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Trouble in Paradise
There is trouble in paradise; it may end in a gunfight at the OK Corral and if it does, there is no doubt whose side we’ll be on. Our friend Tanacha, or Kid, pronounced Kit, is currently embroiled in a bitter legal dispute over the ownership of a bar which her Canadian “boyfriend” brought for her in January this year, and she is sad, very sad indeed.
The problem is that, while Kid (on the left of the picture) was preoccupied setting up the bar, the boyfriend was just as preoccupied setting up a new Thai girlfriend, and if that wasn't bad enough, he then tried to replace Kid with the new girlfriend to run the bar. Kid was having none of it, having done the hard yards establishing the place and using her very wide circle of Facebook friends to draw in the punters.
Without doubt, at 29 years of age, Kid is a canny operator and was not prepared to stand by and watch her hard work go unrewarded, despite the Canadian boyfriend wanting to retain all of his investment, and this unfortunate stand-off has begun. Fortunately the bar is in Kid’s name.
The usually effervescent Kid was visible depressed when I caught up with her, and it saddened me that it could not be resolved short of litigation; she has spent 30,000 Baht so far on legal fees and heads to court early next month for a hearing, and although I am one, I cannot stand what some of the farang, or foreigners, do here.
This is a common problem in Thailand. There are countless stories where foreigners, lust-struck ones in particular, buy businesses for their Thai girlfriends or with a group of unknown locals and then things turn sour. Unless companies are properly set up, farang cannot have the majority ownership of businesses, and so these curious arrangements are entered into which, unless very carefully managed, have the potential to turn to disaster. In this case it has.
We met Kid on our first visit to Phuket when she worked at the Kiwi Bar, and back at that bar on this visit I enjoyed listening while another of the staff, Pons (on the right of the picture), told me of her dreams, and I wondered how she will achieve them on 9,000 Baht or nearly $NZ390 a month. It is a good wage for a local here, but she has a twelve year old daughter in the north being cared for by her parents and every week sends money for her care and welfare. She is frugal and, instead of partying like many of the other young women, Pons has brought land in a village where her uncle lives and knows that every Baht she pays off the land will mean she no longer has to struggle or rely on anyone else when she is older. She has an Australian boyfriend and, although he wants to marry and support her, she maintains her independence and doesn’t want to be reliant on others for money. She is proud, intelligent and optimistic, and has a great wish in life to see “seernow” which I eventually figure is that white powdery stuff that settles in the mountains, and so I tell her that Mama, as Kaelene is affectionately known to them, would be delighted to have Pons come and stay so she can have a once in a lifetime chance to try skiing.
With Pons and Na, we took a late night down trip the infamous and colourful Bangla Road in Patong; we drank at a club and while there I was approached repeatedly by two women asking me to buy them drinks. I declined politely saying my companions, drinking water and Coke respectively, were more than sufficient company. They persisted but had no luck, and it wasn’t until the next evening I twigged as Pons and Na regaled Kiwi Bar owner Tiggy with the story. My intended companions were, in fact, Kathoy, or ladyboys; all I thought at the time was that they were not to most attractive looking women I had seen.
Earlier, on leaving Perth airport for this short sojourn to Phuket I was stopped, taken aside and swabbed all over for explosives. Just a random thing they assured me and it was as well I turned out to be clear of harmful substance, but it was the first time in all of our travels that this has occurred.
It is quite late in our travels for firsts, but returning to Perth flying on Tiger Airlines was another first and it certainly passed the test for a budget carrier. The flight from Phuket to Singapore was on time and the same from Singapore to Perth, the seats were comfortable, service good and the red wine effective.
But there may be one challenge, however, and that is to unionise Tiger Airlines; its staff clearly need something to get the balance right, an attendant returned to my seat en-route as they had wrongly calculated the conversion cost from Australian to Singapore dollars for my can, yes can, of wine. The attendant explained that, unless I coughed up the extra dollar I had been undercharged, his colleague would have it deducted from her wages. What else was I to do but pay up but as I did I pondered on the nature of employers who deduct the cost of genuine mistakes from the wages of staff, and wonder what would have been the effect had the same rule been applied to chief executives and investment bankers as their recklessness plunged the world into the last global recession?
Perhaps the world would be a better place.