Gary is sitting on his condo balcony, nursing his third cold Leo of the afternoon, doing some light mental bookkeeping of his five years in Pattaya.
He looks at his roster of past relationships.
There was Benz. Then there was Bonus. After her came Guitar, and briefly, a girl named Bank.
During his first year in Thailand, Gary thought this was profoundly, poetically charming. He used to tell his mates back in Leeds: “Yeah, Thai names are so whimsical, mate. They name their kids after concepts and objects. My bird’s called Guitar.” In his mind’s eye, he pictured her father sitting on a wooden porch in Roi Et, softly plucking a hand-carved acoustic instrument at sunset.
Then Gary learned basic Southeast Asian economic history. And the romantic illusion shattered into a thousand cheap plastic pieces.
He realized he hadn’t been dating whimsical forest spirits. He had been dating the 1995 Bangkok Post Aspirational Luxury Catalog.
To understand a 28-year-old Thai woman’s nickname, you have to look at the late 1990s. Thailand was riding the chaotic wave of the pre-crash “Tiger Economy.” Rural parents in Isaan were sitting around communal black-and-white TVs in the village square, catching glimpses of a booming, neon-lit Bangkok they could never afford to step foot in.
So, they gave their newborn daughters the only piece of that economic boom they could claim for free: the vocabulary of imported capitalism.
Benz: It wasn’t a tribute to German engineering. It was the ultimate, untouchable symbol of the Bangkok Chao Pho (godfather) rolling through their dusty province inside an air-conditioned W124.
Bonus: The mythical, once-a-year envelope handed out to factory workers in Chonburi that meant the family got to put a new tin roof on the house.
Guitar: It had nothing to do with music. An imported Western Fender Stratocaster sitting inside a glass display case at CentralWorld cost more than an Isaan family’s annual rice harvest. It meant leisure. It meant a life where your hands weren’t calloused from the dirt.
Bank / Tang (Money) / Gold: Zero metaphor. Just pure, unadulterated financial manifestation prayer.
Once Gary sees the matrix, he can’t unsee it.
He realizes that every time he yelled out, “Teerak, Benz, can you pass the lighter?” he wasn’t calling a woman by her soul’s true name. He was audibly reciting an Isaan rice farmer’s thirty-year-old unfulfilled financial wish. He was dating an economic marker of the year 1996.
(By the way: The 90s gave us Benz, Bonus, and Apple. The 2005 generation is currently graduating into the workforce as Chanel, Porsche, and Tesla).
Gary takes another sip of his Leo. His phone buzzes on the glass table. It’s a new match on Tinder.
Her bio says: “Good girl from Surin. No drama.”
Her name is Cartier.
Gary sighs, and swipes right.
Leave a Reply