"I didn't like him so much at first," another Thai married to a European man said of her husband, a retired French oil engineer named Jean-Claude. She gave her name as Boonyong, and she was working as a waitress in Bangkok (she was not in the sex trade) when Jean-Claude met her on a visit and asked her to live with him.

"I said, 'O.K.,' because I had just lost my father and now I could go home and be with my mother, which is what I wanted," Boonyong said. In Ban Cao alone, out of 180 families, 30 local women have married foreigners. There's a village in Roi Et Province, the Thai press has reported, where 200 women are married to foreigners, the majority of them German and Swiss. There are only 500 families in the entire village.

About 15 percent of all marriages in the northeast, a study published by Khon Kaen University found, are now between Thai women and foreign men. Most of the men are Europeans, but there are upwards of 300 or so Americans, many of them veterans of the Vietnam War who were based in Udon Thani in the 1960s and early 1970s and are living here, most of them with Thai wives as well.

There is a sort of calculated redemption on both sides of these marriages. Many of the women have painful stories, of working as prostitutes, of abandonment by Thai husbands and boyfriends, of children they couldn't afford to take care of. They make no secret of the fact that marrying some nice, older foreign man saved both them and their extended families from poverty and unhappiness.

And as for the men, many of them are divorced or unhappily married back home. They came to Thailand for a brief touristic encounter with the local sex-for-sale industry and ended up staying for life.

"In Vienna you have so many obligations," said a retired Austrian international lawyer who gave his name as Christoph Killy. He has been married for 14 years to a woman from Ban Cao. "There's so much you have to do and so much you aren't allowed to do there. Here you are free."

The truth is that deceit and tragedy, along with happy stories, are part of the picture. Houses and land, by law, have to be owned by Thais, and so there have been cases where Thai wives simply expropriated the properties built for them by their foreign husbands whom they expelled, and then invited their Thai boyfriends to move in with them.