Thai Brides
--from Louis Theroux’s weird weekends
It was shocking to watch Louis, as a BBC TV presenter, stepping onto the ground
of marriage agency in Thailand, and by talking with and interviewing people presented audiences the inside scenes of marriage agency.
In the documentary, those mail-order brides were so unbelievably blunt and ignorant. One interviewee, when being asked why she preferred westerners to Thai men
as husband, answered, with her broken English, because “They were all very gentle and kindness.” Another one, being asked what she wanted her Mr. Right to be
like, said, with an indifferent look, that “He should have good look, good house, good money, and good job, etc.” Would anyone believe that unless seeing and
hearing those in person?
In the show, Louis typically interviewed the owner of the agency and traced his
ongoing process with his own wife hunting. The time when Louis first talked to
him, the Dream Weaver was parting with his wife, and meanwhile dated and was engaged with a some-twenty-year-old girl. As the agency runner, he himself had experienced three marriages up thus far, and was stepping into the fourth one. Whatwas ironical, in the whole process, was it took him only eight days to get engaged with the girl, and then later another eight days to separate with her, now his new bride.
When watching the show, you couldn’t help thinking that those Thai women were like pets. They waited someone to adopt them and give them comfort financially.
Youth and genuine relationship were their price for that. I personally have never been to Thailand. I couldn’t imagine what was on those mail-order brides’ mind, and furthermore their parents. More than one girl in the show were advisedand accompanied to the marriage agency by their mother. For God’s sake, that
was really OPEN-MINDED.
Another one interviewed was a guy from US. In the interview he behaved weird andlousy. He said with bloody boldness that he liked to touch women’s body, but in the meantime he was very gent. He would just verbally abuse them, instead ofviolence, if he got offended and irritated. The agency set him on dates, and hewas so nervous and unselectable. Grabbing the hands of the first date and promising the welfare to the woman, it looked like that he fell in love with the woman at first sight. But nay, for only two days later, he got married with anotherThai woman. Only TWO days.
I was absolutely bewildered and shocked. The marriage agency itself, in my eyes
, vomited the filthy air outwards. Then lots of filth-favored men and women came
. The naked ugliness and disgust made me sick and wanted to criticize and burn
the whole marriage-seeking field into ashes. At the end of the episode Louis himself was shocked and struck too. He tried the process of meeting selected women
himself: one room, direct questions, and then both parties pick and choose. It
was like a transaction. Two parties hold different intensions; if got satisfied,
the money-buy-bride trade was done.
It was said the intension of the TV show was to give viewers of it the chance toget brief glimpses of things they wouldn’t normally come into contact with. And in most cases this means interviewing people with extreme beliefs of some kind
, or just generally belonging to subcultures not known to exist by most or just
frowned upon. For me,Thai Brides was not the first show I have watched from Weird Weekends, but it was definitely among the most shocking sub-cultural phenomena I had ever confronted.
