FOR EVERY SHY AMERICAN BOY WHO COULD USE A BOOST TO HIS SELF-ESTEEM, might I suggest a vacation in rural Thailand?
Places like Chiang Mai in the north and Phuket in the south have been crawling with tourists for years, but in Nong Kha and the surrounding countryside, the sight of a large Caucasian boy is still a rarity and has the power to get the local people—particularly the ladies—excited. To give you an idea how Loganmania played out in our day-to-day lives, how’s this for an ego stroke?
Logan, Traca, and I were sitting up on our porch one afternoon, resting in the hundred-degree heat while watching storm clouds form over the mountains, when Jackson came running up the stairs.
“Logan,” she said. “You have company.”
“Who is it?” Logan asked, expecting some of the young neighborhood boys who followed him around like rambunctious puppies.
“I don’t know,” Jackson said. “It’s girls. And they’re not from school.”
No, they were not. They were from the next town over: four seventeen-year-old girls who had heard about Logan through the Thai grapevine and came to see what all the fuss was about. In the fifteen minutes that these total strangers were with him, they posed for camera-phone pictures, swapped emails, asked every question their smattering of English would allow, and basically basked in Logan’s presence for as long as possible. Add this to the continued autograph signings in class and the general pie-eyed mooning that followed him around school, and we had the makings of a teen idol sensation.
Seriously, I was thinking about putting up a little souvenir stand by the road featuring POM ♥ LOGAN T-shirts. (Pom means “I.”) Jackson thought we’d make a killing.
In her own way, Jackson was also adored—but Thai boys were not the type to show up at your house, unknown and unannounced. Though they often shouted “I love you!” from a safe distance and even wrote it on the floor in spilled rice one day, they were usually respectful and—I suspected—a little intimidated by our brash and powerful young lady. I saw this in class all the time.
One of our simplest English class exchanges was a common back-and-forth conversation that went like this:
“Hello. How are you today?”
“I’m fine, thank you. And you?”
“I’m fine, too. What is your name?”
“My name is [insert Thai name].”
“Hi, [Thai name]. My name is John. Nice to meet you.”
“Hi, John. Nice to meet you, too.”
Not exactly Oscar-winning dialogue, but it got them talking. So we’d go around the room and play out this scene with each student, usually shaking hands at the end. But one day, when I told the twelfth-grade class that Jackson (a ninth grader) would be the one walking around to speak and press the flesh with them, most of the boys cowered, scrambling to the back of the room and huddling around the rearmost desk. All the girls thought this was hilarious, and many of the boys were laughing, too—but I could tell some of them were genuinely nervous. One poor guy, who clearly would not be taking my daughter to the Thai prom, grabbed his books and walked, stone-faced, out the door when Jackson got a little too close for his comfort.
I’ve wondered about this crazy adoration and I see a few possible explanations for it. For one: Many commercials I saw in Thailand were really just corporate American spots overdubbed in Thai. So the faces the local kids saw on TV day after day were beautiful U.S. teens, happily hiking through the Rockies or enjoying an ice-cold Coke in the Los Angeles sunshine. As I watched these ads in the context of rural Thai life, I could see that Logan and Jackson appeared to have stepped right off the set and into the Nong Kha School. So maybe that’s why the girls swooned and the boys trembled.
There was also a cultural fascination with white skin. When the TV wasn’t showing happy American kids selling chewing gum and soda, the stations ran an endless litany of ads for skin-whitening products. To drive this “White Is Right” mentality home, all the popular TV shows featured incredibly pale Thai actors, and the models in the magazines were also all bleached out, like perfect shells on the beach. It was a little creepy, actually. In the bathroom at our homestay, there was a brand of lotion from Lux called “White Glamour” and it promised: “fair and admired skin.” It went on to say: “With skin so alluringly white, you will be empowered to unleash and enjoy your feminine spirit.” Because, of course, who could unleash their feminine spirit without a nice white face? Traca talked about this with Aud, a female teacher at school with perfectly even, beautiful brown skin, like a mocha latte come to life. When Traca asked why anyone would ever want to lighten such a wonderful color, Aud blushed. “Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head, embarrassed. “I black. You bee-you-tee-fall.”
Fair skin is not a modern fascination, I’m told. For centuries it has signified high social status. That is, if you are rich enough to stay out of the fields and out of the baking hot sun, your pale complexion and lack of wrinkles will tell the world all about it. But as we looked around our school at these kids with their perfect brown skin, the kind many American teens flock to the beach to achieve, the kind the entire tanning industry is built on, we just wished there was an ad campaign telling every Thai child how bee-you-tee-fall they all were.
As for the crazy adoration, our housemother, Fang, explained it like this: “Iss easy,” she said with a big smile and a thick coat of white makeup on her face. “Thai woman laav falong. Much much mah-nee!”
Which did explain all the fat, balding, older white guys we saw with hot young Thai wives. But it didn’t explain Logan. Not yet.
Whatever the truth, our kids loved all the attention. Each day after school, Logan and Jackson rode the house moped over to a neighboring village and met up with a dozen girls and boys from all over the area. They converged to play soccer and hang out, or at least that’s what they were physically doing. Jackson told me Logan had his eye on this one certain girl, and Logan did not deny it. Her name was Sumalee and she was a beautiful, soft-spoken seventeen-year-old with a constant smile and eyes that lit up whenever Logan was around. Traca and I weren’t invited to these gatherings, but I liked to picture Logan and Sumalee, after the game broke up, working hard to communicate, walking off into the emerald-green rice fields as the sky surrounded them with brilliant pink and red. I’m sure it wasn’t about money or skin color or any of that.
It was just a shy Thai girl with a shy American boy, both getting a little less shy all the time.