John Burdett: The Quiet Farang

August 19, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
The Quiet Farang
By JOHN BURDETT

Bangkok

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?

I decided to ask Pong Arjpong, a local educator who is familiar with the West, having graduated with a degree in international communications from the University of Washington. “There is no access to overseas criminal databases at immigration points,” he said. “And once fugitives are in the country, it is not difficult for them to obtain forged passports, teaching certificates, etc. Every backpacker knows how to get false documents.”

It is true that plenty of Westerners run to Southeast Asia these days when life becomes too hot for them at home, evading law enforcement by moving around Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, using Thailand as a hub. Mr. Karr, too, it seems, was on the run from an arrest warrant issued in Sonoma County, Calif., in December 2001.

But there is another reason Mr. Karr might raise local hackles, regardless of whether he killed JonBenet. Like so many other farang kee-nok, he is apparently obsessed with sex. It isn’t known whether he indulged that obsession here, legally or illegally, but in a sense that does not matter.

Ms. Dandin said: “Farang who love skiing go to Switzerland or Canada. If they love climbing mountains, they go to Nepal. If they love sex, they come here.” She screws up her nose comically — she is aware of the irony. After all, she generally has a good relationship with her students, many of whom are technically kee-nok ne’er-do-wells themselves; not a few disappear inexplicably for periods of time. I remind her that in the 1980’s, before H.I.V. and AIDS forever altered perceptions of sex, promiscuity and prostitution, there was no doubt as to how Thailand intended to claim its share of tourist money. Reputations like that are not easy to shake.

Ms. Dandin nods her head. “The Indians brought prostitution to this country 300 years ago, but we can’t blame them,” she says. “We took to it like ducks to water.”

She looks at me in that helpless way Thais sometimes have when they are aware of the cultural divide. “But you see,” she said, “it’s not a sickness with us. It’s just something some of us do. The sickness comes from elsewhere.”

I have been here long enough to know what she means. The pale pageant queen dancing too perfectly in the video clip. The equally pale, preppy-looking Mr. Karr on the front page of all the newspapers. The books, the documentaries, and the astronomical fees paid to lawyers and investigators. The reputations cynically buffed or damaged. And the terrible manner of JonBenet’s death. In the old days, all of this would have pointed to something alien, monstrous, sick and irrelevant to Thai life.

But times have changed. John Mark Karr chose Bangkok for a reason. And then there were those other allegations of abuse, the ones on page 2, that will affect Thais long after the hype from the other side of the world has subsided.

Today, Thailand woke up to stories of innocence betrayed, regardless of what page of the newspaper, what television news program or what part of the world we focused on. Globalism, it seems, has many faces.

John Burdett is the author of “Bangkok 8” and “Bangkok Tattoo.”