by Peter Ferry
Bobby was tall, reed thin, and almost handsome. He had huge doe eyes and a hesitant, shy manner. When I knew him better, he admitted that he had, indeed, come to Thailand looking for a woman. He was not alone.
Bangkok is the brothel of Asia, and the typical tourist is a single male between the ages of twenty and fifty from Australia, Japan, Arab countries such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and European countries such as Germany. In fact it is so comparatively rare to see a single Western woman here that you almost blush when you do as if you have encountered your sister when you are leaving an adult bookstore. The whole city has a slightly sordid quality to it. There are peep shows, freak shows, and live sex shows. There is the famous Bangkok massage which can even include a massage and, of course, there is the conventional roll in the hay at every turn; every hotel permits prostitutes to ply their trade (even the most expensive and exclusive) and every cabdriver is a procurer. The buyer can contract for any sexual service at a fraction of what it would cost in Tokyo, Paris, or New York.
But it is more than economics and availability that give Thai prostitution its unique character. That comes from services Thai prostitutes are willing to provide that are not sexual. “They call them temporary wives,” said Bobby. “They do your wash, bathe you, polish your shoes while you sleep, go out and get your food, take care of you if you are sick, laugh at your jokes, rub your back. It’s wonderful.” Thai prostitutes sell companionship and more. They sell the illusion of love—temporary love—and perhaps even love itself sometimes. It is always dangerous to put a good face on anything as insidious and evil as prostitution, but I could not deny my feeling that there was something human happening there. We all need so desperately to be loved.
I thought while in Thailand about an old friend who visited Bangkok some years ago. Now he is a prominent Chicago attorney, but then he was just a kid on a once-in-a-lifetime around-the-world jaunt. He told me later in hushed tones about a Thai girl who had fallen for him. Yes, she was a prostitute. Still—he would awaken to find her watching him. She loved to hear him talk, so he talked and talked. She cried when he left, so he gave her half his money. “She asked me to take her with me and I’ll tell you”—he smiled a little sheepishly—“I actually thought about it for a minute.”
When I first arrived in Bangkok after twenty-one hours on planes and in airports, I headed right for the hotel bar. It was 10:00 P.M. I ordered a Singha beer and made a few notes. A young Thai woman was sitting beside me smoking, talking quietly with the female bartender. She seemed bored, perhaps sad. Suddenly two big Australians burst in. They were all backslaps, wet kisses, and beer. Before I went to bed, one of them was folded around the Thai woman. He was saying hoarsely and not very discreetly, “Okay, okay, okay. I don’t care what you was last night. Last night is gone forever. All I care about is tonight, and all I know is that tonight you are my lady.”
At 7:00 the next morning, the coffee shop was full of young Arabs and their Thai girlfriends, who were working the early shift because their boyfriends don’t drink. (The girlfriends of Australians didn’t come on duty until somewhat later in the day.) They were all having Cokes and Marlboros for breakfast and beating time on the tabletops to loud rock-and-roll tunes. One couple drank from two separate straws but one glass; the atmosphere was sort of Third World malt shop. Then a Thai girlfriend huffed through the room, and her large African boyfriend hurried anxiously after her. They both looked as if he had just insulted her meat loaf.
I read a guidebook, ate toast, drank canned orange juice. People who came into the room glanced at me a bit curiously. I felt conspicuously alone. It is a feeling I had throughout my visit to Thailand. “Is he a priest? A cop? A queer?” Occasionally I felt the need to explain, even somehow apologize. “I’m committed, you see . . . made a promise . . . professional objectivity . . .” I didn’t mention my obsessive fear of AIDS because no one else seemed at all concerned. “Oh, a doctor checks the girls every week. They all carry condoms,” an American I met said blithely. “They really got it under control here. Asian success story . . . you can read about it.” Besides, it seemed a bit like talking about plane crashes at 30,000 feet.
On the bus going toward the center of Bangkok, I studied the hotel brochure because it had a map of the city. I noticed two pictures—one taken in the lobby, one in the coffee shop—of very happy-looking Western men and very young Thai girls. This is the ugliest face of Thai prostitution. It often involves children. The photographs were no accident. They were advertisements.
