Thailand Confidential

by Jerry Hopkins

  Of course, his music was best known at home. Every day at eight a.m. and six p.m., all local television stations in Thailand played the national anthem, which was composed by the King. It was also played before most concerts, movies and sporting events. Joggers in Lumpini Park, Bangkok’s largest park, halt when the anthem is broadcast and everywhere, the citizens of the Kingdom stand.

  In addition, the King composed the alma maters for three of Thailand’s leading universities (Chulalongkorn, Thammasat and Kasetsart), along with love songs, rags and blues, many of which have been recorded by a number of artists. In a popular Bangkok nightclub frequented by jazz and blues fans, over the stage is a huge photograph of the King playing the saxophone, the instrument for which the club is named.

  When Hucky Eichelmann moved to Bangkok in 1979 to join the music faculty at Chulalongkorn—after teaching at the University of the Philippines in Manila—his repertoire was limited to Bach, Vivaldi and other classical composers. What he discovered was that the Thai audience for classical guitar—and for classical music, for that matter—was practically nonexistent.

  “Then I learned that Thailand’s King wrote music, and that the people knew and loved the music, just as they loved the King,” Hucky recalled. “So after getting permission from the palace, I recorded an album of ten of the King’s songs. A year later, the King called for a command performance and I was formally introduced.”

  Hucky said 350,000 copies of the album were sold, an astonishing number for a market of Thailand’s size. His new tribute to the monarch, called His Majesty’s Blues, contains fifteen more royal compositions, spanning the range of the King’s works, including not only the blues, but also love songs and Dixieland-inspired rags.

  “The King’s music is good,” Hucky said. “He has written some very lyrical things. His patriotic songs are sincere and his ragtime is fun. He is spontaneous, a part of his love for jazz. There is in his repertoire, as in his reign, a sense of balance.”

  It’s been many years since His Majesty traveled abroad with his saxophone. Yet, his music still circles the earth as Hucky spends about half of each year touring Europe and the Americas, taking the royal repertoire to a growing audience. “I tell them that there’s a king out there writing and playing music,” he said. “At first, they don’t believe it. So I play a few of the songs and the people really enjoy it. I am a guest in this country and this is a way I can pay something back.”

  Recent years have not been kind to royalty in much of the world. In many nations, monarchy is regarded by some people as archaic, or merely ornamental. Nothing more needs to be said about the state of royalty in England, where the crowns have been knocked askew by those wearing them, and the tabloid newspapers have left the poor dears hanging in tattered embarrassment.

  Yet, in Thailand, portraits of the King and his Queen, Sirikit, were prominently displayed on the walls of virtually every home and business in the Kingdom. In Thailand, H.M. Bhumibol Adulyadej and his family were revered, in much the way royalty everywhere was, once upon a time. The King of Thailand was— and is—most insist, the embodiment of national unity, the glue that may be what holds the country together.

  The glue that held the King together? Surely music played a role. He once told a group of students—who later joined him in a jam session—that “the purpose of music is to educate and relax the mind. We musicians can express our feelings and awaken reactions. Music can be used for satisfaction, for amusement, to help us persevere.”

  The Name Says It All

  Love for Sale

  When I arrived in Bangkok in 1993, I was an aging, libido-gone-astray, Western male awash in The World of Suzie Wong, Thai style. Welcome to the Land of Smiles, indeed. Thailand had been the place for casual, convenient sex for farangs since the 1960s and America’s war in Vietnam, when the big, pale foreigners came to Thailand for the first time in large numbers for what was euphemized as R&R, and, thirty years later, I joyously joined the parade. Patpong and Soi Cowboy and Nana Plaza were places where nearly anything imaginable was available at an affordable price, where horny males could push “rewind” on life’s remote control and return to an unrequited adolescence...and this time, the girls would all say yes and make you think they loved it. I was reminded of something one of the literary McCourt brothers said: “You’re never too old to have a happy childhood, and I’m having mine now!” If, as the song promised, “dreams come true in Blue Hawaii,” fantasies came true in Bangkok. It was biology at its friendliest, gynecology with a beat.

  Some farangs told sad stories about the girls they at first claimed to love and subsequently called gold-diggers and worse. In too many cases, the epithets were deserved. Wallets and ATM cards were stolen. Some of the men were drugged as well as robbed. Many bar girls convinced several men simultaneously to send money every month, employing one of numerous commercial services available to answer the letters that came to them, juggling their boyfriends’ holidays so that they didn’t overlap. (One of the services, located near the American, British and Dutch embassies, was called Language Lovers’ Translation Centre.) Money was solicited to pay for fictitious parental illnesses and other needs at home that bore no relationship to reality. Many of the women played their customers along though they already had Thai families. Some even married them just to escape poverty, divorcing them as soon as they were settled in a country where common property had to be shared and alimony—an alien concept in Thailand—was an accepted part of a marital split.

