The Reversal (breaking up with your Thai girlfriend)

This comment was posted on the Bangkok Bad Boy website recently:

May 1st, 2007 at 11:01 pm

Michael always use to have live-in go-go girls staying with him, and he always had two locks on his door. He would give her a key for one of the locks, and that lock would be the only one they would use.
But being a person who does not like arguments and to be hassled, he would start using the the other door lock to keep her out when things got weird.
It avoided conflict when it was time to move on.

About two weeks ago I noticed without any great interest that a neighbor down the hall from me was moving.  There was furniture and personal belongings stacked in the hallway.  I went into my room and started surfing the internet without thinking much about it.

At 11 pm there  was an unholy ruckus in the hallway of my apartment building.  I thought perhaps a child had fallen, as I could hear high-pitched wailing and crying.  It went on for quite some time, so I finally decided to find out what was up.

It turned out that the Ferang three doors down the hall from me had put  all of his Thai girlfriends stuff in the hall, and changed the lock on the door.  She only found out when she arrived home and saw everything she owned stacked up outside the door.  Who knows, perhaps it was “Michael” using the two-lock strategy described in the comment above.

Instead of calmly going to a friend’s house for the night, she started wailing and beating on the door.  This went on for about 30 minutes, until, with midnight approaching, some of the other neighbors knocked on the door and asked the Ferang to deal with it.  The wailing continued, and it turned out that the Ferang had recently given the girl a considerable sum of money (300,000 baht) and she had come back asking for more.

I don’t know the details… I was force fed this information by shouting voices coming through my front door.  IN any event, the request for more money was the last straw for the guy who locked the girl out of the apartment.  Finally, around midnight, the girl mercifully retreated and left the building.

Over the next three days, the pile of belongings slowly diminished as she took it away one taxi load at a time. 

(I thought it was interesting that in a building with about 500 Thai girls, not one of them came up and ‘raided’ her belongings.  It was all quite safe sitting out in the hallway.)

This sort of thing… Ferang throwing Thai girls out of the apartment, with fits of screaming and trauma… goes on regularly in Bangkok.  The cultural clash with your Tilac (“darling”) is sometimes too much for the poor Ferang to deal with, and Thai girls often simply refuse to leave, no matter how nice — or nasty — you are when you explain to them that it’s over.

Generally the Ferang has the power because he has the money.  The girl generally has only one realistic option — to go back to work in the bar.  She moved in with the fat ugly Ferang to start with precisely so she wouldn’t have to work in the bar, so this is an unpalatable option.  So they try to just stay, and hope he gives in.

The one great threat that Thai girls have is the razor.  It’s not just an urban legend that Thai women will cut off your manhood and feed it to the pigs. 

All in all, to avoid all the unpleasantries, most guys will simply eject the girl, in much the same fashion as the fellow in my building.

Oddly, when I faced a similar circumstance, my girl got the best of me.

I have an on-again-off-again relationship with a go go dancer in her early 20s.  I think she’s quite pretty, and she thinks I am kind.  I give her money, she gives me sex and keeps the apartment tidy.  You need a scorecard to keep track of whether she’s living with me or not on any given day or month.  At the moment she’s staying with her family outside of Bangkok.

In early April she and I had a disagreement.  I suggested that she should move out of the apartment, and we agreed to a time for this to happen.  When the time came and went and she was still in the apartment, I asked her what day she was moving out.

She looked surprised — shocked really — and said that she thought I’d changed my mind.  I hadn’t, and I told her so.  So we revised the date to the end of the week.

That night I went to the pub.

When I got home, I found a curious thing.  Most Thai condos have a security feature: there is a locking mechanism on the outside of the door where you can put a padlock to make sure no one can enter your room while you are out.

My girl had gone to the store and bought a new lock.  When I went to the pub, she went out, putting it on the door. 

I arrived home around 1 am, quite drunk, and unable to get into my room.  I thought to myself, “What would Captain Jack Sparrow do?” and I laid down in the hallway in front of my apartment and went to sleep.

My girl came home at 3 or 4 am and found me passed out in the hall.  She somehow managed to wrestle my drunken slovenly body into the room and put me to bed.

The next day she was contrite, crying and apologizing.  She was very guilty (and probably more than a little embarrassed by loss of face) about me sleeping in the hall.  She told me she’d been angry and wanted to get back at me. 

Not being the vengeful type, I chose to look at the funny side of it, and forgave her.  The following day I helped her load all her belongings into her sister’s car and waved as she drove away.

I’m still not angry about it… I actually admire the fact that she did it.  Maybe she’s writing on some Thai-girl blog site about how to get rid of your fat ugly Ferang when you’ve gotten tired of him.  Perhaps it’s time for me to adopt Michael’s two-lock strategy.

All in all, the reversal was an interesting and embarassing moment in my life.  I may not have my dignity, but at least me schlong is still firmly attached and not in the belly of a pig.