Essay
Randy McGraw · June 2026
Thailand is a masterpiece of cognitive dissonance: a wonderful place to live, and a difficult place to work. For a long time I interpreted this as two different Thailands, but after living here for nearly four years rather than passing through on periodic business and social trips, I have come to understand that they are one cloth seen from two sides, woven from the same immutable cultural qualities.
Both statements are true, and how one country produces both is the subject of this essay. Three cultural qualities produce the two faces of Thailand: an obligation that runs only to one’s own circle, a surface harmony kept at almost any cost, and a hierarchy that runs from the top down.
Take the living side of Thailand first. Thailand is America’s oldest treaty partner in Asia, bound to Washington since 1833, and whatever turns its politics take, it remains a remarkably neutral playground where Americans, Russians, Chinese and Europeans coexist in proximity and get along in a way they cannot anywhere else in the world. In Phuket, which draws an eclectic mix of the world, violent crime remains surprisingly de minimis.
The hospitals are among the best on earth, built new on state-of-the-art tech systems with no legacy to drag behind them. I had a knee put right in a single afternoon: I chose the specialist and the hour online, was seen within ten minutes of the scheduled appointment, had the X-ray on the doctor’s screen before I had walked back down the corridor from the X-ray room, and started rehabilitation the same day, the bill going straight to my insurer, the outcome managed and good. In Japan you would waste an entire day queuing into their universal system and a day’s wait for an answer; in America the web of referrals and network providers would absorb multiple visits across as many weeks.
Japan is the best place on earth to eat, bar none, and it is so at every tier of restaurant: from a three-star Michelin table down to Yoshinoya (the best cheap beef bowl in the world) and everything in between, you will have a peak dining experience ninety-nine times in a hundred. Thailand is not quite that, but it is also excellent at every tier, delivering a superb in-its-class experience eighty-five times in a hundred, and at Thai prices that makes it the best place in the world to eat for the money. Singapore, for context, hits the mark sixty-five times in a hundred, which is enough for third place, though its often insane prices send it tumbling the moment you look through a price-to-value lens.
And it is the most child-friendly country I know. Every restaurant has a high chair and small cutlery ready before you ask, and the waitress who takes your two-year-old from your arms so you can eat is not doing you a favour; she wanted to. No ranking measures that. It is the warmth of the place with nothing sold.
And Thailand is safe. In nearly four years here I have not once altered a route for safety: not at two in the morning in Bangkok, not on a motorbike in Chiang Mai, not on a beach alone. That is not luck. By the one count every country keeps the same way, the United Nations tally of intentional homicide, Thailand loses roughly two of every hundred thousand people a year; the United States loses five to six. Thailand sits in the same band as Malaysia and Cambodia, well behind Japan and Singapore, and comfortably ahead of the country I come from. Strip out the insurgency in the three provinces of the deep south and the number falls further still. The danger a resident actually faces is the road, which kills around twenty-five per hundred thousand, among the worst rates on earth. Nobody here will hurt you. The motorbike might.
Why it is safe is the more interesting question, and the answer is the first sight of the machinery this essay is about. Order in Thailand is kept from above, and a good part of it is kept by an arrangement a Westerner would call racketeering. The police, the prosecutor and the judge are not three institutions checking one another; they are one nexus, and the shadow economy that runs beneath the legal one runs under its licence. None of this is my discovery. Pasuk Phongpaichit and Sungsidh Piriyarangsan documented it in Guns, Girls, Gambling, Ganja a generation ago, and every Thai knows the phrase phu mi itthiphon, men of influence. But the scandal is not the point. The point is that a racket’s first interest is a quiet street, because disorder is bad for business, and so the same hierarchy that will one day show you the door keeps the pavement safe for you tonight. Racketeering is our word for it. Here it is simply how the country is held, and it has eight hundred years of culture standing behind it.
In retirement, I plan to spend half of every year here.