In brothels girls are segregated by age. Those younger than eighteen are on one side of the room; those older than eighteen are on the other. Men, especially Western men, it seems, like little girls and the younger a girl, the more popular and successful she tends to be. Bobby told me that when it was mentioned in passing that the girl he bought in Bangkok was twenty-one, she objected vehemently, even tearfully. She was only eighteen, she swore to Bobby. He didn’t care; the pimp shrugged. But to the girl it was more than a matter of vanity. Thai prostitutes, like international gymnasts, have brief, early careers.
Late the afternoon of my first day in Thailand, I wandered through the shops and fashionable hotels along Rama IV Road. Perhaps it was just that I was now attuned, but everywhere I saw Bangkok odd couples. Sometimes they walked hand in hand, sometimes arm in arm; sometimes they seemed afraid to touch, like seventh graders on their first date. And neither that day nor any day did I ever see anyone smirk, raise an eyebrow, or look askance even when the difference in ages was obscene. If this was not considered normal, it was at least routine.
That evening I ate an early dinner in the lovely garden of the stylish J’it Pochana Restaurant, and they were all around me. There was a very elegant and well-dressed Thai woman of about thirty-five with a drunken German man who nodded over his food and sneered at her. I could not figure out their relationship. She did not fit the stereotype, but neither did she seem a wife or secretary. There was a good-looking young Australian fellow trying earnestly to talk to his Thai girlfriend. He was not getting very far. There was a fat, handsome American with several gold rings, a brandy snifter in one hand and a huge cigar in the other. The little girl across the table from him played with the straw in her Coke. When they left, she nearly fell off her spike heels.
Back at the hotel, an international soccer match was on the lobby television. They were all sitting there together: the Arabs, the Aussies, the Europeans, the one African, even the Japanese. Pass the bean dip, please. Across the way all of their girlfriends were gathered around one big table in the coffee shop. I watched them. I looked at them. I wonder if they were good spellers, because that is what Asian women had always been to me: pretty, passive little women who followed the rules and won spelling bees. I thought sitting there in that coffee shop watching this strange, interesting little community of prostitutes how seldom I had looked at Asian women’s faces. That had all changed very recently—not only because of my trip, but because at home I had found myself suddenly and dramatically thrust into the life of a young Korean woman who seemed hell-bent on not being typical, and was making me reexamine the prejudices I didn’t know I had.
I changed into my bathing suit and robe and went down for a swim. The Aussie from the night before was doing slow, tortured laps, while his girlfriend sat at the edge of the pool. He stopped every few minutes and bobbed beside her talking confidentially. I dried off, ordered a Singha, put my feet up, reminded myself several times that I was on vacation and told myself that I was having fun. But when I opened the Bangkok Post, the first story I saw was about a police raid that had freed girls held in white slavery. Those under sixteen years of age were in government custody.
Bangkok was getting me down. I decided to leave the next day on the overnight train through the mountains to Chiang Mai, the capital of the north. It was on the train that I met Suzanne Schmidt, a German filmmaker who had been interviewing bar girls for a documentary on prostitution. She had been impressed by their cando
r and refusal to justify, excuse, or rationalize. I asked her if they are all great actresses. “Oh, no, not at all.”
“But they can’t be sincere—”
“Oh, yes, I think so. They are polite to us; they are polite to each other. They wish to please. They are gracious hostesses who want their guests to be at ease and happy.”
“As hostesses, yes, but as lovers—”
“They understand affection differently. Perhaps it is Buddhism. They see all relationships, not just this one, as transitory. They have fewer expectations than we do.”
On the same train I met a social-services agency worker who strongly disagreed. (She asked not to be identified.) She had lived in Southeast Asia for nearly twenty years and had two adopted Laotian children, both now teenage girls. “They (Thai girlfriends) are very sad girls. They do not want this. It is forced upon them. Many are too poor and ignorant to have any choice. If you knew some of the things I have seen. There have been fires, and afterward they find the girls chained to their beds.”
“Still, many seem to function quite freely.”
