Patcharin analyzes in the book a phenomenon that occurs in the Isarn region of Thailand, which is the largest and most underdeveloped in the country, and that consists of marriages between women from the region and foreigners. For her study she focused on the village of Na Dokmai, a population of 4,300 dedicated to agriculture. What is surprising is that for such a small population, 159 of its wives were married or had long-term relationships with foreigners from 21 different countries. Patcharin looks at what is behind these relationships, which is what drives Isarn women to seek foreign husbands.
A first reason is a distrust towards Thai men in rural areas, who are seen as unreliable: they tend to have other lovers, they are little responsible towards their families, they get drunk and they like the game, and some of them are abusive. The idea that you cannot trust men, who are birds of passage, is deeply ingrained in Thai culture. It is the portrait offered by the classic work "Khun Chang Khun Phaen" and it is the description made by the Dutchman van Vliet, who lived in Ayutthaya in the 17th century: "... men are generally lazy and slow, so that women (which are proportionate and pretty), they do most of the work in the fields. These women also row in the rivers [given the importance of the floating markets in the country, surely in addition to rowing, they would trade] and they do many other things (and unlike in other nations) they do the same work as their slaves and take care of their families with great diligence ... "

More graphic than van Vliet and more contemporary too, is the testimony of one of the interviewees, whose Thai husband went to work abroad with money that she had borrowed: “He didn't send any money home. When I called him, he said she didn't have a job. When I asked him to send money, he told me that she didn't have any money because he didn't have a job (…) He wasn't worried about what happened to me or our children. He wasn't worried that our house might be taken from us. I couldn't make ends meet, much less pay the huge debt to save the house. "

In comparison, with Westerners all are advantages. As one of the Thai women interviewed in the book says: “Most of the men farang [“ farang ”is the denomination of all the Westerners; comes from the Persian "barran" which in turn is an adaptation of "frank"] they accept and support children from previous relationships [in rural Isarn it is very normal for girls to become pregnant very soon and just as normal as the Thai parents of the creatures ignore], but the Thai men do not. It is not in our culture… Women can also enjoy a better life and have new experiences, especially when living abroad.”

One of the components of the fascination with Westerners is that they have money and this is where the concepts of Western and Thai love collide. From Provençal troubadours and Hollywood movies we are convinced in the West that love has to be something pure, detached and immaterial. If chrematistic considerations enter, bad. But in the conception of love in Isarn, if the man really loves the woman, he has to help her financially. Sound interested? In many parts of the world and even in the West until recently women expected husbands to be good providers. “I want a good man who is generous and warm, who takes responsibility for his family, accepts and helps my children and also takes care of my parents. My previous relationship [with a man from the village] shows what life would be like if the man did not take his family seriously [it really seems that the girl looks for a social worker rather than a husband]. " In Isarn love and money overlap and the money that the farang gives to the Isarn girl creates an emotional bond; in the West, love and money are incompatible. “My relationship with Sven started because of money. I needed to help two of my children and repay a loan (…). [The relationship] ended in love. "

Na Dokmai women married to farangs form a kind of separate caste. They live in modern houses, paid for by their husbands, contribute to the temple and other charities. Sometimes they are not fully accepted, because they come from low extraction, but money always paves the way.

With so many avenues opening the wedding with a farang, it is not surprising that many young people in the village think about how to get within reach of the farang. For many of them, the most obvious way, especially when you don't have a lot of studies or you don't speak English well, is to go to a gogo-bar in the coastal city of Pattaya, where I say they know farangs. The interesting thing is that in some cases it is their own parents who propose this “professional opportunity”.

That it is a profession that can lead to the golden dream of a marriage to a farang does not imply that it is a prestigious profession. In fact, when the girls referred to Patcharin about their relationships with their clients, they tended to emphasize the friendship side (for example, that they went together to tourist attractions) and neglected the sexual aspect. It was not uncommon for the tourist who had been to Thailand for fifteen days to become a mixture of escort, tour guide, manager and sexual partner, which in their minds tended to blur the distinction between normal girl and prostitute. Once husband Farang's goal was achieved, they all left the profession and many found themselves in an ambiguous position in their village. They were respected because they had married a farang and had money, but their old profession was not completely forgotten.

Patcharin focuses more on women than on men, but it is still interesting to know what can lead a Farang to marry a girl with whom he hardly has a common language and who belongs to a culture far removed from his own. Based on studies by other authors and on some interviews, Patcharin points out that, coming from feminist societies in which traditional masculinity is threatened, these farangs find in Thai women a model of femininity and care and a return to family values ​​that in the West they are disappearing. To this would be added a certain fascination for the oriental woman, who is seen as an epitome of sensuality. Richard Berstein in the magnificent "The East, The West and Sex" has explored the entire western imaginary since the time of the Romans about a feminine and sensual East.

What I am missing from the book is a statistic of how many of these relationships between Farang men and Thai women succeed. At the time I was quite skeptical and thought that most of them failed. That may have been true in the 1990s, but I believe that Thai society is opening up and that the success rate is increasing, while the rate of failed marriages is increasing in our countries. In the end it will turn out that it is easier to have a successful marriage if you marry a woman who lives 10,000 kilometers away than if you do it with the neighbor on the fifth floor.