If you're coming from an English-speaking, mostly-white environment, Asia takes some adjusting to. If you're from somewhere like New York, LA, London, or Sydney, you've probably already got Asian immigrant communities around you, so the culture shock is softer. But if you're coming from somewhere more homogeneous — small-town America, say — the adjustment takes a little longer.
That said, the adjustment period doesn't last. Everyone's friendly, everyone's curious about you, and if you're a guy, you'll probably have a girlfriend within weeks. That part happens fast.
Case in point: a friend of mine, from what Americans themselves would call the middle of nowhere. Tall, blond, classically handsome — and also, by his own admission, a total small-town guy underneath it. Good-natured, easygoing, but back home he had no real job prospects and no luck with women. Just quietly stuck.
Then he landed in Bangkok. First reaction: pure culture shock at how enormous and dense the city is. Second reaction, much more useful to him: people here look at a tall blond guy and see a Hollywood movie. Suddenly he's read as some kind of effortlessly elegant city sophisticate, which, let's be honest, he was not. But that misread became an advantage.
With no particular skills to speak of, he did what a lot of guys in his position do — started teaching English. Not because he had any special command of the language, just because he happened to speak it natively, and that alone is marketable currency once you cross an ocean.
Job: acquired. Girlfriend: acquired, almost immediately.
So here's a guy who, for the first time in his life, has everything going his way — job, girlfriend, social status he never had back home. Naturally, it went to his head a little. You try telling a guy in that state to stay humble; he's not listening. Everything's finally working out for him, and it's the first time he's ever felt that.
Then the ex-boyfriend shows up.
One thing leads to another, words get heated, and it turns into a full-on shouting match. My friend, riding high on his new life, doesn't back down — comes across like he's telling the guy to know his place and get lost.
What he didn't know — what most newcomers don't know — is Thai culture around face and pride. Losing face in public is, for a lot of Thais, worse than almost anything else you could do to them. Pride runs deep here, arguably deeper than almost anywhere.
And the other thing he didn't know: Thailand quietly has a lot of guns in circulation. More than people realize. Incidents happen that never make international news.
What happened after that, exactly, I honestly don't know. We drifted apart not long after, the way friendships in this city sometimes just do, and I never got the full story.
But the lesson stands regardless of how his particular story ended: never, ever, under any circumstances, get into a confrontation with a Thai person.