Word: thais
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...sweltering corrugated-roofed shed on the Thai-Burmese border, 24-year-old Chinaka hits the canvas in the third. It's not the first time this bout the Burmese has gone down, and the beatings have taken their toll: he seems to be swimming in slow motion on the dirty floor. As he inches on his stomach across the ring, the crowd screams at him to get up while his Thai opponent, fighting the referee's restraint, presses to finish him off. Chinaka's eyes are frosted and bloody from three fresh cuts on his right brow. Giving...
...Bare-knuckle kickboxing doesn't pay much: at fights outside the Thai border town of Mae Sot, the purse is $22 for a Thai winner, $11 for a Burmese, $4 each for a draw?losers get nothing. And the rules are brutally simple. Head-butting, elbowing, kneeing as well as kicking and punching are allowed. Victory is by surrender or straight knockout. If both fighters are still standing after five rounds (or two for kickboxers under 14), it's a draw. There's no count: the two referees' chief purpose is to protect a floored fighter from being stomped...
...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 for the coveted Miss Thailand spot...
Conforming to this new paradigm takes a lot of work. Lek, a pure Thai bar girl, charms the men at the Rainbow Bar in the sleaze quarters of Bangkok. Since arriving in the big city, she has methodically eradicated all connections to her rural Asian past. The first to go was her flat, northeastern nose. For $240, a doctor raised the bridge to give her a Western profile. Then, Lek laid out $1,200 for plumper, silicone-filled breasts. Now, the 22-year-old is saving to have her eyes made rounder. By the time she has finished her plastic...
...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 still think that Western is better." That sentiment worries Asians and Eurasians. "More than anything, I'm proud to be Thai," says Willy McIntosh, a 30-year-old Thai-Scottish TV personality, who spent six months as a monk contemplating his role in society. "When I hear that people are dyeing their hair or putting in contacts to look like me, it scares me. The Thai tradition that I'm most...