Not all cultures are beautiful; some are supremely retarded. Though I feel I’d learnt a great deal about myself and the world I came from through Thai culture, there’s plenty about it that’d be best forgotten, and especially face-saving culture. Face is not exclusive to Thailand; it’s an East Asian thing—and it’s more problem than phenomenon.

In a country like Thailand, you will constantly encounter things and moments that just baffle the brain. I remember a carpark in a supermarket that had a one-way system that was navigated by following arrows in the middle of the roadway only for it—at some point—to have a set of arrows pointing directly at each other, creating some kind of paradox that was hell bent on the destruction of the known universe.

I wondered why on earth they would have this random arrow completely confusing the system and not have rectified it? “Maybe it was for financial reasons,” I thought. That made sense. This country has financial restraints, but this was a carpark for an upmarket supermarket, and surely they had the funds to sort out this simple yet embarrassing mistake.

Roll on a few months, and I encountered a confusing incident with a baht bus driver in Pattaya who refused to take money from me. This confused the hell out of me, because the assumption is that every fucker is trying to extract cash from Farangs no matter what.

Baht buses are a simple idea; you jump on and travel as far as you want, and then exit and pay the driver 10 baht, and that’s it. Simple, efficient, and convenient.

On this occasion I had been picked up and made a long journey where not many other passengers had taken a ride—a slow business day, I suppose. Because of this, the driver decided he’d try his luck and ask for 20 baht instead of 10. I wasn’t having that!; I let him know so.

He kept demanding 20 over and over. I kept rebutting this demand by reminding him how much a baht bus journey actually costs. I had the 10 baht coin in hand and held it out with conviction, just waiting for him to accept defeat and take what he was rightfully owed. Now some Thai lifestyle scholars will tell you not to fuck around with Thai men and money, because you will find out! On this occasion I was not backing down, and though he was agitated, he didn’t let me ‘find out’ with an iron bar to the head, which was nice.

What he did instead was shout and shout and then give up and drive off—leaving me with his 10 baht in hand. For him, it was 20 baht or nothing. He chose nothing. This didn’t make sense. Why take nothing over something, especially when that something was what you were owed? Aren’t these people too poor to do that?

It was following that and some other incidents that my mind went back to that stupid car park and all the other stupid construction mistakes I had seen. It was following that incident that I remembered hearing about face-saving culture, and it all clicked. Because he wanted to rip me off by a measly ten baht, he wasn’t going to back down as he had committed himself to the hustle. If he accepted the 10 baht I offered, he would lose face and lose it to some dirty foreigner like me. He wasn’t having that—culture dictated so.

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This is why Thailand and some of its neighbours have struggled with progress, because this kind of attitude just doesn’t scream win.

Once I applied this face logic to more and more baffling moments, everything that didn’t make sense suddenly seemed logical. And applying this reversed logic to the most illogical of the species, Thai bar girls.

Bar girls are, mostly, essentially on the game—but don’t ever tell them that. They are not prostitutes and will be incredibly offended if you tell them they are when handing over 2,000 baht for spending the night with you.

You are customer.

They are worker.

Prostitutes hang out by the beach or in the prostitute club hangouts, or lurk on motorbikes and try to sniper a blowjob as you walk to get your morning coffee. Though Thailand is incredibly open-minded and liberal, it is deeply socially conservative. If you’re spending most of your ‘best’ younger years on the game, you will see your social stock plummet and not find a good man to settle down with, and good men are already as rare as fat men who take nutrition seriously. Don’t call them a prostitute; this will lower their status and make them lose face. But do pay them the money they ask for after they have rimmed your colon.

I also began to understand why these bar girls would be so upset when they saw a former customer of theirs with a new bar girl. They would behave in such a rabid way. Foaming, screaming, and ready to better someone’s head in. The uninitiated might think one of two things:

One—these girls don’t like missing out on another payday and can’t have their bacon snatched by another worker.

Two—this chick must be well into me; man, I’m a catch, and she must be so upset I’m not with her. Poor girl!

Number two is my favourite. This is the peak of western-man delusion syndrome (and if the Thais stop being so fucking racist to Indians, it will be peak Southwest Asian delusion too!). So many men can come to a nation like this and believe all the hype—I am sexy western man with western man money; I am a catch in my Primark vest and Umbro shorts with sweat and bloat and leaky bowels.

The reality is, if you choose another girl, this lowers the last girl's self-worth and the perception of her worth from others. This is losing face. This isn’t an option. Money over everything isn’t as true as it seems. In other low-income cultures, money is king, or sometimes god is king over money, but here it actually comes second to face, regardless of what your mail-order bride shouted at you on giro day.

Thinking of face culture as I lie in bed at night, as it tries to gain supremacy over the other thousand silly intrusions, I shift to memories and then to theories and then to having to smoke a cigarette because it’s all too much. In the west—especially in the years since my very first time in Thailand—our media and politicians have developed face.

Don’t wear a mask. Actually, wear a mask. We never said don’t wear a mask.

Take a vaccine; just one will stop Covid for good. No, take two vaccines; it won’t stop Covid for good, but you’ll die otherwise. We never said it would stop it. I don’t know where that video of me saying it would came from; it must be the Russians.

We won’t raise taxes. We’re raising taxes. We never said we wouldn’t raise taxes. When you saw me at that party conference, it wasn’t me; it was a Facebook troll farm.

Most call it gaslighting, but I’m not sure. Everyone looks to China as the peak of how you run a country, and China too lives by the culture of face. Everyone wants to be Chinese.

I never cared too much about Thai girls face culture affliction. It’s part of the wacky fun. But it’s abundantly clear that these ladies, despite their apparent easy-going facade, were in fact way more difficult to love than the uninitiated could imagine.

I was uninitiated. I was in for the crash course into hell.