Expat ghettos

Yvon, who is Australian, likes to socialize with other expatriates; he does not speak Thai and as a result feels a little isolated here. Sap, who is Thai, does not like these functions. They – the expatriates – always talk about heavy topics, he says, meaning politics, the discussion of which at social gatherings is in Asia considered in bad taste. The worst is that they do not know anything, he says. This, of course, is true everywhere – I have rarely heard an ad hoc political discussion – whether in America or in Europe – which was not shallow and uninformed (the topic is big and few have the time to master it; not everything is done in public; the picture is often confused by irrelevant but emotionally stirring ideologies). Yet, the problem is compounded among expatriates: they don’t speak the language, can’t read the press, the locals don’t tell them anything: they operate, basically, in the dark. The information they exchange is often rumor; and because of the small size of the community, rumors spread fast. Among the Japanese community here a rumor went about lately about the imminent collapse of a bank about which I knew from financial press that it had only a week earlier reported record profits. Many Japanese withdrew their deposits the very next week. Similarly, a new visa rumor runs the Anglo-Saxon community every month, each subsequent one weirder than the one before.

I am sure there is another reason why Sap does not like to attend these functions: all expatriate communities’ favorite activity is bitching about how bad things are in their host-country, and in particular how stupid and mean the locals. They don’t usually have the delicacy to lay off the topic in the presence of local significant others who are thereby forced to politely agree. The expatriate community is a kind of mental ghetto; it is the same everywhere, whether in Taipei or in Tokyo or in New York. I do not attend the functions which Sap is obliged to attend.

Incidentally, the Anglo-Saxon obsession with politics is striking. Anglo-Saxon colleagues write me from other continents about Thai politics. The royal family, writes one, is divided about succession – as if he was in position to know the first thing about it. There are so many other interesting topics to talk about here: the mechanism of development for example which turns lovely old wooden towns into snarling cement beasts with air so thick it can be sliced with a knife; the ease with which people are persuaded to give up the solid, comfortable old for the cheap, uncomfortable new for the sake of being modern, or like everyone else; the displacement of locals by people from elsewhere – Bangkok, the South – who arrive with money and buy up the choice properties to such extent that today, by some estimates, fewer than a third of the residents of downtown Chiang Mai are Northerners. (The same seems to be happening in Mae Rim). But to talk about these things one has to be a keen observer; one has to actually know something. A tall order.