“For many it’s their only chance.”
“Chance for what?”
“Chance to make money, to stay in fancy hotels, eat in fancy restaurants, buy clothes, buy cheap jewelry—these can be very young girls—even have a Westerner fall in love with them and take them away.”
“Does that happen?”
“Sure, and someone wins the lottery every day.”
All of this was on my mind a week later when I had dinner with Bobby Quinn and Sahli. Before Sahli crossed her arms and left, I had asked Bobby what was wrong with the girl in Bangkok. “Nothing, really. She is a wonderful girl. Do anything for me, but it was dark in there, and I was nervous. I don’t know. She’s a little chunky. Sometimes I kid her and say I’ll trade her in at ‘Happy Days’—that’s the name of the massage parlor—but—”
“Could you do that?”
“Oh, yeah, but she gets all upset, says ‘No! No! No!’ She doesn’t want to go back. So”—there was a long pause—“besides, she has a kid, and she doesn’t want to go to Alaska.”
“Go to Alaska? Did you ask her to?”
“We talked about it. I showed her my pictures.” He produced a battered envelope, twenty-four shots of bleak, treeless landscape, his boat, his friends, the town, a buddy’s cabin that looked a little like a clubhouse adolescents might have built, and some aerial views.
“Most of the women there have been around the block a few times. Been around a few blocks. You can go to Anchorage and get a woman. Go to Seattle. Sure would be nice to have a woman out there.”
“How about Sahli?”
“Yeah. She says she’ll go.”
“You asked her?”
“Yeah.”
The next morning when I got into the front seat of the old Nissan Cedric with the guide, Roger Hodges and his wife Namor were already in the back. We were off for a day of touring northern Thailand, flirting with the Golden Triangle, visiting a Meo tribe village, watching a staged elephant show high in the rugged teak forests, stopping at an experimental orchid farm. There had been just enough rumors of guerrilla ambushes and drug-war skirmishes in the area to add spice if not real peril to our excursion.
Roger was a pleasant, circumspect Australian who folded his long legs before him and sank deep in the seat. I had no idea of his height until we got out sometime later. He and I chatted while his wife, who was Thai, talked to the guide.
In the course of the conversation, I said that I did not like Bangkok very much. Roger liked it. “Canberra,” he said by way of explanation, “is a city of bureaucrats. Quiet . . . unexciting.” He worked as a shipping clerk there. This was his sixth trip to Thailand. On his first he met his wife. On his third he married her. Now he had brought her back to visit her family and friends. He himself was a great admirer of Thailand, its people, its natural beauty, its culture, its history. “Thailand has been here for two and a half thousand years, and we in the West think we have culture. It is the land of the free.” (This is a title claimed by Thailand because, unlike most of its neighbors, it was never colonized.) “I’ll tell you, if there was ever a war, I would want to be on Thailand’s side. The Thais never give up.”
I was not entirely sure Roger knew what he was talking about, but I liked him. He was a retiring, homely man in his early thirties who didn’t always know where to put his hands, especially when I took a picture of his wife and him in front of a little waterfall we had stopped to explore. Then she was off with the guide, stepping from stone to stone headed upstream.
Roger and I took off our shoes and cooled our feet. Yes, she quite liked Canberra. There were other Thai girls there she saw. She spoke some English; he spoke a little Thai. “But it is a very difficult language. There are forty-seven letters, but only one vowel. Then there are ten more letters that are used only in ceremonial words. And there are no prepositions.”
Namor cavorted on the rocks above, mugged for us, called out in a screechy voice. She was cute, but not pretty. She still wore the bright T-shirt and tight jeans that are the uniform of the Thai girlfriend, but she had abandoned the high heels in favor of more sensible sneakers.
“She is a very innocent creature,” said Roger, watching her bemused. “By that I mean without inhibitions, very natural. She has no sense of Western morality, you see.” I was a little surprised by his paternalistic tone. “I have only to feed her twenty-four hours a day. She eats constantly.” Later, on the way back to the car, she raced ahead to a food stand. “See?” He smiled.