  Still others had Thai boyfriends, many of whom took the women to work on their motorbikes and lived off their earnings. More than anyone would suspect actually preferred female companionship. Yet, none of this was revealed as the little darlings crawled all over their customers’ laps and whispered, “Number One! Lob you too much! Go hotel?” I had an attorney friend who worked in Phnom Penh and took his holidays in Bangkok who said, “I never knew any group of people who lied more than lawyers until I started spending time in the bars.”

  Still, the tide of males rolled in, praise going where praise was generally deserved, the thousand-baht notes right behind them. Some of the non-complainers surely were the ones Tennessee Williams was talking about when he said that the city’s name said it all. There was no other way of putting it: if you weren’t happy at home in Sacramento, Manchester, Frankfurt, or Perth, you booked a flight to Bangkok, where young, beautiful women would give you the time of your life. Even if you were a geek or old or fat and couldn’t get or keep it up. Affordably. Paul Theroux wrote that in Bangkok, even the “most diffident” got laid.

  But it wasn’t just quick and easy sex. Tens of thousands of the pay-bar-go-loom liaisons led to marriage, removing the women at last from the poverty that impelled most of them into the business to begin with. Many actually fell in love with the men, went home with their new husbands, stayed married and became parents. I knew several such couples, in Australia, Europe and the United States. One of them adopted the woman’s son, who subsequently became an avid cricket player. More, including me, remained in Thailand, building homes upcountry for our wives and the new families that usually came with them.

  It didn’t always work out—how many marriages did?—but it was a nice arrangement, at least initially. And for the women who worked in farang bars with no interest in marriage, they kept whatever they got from the men with no questions asked or taxes paid. It wasn’t a profession that earned respect for the women— quite the opposite—and too often the exploitation, on both sides, ended in misery. But it was not an altogether bad deal.

  No question, sex in Thailand was different from what these men got at home. There, affection didn’t come with the lap dance or fleeting (and expensive) assignation. In all countries, prostitution was a service industry, but in the West the emphasis was on the second word; it wasn’t just a business, the male often felt as if he were getting the business. In Thailand, on the other hand, the emphasis more often was on the first word. Service. With a smile.

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bsp; Thai women were more compliant than Western women. They weren’t secretive about wanting the man’s wallet, but most seldom made demands they felt the man couldn’t meet. They rarely criticized or complained. They were playful, almost childlike, and however incompatible it seemed considering what they did for a living, they were touchingly (and refreshingly) shy. They didn’t mind holding your hand in public, making you look like a stud in front of all the other farangs in the hotel and its neighborhood, they laughed at any attempt at humor, and they were superb, intuitive actresses, convincing even the oldest, grossest, fattest and most alcoholic that they were the men they’d been sitting in that grim bar all night longing for. Then did it again the next night and the night after that, some of them for years before marriage, or age, or boredom, or fatigue, or AIDS, or something else retired them.

  No one knew how big, or profitable, the business was. Bernard Trink, a longtime American expat who for decades had a half-page column every weekend in the Bangkok Post to report on what he called the “demimondaine”—something that never would have been allowed in the more politically correct U.S.—said there were three hundred thousand prostitutes in Thailand. Others said more, or fewer. But whether they were men or women or katoey (a term generally used to mean transsexuals or transvestites), there was no question they were numerous, and it was estimated that the “sex industry” contributed between eight and thirteen percent of the country’s visitor revenue, depending on which academic or NGO or bureaucrat was doing the wild guessing.

  A businessman friend of mine who lived and worked in Asia for more than twenty-five years, all of his business in the travel industry and much of it in Thailand, said he didn’t like it that the country had an international reputation of being “a whorehouse with temples.” He wished the government would just ban public sex outright, close all the bars and massage parlors and so on, and keep them closed for two years, so everyone could see how much of the nation’s economy really was dependent on it. Not just in foreign exchange, but in jobs. Close the bars and other sex venues, he said, and you crippled airlines, hotels, travel agencies, restaurants, taxicabs, tailors and jewelry shops, and uncounted other categories of commerce, putting half a million people out of work in Bangkok alone. Then, my friend said, the government could legalize or decriminalize and regulate the trade responsibly or else maybe get serious about finding some other source of foreign revenue.

  Maybe he was right. Thailand used to recognize prostitution as a legal trade. A law designed to fight venereal diseases in 1909 called for the registration of brothels and sex workers, along with mandatory health checks, but otherwise regarded the job without the condemnation that now seems so universal. Then in 1960, sex for sale was outlawed and in 1996 more laws were passed in an attempt to control trafficking, rape and child abuse. By 2003, the government started talking about making it legal again, or at least decriminalizing the trade, the idea being to eliminate the criminal element while opening up new sources of taxation.

  It should be noted, by the way, that what my friend was talking about and I was a part of—sex tourism, and all the wonderful and horrible things it led to—comprised the most visible part of the sex industry, but only a small part of it. Although farangs and other foreigners frequently were blamed for creating this highly profitable industry, the truth was quite the opposite. Thailand’s sex market had been examined numerous times by sociologists, historians and many others, all of whom agreed that prostitution was an integral part of Thai society long before Vietnam, and that most of the sex business then and later was conducted by Thais and for Thais. Numerous international organizations such as the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) and various UN agencies concentrated their efforts not on the go-go bars and massage parlors and so on that catered to travelers, but on the brothels and other “local” sex venues and trafficking of Thai women overseas (as well as the “importation” of women to Thailand from Burma, China and Cambodia), because that’s where the more serious problems were. In the farang places in Thailand, the women were there by choice, and even if most venue owners treated the women like cattle, they still were free to come and go.

