Not all expats paedophiles; many just rugbyheads

One has to keep an open mind about minority subcultures. A sense of community is important. Stereotypes never tell the full picture. These were all things that I was repeating to myself, in an attempt to numb my mild terror using liberalism maxims and beer, while watching the All Blacks vs Australia test match last week in a ‘New Zealand bar’ in Bangkok.

It was the first time I’d ever been in a bar, either in New Zealand or anywhere else in the world, whose clientele was entirely comprised of middle aged white Antipodean men. It was likely that I was the first Asian woman to ever enter the bar who wasn’t a waitress, a young ‘local girlfriend’ or a sex worker.

The pub was abuzz with speculation about John Karr, the Bangkok-based paedophile and English teacher who recently confessed to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. The school he was working at in central Bangkok was narrowed down to one of two nearby, but no-one there had met him. There was bitterness about the surfacing of yet another ‘one of those guys that gives us such a great reputation,’ said an ESOL teacher, who actually looked quite a lot like John Karr – pale, wispy – poor guy.

Stereotypes about Antipodeans, or white people more generally in Asia, are as unfair as stereotypes about Asians in the West: your conglomerate aggressive, fat, ugly, red-faced, sleazy, imperialist paedophile is the counterpart to the conglomerate boy-racing, stylish, karaoke-fiend, shellfish quota breaking, drug-dealing triad. Naturally, these stereotypes sometimes make no sense. What does a boy-racer want with shellfish? What would a guy ogling my chest area under the assumption that I’m a local Thai girl and won’t mind, want with a six-year old blond beauty queen? Imputing criminality to an entire population group is really not on. Still, take those cartoon-criminal elements out, and I’d still prefer to be in a bar full of stylish, boy-racing karaoke-fiends, than in a bar full of big red-faced drunken middle-aged guys. But that’s just me.

What were the attractions of the region to men such as this? A bar regular and long-term expat said of New Zealand, ‘there are too many rules. I don’t like rules. Here, you can do anything you want.’ He went on to state that not only Thailand, but China was freer than New Zealand, and that you could do anything you wanted there. I burst out laughing, but I think I managed to make it seem like I was laughing in, like, agreement.

Dozens of Thai waitresses darted in and out of gaps, wearing tight black or yellow rugby shirts and little miniskirts. A couple of them were stuck like clams to the blokes, but most were just trying not to be crushed by the lumbering man-mountains. A few of them told me they never dated foreigners, and gave me knowing looks, coming as close to rolling their eyes sarcastically as nice Thai girls are able to. They laughed with me at the unappetising stodge that came out to feed the New Zealanders – potato salad, slabs of bread, and what appeared to be Cheerios stewed in tomato sauce. The occasional backrub broke out, possibly in an attempt to relax the clientele so they were not so loud and aggressive. As a shouting match broke out between a very angry, huge drunk Australian and an equally angry, huge drunk New Zealander over that spear-tackle, one tiny, long-suffering girl was rubbing at her own temples and flinching at the roars, perhaps already terrified by the wide-screen replays of Richie McCaw being dumped violently on his head.

Later, Mr ‘you can do anything you want’ seemed to be confused as to the available services, when a waitress abruptly walked away from him in a huff. He called after her, laughing, ‘Oh, don’t be like that!’ Leaning over to his drinking companion, he confided with a smirk: ‘I touched her [indecipherable]’. Her wallet maybe? At full time, a huge fat man with man-breasts like deflated basketballs took his shirt off and roared. Thankfully, the waitresses did not follow suit.

Other expats around the city, from yuppies to NGO workers, seem far more a part of a contemporary Asian and international context. This place however, was the haunt of Bangkok’s over-35s expat rugby club. As a symbol of generational turnover, well as being one of two non-white New Zealanders in the bar (the other being the New Zealand Chinese expat I came with), I also seemed to be the only person who knew the words to the Maori verse of the national anthem at the beginning of the match. Men like Mr ‘anything you want’ seemed to represent a side of New Zealand on the decline; a New Zealand that had to take itself abroad in order to keep its traditions intact. A refugee diaspora if you will. By now of course, when you consider their residency status, these Kiwi stalwarts are now ‘Asians’ too. No wonder I felt right at home.

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