Hi there.. welcome to my cyberspace home page. I'm a former cyber-junkie until one day, my aunt took away my computer and put me into a pageant. After a year or two of modeling, I'M BACK into cyberspace again with friends who are s tranger than me (Putt is one of them). With free time on our hands, we decided to start a cyber-magazine, and I am the lucky star of the week - FLAVOR OF THE MONTH.

I left Thailand when I was four, my brother Pe, 2. Dad had an idea about a business venture. Mom thought it would be a good idea to teach her babies English, so with a luggage in one hand and a baby in the other, both my parents returned to the place they received their Master's Degree - Michigan. Dad financed the trip by selling our house, which was on Sukumvit Road for a small sum. It was suppose to be a short visit, maybe a year or two then we were suppose to come back to Bangkok. But things got complicated; Vietnam, threat of Communism, the Domino theory (that didn't happen) and the student uprise against the Thai government. So we stayed. But things weren't so peachy in Michi gan either. Most of my life through elementary school until high school, I was treated like a Vietnamese boat-refugee. Being the only Asian in my school, the question I received the most was, "So, when are you guys going back home?" Being different, meaning not bru nette, blonde and with a pointy nose, meant I was picked on the most at school. We ate strange food, they said. (Personally, Nam Pla, fish sauce, smells very yummy, thank you very much!) We talked strangely they said, (there are other languages besides English, I said proudly!) And most importantly, we looked different (we are from Thailand, I said, not Mars...) I was teased, laughed at, and made into the butt of many cruel jokes. "Hey, watch out she might eat your dog." Hahahaha. "Show us a karate chop-chop like Bruce Lee." Hahahaha. I just kept my silence and put my mind to my studies. "I'll show you," I said under my breath at the age of 10.

I graduated at the top of my high school class of '89 and received three scholarships to study journalism at Michigan State University '93. After four years at MSU and five internships I headed to Thailand to escape the blistering cold Michig an winter and scratchy throat, runny nose allergies of Michigan's hayfever season that lasted from Spring until Fall. I landed in Bangkok by myself in the fall of '93. So here I am, financially well-off as a writer, part-time professor at Bangkok Univer sity and Chulalongkorn University, presenter for hundreds of products: Coca-Cola, Mercedes-Benz, Sifone shampoo, etc., modeling assignments for magazines and M.C. of a tv show. The last I heard, that red-headed freckled faced 10-year-old bully who thoug ht I might eat his dog, is married, divorced with two-kids with a Chevy pick-up to his name. There's truth to the saying, "Those who laugh last, laugh the hardest."

My aunt made me do it. But I'm glad she did. While staying with my aunt at her house in Bangkok, I idle around the house playing with my computer on the Internet until 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. A true IRC junkie. With bags under my eyes and blurred vision, I decided to get out more, so I did a little modeling that my aunt suggested. Quick pay that only took a few hours of my time and wasn't illegal either, "can't get better than this," I thought. But after a while, it got into my aunt's head that her niece was the next Miss Thailand.

I stopped protesting and decided to do it when a camera test at a studio turned me down for a facial cream commerical. They either wanted a luk-klung (half Thai, half Caucasian face) or a well established star. That, "I'll show you!" attit ude came back into my head again, so I decided I wanted to win, to show people a full Thai woman is just as worthy of beauty and respect as any farang, (Caucasian). I won. Modeling and commerical contracts galore. As for the facial cream, HAHAHAHAHA ; >

Pageants are one of the the most over-rated game shows in the world. To what standard can one measure beauty? Women and the public put too much emphasis on numbers and measurements that don't add up. Is a 36D suppose to be better than a 3 2A? Maybe for a tryout for Baywatch or Playboy but not for any professional setting. Is 178cm suppose to mean tall or is 160cm short? Is a 22-inch waist the ideal? How about a 35-inch hip? Women are not Barbie dolls, folks!!! Behind it all, i t's pretty much superficial stuff we are talking about here.

I might be called, "biting the hand that feeds me," but the truth of the matter is, I believe the more developed a society: meaning higher educated and higher cost of living and wages, the less important pageants will become. Of course I understand the power of a woman's beauty is something we all like to look at, but there has to be more to life than something that is skin deep.

Actually I learned a lot from my experiences as Miss Thailand, it's a lesson in life about business, profit-from-behind-the-scene, greed, envy and not being eaten by a sea of sharks. I survived it, still well intact because I've been really luck y. I had a great manager and two good bodyguards: my dad and my King-Kong size brother.

What's after this when my flame dies down and I become a regular person again? I don't really know. I'm still travelling that road, Robert Frost knows so well: Life doesn't have a road map we can easily look at and plan our destination from, we just keep on going until our trip is over.

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