by Matt Gross
*No one at the paper ever discussed hiring me full-time. Once, early in my Frugal Traveler stint, I asked a copy editor if I should push for a job offer. “Why,” he asked me, “would you want to work in this vale of tears?”
Chapter 5
The Best Policy
In Which I Try to Come Up with an Ethical Response to Developing-World Tragedies and My Own Role in Perpetuating Them
Lina’s skin was dark, even for a Cambodian, and her kinky hair was pulled into two short ponytails. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall. She was sitting next to me at the Walkabout, an Australian bar in Phnom Penh, wearing a black sundress that seemed to be covered in thin, white, diagonal stripes—they were actually the words “sex girl” printed over and over again in very small type—and she had just offered to give me $40 to spend the night with her.
“I like you,” she said in English, faking a pout. “Let’s go home.”
This was awkward. I gulped my Angkor beer and tried to figure out how to tell her no. This was going to be difficult, not least because I wanted to say yes—to take her to the apartment I’d rented by the river and strip her of that obscene outfit. But I had a girlfriend back home in New York, and I didn’t want to have to lie to her. And so I told Lina the truth.
“I can’t,” I said. “I have a girlfriend. I can’t.”
She pouted for real now. My honesty didn’t matter. Every expat in Cambodia had a girlfriend or a wife, and that never stopped them from taking home prostitutes like her. “But I want to,” she said. On the stool next to Lina, her Vietnamese friend Quyen looked skeptically down her nose at me.
On my other side, Mark, a photographer friend who was just a few years older but whose red face was deeply lined from sun exposure, shook his head, then exchanged a few sentences with Lina in Khmer.
Our artist friend Buckminster, he explained to me, had taken Lina to his place the previous night and—who knows why?—paid her far too well: He’d given her $50. Now Lina was feeling flush and generous.
“She’s a nice girl,” Mark said. “You really don’t have a choice. Say yes.”
Mark was entirely right. Lina was a nice girl—energetic, sassy, silly, chatty—and to refuse her was to insult her, to remind her that she was nothing but a hooker, no match for the nice, official girlfriend in America. And if I accepted—well, so what? I could come home from this monthlong vacation, my premillennial jaunt in 1999, and tell the easy lie, knowing that, like most people, my girlfriend would believe me unquestioningly. Plus, I’d make $40.
So why did I say no? I had many reasons: For one, I don’t like lying. I don’t mean this altruistically, in the sense that it is simply, universally better to tell the truth. Rather, it’s because I find lying easy—so easy that when people believe my lies, I’m disappointed in their gullibility. With strangers, this matters less, but with friends and family, I have high expectations. I don’t want to think poorly of them, I want to believe they’re as bullshitproof as I am, and so I try to tell the truth, even when it hurts.
But I had a more immediate reason for saying no. Because—and neither Lina nor Mark knew this, nor do most people—I had a history with hookers. A lousy history.
Spend twenty-four hours in Southeast Asia, of course, and you’ve got a history with hookers. They are tragically, stereotypically, everywhere: at the bars in the tourist districts, smiling at you from the motorbike cruising next to your taxi, hovering in the lobby of your mini-hotel, slurping noodles with their johns at the all-night Chinese restaurant you’ve drunkenly wandered into for after-hours dumplings. They can be aggressive, bashful, bipolar, stoned, confused, haughty, alluring. Their faces can be caked to lighten their complexion, or they can look untouched, peasant girls trucked in from the countryside. They can be crude, broken, looking only for the next $10 fuck, or they can act so sweet you’re tempted to call them your girlfriend. Indeed, there’s often a fine line between the girl you pay for sex and the girlfriend for whom you buy clothes and drinks, whose little brother’s education you fund, whose mother’s medicine you pick up from the pharmacist. And this is only the beginning—there’s a whole rainbow of prostitutes, an infinite spectrum of the savvy and the innocent, the willing and the enslaved, the vigorous and the ailing and the desperate.
