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“The Quiet Farang”

John Burdett, author of two excellent novels about Bangkok, had an informative op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times. He says that there’s a reason delinquent foreigners come to Thailand — and that the country has some endemic problems of its own:

The story of the cute white girl in the red tartan bonnet who had been dead 10 years burst into the Thai news media just as another equally harrowing local story was breaking: allegations, vigorously denied, of the systematic serial rape of five 8-year-old girls by two highly respected Thai teachers with decades of experience as educators.

In Thailand, only monks are revered more than teachers. But this local news, which surely touches the lives of Thais more deeply than John Mark Karr’s confession to the murder of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey a decade ago, was knocked off the front page even as doubts began piling up about Mr. Karr’s reliability.

Since her death, JonBenet has become a multimillion-dollar American industry, whereas the allegations at Prachanukul School in Bangkok’s Sai Mai district are just another Bangkok crime story. Or are they?

As of now, it seems possible that Mr. Karr did not commit the murder, but is an attention-seeking farang kee-nok — “Western drifter.” Like other members of that group, he tried to make ends meet by taking on teaching jobs, made regular visa runs to Malaysia, lived in a budget hotel, drifted around Southeast Asia with no apparent direction.

Yet it is exactly his familiarity as a type that has concentrated the attention of those Thais most familiar with it. Nit Dandin, a veteran teacher of the Thai language to Westerners, put it to me this way: “Why do farang come to Thailand after they kill or rape somebody in their own country?”

Why indeed?

Read the whole thing.

(Via.)

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