The Out of Towners

I received a post-card today, one of those promotional freebies you find in the desks of the better hotels, in this case the Sheraton Towers in Singapore, though the card was sent from Mexico. The picture shows an elegant Caucasian couple stepping out of a limousine, and a liveried Asian doorman holding the car door open and greeting his guests with a salute and a big smile. Above his head somebody has drawn one of those “thought bubbles” like you see on the cartoons page, and in the bubble is written “Bite me, Whitey!”

This is probably not how the Sheraton’s Public Relations Department intended their hotel to be represented when they distributed these cards. The unsuccessful attempt at racist humor was in fact the work of the woman who sent me the card. Here’s what she wrote on the back:

“Dear Steve, Our family left Phuket in such a hurry - I never told you it was a pleasure meeting you. But you can keep that damned rock and 96% of the xenophobes that reside there! After nine months of trying to get a grasp on how the Thai think, I can only conclude that they don’t - at least not in a fashion that I can find any logic in. I imagine it’s one of those “Never the twain shall meet” sort of things. Whatever, it was an expensive and demoralizing experience for us. One we’re trying not to repeat. We are now living in Mexico, another developing nation where an A-type personality is not required. Sincerely, B.D.”

Despite the assumed literacy of somebody who uses the word “xenophobe” on a post-card, this woman takes extravagant poetic license by describing our encounter as a “meeting”. What in fact happened was this: one day last January I was in one of Phuket’s best restaurants and had ordered one of those special desserts that take 20 minutes to make. Just as it arrived this woman appeared, looming over my table, ranting and raving about how the hotels “make” the beach boys serve the farang women who remove their bikini tops on the beach.

She prefaced her tirade with the words “I’m here because I love the Thais, and I think...” and then she chattered on and on, while I sat stunned and my coffee got cold and my Warm Melting Chocolate Cake with Homemade Pistachio Ice Cream and Mint Essence turned into sludge on the plate. Her speech was filled with erroneous or misunderstood “facts” about Thai culture lifted piecemeal from the Lonely Planet Guide, and of all things in this country that could prod a person into a wrath of righteous indignation, it was the boobs on the beach that had raised this woman’s ire to the point that she would accost a perfect stranger in a public dining room.

I might add that this was a dining room where this woman and her family ate almost daily, and where I can only afford to eat dessert once a month. I heard later that she was asked to stay out of there after she accosted another guest, this time a man who has for the last decade successfully managed a very large foreign company’s office in Bangkok, because he was seated with one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, thus “showing the sole of his foot to the whole room.”

And after nine months of defending Thai culture and traditions from such boorish foreigners, B.D. has moved on to sunny old Mexico. From hints like that nine-dollar-word “xenophobe” and the line about “it was an expensive experience for us...”, I get the feeling that what turned B.D. from a lover of Thailand to a detractor was the fact that foreigners are treated differently from natives here. If you read the letters to the editor pages you hear a lot of this; “Why do I have to pay to see the Emerald Buddha when my girlfriend gets in free?” and “So this taxi driver claimed his meter was broken, even though it worked fine for the Thai passenger who had just disembarked...” etc. etc. ad nauseum.

The implication that all these whiners seem to make is that this sort of thing only happens in Thailand. Let me tell you a story. My grandfather owned a small grocery store in a Jewish neighborhood in Des Moines, Iowa, during the 1920’s and 1930’s. For two decades he kept a brand new broom propped against the check-out counter, and whenever anybody “not from the neighborhood” bought groceries there, they were charged for the broom. If they noticed, Grandpa would say “Dat’s not your broom? Hey, who left dis broom here?” and deduct the cost from their bill. The vast majority didn’t notice, and Grandpa always said that he put my mother through college on that broom.

That’s a story that’s still told, with pride, at every family wedding, bar mitzvah and funeral. I think of Grandpa’s broom whenever I’m reminded that in this country I’m “not from the neighborhood”. When I’m charged for a broom, I either point out the mistake nicely, or I pay for it and thank God that brooms are so cheap in Asia. But B.D., and many people like her, see the broom as a personal insult, or worse, evidence of a grand conspiracy to deprive them of their rights.

We are not born with any rights. There’s no political manifesto inscribed on the Periodic Table of Elements, and no Emancipation Proclamation encoded in our DNA. Rights are a social convention granted by a group to its members, and if a group chooses to withhold certain rights from non-members, well, to stretch a point, the group has that right. So I’m going to send my own post-card to B.D., one of those classic Phuket scenes of a single umbrella on an ivory-white palm-fringed beach, and here’s what I’m going to write on the back: “Dear B.D., if you don’t want to buy brooms, do your shopping in your own neighborhood. Love, Steve.”

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.