  (Many, if not most, sex workers were given only two or three days off a month, there were no benefits, there was no sick leave, and fines were levied for missed days, lateness, and a host of other minor infractions. Some bars required a minimum number of “bar fines” a month—in the busier places, as many as twenty—and pay was deducted for every one they were short. So, too, with hustled drinks. Although some were promised salaries as high as US$200 a month, double what she might earn in a factory or as a retail clerk, few actually received it. Brothel workers and massage women had it even worse; most got no salary at all, shared their earnings with the boss, and had to pay off the cops. In the bars, that was the owner’s responsibility.)

  In a book published just after the country’s economic crash in 1997, Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle, for my money the only book on the subject on a crowded shelf worth reading, the authors said the boom was “fueled by national and international development polices that deliberately functioned to impoverish certain regions of the country, in order to maintain a heavy flow of age- and gender-specific workers for low-paid unskilled jobs, including those in tourism.” This led, they said, to “more desperate families, more and younger women recruited to prostitution and worsening labor conditions, greater competition, smaller incomes, and more menacing health conditions, as safe sex becomes a luxury fewer girls can afford to insist on.” I thought this a cynical view, but not entirely off the mark.

  In the winter of 2001-2002, a new Minister of the Interior launched a campaign to create a “New Social Order” and dozens, maybe hundreds of entertainment venues (mainly bars) were raided by police looking for underage drinkers and administering piss-in-a-cup drug tests on the spot. [See “Piss in a Cup,” page 119.] Few were arrested, but the media invited to go with the cops on the raid dutifully reported how hard at work authorities were at cleaning up Bangkok.

  At the same time, Bangkok and a majority of other provinces were zoned and if your business wasn’t inside one of the approved “entertainment zones,” closing time was moved, for many, from two a.m. to midnight. Dancers were told to put on their clothes and sex shows were shut down, as were a number of clubs. (Oddly, in numerous gay bars, open anal and oral sex continued undeterred.) Forecasts of gloom and doom followed, but I don’t think it meant much. It wasn’t necessary for a woman to shoot darts at balloons and smoke cigarettes with her you-know-what or disappear beer bottles and live frogs in the same cavities to get a traveler’s attention. A bikini on stage and a smile over a cola that cost a couple of dollars afterward was more than most men could find anywhere else.

  Whenever I returned to the U.S., inevitably I was asked about AIDS. I always said most of the problem was not in Thailand’s tourist bars—although it is there, too—and that government studies showed that more generally it was in places that catered to Thai men, whose promiscuity was as well known as it was rampant. It was a cultural tradition in Thailand for young men to be taken to a brothel by an older friend or relative when they were teenagers as a rite of passage, I said, and it was accepted that they then returned to the brothels for the rest of their lives. Thai law also permitted a man to take a mia noi, or “minor wife,” and when the leading political party announced in 2004 that it would not allow their party members who were adulterers and polygamists to stand for re-election to Parliament, the protest was so vociferous, the proposed ban was dropped. [See “Shadow Wives,” page 65.] Thailand was, like so many “emerging” nations, still up to its hips in chauvinism and testosterone.

  It was further shown in studies conducted in 2004 by Assumption University that Thai teens were having sex at a younger age, with one survey claiming that twenty seven percent of those aged thirteen to nineteen had had sexual experiences, and the average age was fifteen. More and more female university students admitted se
lling themselves by the hour in order to buy cell phones, clothing and other fashion accessories.

  This was rarely reported outside Thailand. Instead, international media wrote almost exclusively about foreigners, thus it was the Western customers and pedophiles who got the headlines, not the Thai ones, who outnumbered the farangs exponentially. Because the media had clients to satisfy, too, and newspaper readers and TV watchers back home couldn’t have cared less about what Thai men did with Thai women, they wanted to hear about the bargirls of Patpong and Nana Plaza and the juveniles. So they became the subjects of countless “exposés” and news reports and documentaries and tedious academic tomes, and the hundreds of thousands of sex workers who served Thai truck drivers, fishermen and the military, three of the occupations that drove what surely was one of the nation’s biggest service industries, went largely ignored.

  Meanwhile, in a quiet little side street not far from several five-star hotels in Bangkok’s Sukhumvit district, there was a bar that offered blow jobs starting at ten a.m. A couple of blocks away there was another where the women stood in a line against the wall; those on the left were available for anal sex and those on the right were not, and customers were encouraged to take two in any case; if you ordered a second drink it would not be served, because this was not a bar for drinkers. While in southern Thailand, in an attempt to win back tourists from Malaysia driven away by insurgent violence, open-air restaurants, cafes and go-go bars announced a new policy, allowing male customers to touch any part of the female employees’ bodies, including intimate areas, for up to ten minutes for fifty cents.