little else. Mikael, from all I could tell, fit every stereotype of the hard-drinking Scandinavian.

Mikael said there was never any formal discussion of a bride price to be paid, but that it was probably included in the roughly $5,000 U.S. that he spent during this period of time in Gung's village: for the wedding, for the parties, and for major repair work on Gung's parents' home. They were both in their seventies. He said he would be sending the parents about $50 a month; there was no pressure to do so, he would just be doing it.

One incident that arose during this six-week period of wedding preparations was that once and sometimes twice a day a pair of young girls-they always came in twos--from the village would come to Gung's house and seek out Mikael and ask him if he had any Finnish friends that would be interested in Thai girls. And did he have any pictures of them? Initially, he treated all of this as a joke. But then he realized that all of the young girls were very serious. Like young girls everywhere in Isaan, Thailand's poorest region, they want a better life.

I wondered how his wife would be able to cope with the long and cold winters of Helsinki, especially in light of her previous experience. And, no less, with the racism that Mikael said was rampant in Finland.

He wasn't sure how she'd handle the climate, though he portrayed her as tough, resilient, and determined. He noted that since he first met Gung there has been a large number of men from Finland who have gone to Thailand and returned home with Thai brides, and that in the area of Helsinki where he lived there were about one or two Thai women per block. And in addition, a large number of Thai massage parlors. The Thai, he claimed, were a real presence today in Finland.

But the fact of all these Thai women in Helsinki, and presumably other parts of Finland, would not be of any help to Mikael's wife, since he said she would refuse to associate with most of the women. In her mind, they had the stigma of being a bar girl, and though Gung had been one herself, it was a past she now wanted no part of. She would have to make friends outside the Thai community.

When I had this long conversation with Mikael he'd had quite a bit to drink, and he'd been out the night before with friends hitting bars all night, and in the process he'd lost--or had stolen--his cell phone. Gung's cell phone number was included in his phone, but he couldn't remember it. He had no way to get in touch with Gung, who had gone north to her village to get some important papers, and he did wonder if she'd have questions about what he'd really done the first time he was away from her for a night. Had he been out with other women.

He wasn't sure what she'd ask. And then he said that Gung was like most Thai women. She wouldn't make a fuss if he occasionally found himself with other women, and she would know if he had been because she would keep that short a rope on him and his activities.

What about the camera incident? I asked.

He saw the problem, the apparent contradiction. He wasn't sure he could explain why she would get so "hot" in the one case and probably not in another case of more obvious infidelity. He could do no better than say that it must have something to do with the fact that he'd had an affair with the woman that got so drunk before they'd gotten married.

But the big issue that remained in my mind, and I think in his, was: could Gung really adapt to the endless dark and cold winters of Helsinki after living her whole life in the tropics? And particularly in view of her one experience there, not a happy one. He thought she could, but he wasn't a hundred percent sure, as he was about everything else in their new marriage.

Perhaps Gung had reached that age where her options for marriage had diminished considerably, or disappeared; and in any event working for the rest of her life in a northern Thai village, or Bangkok, for survival wages was not an attractive option. Once again, love, like so much in life, is fundamentally about economics.

The author can be contacted at:  korski1@cox.net

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