Thais and Vietnamese like cats and dogs

After food, Thailand is perhaps best known for the beauty of its women, both real and imagined.  If the West is a man and the East is a woman, then vive la diference!  Thailand has more homosexuals and transvestites than any other place in the world, and few men would be called ‘jocks’ strictly by appearance.  Even successful businesswomen never look anything but ultra-feminine.  By contrast, American women routinely wear business suits, shave their heads and otherwise blur their femininity beyond recognition.  But you already knew that.  In America even the women are men.  In Thailand even the men are women.  But if Thais are like cats grazing up against you, purring, jumping up in your lap even though you just tossed them down, then Vietnamese are like dogs humping your leg.  They bark at you in the street, chasing phantoms, ultimately lying dead in the road from chasing enemies they could never defeat in a million years, even if they knew who they were.  Apparently mirrors came late to Vietnam.  The Vietnamese are a cursed race, more Chinese than the Chinese themselves.  While Thailand, Laos, Burma, and Cambodia took India and Buddhism as role models to ultimately circumvent, if not defeat, the Chinese, the Vietnamese took the Chinese themselves as role models in their struggle against those same Chinese.  Bad choice, unless you’re suicidal, like India trying to defeat England militarily fifty-something years ago.  The Mahatma had a better idea.  The Vietnamese DID defeat the US, true, and fought probably fairer and squarer than the US itself, but at such a cost and for such ultimately questionable goals that the Word Police are considering changing the term ‘Pyrrhic’ to ‘Vietnamic’.  The men still wear Viet Cong army helmets as a badge of honor.  Now that’s weird.  Vietnam is a question mark inverted, chip placed precariously on the shoulder, hugging the South China Sea for dear life.  In Vietnam, unlike most countries who identify with their landmass, the word for ‘country’ is the same as the word for ‘water’, as if the UN would be better off referring to Thaiwater, Finnwater, Icewater, Bechuanawater, etc.  I’m getting thirsty.

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