The Naked Tourist

by Lawrence Osborne

  There is no society on earth more tolerant of the sexual drive than Thailand. Especially delicious is the Thai idea of sex as a series of gradated moods, each of which has its name: len pheuan, “playing with a friend” (for girls), len sawaad, “playing at love,” and so on. And so there is also seua bai, “bisexual tiger.” (Around two thousand people surgically change their sex in Thailand every year.) Like the Venice of the Grand Tour, Bangkok has made itself a center of world tourism, the seventh most visited city on the planet and rising, and it has done this by imitating Venice’s openness to the sex drive. No other city admits human nature as it really is, without trying to pretend otherwise. For Buddhists, this is simple; for everyone else it appears to be impossible. Few scholars of intercultural relations can say why.

  I looked down at the shoes again. Suede? But in Hedonopolis they seemed appropriate. The ladyboy and client moved on, and there was a reprise of “The Blue Danube.” Strangely enough, I wanted to dance. My hand had stopped shaking and I was drinking nothing more than a shandy—glorious how Thailand has all the British drinks—along with a plate of Thai spiced peanuts. It was now my sixth hour in the metropolis and the Jarawa already seemed a distant phenomenon, let alone a distant memory. I looked up and found a small, incredibly pretty girl sitting next to me, with a hideous pink hair clip shaped like a predatory butterfly. The gaze was not innocent, nor was it venal. It was uninnocently unvenal. She put her hands together—a wai—and uttered the obligatory sawadee ka. As any visitor knows, it is almost alarmingly easy to meet Thais who are bent on meeting you. There is nowhere to run. And why would you run? Her name, she said, was Lek.

  In the ballroom atmosphere of the Oriental lobby, lit by King and I chandeliers, I felt like an English sailor on a Samoan beach. Sailing from island to island, aimlessly and venally, greeted by Lek, who wanted money, amusement, kicks, a shot at love, a break from the street. It is the femininity that had seduced the probably bisexual Margaret Mead. The Samoan girls are well described in the literature, which is not to say they have been described as they are: honey skinned, petite, incapable of our pudeur, lasciviously merry, subtly sly, etc. And it struck me that in some ways Bangkok has become not just our Venice but also our Samoa, our landlocked metropolitan Polynesia. It is Samoa, if you like, reinvented as a twenty-first-century Blade Runner city.

  Lek was far more aware of this than I could be. She was dressed like any five o’clock commuter on the Skytrain. On the surface, Thais are prim, modest, and reserved. But they accept the divergence of appearance and actual behavior. Thais in particular separate gender, which is a public artifact to be kept riab roi (proper), and sexuality, which remains undiscussed and therefore unrestrained. Lek suggested a drink at the Bamboo Bar, where she could smoke a cigar, and walking beside me the casual bellhop observer was not to know that she was not my travel agent. If my Thai had been better, however, I would have known that lek means “small,” and in a country of diminutive women a woman has to be absolutely tiny to earn that nickname. When we stood, she came up to my hip. She giggled. Soon, she was laughing uncontrollably. The bellhops laughed as well. In my suede shoes I had become a six-foot-five-inch-tall Jacques Tati, lacking only a raincoat and a pipe—awkward, gangling, as un-Thai as a man can be. But Thai women are also bold. She demanded a Cuban cigar at the bar. “You German rich man lawyer,” she said, stroking my leg.

  “No,” I replied. “Me broke English travel writer.”

  “Trarer?” She lit the cigar, and suddenly empathetic deliciousness broke out on all sides. “What is?”

  “Like chess game. Useless.”

  “You bad man!”

  Opened in 1876, the Oriental is one of the oldest hotels in Asia. Like the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, it made its fortune from the opening of the Suez Canal, through which companies like the East Asiatic Company began taking boatloads of European tourists hungry for “the East.” It was a “grand hotel,” a new concept, and it was built inside a city with no roads, no hotels, no restaurants, and no farangs. It was King Chulalongkorn, crowned in 1868, who opened Bangkok to the West, and the grand hotel was his instrument.

  The grand hotel was conceived as a self-contained world which, for the first time, combined all aspects of travel: accommodation, catering, laundry, exchange services, telephone operators, sports, and social facilities. It was usually executed in buff white Neoclassical style—the bland operational style of British colonial buildings that reassured the clientele. Overbearing Western luxury was planted directly in the middle of overbearing Eastern poverty, and the contrast was not avoided; it was even played up. The European tourist of 1870 was hyperconscious of being an imperial creature, though the Kingdom of Siam was not a colony in any way. The grand hotel was his peaceful gunship and it had to loom impassively over the natives. In the insular East of that century, the culture shock must have been immense.

  With its opera soirees and crystal chandeliers, the Oriental rose from the banks of the Chao Phraya like an imperial fata morgana, quickly seducing the Thai aristocracy and becoming a prestigious address in the social calendar. “When a European colonist had the courage to build this, the first great hotel,” wrote Professor Maxwell Sommerville, visiting the Oriental in 1897, “all classes of Siamese opened their eyes with wonder. Somebody was fashioning an ark in their midst.” He reported that stupefied Thais visiting the Oriental often remarked “Tam jai, tam jai,” or “Please yourself, please yourself!”

  The same story was repeated all over Asia. Planted along the shipping routes, the grand hotels became oases of alien luxury visited by the hodgepodge elites of Europe. The Galle Face in Colombo, the E & O Hotel in Penang, the Hotel de l’Europe and the Adelphi in Singapore, the Hotel des Indes in Jakarta, the Bela Vista in Macao, the Hong Kong Hotel, the Raffles chain in Cambodia and Singapore: they were all arks. Almost every one of them, if it is still in operation, will have a Somerset Maugham Suite and a Colonial Bar with rattan furniture. At the Oriental, Noel Coward loved “the livery-coloured water” seen from the back terrace at cocktail hour. Joseph Conrad, who took over a ship called the Otago here in 1888, was also a frequenter of the bar—hence there is also a Joseph Conrad Suite upstairs in the Authors’ Wing.

  The Oriental cultivates a very deliberate literary air, with all the trappings and decors of literariness: cane chairs, potted palms, high tea, a library of snoozy clocks and glass book cabinets. The library walls are crammed with portraits of the usual suspects. Evelyn Waugh, Pierre Loti, Somerset. I noticed, however, the lugubrious addition of Jeffrey Archer, labeled the Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare (as yet, no Jeffrey Archer Suite). Inside the Somerset Maugham Suite, the theme continues as the Great Man’s Boudoir, with red velvet walls and gilded stags. I was allocated a butler dressed in gray silk with the marvelous name of Thaworn Champihom.

  From the Authors’ Wing parlor—the Japanese ladies play cards there all day—an underground passage runs to the lobby. The boutiques are wherevery: Burberry, Lotus Arts de Vivre, Cabochon jewelers, Pink Poodle. There is a small waterfall and a pebbled stream.

  I thought of a strange article I’d read in the Thai Airways brochure coming over from Calcutta, about a concept called “unseen Thainess.” It was, our article said, an “invisible product” that emanated from tradition, culture, and “a belief in sacred things.” Marketers have long advised the Thai tourist industry that although Thailand produces few recognizable consumer brands, the country is itself one. Marl Lindstrom, the Swedish expert on branding, has even said that the “Buddhist belief system” is part of the brand that consumers use when they visit Thailand as tourists.

  Thailand is indeed an astonishingly successful “country brand” that sells itself as such. And the Thai idea of beauty was surely contained in both the aforementioned unseen quality and the savvy required to put this quality to use.

  From the first day, I had a medical agenda for Bangkok. I lay all day in bed with brochures of clinics, hospitals, and spas costing a fraction of what the
y would in the United States or Europe.

  It wasn’t only my teeth that I could at long last repair in preparation for the life-threatening conditions of the Papuan hinterland. It was also my skin, my kidneys, my endocrine system, my failing eyes, my nails, my hair, my feet, my intestines, my bones, my spleen, and, if I liked, my soul. Repair of the last item seemed to be thrown in more or less free with any of the others, especially if it was combined with yoga. I began to feel restless, pacing up and down with a brochure for “skin perfection” or “muscle toning” and wondering if I was really looking more exhausted than I might if I only laid out the cash. Many of the clinics offered things called “cosmeceuticals.” On Sukhumvit Soi 1, all the cosmetic surgery outfits offered steep walk-in discounts. Simple curiosity began to tip me over toward the idea of intervention, experimentation. For the medical tourist is the victim of an incessant appeal to his or her own curiosity—you want to find out about your own health, to delve deeper into yourself. In other words, you become the object of your own curiosity.

  I nevertheless attempted the older-fashioned tourist excursions. Wat Po and the river temples, the floating markets, the Jim Thompson House. I took the river taxi down to Wat Po and, with a digital camera, wandered around the glitzy enameled temples with an ever-darkening sentiment of ignorant disorientation. Wat Po is a Spectacle. But what does it mean? I sat in the temple café and read some of the guidebooks on Buddhism, like all the other tourists. It was just like the Chinese tourists who sit in the park behind Notre-Dame in Paris trying with evident boredom to fathom something about the absurdities of Catholic theology. Confronted with a part of the global Spectacle, you seek to unravel its code, though seldom with much success. Meanwhile, you are hounded on all sides by demented touts who show you no mercy as you try to arrive and depart from the Spectacle with dignity. They run after you holding up chits of paper that look like used lottery tickets, crying, “You wa’ temple, water taxi, nice girl shag?” An afternoon at Wat Po was enough. Returning to the Oriental, I vowed never to visit another temple again—for, on second thought, the same energy could be used to shop around for blood-rejuvenation packages.

  Quite rapidly, therefore, I lost interest in the historical area around the river, the area subtending to the Oriental, and turned to Sukhumvit Road, the great artery that slices through Bangkok and around which is encrusted most of its farang entertainment and business. Sukhumvit is perhaps the greatest urban axial road in the world today in the sheer weight and density of pleasure it offers. Although few tourists realize it, it stretches all the way to the beach city of Pattaya sixty miles southeast of Bangkok. It is here that two great succors of the human body converge—fucking and medicine. Sukhumvit has actually reinvented medicine itself to make it something it has never been in all its short if illustrious history: a pleasure.

  Instead of visiting Wat Po and the other marvels of history that Bangkok aka Krung Thep, City of Angels, has to offer, I began to take a morning cab to the congested lower end of Sukhumvit, where there were scores of clinics to shop around in. I collected price lists for acupuncture and water therapies, dental plans and hepatitis and malaria shots. I brought them back to the Oriental, where Thunaworn would pick through them as they lay on the desk in the study. Several times he asked me whether I was an invalid. If I was an invalid, he said, his sister had a remedy for anemia that used a whole rabbit and water buffalo’s blood. He was not joking. But I pointed to my teeth and related their sad history of fear and neglect. I had not been to the dentist in eleven years. He wagged his finger and the eye twinkled. “You very bad man! You sad tooth!” And he made a face like a wounded molar, if that is possible.

  “I am doing my teeth, Thunaworn. It is why I am in Bangkok. I cannot go to the jungle with a bad tooth. What if I have a dental crisis hundreds of miles from anywhere?”

  Thunaworn made another sad face. “You fucked, sir.”

  On one of these prospective jaunts to Sukhumvit I came across an incredible hospital called Bumrungrad near Soi 3. It’s the biggest private hospital in Southeast Asia, servicing nearly a million patients a year from 140 countries, 300,000 of them foreigners. It’s a medical supermarket. Hundreds of treatments are gathered under one roof, along with restaurants, shops, galleries, and fringe clinics offering variations on the hospital’s scientific treatments, a large part of which are cosmetic. The Cosmetic Surgery unit is one of the busiest in the world, famous for its sex-change operations and discount liposuctions. The hospital offers accommodation just like a hotel, including a Royal Suite and room service. It would probably be a wonderful place to die.

  There is no imaginable procedure that is not a tenth the price in Bangkok that it would be in London or New York. The city offers bizarre pseudomedical fusions of East and West that would be illegal in a Western country. Statistics from the Tourism Authority of Thailand show that in 2002 foreigners looking for health care in Thailand grew by thirteen percent over the previous year, with 632,000 foreigners visiting thirty-three private hospitals. One in ten tourists traveled to Thailand specifically for medical treatment, the biggest customers being Bangladeshis, followed by Americans and the British.

  Even at Bangkok’s international airport, I had noticed that the free city maps handed out at the information booth prominently advertised all the plastic surgery clinics. One such was Bangmod Hospital, which offered breast implants, face-lifts, abdominoplasty, cut-price liposuction, double eyelid surgery, nose implants, laser skin resurfacing, and “sex reassignment surgery.” The twelve-member Stock Exchange of Thailand health-care services index—which includes health giants like Bangkok Dusit Medical Services and Bumrungrad Hospital—has risen more than 350 percent since July 2000, three times more than the broader Thai stock market. Medicine is big business in Thailand—the haphazard fruit of globalization and outsourcing. It is already legendary for its sex-change procedures. You can book into a hospital-hotel, order in room service, have your sex changed, recuperate around the pool for a week, then fly home with a lasting tan. Cocktails are thrown in free.

  The Bangkok Dental Hospital lies on Soi 49 near Sukhumvit Road. The soi, or small streets, in this area of the city are where the new Thai middle class want to live, and the clinic is surrounded on all sides by Corbusier-like high-rise apartment complexes fresh with recent paint. Too far to walk from the main road, the facility is serviced by fleets of taxis carrying the affluent white families from California and the Ruhr who come here to have their children’s teeth fixed.

  It is, as you walk in up the white steps, like an installation from the British TV series The Prisoner: a futuristic set burbling with multilingual voices. A serpentine pool, a small espresso bar, red and purple seats, an atrium sustained by flashy metal columns. Très Hong Kong, in the words of an elderly woman who labored in from the street clutching her jaw. Through high glass windows a tropical garden could be seen, in which Muslim women in chadors pruned away in the sunlight. Mickey Mouse faces were plastered over a wall and the blond children sat obediently in their purple seats awaiting their ordeals.

  The staff of this James Bond contraption were all female, hand-selected one would have said for attributes little associated with the rigors of dentistry. They swept around its airy spaces in white heels and starched hats, and their allure could not by any stretch of the imagination have been accidental. It is curious that the West has not yet understood the potential chemistry of sex and dentistry.

  Even the dental X-ray was erotic. My head clasped in the machine’s arms, I saw my face reflected in an oblong mirror that revealed how flushed it was as I bit on the little yellow plastic mouthpiece. The assistant saw it too and smiled. The X-ray tube rotated automatically around my head, perhaps revealing to a hidden camera the neural glow of a repressed lust. But surely, I wondered, you cannot feel lust in an X-ray machine? A dental technician came and sat with me inside a functional office. She was as beautiful as all the others. She wai’ed and said her sawadee kap. Then we looked somberly at the X
-rays.

  “You no be dentist long time?”

  I fear dentists. A sadistic old man pokes around in your mouth and tells you to stop crying. Everything reminds you of hospitals and therefore of death. Not in Thailand. Here, the male edge has been erased from things: delight returns. The fillings and the high-fusion metal crown would require four surgeries spread over a week. The total cost would be $383, anesthetics included. In New York, it had simply been unaffordable, well over $8,000.

  The surgery room overlooked a placid suburban house and its garden. Four female technicians entered and wai’ed. They said they had been shocked at the number of my cavities; I had been skating on thin ice indeed. They began, and I lapsed into a quiescent contentment, the rubberized hands reminding me of those exquisitely carved carrots made to look like roses that one gets in Chinese restaurants.

  It was a stormy day, the palms outside the window tossed about with a dry hiss. Between procedures I was advised not to look in a mirror. Downstairs in the atrium café I drank espresso after espresso, still fascinated by the Muslim women tending the tropical garden. Were Muslim gardeners cheap? There were plenty of Westerners eager to chat, which was to say compare their experiences, prices, and bargains. Most were not in Bangkok simply to do their teeth.

  Joel, a systems manager from Oakland (in my notes I wrote, “A little shifty, very bad teeth for an American”): “My girlfriend went to Landmark Plaza yesterday. There’s the wildest clinic on the fourth floor. She had a colonic irrigation done. Flushed her out with coffee. I’m going tomorrow.”