Bangkok Babylon. Jerry Hopkins

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      That was in December. In May, 2002, a forty-five-year-old, yellow-haired, rosy-cheeked, corpulent bus driver from Denmark named Villy Danborg entered the Three Roses Bar, met Jeab, and spent the next four days with her in a hotel room across the street. They communicated in English–“Ve talk, ve make luf,” he later told me–and before returning to Copenhagen, he asked Jeab to marry him. In the months that followed, he wrote long letters (which I read to her) and they talked on the phone as often as a dozen times a day. In this way, Jeab learned that he had twin nineteen-year-old sons by a Danish woman he never married, a five-year-old son by a Vietnamese woman he did marry. Both women walked out on him–also leaving their sons behind–as did a subsequent Thai wife, aged forty, who migrated to Denmark under his sponsorship with a teenaged son; she left Villy and moved in with a man only a little more than half her age soon afterward, taking her son with her. This left Villy with three boys to raise and he said they, and he, needed a woman.

      Through persistence, Villy convinced Jeab to get a passport and visa to visit Denmark for three months. The idea was that if it worked out, they'd then get married and Jeab's two daughters would move to Copenhagen, too. (During her initial visit, her daughters were to remain in Thailand with her brother.) Villy said he wasn't rich, but his salary, plus a fee for managing the forty-unit co-op in which he had a spacious flat, gave him $4,000 after taxes a month and he thought they could live on it comfortably, while Jeab's girls could get a western education.

      On a later visit to Thailand to meet Jeab's family and visit her village (and then accompany Jeab home with him), Lamyai and I helped Jeab through the passport and visa process and told Villy we'd accompany him on the overnight train to Surin. I also offered to help him try to understand the strange new world that he was about to experience. I liked Villy. I thought he was an innocent as well as a romantic, and if I thought he was rushing things, he had a good heart and when he said, “I luf her, I cannot help myself,” I knew he meant it.

      The village came as a shock, I think. He was pleased by the modern house that Ron built, and impressed by ours, as well, but the village's engulfing shabbiness, trash strewn everywhere, everything tired and worn, the women doing little more than gossip all day, the men drinking from early morning, nobody doing much work, left Villy quite distressed, especially after seeing Lamyai's extensive and flourishing gardens. Why didn't the others do the same? I told Villy about the “inertia of the poor,” a concept that generally applied to the poorest of the poor, those who had, more or less, given up or lost any desire for or notion of improvement, taking whatever came. Westerners might confuse this with what they, the foreigners, called laziness.

      Notice, too, I said, that most of the people in the village were old or very young. The middle generation, the parents of many of the children he saw, worked elsewhere, many of them in Bangkok, because there was no money here. I said I knew of seven households (out of about forty) in Nam Bua Daeng whose young women either worked in the bars or returned home only after a farang started sending money. What he and I did, I said, contributed much to Thailand's rural economy. The war bride phenomenon didn't begin with American hostilities in Vietnam, but it flourished then and spread to Thailand and the Philippines, where few of the brides were met in a church. Thousands of foreign men married Thai bargirls and took them home, while others remained in Thailand with them, or didn't marry them but wired regular allowances to their bank accounts. There was an old joke about the farang being taken home and the woman saying, “I'd like you to meet your village-in-law.”

      Meanwhile, Jeab was behaving in a manner that seemed designed to offend, as if she were trying to get Villy to change his mind. She told me that she was tipsy when she met him at the airport and hadn't completely sobered up since. She was smoking ganja, too, and filling up her mouth with the blood-red mix of leaves and paste and bark and betel nut that she sometimes chewed. His determination and cheerfulness never faltered, his “luf” untouched by her boorish assault.

      “I have this determination and cheerfulness because the angel talked to me,” Villy told me some time later. “Just ten minutes before I saw Jeab the first time, the angel told me that I now will meet one girl I can stay together with. I wrote in my diary that she was the most bad girl in all Nana Plaza. But I loved her and I trusted the voice in my head, telling me not to be afraid.”

      The second day of Villy's visit to Nam Bua Daeng a small party was planned to formally introduce him to neighbors and family members; few of the latter lived nearby, or even often talked. (Another disturbing factor for Villy, after he and Jeab came to see us the previous evening, finding Lamyai's entire family–siblings, their kids, the lot–sitting in a big circle sharing a meal.) Lamyai and I arrived at Jeab's house at ten, dressed in expensive, tailored silk, appearing sartorially apart from but mixing easily with the other guests, few of whom even bothered to find a clean tee-shirt (one of which was emblazoned with Osama bin Laden's face). It was loud and chaotic and the storehouse of beer and whisky was rapidly depleted; Jeab dispatched someone to a nearby town for more and soon the men were pissing in the yard.

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