People wash up on foreign shores for many reasons – opportunity, sanctuary, happenstance, adventure, love, vacation or in my case, a dependent spouse visa. While tourists come and go, ex-pats (ex-patriots) settle in and take root. In Thailand, most ex-pats are from neighboring countries. Some are permanent ‘migrant’ workers, some are bigwigs of international corporations, and some are things in between. Then there are the Westerners, who also run the gamut and number somewhere between a couple hundred thousand and a million. Over the years, a fair few of these have ended up with Thai wives. The malls are full of heavy jowled, thinning haired, sagging belly, tattooed, flip flopped old white men holding their high-heeled, smartly dressed, 15-year younger wives’ Louise Vuitton monogrammed purses while window shopping at the new Gucci store. While these fellows
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