The Global Cyber Journal of Wit & Wisdom @ Thaiskale.com

In the western academia world, we’ve constantly heard about the cultural and genetic ‘melting pots’ of North America and Europe–societal collages blending various backgrounds customs, beliefs, values, and more obviously, genetic and physical features such as skin tone and pigmentation. This image of a diverse globalizing west tends to put the rest of the world in a mono shade.

Thailand, for example, is somewhere Thai people live. Yet many might not even be able to tell you that much. In fact, many supposedly educated westerners couldn’t even tell you the difference between Taiwan and Thailand, two completely different nations and cultures. To these ignorant individuals, Asia is just one big place where yellow skinned, slanted eyed people dwell among jungles and rice paddies, dreaming about the magical day that they can migrate to the west.

The truth of the matter is quite a different reality. Asia has thrived with its own melting pot– thousands of years before Europe ever set a’sail for the new world that has become known as the Americas. Aside from Asians mixing and assimilating with other Asians in all stretches of the vast Eastern lands and waters long before recorded history tells, Europeans have been lured to the vast Orient for thousands of years (Alexandar the Great and Magellan are two popular examples in history)–spreading and mixing their biological and ideological seeds amongst a massive gene pool predating the birth of Christ, Bill of Rights, Adolf Hitler and the UN.

Thailand, is one gene pool, particularly worth mention. Despite what you may have heard in the pub, American GI’s of the Vietnam war era were not the first foreigners to intermingle and take on Thai brides and produce hybrid children. In fact, the Thai that is today would not even be if hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Europeans, Arabs, Japanese, Chinese, and others had not traveled long distances from their birth homes to domicile in-around the Indo-Chinese peninsula, or more precisely, Southeast Asia.

History and records are all great for a camp fire tale, but what about the most valuable gift it has left us, the present?

Thailand today has tens of thousands of mix blooded nationals and residents. Since, ultimately everyone in the world is mix blooded, a more precise statement would be Thailand has tens of thousands of nationals and residents who identify themselves and are identified by their society as mix blooded. The mixed bloods of centuries past have mostly integrated and assimilated into society, that you would never know the difference between them and the locals. Some of their kin wouldn’t know either.

In Thailand and Thai culture around the world, the clearly identifiable mix bloods (first and second generations) are called Luk krueng (also spelt Luk kreung and luuk kreung). Luk kreung ลูกครึ่ง literally means ‘half kid.’ In pop culture, it usually refers to a Thai - western mix, but the term umbrellas all dual mixes of offspring.

Another term for this cross cultural-ethnic group of people you might hear is Luk Pasom ลูกผสม, which though is more accurate in its description, is not as popular a term to use.

In western countries like the USA, society might coerce mixed bloods to blend in with everyone else, where in Thailand, the mixed race, or luk kreung tend to stick out as a ’special’ group of people. Like dynamic Hindu dieties, their exotic blends of features, skin tone, and bilingual language accents have provided entertainment, awe, and idolization for the masses–with the concept and ability to easily step beyond the mortal black and white boundaries into a multi-faceted colorful existence.

The image standard is of a beautiful ‘not too western-not too asian’ look, but somewhere in between, which frames a form of beauty in the sense that it models the desirable natural world lacking extremes. Most people don’t want to live in Antarctica any more than they aspire to build a retirement home in the Sahara desert.

While there is nothing wrong with recognizing beauty in any thing or anyone, the issue lies in the false standard that has arisen in society regarding mixed bloods. Because, many luk krueng have come to dominate television and movie screens, as well as modeling adverts in recent decades, society, aided by the mass media has come to draw even more obstructing, unrealistic standards; Just look at the amount of Thais dying their hair brown, applying skin whitening cream, wearing contact lenses, and intentionally altering their speech to have a bi lingual accent in an attempt to mimic this misleading luk kreung standard of beauty.

While some luk kreung have been nurtured all their lives to be in the world of stardom, others come from ordinary mediocre upbringings, wishing just to be part of the world rather than in the spotlight of it. As one luk kreung said:

While we may get the best of [atleast] two worlds, in the end, our genetic code is 99.9999999…. percent the same as every one else. Don’t treat me how you think someone I look like or that looks like me should be treated, but rather, respect me for who I truly am, of which you couldn’t possibly know until you actually get to know me.

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