You need to sort out your English mate, I tried reading some of that stuff of yours and all I got was a headache trying to understand what the heck your are on about.

As one writer said…the Westerner centuries past would have understood the “losing face” phenomenon….but I guess that’s saying Thai are still living in the Victorian Age….which while I think it is a good thing in a lot of ways… by appearances its not such a great thing for Thailand in a lot of ways.
Another writer said; in the Western world you can still get your block knocked off for insulting someone. Well that’s true.
But if, for example, you reported a deficiency/ problem in the workplace…or accused a politician of being corrupt…you’d probably get positive results in the West. Here you’d have to be of a higher caste/position than he to criticize, and even then you could get into serious trouble.
Its called: not having freedom of speech.

Seems also the Thai can lose face over such trivial things as some of the exchanges that took place between people who commented on this thread.

And there’s the permanence feature. They don’t forgive and forget readily.

The problem for us farang (which indeed we can do nothing about) is that things that are wrong don’t get corrected…things that are broken don’t get fixed…people responsible don’t receive justice… and that hurts everybody including us.

I started the thread simply to point out that one should always be mindful of this strange quirk, which we don’t really understand, where the most trivial behavior may cause serious upset, even among people you care about.

One fellow said “I don’t worry about things I cannot change.”
Well neither do I…not much anyway…but in my relationships with Thai I always try to downplay the losing face thing… This works particularly well when she has committed an offense against me…sometimes even unnoticed by me…for which she offers a fearful apology. I always say: don’t take it so hard. I’m not Thai. I have no face to lose.

Children on motorbikes…while it is necessary for most… I would like to see them drive slower and put helmets on their babies. Its another peculiarity of Thai culture that they don’t seem to grasp the cause-and-consequences equation very well. Strange though, I don’t see in the news that they are the victims of accidents all that often.

I was amused by the comments about nose-picking. My first day in Thailand I boarded a taxi and there sat a stunning Thai woman. She smiled and said hello. I return the greeting…and moments later, without so much as turning her head, the breath-taking beauty had her index finger buried right up her nose.
I recognized at that moment what a contrast of beautiful and unsightly Thailand can be.

That being said, the face thing is an Asian thing, not just Thai and it’s the one thing I have the biggest gripe with in dealing with Asian culture in general. I really feel for the many Thai people in this country stuck in bad situations because they can’t, or won’t, speak up against injustice.

After 10 yrs in the U.S, I don’t worry about a “loss of face” that much anymore. I said what I want to say and I don’t care much about what others would think about me. I became more direct to the point which is quite a big transformation for a Thai person like me. In the U.S, I have to stand up for myself or I wouldn’t get what I want. Thais are not very direct when they communicate. Kids don’t even look at you when they talk to you.

I do miss the simple life in Thailand and Thai people(the good ones).
Thanks for sharing!