Note that in every example above, you are the one paying. Difficulty appears in Thailand distinctly and immediately at the threshold that most visitors never cross: the line between buying and selling. Put plainly, the Thailand you get depends on which side of the transaction you are on: whether you are giving them your money or taking theirs. On the near side of that line, Thailand is the most gracious host in the world. On the far side, that accommodation thins like a theatrical scrim. As long as you are paying, it is a beautiful, opaque backdrop of smiles; but the moment the money shifts and the lights come up from behind, the fabric becomes instantly transparent, and what stands behind it is the mechanical scaffolding of a hierarchy that was there all along. One layer deep, it is not the same country as the veneer.
I can only report what I have experienced, which is this. As an expatriate I sit entirely outside the web of reciprocal obligation that binds Thai society together, and outside it, the obligation to deal squarely does not seem to reach me. I am a utility rather than a peer, a hired gun rather than a colleague, only as good as the next touchdown they believe I can score; a temporary resource to be tapped rather than a member of a community to be protected. It took me too long to see that this was not a slight.
What the foreigner experiences out there as self-serving deceit is more often a combination of kreng jai, the deep reluctance to cause another person discomfort or confrontation, and sheer pragmatism. If a polite evasion or an omission smooths over friction without causing a public scene, it is a practical maneuver, not a character flaw. Truth is contextual, and subordinate to surface harmony. It is the same coin again: one of the loveliest traits one can meet anywhere, and a reason a day in Thailand passes so easily. It is also the reason a hard truth is so rarely delivered even when you need and depend on one: the evasion that spares your feelings at dinner is the same evasion that, in business, leaves you without the one piece of information you most needed. This is where the two Thailands turn out to be one. The ease of living and the difficulty of working are the same virtue, met from different sides of the threshold.
Let me tell you about an experience that highlights this, and why it makes Thailand a terrible place to be an employee. In January 2023 I took a senior commercial post at the digital arm of Thailand’s largest telecom group. Its merger with a rival had been public for more than a year and closed eight weeks after I arrived; I had read about it, and I thought I understood what I was joining. What no one mentioned, in any of the warm and gracious conversations that preceded my start, or anywhere in the interview process, was the precarious condition of the division itself, the planned downscaling and the absence of my organization from that plan, or what a merger of that size would do to the business I had been hired to grow. Nobody lied to me; there was no error of commission. But the omissions were large, and they led me to a bad decision. It did not occur to anyone to volunteer the actual situation, or even the risks, and the burden of asking sat entirely with the person who did not yet know what to ask. That is not a burden anyone should have to carry into a job. An employee has no recourse once the decisions are made. A partner, as I will come to, does.
This scales seamlessly from the street, where the price depends on who is asking, to the boardroom, and it becomes starkly apparent when set against the neighbors. In Malaysia I developed and ran a joint venture with Astro, via Singtel, and Astro is a great organization where the rules of engagement for foreign talent were ruthlessly clear. They sourced British or American expatriates with highly specialized expertise, routinely pulling chief product or strategy officers from legacy giants like Sky or, in my case, DIRECTV; they asked me to interview as I was leaving Singtel. You were a highly skilled mercenary brought in for specialized utility. The deal was always, without deviation, a hard two-year contract, extendable by a single year only if they liked you and the operational need persisted. Three years was the maximum, and then you were out regardless of circumstance. The boundaries of your power were sharply drawn so that you did not get too cozy or accrue influence outside your mandate, and when it was time to go, it was time to go. No one was irritated or bitter, because the terms of the deal were clear up front, and the pay reflected the risk of stepping off one’s path and back on. That is British institutionalism at work, in a culture that can understand it: structured, transparent pragmatism, and a fair way of dealing when both sides expect to deal again.
Thailand, conversely, operates on the absolute illusion of harmonious integration. They will welcome you with seemingly endless accommodation, never bothering to articulate the reality that your expiration date is already set. A rigid, short-term mercenary contract requires a directness that violates kreng jai. So when your utility is exhausted there is no transparent transition. They simply push you out when they are ready, preserving their surface calm through silent maneuvering, to avoid the “rudeness” of an honest exit. Or they make your position untenable and leave you to draw the conclusion. The Malaysian way is colder and kinder. The Thai way is warmer and harder, and alien to what a Westerner expects.