How to deal with them—and with all the other tragedies of life in the developing world, from beggars and thieves to street children and adults still suffering from birth defects or wounds suffered in the war—is a real dilemma for travelers, men and women, backpackers and jet-setters. Are you supposed to be offended by the intrusion of their presence into your vacation? Or amused, as if they’re scenery in the louche, Third World atmosphere? Are you supposed to be crushed by the unfairness of it all, that some should go hungry and legless and abused while others should fly halfway around the world in search of adventure? Or should you be moved to do something about it, whether by dropping coins into the gnarled, outstretched hand of the man at the noodle shop, or by seriously taking up a cause and working with aid groups to alleviate poverty and injustice? Is there a single right answer?
These were issues I dealt with almost from the day I moved to Ho Chi Minh City—and indeed, almost everywhere I’ve traveled since. Back in 1996, I would walk out the door of the Lucy Hotel and in the damp heat of the rainy season instantly encounter evidence that, well, Vietnam had a ways to go. The sidewalks were cracked, uneven, unnavigable, crowded with parked motorcycles and food carts, smelling of trash and sewage. Half the street was composed of makeshift shanties. Little kids squatted at the curb edge and shat into drains that did not lead to treatment plants. Beggars, some able-bodied, others on crutches—one, I remember, with twisted, useless legs, crabbing around upon a makeshift plywood skateboard—would put out their hands and ask for a dollar.
At night in the bars, I’d see street kids. A sweet eight-year-old girl had been taught to say, in near-perfect English, “Would you like to buy a fan?” Others sold sticks of gum. One kid in particular captured my attention: He was short, with an overlarge head and eyes that never focused properly. He spoke with a bit of a slur, and he called everyone di già—old whore. We called him Peanut Boy, or Peanut Head, and rumors about him swirled: He was thirteen but looked five. He was a heroin addict. He was an Agent Orange victim. Whatever the truth, he was simultaneously sweet and sour. He could be cute, a damaged baby you wanted to cradle, until suddenly, out of nowhere, he’d grab your nipple through your shirt and twist it hard, and laugh. When he tried to play pool, it was heartbreaking—he could barely peek over the edge, and you got the sense he would never grow tall enough to see the felt.
This scene wasn’t just taking place in rough-and-tumble Pham Ngu Lao. After dark, in the center of town, amid the graceful old French colonial buildings, homeless families slept on cots, or sheets of cardboard. Every time I’d leave Pho Hoa Pasteur, the most famous noodle shop in the former Saigon, a man whose legs were missing below the thigh would smile at me and hold out a baseball cap. Elsewhere, thin women with thin babies would mime putting food into their mouths.
In the face of such depressing moments, it was hard to figure out how—or even whether—to respond. My first instinct was always to hand over some small amount of money, one thousand or two thousand Vietnamese dong, about ten or twenty cents. But as I quickly learned, that merely drew other beggars over: If I had a thousand dong for one, surely I had the same for all? And if I did give out money, how could I be sure that the cash would go to its recipient? In Bangkok, where I and others would go to renew our visas, we heard rumors that panhandlers were organized by the mafia, with some of them intentionally crippled in order to bring in donations.* Who’s to say it was any different in Saigon?
The same seemed potentially true of the street kids. Where were they getting these fans and packets of chewing gum to sell? Who would the money truly go to? With them, in a way, it was easier. Peanut Boy and Fan Girl didn’t really expect anything of you, and if you bought them a Coke or a
bowl of noodles, they were happy and, a little to my surprise, politely grateful. They took what they could get. There was no pressure—only an aura of desperation that lingered after they’d left.
With the beggars and the kids, there was always a simple alternative: Walk away. Ignore them. Make your face a blank, impassive mask that sees nothing but what it wants to. And if you must acknowledge the poor filthy creature before you, it is solely by a slow, subtle shake of the head, your eyes half-closed, as if you’d just remembered something shameful that someone else, somewhere else, had once done long ago.
It sounds callous, but when you feel beset by demands for your money and your attention, when you just want to sit on a plastic chair in a leafy alley and enjoy a twenty-cent iced coffee with condensed milk, when the trauma of witnessing the hell that, for hundreds of thousands of people, is everyday life in Saigon—or Bangkok or Mumbai or New York City—grows to be too much, you sometimes have no choice but to shut it out entirely.
