Salon.com > Patrick Winn

New Thai campaign ad appeals to transgender voters

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 16:22:00 +0000

Is there a hidden, transgender voting bloc ripe for a political awakening?

At least one Thai politician seems to think so.

"Our modern world increasingly accepts varied genders... Bangkok must be a city that understands sexual differences, not just accepting different lifestyles ... it must be a friend to every difference."

So goes the latest campaign ad for Pongsapat Pongcharoen, a U.S.-educated police general. Polls suggest he'll soon become Bangkok's next governor.

Slick, minimal and set to a twinkly backbeat, the video showcases a stream of cheerful faces. Many of them belong to "kathoeys," male-to-female transgender Thais more commonly known by a cheaper term: ladyboys.

Is this the dawn of a new trend: courting the transgender vote?

Death by soap opera?

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 21:31:00 +0000

Soap opera-crazed Indonesia is watching a tragically ironic drama play out in the death of a 9-year-old, whose parents blame a hit soap for playing a role in their daughter's death.

"Love in Paris" is a romance starring a young starlet, actress Michelle Zudith, whose character suffers from leukemia and is expected to die before 20 -- a plot device that affects her search for love.

Ayu Tria Desiani was a 9-year-old who suffered leukemia in real life. According to the Jakarta Globe, she frequently required treatment in hospitals. After experiencing a burst blood vessel, the Globe reports, she was rushed to an ICU ward yesterday.

Turns out the ward was filled with atypical guests: the perfectly healthy cast and crew shooting a scene for "Love in Paris."

Are expats America’s laziest voters?

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 16:28:00 +0000

BANGKOK, Thailand — There is no variety of American voter quite so unreliable as expatriates. They vote far less frequently than even teenagers and high-school dropouts. When it comes to campaign contributions, they donate less than 1 percent of the total haul.

Compounding their low turnout rate — a scant 7 percent in the 2008 U.S. presidential race, according to the non-partisan Overseas Vote Foundation — is the mystery surrounding their voting habits. Do most Americans living abroad skew towards Democrats or Republicans? No one knows for sure. In U.S. politics, a field dissected at the molecular level by highly paid strategists, the data is conspicuously absent.

“Across all expatriates, how many get the ballot and how many mail it back in, yes, that number might surprise some people as being insufficient,” said Ross Feingold, 38, the Hong Kong–based Asia chair of Republicans Abroad. “But we do have people who go to extraordinary efforts to their ballot in.”

Is it time to ban ivory for good?

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 14:07:00 +0000

BANGKOK, Thailand — Smuggling boxes of elephant tusks is not so different from smuggling bundles of cocaine.

Both are procured for a pittance and sold abroad for a fortune. Both enrich transnational criminal networks; in ivory’s case, the commodity is acquired in the African savannah and sold primarily in China. Both send mules and middlemen to jail but seldom bring charges upon syndicate kingpins.

The major differences? Ivory is cruelly hacked out of elephants’ heads. Its sales have ravaged Asian elephant stocks and threaten to drive remaining African populations towards a similar fate. And ivory, unlike coke, is openly sold in high-end Hong Kong and Beijing boutiques.

Shooting an elephant for its ivory has been forbidden since 1989, the year poaching was banned by the 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. (Most call the treaty organization CITES, pronounced “SIGH-tees.”) The ban helped slow elephant populations in free fall, the outcome of unruly ivory markets and abundant assault rifles left behind by African civil wars.

Ramadan porn-block blitz

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 01:00:00 +0000

What do you get when you allow an attention-seeking fundamentalist to head a massive nation's IT ministry?

A lot of anti-porn crusading.

Tifatul Sembiring, communications and information technology minister of Indonesia, hates porn.

He hates it so much that he told the Jakarta Globe two years ago that frequently checks porn sites on his mobile phone to ensure they are adequately blocked.

He hates it so much that he likened an Indonesian pop star's appearance in a leaked sex video to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

But Tifatul especially hates porn during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. For the second time in two years, Tifatul has vowed to purge Indonesia of online pornography during Ramadan. He told the Jakarta Post that the government is now on "high alert" to make Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority nation, "free of porn."

Twitter rage from Myanmar

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 09:05:00 +0000

A flare-up of arson attacks and riots in Myanmar's remote Rakhine state -- which, by most accounts, have led to 500 homes torched and seven deaths -- have stoked nationalistic anger.

That fact alone is hardly surprising. Many of the country's majority ethnic group, the Burmese, have a dim view of the perceived assailants: Muslim men from an ethnic group called Rohingya. Though the Rohingya maintain they've existed on Myanmar's coast for centuries, they are widely derided as invaders from neighboring Bangladesh. A government official once famously derided them as a "dark brown" tribe that are "ugly as ogres."

What's novel, however, is the outpouring of anger on Twitter.

Here's a sampling of the anti-Rohingya Tweets:

@kozawgyi: We do not want #Extremist #Rohingya #Terrorist who engage in destructive acts in our Land. Our emotion is as same as USA #9/11 attack!

