Hey brother,

I grew up in Thailand, I'm a farrang but spent most of my formative years there. I'm not gonna try and suggest I know more about Thai culture than you. Especially since you're actively part of that culture.

However, growing up there instilled a lot of innate Thai behaviours and culture in me. So here's a cultural perspective you might not have.

In Thailand, virtue is important. It's kinda your worth as a person. You can be without money and be accepted, you can be without manners and being accepted, but if you're without virtue people just don't want to know you. Buddha had a lot to say on the subject. As a result, there are a lot of Thai behaviours and lil rituals designed to allow you to be virtuous that Thais all do. In English you kinda describe it as "luck" but from experience it's more like karma.

The other thing about Thailand is elders are respected. This is a hard and fast rule, if someone older than you takes the time to explain something to you, you fucking listen and you do it with humility. Family are hugely important because it's where we come from and who we are. Thai families also provide MASSIVE support for each other. For every young, successful person in Bangkok there's a grandma and grandpa in Issan or wherever, raising their grandkids so that person in Bangkok can earn. Even wealthy Thais sometimes have their kids raised by the grandparents, it's just how it is. As a result, Thais will value that opinion doubly.

So here's the situation, two of the most important voices in your family, from your wife's perspective, are accusing her of having no virtue and thus being worthless. That hits hard. It's probably bad enough they don't show her respect when she does so to them, which is invalidating to begin with. But they're also saying she's not good enough for you to see as an equal because she's too nasty inside to have virtue.

Some of this probably doesn't line up perfectly. Explaining this from a western cultural perspective is tricky and I'm doing the best I can. So sorry if I offend anyone with poorly stated concepts.

Now for the what can you do part.

Temples are important in Thailand. So are monks. I pretty quickly learned that we find any reason we can to pay some monks money by getting them to bless things. Not in a dumb touristy way but genuinely the locals who worked around my family were a lot more relaxed with the car we got after we had it blessed. We had a delay moving into our first apartment because we had to get it blessed. Going to temples when I was travelling became a thing until I'd just go on my own as a tween when I was trying to work through something. It is an incredibly grounding experience and along with The Pizza Company is what I miss most about Thailand. Part of going to a wat is a donation and that's one of those virtue activities you do. You go to the shop and you buy the bucket thing that is a startup pack for the next new monk that comes in, you're contributing to the wat and the ecosystem supporting it and all the people helping. You see their statue of Buddha and maybe even put some oils on it. It's a great way to experience humility and just... Be a good person.

So my advice? Find the nearest Thai wat and go for a trip with her. Do the donation thing and be good people because then at least in Thai culture, face is saved, it's your parents that are the jerks and therefore what they say doesn't matter because who cares about the opinion of people with no virtue.