This is what I would do from time to time: make myself blind. What cripples, what orphans, what buckling pavement and excremental stink? I had my coffee and croissants at the French café, my air-conditioning (from time to time) and studio apartment, a credit card, and a passport that would get me the hell out of there if and when I needed to get the hell out.
But that attitude took its psychic toll too. Willed blindness is only temporary, and in startling moments that dim veil reverts to Honda exhaust and the smoke from burning garbage, which clear to reveal a shattered but spirited populace clamoring for your charity. How sweet that sound!
For months, I yo-yoed between affection and impassivity, bestowing or withholding generosity with all the capriciousness of a Greek god. And it worked—these twin attitudes made my life in Saigon bearable. If I seemed to be turning gullible, I’d shut down, and when I seemed like a jerk, I could pay off my conscience with a spontaneous gift to someone in need. And when I felt like a sucker, the wallet would seal up again. It doesn’t sound like an attitude to aspire to, and it was hardly a unified philosophy, but the human brain does not demand consistency to get through the day. All it needs is relative peace. And with my mind at rest, I began to feel that maybe I had a place here in this strange country.
Except when it came to the prostitutes. Frankly, I was scared of them. There were bars—darkly illuminated by neon and Christmas lights—where the only women inside were working girls, and these girls would stand in the doorways, in long, cheap evening dresses, their faces overly made-up, and try to lure you in, sometimes by actually running out and grabbing your arm and yanking you inside. They fawned and spoke little English, and I couldn’t see how anyone would find them attractive. They smelled desperate. But so did I, probably.
I was also afraid because they reminded me that although I felt like I was slowly getting a grasp on the country, I really had no idea what I was doing there. First was the language barrier: Their English was minimal, my Vietnamese was worse. But this difficulty with the language served as good protection against prostitutes. If I couldn’t talk to them, I couldn’t even come close to sleeping with them, right? Or could I? All around me, it seemed, were guys for whom mutual incomprehensibility was no obstacle to sex. They wanted a girl, they bought her, easy as that. And when they’d got her back to the minihotel or the shiny, shoddily built suburban villa, they knew just what to do with her—or so I imagined, because at the time I had no idea what to do with a woman. Oh, I’d had girlfriends, including a long-term relationship through college, but sex had been awkward at best, and more often disappointing. I had neither stamina nor dexterity nor confidence; forget performance anxiety—I was in terror of what I might have to do.
Not that I had much chance to do anything anyway. In my first few months in Vietnam, I’d had two not-very-close calls. One was with Marie, the cute, bright student from my literature class at Ho Chi Minh Open University, whose energy and enthusiasm brightened up the lecture hall every week. The day I announced to the class I was quitting, she and I spoke for a while afterward, then rode our bicycles home together, a wonderful ride marred only by its end: We turned off Pham Ngu Lao onto the Lucy Hotel’s side street, but then I forgot that she didn’t actually know where I lived, and when I swerved over into the stretch of sidewalk that served as the Lucy’s parking lot, I rammed my bike into hers, knocking us both to the ground in front of Lucy, Ms. Luc, and assorted other hotel denizens. Marie and I exchanged phone numbers, and Band-Aids, but we never spoke again.
The other near-hookup was with Loc, a well-spoken Vietnamese guy I’d met in my first days at the Saigon Café, that fluorescent-lit corner bar. Loc didn’t announce his sexuality right away, instead just chatting me up, and since I didn’t know anyone in Ho Chi Minh City at that point, we made plans to go riding around town on his motorbike. The tour was brief and random, and after we’d sped past the French-built Catholic church, he asked me, seemingly out of nowhere, “Do you want to see the Jew?”
“The Jew?” What could that mean? Was there a synagogue in Saigon?
“Yes, the Jew. The place with lots of animals?”
“Oh, the zoo.”
Instead, we went to his family’s place and, sitting in his tiny bedroom, which opened onto a billiards parlor the family owned, Loc played his acoustic guitar and told me about his last girlfriend, an Australian businesswoman who’d brought him along on a trip up the Vietnamese coast, and his current boyfriend, another expat who was away in Singapore or Hanoi. “Sometimes I go with boys, sometimes I go with girls,” he said. Then: “Have you ever done anything with boys?”
