I cannot digest this at all and I feel sibei disturbed. Just came back from visiting my wife’s hometown last week. She’s from a super remote village outside Chiang Mai—like the type where you need to drive past dirt tracks and padi fields just to reach. Everything seemed quite chill and wholesome at first, until this topic came up over dinner and completely shattered my mind.
We were sitting around having drinks with her parents and some relatives, just casually talking about future plans and saving money for kids. In Singapore, when we talk about saving for our children, what do we think of? Milk powder, insurance policies, enrichment classes, or university tuition funds right? Normal Singaporean parent mindset—kiasu about education and long-term financial independence.
Out of nowhere, my mother-in-law casually brings up their financial strategy for the younger girls in the extended family. She was literally smiling and telling me, super matter-of-factly, that they are setting aside a monthly budget specifically for cosmetic plastic surgery once the girl hits late high school age. Nose job, skin treatments, double eyelid—the whole package.
At first, I thought my Thai was failing me or it was just a bad translation joke. So I asked my wife to clarify. My wife just nodded along like it was the most standard thing on earth and said, “Yeah, we save so when she grows up, she can be pretty, then she can go earn big money or marry well to support the whole house.”
Bro, my jaw literally dropped onto the floor. I tried probing further, thinking okay, maybe this is just one strange family unit. But my wife straight up told me that in her village and surrounding rural areas, almost every family operates on this exact same logic. It’s basically viewed as a high-return investment vehicle. They literally view altering a child’s appearance as a core financial career path so the kid can go into nightlife, entertainment, service industry, or marry a foreigner to send remittance money back to the village.
I sat there feeling super sick to my stomach. To me, raising a child is about nurturing them, protecting them, and helping them build a life based on their education and character. To hear parents openly talk about tweaking their own flesh and blood’s body purely so she can “go out and earn” or leverage her looks for the entire family’s survival… it felt so incredibly dystopian and transactional.
I didn’t start a fight on the spot because I wanted to save face for my wife in front of her relatives, but the entire night I couldn’t sleep at all. Now that we’re back in SG, I keep looking at the situation with so much anxiety. I love my wife, but realizing that this was the normalized environment she grew up in makes me deeply uncomfortable. What happens when we have our own children? Am I going to end up in a massive war with her family because I refuse to view my own child as a financial asset?
Is this really a widespread culture in northern Thai kampongs, or did I just walk into a super extreme micro-culture? Any bros here who married wives from rural Thailand and experienced this kind of massive culture shock? How do you even set boundaries without letting it poison your marriage?