Gray Areas and Nebulous Spaces 📁

Dank nugs and illegal babies in Southeast Asia

Hi! Can you believe we’ve been traveling for nearly five months already? Since my last note Alli and I have been through peninsular Malaysia, around Borneo, and more recently, here in Thailand. Soon we’re headed to Cambodia, and by the end of the year, Vietnam.

Here’s an essay about navigating the nitty gritty and the in-between. Let’s explore some examples where a legal gap in one particular Southeast Asian country has created an unusual gray area with wide-ranging repercussions.

Baby business business

As I learned in this excellent investigation in The New York Times from Hannah Beech, Cambodia has become a popular destination for surrogacy. In the decade since other nations in the region sought to curb the practice, “foreigners flocked to newly opened fertility clinics and surrogacy agencies in Phnom Penh,” writes Beech.

But recently, some Cambodian politicians have turned on surrogacy and have come to see the enterprise as selling babies and akin to trafficking. While Cambodia has no law against commercial surrogacy, the government has moved to ban it anyway with what Beech calls an “ill-defined injunction, imposed in a graft-ridden country with little rule of law, [that has] ended up punishing the very women the government had vowed to safeguard.” 

In a truly sad twist, pregnant women have been swept up by police, forced to give birth in prison, and charged with human trafficking. But there’s so much more, beyond just poor women being treated poorly in a poor country. Here’s Beech:

The practice flourishes in the nebulous space between those who can and cannot bear children; between those with the means to hire someone to bear their biological offspring and the women who need the money; and between those whose sexuality or marital status means they can’t adopt or otherwise become parents and those whose fertility spares them having to face such restrictions.

Complicated! I think that a “nebulous space” is such a perfect, lyrical description of what it’s like for the people and places caught up in a gray area.

Jazz cigarettes, Thai style

Next door to Cambodia, in Thailand, there’s a fascinating example of another “nebulous space.” Back in June, Thailand became the first Asian country to decriminalize marijuana. However, the law went into effect before the government had decided how to regulate it, and weed is now effectively legal, with some caveats and a lot of confusion.

As recently as 2020, when we visited Thailand right before the pandemic, guidebooks and forums warned that tourists should stay far away from weed to avoid serious punishment, including imprisonment. Now, trendy bars in Chiang Mai openly advertise cannabis with pot plants out on the street and they sell joints that can be smoked poolside. 

The change is positively whiplash-inducing, and as Patpicha Tanakasempipat writes in CityLab, it’s possibly about to shift again:

The government has repeatedly said since June that decriminalization was aimed at medical and commercial use for marijuana rather than recreational purposes — though the draft bill didn’t directly outlaw recreational smoking, it said lighting up in public will be prohibited. Other restrictions include bans on causing unpleasant smells in public, selling to pregnant women or people under 20 and commercial advertising.

But the revenue is rolling in, boosting a tourism industry eager to recover from pandemic losses. I wonder if it will become increasingly harder to put the genie back in the bottle as the government continues to deliberate. In the meantime, even though it’s hard to get a straight answer about what kind of marijuana consumption is legal, Thailand is trying out being the Amsterdam of Asia.

Big picture

Think about gray areas too long and everything starts to look like one, especially the act of traveling itself. Constant travel is a paradox. It’s both a life of leisure and unceasing movement. It’s a complete professional and personal pause, but also a way to genuinely learn something new about the world every day.

And while we spend a lot of time in cool, interesting places, we also necessarily pass through in-between, nebulous spaces. We often spend a day, or two days, just getting to the next place: hours of nothing in a tiny airport where the electricity keeps going out; the second of three boats, between two islands in two different countries; border towns that take two different currencies.

Even Asia itself can feel a bit like the middle of the world. Indonesia, in 1955, first put forth the idea of the Third World, not in the way it’s used today, but as a proud and neutral alternative to the US and USSR. It was a dream, still deferred, of formerly colonized nations rising up collectively to assert their power and freedom. And today, there’s still a bit of that, with Southeast Asian nations eager for investment and support from both the US and China, but without taking sides against one super power or the other.

When I set out to take this trip, I knew that I would change and grow, but I underestimated the dynamism and constant change of Asia itself. It’s rarely black or white, one thing or the other. These places are one thing, turning into another thing, and often passing through a nebulous space somewhere in the middle.

—Josh

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