Word: luk
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Tata Young certainly knows how to let loose. Back in 1995, when she broke into Thailand's entertainment industry at the age of 15, the pert half-Thai, half-American singer was on the forefront of the Eurasian trend. Today, the majority of top Thai entertainers are luk kreung. Now 20, Young is the first Thai to sign a contract with a major U.S. label, Warner Brothers Records (owned by AOL Time Warner, parent company of Time), which she hopes will elevate her into the Britney Spears/Christina Aguilera pantheon. Back at home, Young has to contend with a gaggle...
...luk kreung crowd tend to hang tight, dining, drinking and dating together. "We understand each other," says Nicole Terio, one of the group. "It comes from knowing what it means to grow up between two cultures." But the luk kreung's close-knit community and Western-stoked confidence sometimes elicits grumbles from other Thais, who also resent their stranglehold on the entertainment industry. The ultimate blow came a few years back when Thailand sent a blue-eyed woman to the Miss World competition. Sirinya Winsiri, also known as Cynthia Carmen Burbridge, beat out another half-Thai, half-American...
Despite their long traditions, though, Eurasians did not make the transition into the modern age easily. As colonies became nations, mixed-race children were inconvenient reminders of a Western-dominated past. So too were the next generation of Eurasians, the offspring of American soldiers in Southeast Asia. In Thailand, luk kreung were not allowed to become citizens until the early 1990s. In Hong Kong, many Eurasians have two names and shift their personalities to fit the color of the crowd in which they're mixing. Singer and actress Karen Mok, for example, grew up Karen Morris but used her Chinese...
...rounder. By the time she has finished her plastic surgery, Lek will have lost all traces of the classical Thai beauty that propelled her from a poor village to the brothels of Bangkok. But she is confident her new appearance will attract more customers. "I look more like a luk kreung, and that's more beautiful," she says...
...blocks away from Rainbow Bar, a local pharmacy peddles eight brands of whitening cream, including Luk Kreung Snow White Skin. In Tokyo, where the Eurasian trend first kicked off more than three decades ago, loosening medical regulations have meant a proliferation of quick-fix surgery, like caucasian-style double eyelids and more pronounced noses. On Channel V and mtv, a whole host of veejays look ethnically mixed only because they've gone under the knife. "There's a real pressure here to look mixed," says one Asian veejay in Singapore. "Even though we're Asians broadcasting in Asia, we somehow...