“No, sorry,” I said, shrugging. “I guess I just like girls.” From my backpack, I pulled out my notebook and showed Loc a drawing I’d made of Tammy, copied from the photo I took of her after our car crash on the Eastern Shore. The drawing was terrible, and I felt bad for us both—for disappointed Loc and for my own tragically incompatible tastes.
“That’s okay,” Loc said. Then he strummed his guitar and sang me a Bryan Adams song: “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You.”
In March 1997, the Viet Nam News sent me to Phnom Penh to cover the First Biennial Southeast Asian Film Festival, a grand series of new releases from all over the region, mixed with several old French movies starring Alain Delon, who was rumored to be making an appearance. The Cambodian capital was then at the height of its post–Khmer Rouge Wild West phase. Large bags of marijuana were sold at the central market. Armed men, some of them soldiers, others unaffiliated, drove around in glistening Toyota 4x4s. The morning after I arrived, a peaceful protest against corruption in the judicial system was attacked by men with grenades; at least sixteen people were killed, and many more injured.
At night, after the screenings had ended and I’d written my reviews and faxed them back to Ho Chi Minh City, I’d hit the bars with Douglas, who’d come over from Vietnam to show me around this seedy town. Douglas would lead me to Heart of Darkness, Sharky’s, and Martini’s, a notorious hooker bar with a flesh-packed dance floor and a slightly less claustrophobic garden with concrete tables and benches. That was where I found Ali—or rather, where she found me. She’d spied me and Douglas right away and sauntered over in her peach blazer—a dark-skinned, short-haired tough girl jutting out her chin and telling me in a low, defiant voice she wanted me to fuck her. Flattered, terrified, I refused. But I danced with her anyway, until she left to pursue surer clients.
Douglas, who was far more at home in this underworld, was, I sensed, disappointed in me, and after lunch the next day we embarked on a trip to Svay Pak, a brothel village eleven kilometers from the city. Why did we go? I can’t speak for Douglas, but for me it was simple fascination that there existed in this country, on planet Earth, a village of brothels. To this twenty-two-year-old, it sounded fantastical, unreal, something out of Bukowski or Vollmann. Or maybe it was because I wanted to test myself, to see how far I’d descend into Cambodia’s dark heart. Or maybe we had no reason—it was just something to do, something that
one did, on a hot afternoon in Phnom Penh.
We found two motorbike taxis, told them “Kilometer 11”—Svay Pak’s distance marker on the highway—and soon we were wandering around a sleepy compound of shacks and long, low, warehouse-like buildings with corrugated tin roofs. It was in one of these that we found ourselves sharing a beer with two Vietnamese girls. I can’t remember their names, only that they both had long hair, loose white dresses like Edwardian heroines, and too much makeup. Douglas chatted comfortably with his girl in Vietnamese, while I struggled to ask basic questions like “How old are you?”
After his beer, Douglas announced, “I’m going to get a massage.” I’d like to say that Douglas winked at me, but he probably didn’t. Then he left me alone on the long, sticky black nylon couch with my girl.
This was awkward. I asked her where she was from, how long she’d been in Cambodia, did she want to go back. I sipped my beer, and pulled out my camera. She tried to look alluring—pouting, draping herself across the couch, giving sidelong glances, even kissing me on the cheek—as I took a few shots. But clearly, this was not going where everyone—she, Douglas, Douglas’s girl, the middle-aged mama-san who’d met us at the door, the taxi drivers who smirked and dropped us off—assumed it should go.
I asked about her mother. She said she missed her.
My Vietnamese conversational skills exhausted, we lapsed into silence.
Douglas and his girl returned. He looked refreshed. He may very well have had a massage.
“Ready to go?” he said.
It was not many more days before Douglas and I were back at Martini’s, along with Ravudh, the young desk clerk from our hotel, and his friends, most of whom were the well-heeled children of government officials. I was half-drunk. Or mostly drunk, I can’t remember. Ali cornered me, rubbed up against me, restated her desire, and I led her back to our table in the garden, where we ordered snacks. I got Chinese dumplings. Ali got a mango and sucked lasciviously on the sweet, fuzzy pit. Ravudh and his friends departed. Without my ever saying anything, everyone understood that Ali was coming home with me.