None of this is only my impression; those who have studied it describe the same thing. The anthropologist Niels Mulder describes a moral inner world of family and of those to whom one owes a debt of gratitude, bunkhun, and an outer world conducted by other rules. The foreigner lives in the outer world, and there is a logic to keeping him there. He always holds a return ticket. Obligations that last a lifetime are reasonably reserved for people who will be there for one.
The outer world is also a tolerant one, in a way that takes a Westerner years to believe. You may act the fool here. You may be drunk, loud, wrong, overdressed, late; you may lie a little and be lied to a little, and the answer is mai pen rai, never mind, and the day rolls on. The ground of it is Buddhist and it is real: khanti, forbearance, is one of the ten perfections, and upekkha, equanimity, one of the four sublime states, and both are taught to children before they can read. The scholarship agrees. Suntaree Komin’s study of Thai values, still the standard forty years on, puts smooth interpersonal relations and flexibility over principle near the top of the nine things Thais hold dearest, and ego, the protection of face, at the very top. That last item is the hinge. The tolerance is wide precisely because the thing it protects is narrow: nobody’s face may be touched.
But cross that line, shame a man in front of his people, strike a Thai, mock what the country holds sacred, and the tolerance ends at once, it ends decisively, and it ends collectively. The phrase is sang son, to teach a lesson, and the lesson is not delivered one to one. You are not fought; you are surrounded. The circle that would not trouble to tell you the truth at dinner closes ranks in seconds against the outsider who has touched one of its own. It is the same quality as the smile. Both come from the obligation that runs only to one’s own, and the outsider stands on the far side of it in both.
What the culture is too polite to say, the statute book says plainly. A foreigner may not own land. The Foreign Business Act generally keeps him below a majority of the company he builds (Americans enjoy an exception under an old treaty of amity, which tells you how deliberate the rule is for everyone else). Each work permit must be backed by two million baht of registered capital and four Thai employees, and a list of occupations is reserved to Thais altogether. At the national parks and the temples there is one price for Thais and another, posted in plain sight, for everyone else. None of this is scandalous; every country favors its own. But it is the clearest statement of the deal that Thailand ever makes: you are welcome as a buyer, and constrained as a builder.
Behind the law lies the question of who owns the country. The volume Unequal Thailand, edited by the economist Pasuk Phongpaichit and the historian Chris Baker, gathers Thai scholars’ evidence on how concentrated the ownership of land, wealth and business has become. It is the modern legacy of the old sakdina order, a rigid patron-client hierarchy, and it leaves the working masses with very little structural agency. Family firms everywhere prefer family. A foreign executive in such a firm is, by construction, passing through.
For the uninitiated, the famed Thai smile masks a wallectomy waiting to happen around every corner. The nation markets itself to the world as the “Land of Smiles” and the uninitiated buy wholesale into this piece of twentieth-century state branding, a heavily produced performance, built to draw foreign capital and tourists that has worked magnificently. The scholar Peter Jackson calls it the Thai “regime of images”: what is said and done in public is watched far more closely than the same thing done in private, and whatever disturbs the image of smooth calm is quietly removed from view. Walk through the entertainment districts on which that same tourism machine depends, and a less flattering version of the slogan suggests itself: the land of vertical smiles.
The slogan deserves the mockery. The women do not. With so many unable to make a livable wage, daughters are pushed into soft prostitution or outright sex work, tracking tourists through the major urban centers. The International Labour Organization’s 1998 study of the region, The Sex Sector, found that many poor rural families depend on the money their daughters send home from the trade, some of them simply to get by. Strip away that informal economy, the food and the nightlife, and tourism revenues would drop precipitously, with catastrophic fallout for the rural poor.
By the narrow official measure, tourism contributes eleven to twelve percent of Thailand’s GDP; by the broad measure, which counts the spending that ripples outward from every visitor, it approached twenty-two percent in 2019. And the recorded economy is only part of the picture. The economists Leandro Medina and Friedrich Schneider, whose database covers 157 countries, put Thailand’s shadow economy at about forty-one percent of GDP in 2017, among the largest shares in the world, and Thai economists have since put it higher still.