@ashinswami: Rohingya are killing and burning now poor Rakine villagers. How to stop them?

@thatburmesekid: they kill our people.they burn our villages.It is not protesting but they are terrorists. #Rohingya get out from #Myanmar.

Did slaves catch your seafood?

Mon, 21 May 2012 14:26:00 +0000

PREY VENG, Cambodia, and SAMUT SAKHON, Thailand — In the sun-baked flatlands of Cambodia, where dust stings the eyes and chokes the pores, there is a tiny clapboard house on cement stilts. It is home to three generations of runaway slaves.

The man of the house, Sokha, recently returned after nearly two years in captivity. His home is just as he left it: barren with a few dirty pillows passing for furniture. Slivers of daylight glow through cracks in the walls. The family’s most valuable possession, a sow, waddles and snorts beneath the elevated floorboards.

Before his December escape, Sokha (a pseudonym) was the property of a deep-sea trawler captain. The 39-year-old Cambodian, his teenage son and two young nephews were purchased for roughly $650, he said, each through brokers promising under-the-table jobs in a fish cannery.

There was no cannery. They were instead smuggled to a pier in neighboring Thailand, where they were shoved aboard a wooden vessel that motored into a lawless sea. His uncle had fallen for the same scam five years prior and escaped to warn the others. But Sokha told his son, then just 16, that this venture would turn out differently. He was wrong.

Asia’s rampant cheating problem

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:12:00 +0000

BANGKOK, Thailand — From sleep to social lives, there is little Asia’s most upwardly mobile students won’t sacrifice for education. Though they belong to the so-called “Asian Century,” American colleges remain the premier destination for the elite from Shanghai to Singapore to Seoul.

The path to U.S. college acceptance, however, increasingly compels students to sacrifice their integrity. For the right price, unscrupulous college prep agencies offer ghostwritten essays in ﬂawless English, fake awards, manipulated transcripts and even whiz kids for hire who’ll pose as the applicant for SAT exams.

“Oh my God, they can do everything for you,” said Nok, 17-year-old Thai senior in her ﬁnal year at a private Bangkok high school. (She asked GlobalPost to alter her name for this article.) “They can take the SAT for you, no problem. Most students don’t really think it’s wrong.”

Anxiety reigns after Kim Jong Il’s death

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 13:58:00 +0000

BANGKOK, Thailand — North Koreans lucky enough to own TVs learned of their nation’s biggest event in decades from a stout, sobbing anchorwoman in black robes.

“Our comrade, Kim Jong Il, the General Secretary of the Korean Workers Party, the Chairman of the National Defense Commission and the commander of the Korean People’s Army has died,” read the news presenter, her voice quivering with grief.

“We make this announcement with great sorrow.”

It has been received, however, with great uncertainty.

Even experts on North Korea concede that intelligence from the secretive, authoritarian state amounts to rumor and guesswork. Following an announcement that Jong Il suffered a fatal heart attack in a train carriage, North Korea’s unpredictability is driving its enemies to brace for the worst.

Inside North Korea, where Kim Jong Il lorded over 24 million citizens like an emperor, the communist government has urged the public to remain strong despite their grief.

Terrorism at a Thai brothel

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 13:01:00 +0000

BANGKOK, Thailand -- There are no battlefield guarantees in Asia's bloodiest Islamic insurgency, a jihad in Thailand's tropical south that has ended nearly 5,000 lives.

But there are a few rules of thumb. In their self-proclaimed "holy war" to carve out the world's newest Muslim state on the Thai-Malaysia border, jihadis consider soldiers, cops, Buddhist monks, government teachers and their Muslim collaborators as fair game. Backpackers partying just a short distance up the coast are left alone.

But less mercy is offered to a different sort of tourist: Malaysian men, many fellow Muslims, border-hopping into insurgents' turf for paid sex. Now, after a bloody Sunday night bombing spree in their favored brothel town, Malaysia's government is warning its men to stay away.

Shortly after sunset on Sept. 18, in the gritty Thai border town of Su-Ngai Golok, a series of explosions erupted on a busy lane lined with hotels, food stalls and karaoke joints.

Vietnam War babies: Grown up and low on luck

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:03:00 +0000

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — Vo Van Dang is not Vietnamese.

That, at least, is his contention. Though he has never left Vietnam, speaks no English and lives in a Ho Chi Minh City slum house, where 20 people share an open-air toilet, Dang insists he is American through and through.

“I don’t belong here,” said Dang, born in 1971 during a brief love affair between a nightclub prostitute and a dark-skinned American GI. “I belong in America.”

If only he can prove it.

Dang is among tens of thousands of children fathered in Vietnam by U.S. troops during the 1965-1973 war. Most were born to absent fathers and mothers who risked Viet Cong wrath by working as housekeepers, vendors or bar girls around U.S. bases.

There was once great hope for men and women like Dang: an obscure U.S. visa for Vietnamese nationals fathered by GIs. But the allowance for “Vietnam AmerAsians,” a clunky State Department term for mixed-race children of the war, appears to be fizzling at last.