You just never know where it’s going to happen, do you? Last week, it happened at breakfast. I was invited to the home of respectable German friends, there to meet some of their other friends. One of the guests was a middle-aged Swiss man who worked in Asia, in places such as Laos, Thailand, Myanmar. Hearing this, I was both interested and curious and asked what he did. “I’m in development,” came his reply.
Since that doesn’t mean anything to me, I asked for an explanation. It turns out that he is attempting to help Thailand increase its income from tourism while, at the same time, decrease the number of people who flood into the country. Could someone who lives in Venice hear anything sweeter than a desire to lower the number of tourists? This, decidedly, was my sort of guy.
He asked if I’d been to Thailand, and I said I had been there three times, then added, in what I suppose was meant to be a joke, that the last time I went through customs at the Bangkok airport, I seemed to be the only person who was not a sex tourist, as three planes filled with what looked like Japanese construction workers had landed at the same time mine did.
“Terrible, terrible,” he muttered, his face filled with disgust. “That’s the worst sort of sex tourist.”
Not aware that there were different grades of sex tourists, I remarked, “Seems simple enough to me. You spend a thousand dollars for your ticket. Or you spend three hundred. You’re still going there to have sex with ten-year-old girls.”
Once again, his disgust was manifest. “No, kiddie sex is terrible, awful, horrible. We want nothing to do with it. And we don’t want all those planeloads of poor men coming in.”
“What do you want, then?” I asked, forgetting to sip at my coffee.
“We’re building luxury hotels in the north so that a better [for which read, I think, “richer”] sort of tourist can come to Thailand. That’s much better for the country, for the ecology.”
I looked around to see if anyone else was following this conversation, but everyone was busy talking of music. As he continued, telling me of his great plans for new and more exclusive hotels, I realized that I had only two choices: either get up and refill my coffee cup or drive my fork into his left eye. This was someone else’s table, which meant the rules of politeness pertained, so I excused myself and went to get more coffee and, when I came back, added my stupidities to the talk of music. I remained calm, resisting the urge to ask him if, given the financial difficulties of the music festival we were all attending, the female soloists should be made to prostitute themselves for the financial good of the festival. Or perhaps, in order to reduce tourism, we make use of the choir boys, instead, and just charge more? He chattered on amiably until it was time to leave, I all the while aware that he was incapable of understanding how horrible I found his Jesuitical rationalization. In a way, his moral autism was worse than what he was doing, though that was disgusting enough on its own. He told me of his concern for the ecology of Thailand and how his love for that country had driven him to spend an entire weekend cleaning up the beaches of one of the smaller islands. What better proof could a person give of his love for a country not his own, a country filled with small, dark-skinned people?
I’m sure he sees himself as an ecologist, and I’m equally certain he believes he is a friend of Thailand. Well, I’m an American, and we tend to use more direct language, so we don’t call men like this developers. We call them pimps.