I do not believe anyone designed this. It is a consequence of other things. But it turns out to serve what those at the top want, and so they turn a blind eye. Quality education and genuine upward mobility stay out of reach for the many. Young people from rural families finish basic schooling with little they can offer the formal job market, and the shadow economy takes them in. That desperation feeds the tourist machine. While it provides the remittances that keep debt-burdened rural families barely afloat, the engine funnels the lion’s share of its capital right back up to the owners who control the real estate, the infrastructure and the hospitality sector: an unspoken pillar of the economy, allowing those at the top to profit from the very desperation beneath them, without ever having to build a functional social safety net or redistribute wealth.
Here the two Thailands meet again. The same ledger that prices the foreign executive by the next touchdown they believe he can score prices the rural daughter too, with far less to fall back on. The hierarchy that makes the living so cheap for the buyer is the same one that makes the working so hard for the seller.
I should be fair, and I should be consistent. Asia is Asia all the way around. It is not the West, and a Westerner has home-field advantage nowhere in it. I have argued elsewhere that the usual error is the visitor’s, for being a bad guest and bringing his own yardstick into someone else’s house. So let me be plain about the yardstick I am using here. It is not a Western one. It is Thailand’s own neighbors. Foreigners do build businesses here, and some thrive. Senior hires are eased out of family-controlled companies all over emerging Asia, not only in Thailand. And a surface of harmony is no Thai invention. Japan, where I spent sixteen years, prizes the unrippled surface at least as much. But in Japan there is rule of law beneath the surface, and it holds for the outsider too; the deal is unspoken, yet it can be relied upon. In Singapore the law is explicit and the deal is stated plainly. In Malaysia the deal is a contract, with a term and an end. The veneer is not the problem. Every culture in Asia has one. The question is what lies one layer down, and in Thailand, for the outsider who has crossed from buying to selling, there is neither a stated deal nor much to stand on.
None of this makes Thailand a dead end. On the contrary, it makes it a place with a method, and the method is partnership. The foreigner who arrives alone, however capable, stays in the outer world; the one who arrives with, or builds, a Thai partnership is brought, by degrees, inside. Starbucks ran its own stores here for twenty years, then in 2019 handed the market to a joint venture and has grown faster since. KFC has been here since 1984 and owns not a single outlet, operating through three Thai franchisees. The pattern holds from the barber shop to the Muay Thai camp: the foreign name supplies the brand, the playbook and the standard, the Thai partner supplies everything else, and everything else turns out to be most of it. I did it myself, in the same telecom post where I first missed the question, structuring a virtual joint venture with Sumitomo for a streaming and advertising platform: a Japanese trading house with the capital and know-how on one side, the Thai operator with the customers, the network and the places to put it to work on the other, and neither able to build it alone. It worked because each side could see, in plain arithmetic, what the other stood to earn, and because neither of us was selling to Thailand. We were building inside it.
In my mother’s terms, which I have written about elsewhere, I was a guest who misread the invitation. Thailand invited me, warmly and sincerely, to the table. I mistook it for an invitation to the kitchen. The misreading was mine.
So reading this should leave you with a question of your own. Keeping the metaphor: are you buying, or selling, Thailand? The quick answer, from most foreigners who have tried to work here, is selling. Great place to live, bad place to work. But for me, I’m buying.
Here is why. The qualities that make this country hard to work in are the same ones that make it wonderful to live in, and they are not going to change. The adjusting falls to you, entirely. Adjust yourself, as any good guest does. Do not arrive alone, and do not stay alone: find the Thai partner who supplies everything your name and your standard cannot, show him the ten and his share of it, and make his success the mechanism of yours. Learn to ask what no one will volunteer, and to hear what is not said. Build trust the only way it is built here, by delivering results, and deliver them in a way that acknowledges eight hundred years of a history that was never colonized and needs no correcting. Be someone people enjoy doing business with, because here that is not optional. Leave your convictions, and the imported culture wars, at the door. Do that, and the outer world quietly begins to let you in.
© Randy McGraw. All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced, copied, or used in any form without the written permission of the author.
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