That evening, my last in Chiang Mai, I had drinks with Bobby Quinn again and told him about Roger and Namor. Then, late the next afternoon as I was hurrying to catch the overnight back to Bangkok, baggage in hand, I saw Sahli coming down the platform toward me. We were both very happy to see each other, as if we were old friends or more. We were tempted to embrace, but both of us thought better of it at the last moment.
“Sahli,” I said, “what in the world are you doing here?”
“Bobby.” She pointed to the train and held up eight fingers.
“Bobby’s on the train?” I said. “He’s leaving Chiang Mai? But why?”
That was a question she couldn’t negotiate. She shrugged and smiled. We bowed, giggled, again resisted the temptation to touch each other, and parted. I turned to watch her go, and she turned once, too.
After I got settled, and we were under way, I found Bobby in car eight and bought him a beer. I was surprised that he was on the train because he had not intended to leave for two or three more days. But things had changed. Bobby had searched out Roger and Namor, and the two couples had spent the day together. Roger had had some very specific advice: “Spend as much time together as possible. Then go home. Write letters. Give it some time. Come for another visit. Then make up your mind.”
Bobby was on his way to Bangkok to see if he could get a visa extension. Both he and Sahli knew that the odds were slim, but . . . he imagined her out on the crab boat with him. Perhaps she could cook. They had lain in the dark and talked. She seemed willing. Still, she was so quiet, so shy. He wished she were more outgoing, like Roger’s wife.
That evening I stopped to talk to an American woman in my car. She was a linguist from San Jose, California, who had lived fifteen years in southeast Asia and taught the last two at the University of Chiang Mai. I repeated what Roger had told me about the Thai language. She smiled and shook her head. It was all wrong. There are many vowels and, of course, there are prepositions.
In Bangkok the next morning Bobby and I shared a cab. He gave the address of his old hotel.
“What about the girl there?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t much want to be with her after Sahli, but I don’t want to hurt her feelings.” He paused. “I could give her to you. Do you want her?”
“Sure. I’ll give you two Mickey Mantles and a Whitey Ford for her.” We both laughed. “No, since I leave tomorrow, I don’t
want to blow it. Then I couldn’t be smug about all of this.” And I realized that I was apologizing once again for not having taken part in Thailand’s carnal circus.
Across the narrow street from my new hotel was a strip joint. Girls with waist-length hair and tight skirts sat at the open-air bar out front. When any potential customer passed, they stopped talking, leered, postured, licked their lips, winked, and whistled. They reminded me of Loop construction workers on their lunch break.
All day I wandered through Bangkok’s shops and bazaars, its Indian market and vast Chinatown. Officially I was shopping. Actually I was thinking about Bobby and Sahli and Roger Hodges and Namor and the Korean woman back home. About the tiny schoolchildren I had seen everywhere who all wore blue slacks or skirts, crisp white shirts, and carried black satchels. About the rooms full of chanting monks in soft saffron robes and the Thai pirates who preyed upon refugees. About the giggling Thai kids who played Motown tunes as the train from Chiang Mai climbed into the mountains and the obnoxious, funny teenagers who shared a bottle of Thai whiskey and leaned screaming from the train windows; they reminded me of my old high school crowd. About every pretty girl I had seen with an ugly man. About the hundreds of cabs that had honked at me and the dozens of people who had stepped into my path and asked, “Where you go, man?” About the woman who had crossed the street from her house to squat beside me when I sat in the shade by a stream and touch my leg and ask, “I love you?”
I was up at dawn. I rode the city bus to the airport because it cost much less than a cab. It was Sunday, and neither the bus nor the streets were crowded. Across the aisle from me, a girl slept. She held a brochure in her hand. On it I could read in big red letters “Sexy Gal.” There was a snapshot of a girl posing one hand behind her head a la Marilyn Monroe. The sleeping girl’s hair had fallen forward so that I could not tell if she was the girl in the photo. I watched her. I wondered if she was up very early or very late. I suspected very late. Now that I looked, she was wearing white leather slacks and high heels. She was carrying a quite expensive leather purse. On it, I suddenly realized, were emblazoned dozens of little Elmos.