The Pretty Boy

My wife’s family is fairly well-off. Her parents own a considerable amount of rice-farming land and they rent this out to people who don’t own land but want to grow rice. It helps to pay the bills.

Her brother and sisters are all “comfortable” financially, and she has a healthy bank account of her own.

Some months ago, she and her brother got together and had a phone conversation. The outcome of this conversation was that her brother’s 17-YO son would be coming here to undertake a course in English. The course is called ELICOS [English Language Intensive Course for Overseas Students], and runs for 35 weeks, 5 days per week, 9 AM to 2:30 PM, presumably with some sort of break for refreshment.

This young lad arrived here Sunday 2 September, had a week to settle in and shake off the jet-lag, then on Monday 10 September, he was thrown in at the deep end. I don’t ask how he is doing academically, that does not really interest me. What did interest me was that my wife paid the visa application, tuition, and medical insurance fees here and her brother deposited the Thai Baht equivalent into her Thailand bank account.

The fees here totalled about $AU10,600, or $US8,500, and that’s THB300,000, close enough. So here we have a 17-YO boy whose parents think nothing of dropping a huge sum of money [by Thai standards] into teaching him English. You are welcome to draw your own conclusions, but the conclusion that I draw is that the family is better-funded than I originally believed. But not only does the boy have this financial advantage, he also has good looks. I judge his looks, not from my observation of his person, but from the reactions I see of the women who observe him. He gets some “interested” stares, and there are even a few come-on remarks thrown his way but, perhaps fortunately, his English comprehension is not there so he does not know what these mean, and more importantly, what he could do about them if he knew what they are and wanted to take up a few offers.

The ELICOS course is held at the same campus that my wife attends, so he gets a free ride to college most days, and this morning something happened that worried me.

We were in traffic and drew up level with a police car. This police car was driven by a policeman and there was a policewoman passenger. The nephew was sitting in the seat behind me, and the policewoman caught sight of him. From that moment she was watching him, something like a construction worker might stare at a passing beauty. I worried that he might not have fastened his seat-belt [an omission which attracts a fine for both driver and non-fastener here], but it became obvious that she was smitten with his good looks as the traffic moved on and the police car [with the policewoman still staring] eventually took a turn that I did not.

This boy will soon be fighting them off; he is young, good-looking, and comes from a well-heeled family.

If only I could walk in his shoes for a few years...

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