I’m most certainly not a virtuous person, but I still feel a deep sense of shame and embarrassment when Western tourists come to Southeast Asia and treat it as their personal playground, behaving in a way that they never would back in their home countries because their relative purchasing power gives them the trappings of status. I also take a great satisfaction in seeing people cross the threshold of tolerated behaviour that they didn’t realise existed and having to suffer the punishment of public humiliation as a result.





Chances are, you probably do too. There’s a whole cottage industry chronicling the travails of white people behaving badly in Southeast Asia, and the audience for news stories about foreigners being busted for bad behaviour usually dwarfs that of all other news stories. (Case in point: With less than a fortnight until the referendum that will perhaps facilitate the end of military rule in Thailand, the most shared story on Coconuts Bangkok was a young couple forced to apologise after they were caught having oral sex outside a guesthouse on Ko Phi Phi.)

For a long time, I thought the Bintang singlet was the most obnoxious symbol of white entitlement in Southeast Asia. It’s hard to think of a piece of apparel that better sums up the kind of Western journeyman who comes to this part of the world with a complete disregard for local custom or cultural mores. To this class of traveller, this region is the sum total of cheap cocktails, expansive beaches and full-moon parties, along with a half-day of cheap shopping along Sukhumvit Road on the way back to regular life.

But as egregious as this is, there’s at least a kind of simple honesty to that experience. They might be unpleasant but they’re just here to blow all the money from their call-centre job and hopefully win the affections of a Swedish backpacker along the way, and they don’t claim otherwise. Pay that at least some begrudging respect: At the end of the day, it’s less obnoxious than the tourists who ostentatiously pretend to pay respect to local culture, but retreat into their white privilege bubble at the first sign of threat or challenge. For that class of tourist in this part of the world, the Eastern religion tattoo is such a common motif that the uninitiated would probably mistake it for a coat of arms.

Last week, a Spanish national joined a long and ignominious list of foreign travellers to be frogmarched out of an Asian country for sporting a tattoo of the Buddha on his leg. In this case, his tattoo was spotted by monks as he was wearing shorts. Presumably, he was in a public place. And, because there is absolutely nothing else to do in Bagan, we can also conclude he was on his way to or from any one of the thousands of Buddhist temples open for public exploration.

We can only conclude that this was a man who considered himself enough of a kindred spirit of Buddhist precepts to get a Buddhist tattoo. A man who not only defied cultural prohibitions to get an image of the Buddha inked on his leg, but somehow remained oblivious to culturally acceptable standards of dress in Buddhist religious monuments outlined in every tourist guidebook and travel forum. We can debate whether the severity of the punishment was warranted, but we can’t deny that was a dumb as hell thing to do – especially when, over the past two years, at least three other people have been deported from various Asian countries for the same reason.

The Spanish tourist should at least be commended for not making public comment on the case – others subjected to the same treatment who have spoken their mind have never done themselves a favour.

Booted out of Myanmar in 2014 for the same reason was Canadian Jason Polley, who claimed to be a practising Mahayana Buddhist and who told reporters the incident was a result of the more doctrinaire attitude of Theravada Buddhism practiced here. The fact that Tibetan Buddhists have the same cultural taboos relating to feet make his claim ridiculous, and perhaps he realised it when he told the South China Morning Post that he would spend the equivalent of US$1500 to cover over the tattoo.





In that heady climate of 2014, when Buddhist nationalists helped to sponsor a number of “religious offence” criminal prosecutions, Polley was lucky to get spirited out of the country instead of winding up in jail. Only a few months later, New Zealand expat Philip Blackwood and two others were handed a two-and-a-half-year sentence for wounding religious feeling after the online publication of the notorious “psychedelic Buddha” promotional flyer for a new nightclub.

That’s not to suggest any comparison between the two cases: By all accounts Blackwood was considerate and respectful of local culture, had a debatable level of culpability in the whole mess and apologised unreservedly in response to the resulting public outrage. Cultural misunderstandings undergird the experience of a foreign culture, but there’s a difference between Blackwood’s misfortune and indelibly marking your skin with the iconography of a foreign culture without considering the potential consequences when you embark on an adventure in that culture.

You can understand why a Western tourist would be enamoured of religion in Asia, especially if, in their home societies, religion is no longer a central organising principle of society. But it’s not an attachment to a value system or a way of being – how many Westerners agree with the subservient role to which Buddhism relegates women? Instead, it’s an attachment to an aesthetic, along with a selective interpretation of Buddhism’s precepts that shuns any responsibility to respect its traditions.

There’s no universal prohibition on Buddhist tattoos in Southeast Asian countries. I used to work with a Cambodian guy whose body was inked with Buddhist iconography from the neck down. He got those tattoos when he was fighting in the jungle as a child soldier during his country’s civil war, because he was told it would deflect bullets. Would anyone suggest that a white guy getting a Buddha tattoo is performing a similar ritual of devotion? That incorporating it into their flesh and making it part of the identity they broadcast to the world is a genuine embrace of a foreign culture, and not an act of narcissism? I think Siddartha had some answers to those questions.

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