I've been an expat for a long time. It is quite rare that i meet someone that has been doing it longer than I have and while this doesn't necessarily mean that I am special, it does mean that I have seen and done a lot more than the average person who spends a year or two living outside of their own country. I have been doing it for so long that i experience culture shock when I visit my home country, not the other way around.
In my travels and the places I have lived I have met a ton of people from all over the world and most of them have been really fantastic folks. There are some undesirables out there though that give all of us a bad name and unfortunately these are the ones that stick out in the minds of the locals more than any of the people that are just living life normally. I noticed a couple of these in the past week but I have been seeing them for a very long time and in almost anywhere that I go in SE Asia.
Here's just a couple of examples but there are a lot more.
The "everywhere is the beach" people
I love Randy from Trailer Park Boys so I have no issue with him. However, the other day I was at a shopping mall and there was a guy that was actually inside the mall without a shit on, wearing flip flops and seemed to be completely unconcerned about the fact that this is not the beach. In fact, it is miles from the beach and definitely not a place that you should be walking around like this. This is not an isolated situation unfortunately and there are a lot of travelers that come to this and other SE Asian beach areas that somehow got the impression that it is ok to just not wear clothes wherever they happen to go. Most Asian countries are actually very conservative and this was clearly making people very uncomfortable. I think it takes a special kind of stupid to do this but this guy seemed to be completely unaffected by the fact that he was being a jackaloon.
When I see people like this I want to walk up to them and ask them "would this be ok in your home country?" because they answer to that question is almost certainly "no." This is not a playground nor a beach, how about having some decorum and respect?
Excessively drunk and loud in public
I have no problem with drinking and getting drunk. I do entirely too much of it myself. On the other hand though I am a very polite drunk and so are almost all of the people that I know. If we do get a new member of our group that is too loud when drunk they will not remain part of it for very long. It is on the other hand, extremely common for the expat community in any of the areas that I have lived to have a regular that is excessively drunk on a regular basis and making everyone's night less enjoyable because of it. Shouting at televisions, getting into arguments with staff, or getting irate with other patrons over something as meaningless as a game of pool that nobody is gambling on are just a few of the examples of people making fools of themselves in public.
This behavior is noticed by the locals and it reflects badly on all of us as a result. I don't know exactly what it is about being an expat that leads to this sort of behavior that I rarely noticed outside of college in the west, but it does seem to be something that quite a few people engage in on a regular basis. When I see people like this I immediately know that I do not want to associate with them and for the most part the only people that do associate with them are other people that are the same way. This compounds the problem because a gaggle of loud drunks is much worse than one on their own.
I think what a lot of people need to keep in mind is that we are guests in these countries and we are very fortunate to have the luxury of being capable of living in them. When people act a fool on a regular basis and do things that would likely result in them getting arrested "back home" and feeling as though they can do it with impunity (which they kind of can here) it makes the situation less likely to be able to continue.
How about just acting like a normal human being and being polite? Is that too much to ask?