The story of a young Thai man, who wanted to find out how much a beggar makes in Bangkok’s Chinatown area and masqueraded as a beggar to do so, went viral on TikTok on Saturday, soon attracting two million views and 130,000 likes.
According TikTok user “KTN Food”, the man first made his clothes look old and tattered and made his face dirty, like a beggar, and left his condominium to take a motorcycle taxi and then the MRT to Chinatown.
Opon arriving there, he chose a spot on the pavement in front of a well-known hotel. He sat cross-legged with a plastic glass in his hand and, with a “wai”, begged passers-by for money.
He said in his post that some passers-by looked at him and one of them asked what he would like to eat. He responded, saying he would like to eat pineapple.
After an hour, he said he counted the money he had received, amounting to 325 baht, which is more than the daily minimum wage, adding that, if he begged for six hours in a day, he could have earned up to 1,800 baht, or 55,000 baht in a month.
He recalled that, when he was a student about a decade ago, he went to Siam Square to beg for money from passers-by and made about 10,000 baht after about five hours.
