The Alluring Aryans of Southeast Asia Advertising

Originally published via Armageddon Safari:

Nothing — and I mean nothing, if advertising strategies are any indicator — moves product in Southeast Asia like Caucasoids with blonde hair and blue eyes flashing their pearly whites.

Especially the blue eyes, which are like catnip to these people.

You could airdrop the fugliest incel freak into the jungles of Southeast Asia, with his pasty white face and lackluster personality.

If he’s got blue eyes, ipso facto he’s batting .500 with the native ladies, which is why many such mutants end up chasing tail in Asia, because it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

The more Aryan the aesthetics, the better.

Please withhold your accusations of white supremacy.

I didn’t invent the rules; I’m just relaying them.

Don’t hate the player; hate the game.

Anyway, a smiling white face plastered on your building edifice or on the subway or on your artisanal cracker packet or wherever conveys professionalism.

It conveys quality.

It conveys luxury.

Exhibit A: some obscure grocery store I frequented in Ben Tre, Vietnam.

“That white bitch loves our apples, and you will too,” is the subtext.

And this one, plastered in various iterations on gigantic posters around the perimeter of a very expensive-looking “international school” catering to local elites in Saigon.

(“International school” has a specific definition, which is that a certain majority percentage of the teachers are foreign — i.e., white — and the curriculum is entirely or mostly in English.)

“That little Asian kid is going to graduate with a sense of cultured refinement that you simply can’t get at the local public school,” is the sentiment here.

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Southeast Asians are also enamored of Korean twinks in boy bands, which has a lot to do with the comparably lighter complexion of East Asians (Koreans, Chinese, Japanese) as opposed to Southeast Asians (Thais, Cambodians, Malaysians, and to some extent Vietnamese, although they are often on the lighter side on account of the Chinese influence from the north).

In a section of my widely acclaimed expat memoir, Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile (which I highly encourage you to purchase here in your chosen format for an affordable price) pertaining to my employment in what is called in Thailand a “demonstration school,” the meaning of which was never made clear to me but which I always took to mean something was being demonstrated there, although what was being demonstrated was also never made clear, I describe the phenomenal experience of being placed behind a glass case to be inspected by prospective parents on a guided tour of the facilities.

My role there was not really to speak to the parents, the vast majority of whom did not speak English, but rather to smile at them and look “smart,” as they say there, meaning professional and classy, so as to impress upon them the quality of the educational opportunities offered.

Via Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, February 2017:

“Now that retired-menopausal-banker-turned-head-administrator Khun Ta had been lying to parents of potential students for at least three months about Bangkok Thonburi University Demonstration School’s non-existent “fully-developed” English curriculum, the administration had been feeling pressure to display more solid evidence of its bona fides.
So they recruited a single lonely farang (me) for display in a glass case, whose job was to smile to incoming visitors and lie to them about said non-existent curriculum, which was purportedly developed, I was instructed to say, by the British Council, an esteemed ESL industry leader. …
We were recruiting, and I was the white face of the marketing campaign. This was the career I had ostensibly trained for in all of those pointless liberal arts political science classes about the UN and Constitutional Law and stuff, which I went into $30[EF1] ,000 of debt for the privilege of attending.
Parents of upper-strata wealthy children (some even in the elite tier) in the free market for an educational institution passed through automatic doors under the three-story palatial ceiling in twos or threes, sometimes with a grandma in tow or an aunt or some other concerned relative with a stake in securing their little sweetheart’s future prospects via quality education.
And, as I was instructed to explain, BangkokThonburi University Demonstration School delivered quality education in spade with its state-of-the-art proprietary English-language curriculum that didn’t actually exist. Of course, I didn’t tell them the last part about it not being real because that would have ruined the magic.
“We have a state-of-the-art proprietary English-language curriculum,” I dutifully recited.
Khun Ta looked over my shoulder to make sure I explained stuff to the parents right, on the rare occasions that they spoke English and inquired to me. Most often, though, I just sat behind the glass and looked refined and stately, like mid-tier European nobility or something. Asians love that stuff.
Given the fact that Khun Ta didn’t speak English super well, though, I could’ve said almost anything while she was eavesdropping and she would have had no idea.
The parents showed up because they either got an email or a phone call or some old-school snail-mail invitation — complete with smiling children being dutifully educated by smiling white teachers — from BangkokThonburi University asking them to visit for tea and propaganda.
I knew for sure BangkokThonburi University Demonstration School did the snail-mail marketing thing because, once a week or so, the Thailand Post mailman came to drop off buckets full of hundreds of return-to-senders mailed to recipients that were dead, had moved residences, had sold their kids to a sweatshop, or for whatever reason weren’t in the market for a quality private education with non-existent top-shelf English curriculum developed by the British Council.
For the real-life parents that got the letters, though, BangkokThonburi University Demonstration School staff members greeted them at the door and welcomed them into the air-conditioned office lounge, wherein I sat in my exhibit with good posture behind a Windexed glass partition, well-groomed, smiley white face toward the audience, exotic-imported-zoo-animal-style.
“I am here to mold your children into world-class successes,” my body language spoke to them…
Once inside, the parents were courteously served tea and a half-hour of blatant lies — truly, remarkably brazen lies, even by Thai standards, like that BangkokThonburi University Demonstration School had a comprehensive, unique, specially-designed curriculum in three different languages (Thai, Chinese, and English) and fully trained, qualified staff on hand to administer this curriculum to their child once they signed up.
BangkokThonburi University Demonstration School had none of these.”

Benjamin Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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