Poor Thai people often beg for money near touristy markets, but I also saw a group of individuals in and around a Thai market whose customers were mostly locals. Sometimes we could see single women with a child or two, but there were often men begging as well. The men were unique in that they all seemed to have serious physical afflictions ranging from large open sores to missing digits or limbs. We saw a couple of these men pushing their way through the crowded path of shoppers in the market. It is sights like these that make you wonder what excuse most beggars in the U.S. have, and reflect that had they seen these people for themselves they would be ashamed. There is no clear right or wrong to giving Thai beggars money. As a tourist it certainly makes more sense to give your cash that would otherwise go towards souvenirs on bettering the lives of a few in desperate need, but as a visitor you realize that you can not even approach the panacea to a Thai problem that needs to be addressed by the Thai. For some reason, I am more inclined to give money to poor children than adults even if the adults seem to be suffering more than the children we have seen. I like to think I do so because they are more innocent than adults, but whom am I kidding anyway. Children are simply cuter no matter how you rationalize it.
By our fourth day in Bangkok, we had been approached by half a dozen men wanting to know where we were from, how long we had been in Bangkok, what we thought of Thailand, and additional dressing questions before convincing us that we should go shop for jewels and gold at the Thai Export Promotion Center. Walking with a camera around my neck, I guess I was an easy target even if it was already obvious that I was a foreigner. One man approached me with the usual questions, and I tried to let him know in as polite a way as possible that I wanted to be left alone. In less than a minute, another Thai man asked me where I was from and said he had been to Boston, Massachusetts, where his friend lives, before he started talking about a billboard I was walking past which advertised Thailand's drive for technological growth. He never mentioned the Thai Export Promotion Center and I walked on thinking that maybe everyone wasn't trying to pull a scam. Then a young man in his mid-twenties seemed to be walking past me as he said something about the fact that I probably wasn't wearing trousers because the river was "fat" (I was wearing shorts because it was hot). He was friendly, and at first seemed to be walking past me, but the direction of our discussion - more ingenious than the rest - eventually led to the Thai Export Promotion Center. His tactic was to say that he was a student at the school a few hundred feet past where we were and that he had traveled outside of Thailand a bit even though he was the son of poor parents. He said that the Thai government, which had a monopoly on the gems sold wholesale in Thailand, would sell these same gems to Thai people like him who could then sell them abroad for a profit. He also said that the government would sell to foreigners for one week in the year and that the last day had been the previous day, but they had kept it open one more day because of demand. Whenever I tried to ask him a question that he didn't have a clear answer to, his English skills became weaker, but he was smooth and I was falling for his scam. He convinced me that the center would only be open for a little more than an hour and that I should go straight there, adding that I should use a credit card to make my purchase because that way I would have a longer period of time to pay for the purchase. He was such a nice guy that he helped me arrange for a tuk-tuk ride there. When I insisted that I had to get my wife (the more rational consumer in our marriage) he first tried to convince me that I didn't have time, but when he realized that I wouldn't budge on this he continued his soft-sale approach. I was almost completely convinced by the time I was about to get into the tuk-tuk because he said that he would accompany me if he could, but that he unfortunately could not.
I took the tuk-tuk to our guesthouse and convinced Karen to come with me without an explanation, "I'll explain everything on the way." Her judgement was often more conservative than mine and often times more accurate as well. I had finished my explanation by the time we reached our destination and we both reached the same conclusion. We were dropped off on the curb in front of a small shop named Lucky Lapidary which had a sign made out of very unofficial looking white tape on the glass front doors that read "Export Center". We walked a few feet away from the shop and hailed a taxi, but not before some man walked "casually" past advising us not to cross the street illegally then asking us why we didn't go into the shop.
When we got back to our guesthouse and were walking up to our room, I looked more carefully at a poster that the management had hung on a wall which I had passed numerous times without ever stopping to read:
ALL THAT GLITTERS IS NOT GOLD
In 1991, travelers lodged several hundred complaints at the Tourism Authority of Thailand involving rigged jewelry purchase [sic] in Bangkok that averaged almost a case a day, not to mention those that went unreported or were handled by other agencies.
The following are valuable pointers for your protection:
-Be wary of any encounter with strangers that ends up requiring your presence at a gem shop. ...
Thailand seemed to me a contradictory place for women. We never saw bus-, taxi-, tuk-tuk-, or motorcycle taxi- drivers, but we saw women and girls driving scooters and motorcycles everywhere we'd been in Thailand. Women office workers often wore uniforms that didn't seem to change much from office to office in cut or the lack of variety of colors (this I have only observed from banking transactions and on the street). Thailand is also the one place in the world where it seems that it is common for women to perform construction work. Then we saw a story as it unfolded in Bangkok newspapers.
This story that unfolded in Bangkok's newspapers during our stay goes further than any of our observations to explain the contemporary position of women in Thai society. A young woman described as a "street girl" was in search of three policemen who had forced her to have sex with her boyfriend in a train car while the three looked on at Bangkok's Hualampung Train Station. One of the newspaper stories featured a photo of the Prime Minister Banharn's wife and daughter at a table with the girl as they tried to convince her that her search for the suspects was "futile". There was never an official explanation how such a search could possibly be futile, but this had consistently been the official viewpoint nevertheless. Several days later, the girl identified one of the suspects but only after receiving the assistance of a non-government agency which works for women's rights. Another few days past and she was able to identify a second suspect. After the second suspect was identified, some official decided that it was no longer considered futile to search for the third suspect and he announced that his capture was imminent.
PRINTER-FRIENDLY FORMAT
