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  hardie karges 1:12 am on January 31, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Laos ( 2 ), Tai, Thailand, transvestite   

  Transvestite Travesty 

  Transvestite shows are popular the world over, especially Thailand, which is convenient since they have more transvestites than anywhere else.  Many of the shows in other parts of the world are comprised of all-Thai casts, also.  They are a regular feature in such Thai tourist locations as Pattaya and elsewhere.  Of course the real show goes on unofficially, transvestites posing as real girls in dimly lit pick-up bars.  Many end up going home with clients who only find out too late, to their drunken horror, that their cute little pick-up has got a cute little stick-shift that got lost in the shuffle of nickel ads and cheap brochures.  Many hospitals in Thailand have whole sections for sex-change operations, also, which ads a whole new dimension to the phenomenon.  More than one guy has had the existential dilemma of deciding whether to dump the best wife he ever had because she used to be a he.  Ethnic-Tai Laos is the same, just more hidden because of the official Communist party line.  Those parties are boring.  Chinese go by the busloads to the Burmese border just to cross over and see the transvestite shows in mostly-Tai Shan state.  But no, the phenomenon is certainly not limited to the ethnic-Tai arena.  Mexico, for one, has them also.  There they’re called ‘travesty shows’.  Look it up in the OED.   

   

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  hardie karges 2:21 am on January 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Thailand, Vietnam ( 9 )   

  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.