Love fever, Rice fever, Yellow fever…you be the judge

It’s nice to think the Bangkok Post provides opportunities for aspiring authors, but the editorial team really should monitor the quality of what is published.

On Sunday August 30, the Post’s Brunch Magazine had an intriguing cover, ‘Love You long Time Yeah, Right Buddy! Why Farang Men Think Asian Women are Fair Game’, by Rikke Bjerge Johansen. Page 6 made it clear that this was indeed the cover story, although now sporting a new name: ‘The Fever of Love: Forget the swine flu – We need a cure for farang with “Rice Fever.”’

Well, what a huge disappointment! In this poorly crafted piece, a young woman of mixed Danish and Korean heritage, relates how she has frequently been approached by men since she arrived in Thailand twenty months ago – and (despite the story’s title) not only farang or Caucasian men, but also Thai men. Surprisingly, she tells us that she has only discovered this type of male behaviour in Thailand.

Her story is full of stereotypes – her boyfriend is worried that ‘people think of (him) as just another loser farang with a cute Asian girlfriend’, and there’s the Bangkok counsellor with a Scandanavian name who works with farang men who explains that farangs here exhibit behaviour that “they would never do in another country” (although conveniently he has nothing to say about why Thai men are, in the writer’s words, “not backward in coming forward either”).

The story peters out with some snippets from a Thai girl who has been propositioned, not surprisingly, when visiting a girlfriend who works in a Nana hotel, an older French man who asked a 32 year old office worker for her phone number, another Korean-Danish girl who inanely questions her identity (Korean?Danish? or Thai?) since living in Bangkok, and a young woman who relates how a polite man gave her his name card and asked for her phone number and called her later, and how she doesn’t mind if people are “polite”.

Ho hum, what is this all about? What a waste of coloured newsprint, and an insult to Post readers!! We just seem to have normal stories here of men trying to hook up with women. With respect to both the writer and her expert farang counsellor, this doesn’t happen only in Thailand. It happens to women all over the world, of all races, and more so to especially pretty girls.

For some badly needed balance, how about a follow-up story asking Thai women living abroad about their experiences with foreign men trying to hook up, or how about what Thai women think about being propositioned by Thai men and the whole Thai dating scene? Many Thai women are more than happy to share stories of their experiences, and why they are interested in meeting foreign men.