A Girl S Life In Moon River Village Thailand

Village girls torn between two worlds indulge in sex at a very early age. Teen age pregnancy, drug use, dropping out of school and running away from home have become common. Extended families once dependent on young people for labor are left on their own. Young people escape from the villages. Some will return, to die of HIV, privately, hiding their illness silently, adding more shame to their family’s lives. Fathers and mothers and grandparents, illiterate but hard working and honest, are left wondering - How did all this come about so quickly? Why did village life centuries old break apart? This is a story about “Happy”, a young girl from a rural Thai farming village. She is a happy girl because she escaped the confines of her parent’s rice fields and the restrictions of village life, where everyone knows everyone and everyone contributes to village labor. She is happy because she is liberated from all that is loved by her farmer parents and traditional village people. She is free of farm labor and free from helping her extended family harvest rice. “Happy” is free because she entered the “entertainment industry” of Bangkok, Pattaya and Phuket, free to dance naked to the intoxicating sounds of rap music, free and happy to sell her sex. Poverty and lack of education is the sex trafficker. It is more anonymous, but its face is everywhere. It is the mother of ignorance and the father of futility. This is a story written by the only Western man living in a remote Thai village. He writes what he observes. He writes about the characters in his small village: “Happy”, “The Solder Man” and his wife, “The Pumpui Fat Lady”, “Buddhist Monks” who come to rid a place from bad spirits manifesting themselves as pests; bed bugs, cock roaches and fleas. And he writes about “Kitty” a seven year-old girl infected by HIV, brought to the village by her prostitute mother who hopes to find someone to care for “Kitty” before mama dies. It is a story of dramatic social change and the breakup of traditional Thai village life. Keywords - Thailand, Rural Thai Village Life, Prostitution, Social Change, Issan, Teen Pregnancy

Khantida, a spirited young Thai courtesan, once married to a handsome but ruthless police major, finds herself desperately seeking sanctuary in her rural childhood village, Phayu. Wrathful ghosts and angels are drawn to the battle between the former lovers as the village suffers. The fates of Khantida, her 6-year-old daughter, Noi, her sister, Som, and numerous other citizens of northeast Thailand are all played out in one shocking, often horrifying, week. Much of the world undergoes terrifying changes attracting the spirits of the dead as well as angels from Nirvana to a tiny Thai town that nobody ever heard of.

A whirlwind personal history of modern Asia, as told through his Malaysian and Chinese heritage

This book focuses on the ways in which unofficial modes of border crossings are practised by the Thai Ban, along the Mekong Thai-Lao border. In doing so, the book assesses how these border crossings can be theorised as a contribution to existing literature on borderland studies. With that, the book discusses the importance of the notion of the Third Space and its effects on the pluralities of border-crossings in the borderland by weaving together spatial negotiations, temporal negotiations, and negotiations of political subjectivity. To illustrate the importance and complexity of the notion of the Third Space, the borderland of Khong Chiam-Sanasomboun, an area composed of quasi-state checkpoints as well as mobile checkpoints, is used as a case study. The author employs an ethnographic approach using the four methods of participant observations, interviews, interpreting visual presentations, and essay readings to examine the everyday practices of the Thai Ban people in crossing the border between the riverine villages in the two nation-states of Thailand and Lao PDR. With this, the findings in the fieldwork reveal that people engaged in everyday border-crossings in the riverine area do not simply embrace or reject the existence of Thai-Lao territory. Most of the time, the stance of Thai Ban people is the mixture of subversion, rejection, and acceptance of the boundary resulting in the sedentary assumption in the form of Thai-Lao territory co-existing with people’s everyday mobility.

This book is the product of a collaborative effort involving partners from Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America who were funded by the International Development Research Centre Programme on Women and Migration (2006-2011). The International Institute of Social Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam spearheaded a project intended to distill and refine the research findings, connecting them to broader literatures and interdisciplinary themes. The book examines commonalities and differences in the operation of various structures of power (gender, class, race/ethnicity, generation) and their interactions within the institutional domains of intra-national and especially inter-national migration that produce context-specific forms of social injustice. Additional contributions have been included so as to cover issues of legal liminality and how the social construction of not only femininity but also masculinity affects all migrants and all women. The resulting set of 19 detailed, interconnected case studies makes a valuable contribution to reorienting our perceptions and values in the discussions and decision-making concerning migration, and to raising awareness of key issues in migrants’ rights. All chapters were anonymously peer-reviewed. This book resulted from a series of projects funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada.