by Nick Tosches
By the late 1930s, opium dens were rare. A 1936 book, Chinatown Inside Out, tells of fake opium dens operated in cahoots with tourist-bus companies to offer a bit of “false local color.” (As for false local color, the book’s author, Leong Gor Yun, was in reality the multi-pseudonymous Virginia Howell Ellison, the author of The Pooh Cook Book of 1969 and The Pooh Party Book of 1971.)
The bust, in the fall of 1950, of a den in St. Paul, Minnesota, seemed a beguiling anachronism.
The last known opium den in New York was a second-floor tenement apartment at 295 Broome Street, between Forsyth and Eldridge Streets, at the northeastern edge of Chinatown. It was run by the apartment’s tenant, a Chinese immigrant named Lau, who was 57 when the joint got raided and his ass got hauled away. There were a few old pipes and lamps, 10 ounces of opium. And 40 ounces of heroin. The date was June 28, 1957. That was it. The end of the final relic of a bygone day.
I was assured by friends and contacts around the world that the same ouroboros had wound through every continent. Even in Asia, I was told, the opium dens had vanished within the last 20 years. It was the same story, even in the most corrupt and lawless of lands: the old smokers had died off, the kids wanted the rush, the drug lords wanted to keep it that way. Old and young who had lived their lives in these places, old and young who had looked upon and skulked through this world as had Sir Richard Burton. Sinners and saints, lawmen and criminals, drug addicts and scholars, lunatics and seekers. They all told me the same: there ain’t no such thing no more; them days are gone.
But I could not believe it. I would not believe it.
I remember Hong Kong. I was here long ago. I did not then know from vinegar, other than the kind you mixed with oil; let alone did I know from opium. Hong Kong then was a city where you could get whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted it. There was no night, no day: only the light of the sun and the light of neon, and the lush darkness, the endless rushing midnight, the true soul of the place, that imbued even the blazing dawn, where sun and neon became for one still instant the electric haze that was the single heartbeat of rest—taken upright at a bar or a gambling table, or abed in luxuriance of silk and faintly perfumed breath—that preceded the waking fiery breath of a dragon and a city that were one.
This is what I remember as I roam through Hong Kong these many years later, in the wake of the region’s return to Chinese sovereignty. It was rightfully so that the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, America’s greatest economist, praised Hong Kong as the exemplar of free-market capitalism, the only true capitalist city on earth. The fierceness of that freedom was the fire in the breath and the neon in the blood of the dragon. Now the fire is but smoke and ember, the neon anemic, the dragon feeble and more of shadow than of substance. Communism is a cement mixer that spews forth drab and indistinguishable gray concrete. Wherever Communism comes, everything—the physical architecture of the place, then its soul—turns drab and gray, and in its weakness crumbles to a drabness and a grayness uglier and grimmer by far.
Leaving my hotel, I walk out into the night, across Salisbury Road, to the wide neon boulevard of Nathan Road, whose countless winding side streets and intertwining alleys were the places where all could be had for a price, be it sex or murder, a drink of rarest snake blood or a shot of purest dope, gambling or guns, gold or embroidery or jade, amulets to ward off demons or to court their favor.
The Chinese food here is still the best in the world. My friend, a gentleman more advanced in years and in dignity than myself, is a man of respect who has lived in Hong Kong all his life and knows its labyrinthine streets and alleys like the veins on the back of his hand. (I here pause, after deleting the good Chinese name that followed the phrase “my friend” in the above sentence. I pause to state the obvious, as I have been instructed by legal counsel that “it is necessary to mention that names have been changed,” as indeed they have been. In some cases, as in the above instance, I have disposed of names entirely. Now back to “my friend.”) He takes me where I want to go, to the restaurants where no English is spoken and where white men are not welcome, the restaurants where, in his presence and with his benison, I eat like an emperor, or at least like someone who knows what he’s doing.
Handfuls of scurrying shrimp, their tiny eyes bright and their soft shells lovely with the delicate translucent blue of life, are scooped from a seawater tank, presented to us on a platter kicking and scrambling, their leaping escape to the carpet prevented only by the expert maneuvers of the waiter, who then dispatches them rapidly into a black cast-iron wok sizzling over high fire at tableside, douses them with strong fermented-rice liquor—to make them drunk in their dying, and thus supple of flesh—sets the liquor aflame, and even more expertly maneuvers their containment during the intensified frenzy of their fast death by fire.
Succulence and death. Cabbage, pig tripe, and white radish. Cobra soup—the more venomous the serpent, the more potent the tonic; gelatinous and steaming and delicious beyond description—garnished with petals of snow-white chrysanthemum. Later, amid the crowded stalls of the night market, we watch as an elderly Chinese man hands over a small fortune in cash to another elderly man, a snake seller much esteemed for the rarity and richness of poison of his stock. The snake man pockets the money, narrows his eyes, and with a studied suddenness withdraws a long, writhing serpent from a cage of bamboo. Holding it high, his grasp directly below its inflated venom glands, its mouth open, its fangs extended, he slashes it with a razor-sharp knife from gullet to midsection, the movement of the blade in his hand following with precise rapidity the velocity of the creature’s powerful whiplashings, which send its gushing blood splattering wildly. Laying down the blade, the snake man reaches his blood-drenched hand with medical exactitude into the open serpent, withdraws its still-living bladder, drops it into the eager hands of his customer, who, with gore dripping from between his fingers onto his shirt, raises the pulsing bloody organ to his open mouth, gulps it down, and wipes and licks away the blood that runs down his chin.
“Arthritis,” my friend observes to me by way of explanation. “Good live bladder. Top dollar.”
This—what we have witnessed here in the Hong Kong night—is true connoisseurship, pure of any note of bell pepper lurking in the cassis. It is the same, true connoisseurship that surrounds the secret brewing techniques of the best snake soups, the pickling techniques and proper extraction, morseling, and savoring of delicacies such as pig-face.
Surely, I figure, if this sort of rare and fine connoisseurship lingers furtively on, there must yet exist somewhere amid the labyrinths of this vast city at least one last sanctum of that greatest of connoisseurships.
Hua-yan jian, they were called: flower-smoke rooms. The flowers were courtesans; the smoke was opium. The flower-smoke room: the celestial perfumed salon of timeless serenity where one could suck on paradise while being paradisiacally sucked.
The flower-smoke rooms, which thrived in Shanghai and Hong Kong from the 19th century until the early 1930s, were of all sorts, from lowly brothels to chambered quarters of sybaritic splendor. The vast majority of them, I have been assured, were of the former sort.
My friend told me that the last and lowliest of the hua-yan jian had shut down many years ago. As for even the most low-down, humblest, and flowerless hole-in-the-wall remnant of an opium den, there was not one left in all of Hong Kong. Now, under Chinese rule, it would be almost impossible to find opium, let alone a place where it could be properly smoked. Even in the new Shanghai, where child prostitution has burgeoned amid the tourist attractions, not a flower-smoke room is to be found.
My friend was not alone in telling me this. An acquaintance close to sources in local law enforcement, after inquiries among those sources, conducted secretly on my behalf and with fine wile, was told that, while drugs were still common, the presence of opium in Hong Kong was practically nil. There was still opium to be found in the boomtowns of neighboring Guangdong Province. There, in Guangzhou, the sale of opium is pun
ishable by death. There, in Shenzhen, a few days before I was in Hong Kong, 11 drug dealers, including a teenage girl, were taken directly from trial to execution.
I stand awhile toward midnight under the big whorish neon lips outside the Red Lips Bar on Peking Road. It is like standing in church light, filtered softly through dark stained glass: a comforting, a respite, a connection with old ways, old values, and sleaze gone by.
In a music shop, I buy a couple of CDs by one of the most revered of Hong Kong’s elder entertainers, the singer of Cantonese opera who was known as Sun Ma Sze Tsang, among other stage names, and whose real name was Tang Wing Cheung. He was born in Guangdong Province in 1916, and he died in Hong Kong in 1997, a few months before the return to Chinese rule. Half a century ago and more, licenses to smoke opium were issued to certain inveterate smokers of means and standing. I do not buy the CDs because I like Cantonese opera or the singer known as Sun Ma Sze Tsang. I buy them because he is said to have been the last of the licensed opium smokers. With his death, at the age of 81, on April 21, 1997, the legal smoking of opium, long unique unto him, came to its end.
I turn to yet another native acquaintance, a gentleman of a different sort, with whom I am able to penetrate the inner circles of the triads of the Sham Shui Po district, an area so dark that its reputation as a black market serves as a veneer of relative respectability.
There are several meetings with different men, different groups of men. Again and again, the hushed word for opium, ya-p’iàn.
In the end, there is nothing that the night stalkers and gangs of Sham Shui Po cannot get for me. Perhaps a kilo of pure No. 4 heroin? A ton of pure No. 4 heroin? A truckload of pills? Artillery or explosives? American hundred-dollar bills complete with watermark, safety thread, and intaglio as fine as that of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing? Or perhaps I should like to buy—we’re talking outright ownership here—a few women, children, whatever. No problem.
But no one can bring me to an opium den. Why? Because there is no such thing.
I lean inside the hotel elevator. My tired eyes settle on a stylish framed placard advertising the Club Shanghai on the mezzanine level: SCANDAL AND DECADENCE—1930S STYLE. Downstairs, at breakfast, I read in the Hong Kong Standard of the government’s attempts “to woo a Disney theme park to Hong Kong.”
I walk into a joint on Patpong Road in Bangkok, sit down on a banquette near the bar, and within a minute there is one naked scrawny girl to my left, another to my right, a third crouched between my legs beneath the little table set before me. The brace that flanks me have squirmed and curled their way under my arms, drawn each of my hands to a breast; the one under the table strokes my crotch and thighs with her fingers and head. On the raised stage in the center of the room, five more girls perform simultaneously, one at each corner, one in the middle: two squat to lift Coke bottles with their pudenda, two undulate with spread legs against stage poles, one lies with a leg raised high, masturbating and wagging her tongue. With one hand, I squeeze a nearby nipple between thumb and forefinger. She whose nipple it is responds instantaneously with a swooning moan so overdone that when I laugh she just as instantaneously bursts into laughter herself. The three of them will continue to work me either until I agree to take one or two or all of them upstairs, or anywhere I please—150 baht, the equivalent of about four American dollars, to the house; another few hundred baht per girl, negotiated separately with them, for the night—or until I slap them away in anger like flies. This is why most Westerners come to Bangkok.
“They like Americans,” says an expatriate friend who has long been involved with one of the loveliest of the countless girls who work the joints of Patpong Road and the Nana district. “The British are cheap, the Japanese want to put out cigarettes on them, and the Germans are, well, German.”
Most of the girls are Isaan, he tells me, from the northeast of Thailand, where an insectivorous cuisine is common. We sit in the warm night air of a small cloistered square—more of a courtyard—in the heart of Nana, near where his girlfriend lives and works. The girls here are much more sedate, cooler, less rabid than those of Patpong Road.
Between two bars, directly opposite a joint proclaiming, top floor 250 girls, is a little Buddhist shrine strewn with the flowers of the girls’ frequent offering. The passage from the courtyard leads to the main drag of Sukhumvit Soi 4, where, amid much smoke of oil and grill, street vendors cater to the taste of the girls: fried grasshoppers, fried grubs of different size and kind, fried beetles, served forth hot from bubbling oil in parcels of white greasy paper; roast-blackened baby sparrows, roast-blackened chicken feet, straight from the grill on skewers of splinter wood. My buddy has brought us a package of fried grasshoppers to share at the outdoor bar where we sit. The girls pay 10 baht, the equivalent of about 25 cents, for these scavenged or foraged delectables; everybody else pays twice that.
“Have you ever had the maggots?” I ask, as he chews a mouthful of the almost tasteless fried grasshoppers, a fitting bar food, all salt and crunch, but a good source of protein as well. He shakes his head.
“It’s the baby birds that scare me,” I say.
Girls pass, approach the shrine, sweep back their hair with both hands in ritual obeisance.
“They ask for a good night, a customer who treats them kindly,” observes my friend.
Under the third precept of Buddhism, which demands abstinence from all sexual misconduct, 20 groups of women are listed as forbidden. Whores are not included among them.
Again, flowers without smoke. My expatriate friend has been living in Bangkok for many years, and he tells me that he has never heard of the existence of an opium den.
And yet Bangkok, with its vast Chinatown, is said to have boasted the biggest opium den in the world, an immense establishment on New Road, the oldest paved street in Bangkok. This biggest of opium dens is said to have been able to accommodate 8,000 smokers at once, and to have maintained a stock of 10,000 pipes. It is said to have operated into the early 1960s.
Bored with the tourist joints of Patpong Road and Nana, I have asked another friend, a Bangkok native whose good name I shall leave unsullied, to take me where the Thai guys go. We drive across town to what he says is the best eating place in Bangkok. It is a nameless operation in a nameless alley near Songsawad Road in Chinatown. It does not exist by day, when the alley is crowded with trucks and the dense traffic of human haulers. It exists for only three hours, between six and nine at night, when a few old, unsteady folding tables and folding chairs are set out in the alley near the foodstuffs, fires, pots, and pans of two suddenly materialized cooking stalls. At the stroke of six, BMWs and chauffeured Mercedes-Benzes pull up at the corner of the alley; in minutes, all the chairs are taken. There are no menus. Some nights there are napkins, some nights not. Tonight is a lucky night.
There are five tones in spoken Thai, each lending different meaning to a similar sound. I have no idea what is being said between my friend and the stall tenders, but some minutes later there arrive bowls of steaming fish-ball and noodle soup. The most coveted bird’s nests for the most precious of Chinese bird’s-nest soups are Thai: the swiftlet nests gathered from amid the paintings on the walls of a cave in the high, sheer cliffs of Koh Phi Phi Leh, an uninhabited island off the southern coast of the peninsula. A bowl of soup made from one of these small nests can cost the equivalent of between $200 and $300. And yet its taste is as nothing compared with the taste of the soup in this nameless dark alley. Its price is 60 baht, the equivalent of a dollar and change.
Throughout the night’s roamings, my friend explains that opium is a dead drug. The drug of Thailand today, as throughout Southeast Asia, is ya ba, “crazy medicine”—speed. While Thailand has all but eradicated the opium poppy in its effort to ingratiate itself with the Western powers, the country is still a central transport area for the heroin refined from the opium of the poppy fields of other, nearby regions. More and more, however, the transport caravans of the drug lords are hauling truck
loads of amphetamine as well as of heroin.
As my friend saw and convincingly expressed it, the relatively recent and fast-growing spread of cheap and plentiful ya ba is a plague that will ultimately prove far more destructive than heroin to the foundations of Asian society, just as speed itself is, in the long run, far more physically destructive and deadly a drug than heroin. I could go to the drug bazaars of the slums of Klong Toey, west of Bangkok. There I could buy all the marijuana, all the crack, all the heroin, all the speed that any man could ever crave. But I would find no opium.
In the morning, I meet with an older friend of my friend. He remembers the opium-den days of Bangkok, and he knows Chinatown well. He takes me to an ancient “teahouse” of many stories on Yaowarat Road in Chinatown. At the second landing, he exchanges words with a group of ominous-looking men gathered round a circular table. One of them nods, and we proceed through a curtain into a narrow hall that becomes a maze of narrow halls, lined with small rooms. An old woman takes us to one of the rooms, brings us two small, dirty teacups and a pot of hot tea. A teenage girl enters, then another. These girls bear numbers, pinned to their open shirts. One is No. 58. The other, astoundingly, is No. 199. How many girls does this maze hold? I like No. 58, and, ahem, she says she likes me. She pours tea into the dirty cups, begins stroking my crotch. She looks fresh, new to this place and still full of life. She speaks a little English, and while my companion lies back to enjoy his tea, I employ the only Thai that I have almost learned to properly intone: fin, which, in the second of its five tones, means opium. She mistakes my meaning as a desire for heroin. She seems shocked, makes gestures of jabbing a spike into her slender forearm. “Why want? No good.” Then blasé: “We buy, then we make love.” My companion explicates in Thai. She seems no longer shocked but, rather, nonplussed, regarding me with a bemused smile as if I were a most odd man, misplaced in time.