Thailand Confidential

by Jerry Hopkins

  Shadow Wives

  It’s probably a good thing that Thai soap operas don’t have English subtitles, because if they did, attendance at the Grand Palace and other tourist attractions might fall as visitors remained in their hotel rooms to watch the daily ration of domestic theater. Because however badly plotted and awkwardly acted these dramas may be, they offer a look at Thai society that is closed to outsiders and confirms quickly just how amazing the country can be.

  There are numerous unusual aspects of Thai culture and life revealed on these programs—with ghosts and katoey, the term used for transvestites and over-the-top homosexuals, just two of the more obvious. Still, the one that intrigues me most and I think would entrance many visitors is Thailand’s peculiar take on marriage: the taking of multiple wives.

  “What we have in Thailand is legislated monogamy but institutionalized polygamy,” Natayada Na Songkhla wrote in The Nation . “A man should only have one wife but often ends up with more. People in Thailand are obsessed by the concept of multi-wife households. The fact that we aren’t supposed to have them just makes the subject all the more compelling.”

  This is not to imply that the all men have more than one wife. In a story published in the same newspaper (Feb. 5, 2001), it was claimed by Prof. Nongpa-nga Limsuwan, head of the psychiatry department at Ramathibodi Hospital, that research studies showed that “only one-quarter of Thai male adults keep minor wives.” Only twenty five percent? As I write this, I can hear Western jaws hitting the floor.

  “Thirty five percent of the Thai men surveyed said they saw nothing wrong with having more than one wife, while fifty five percent longed to have minor wives,” the professor said. How many of these might, by some, be termed adulterers and self-styled swingers was not revealed. Nor is the good professor saying Thai polygamists live with more than one wife, as usually is the case in Muslim societies, where the Koran (4.3) says, “Marry of the women, who seem good to you, two, three or four,” so long as the man can properly care for them. In Thailand, usually there are separate residences. Although Asiaweek, in a 1999 story on Thai “concubines,” identified a meatball factory owner from Nakhon Patho who said he and his seven wives and twenty children lived under the same roof, this type of arrangement is extremely rare.

  As with so many things defining the social order in the Land of Smiles, in affairs of the heart, it pays to be first. Because it is the first wife and the children she bears who get the most respect from society at large and, significantly, all of the man’s estate when he dies, unless he has made other agreed upon or secret arrangements. Usually, the mia noi, or minor wife (the words translate “little wife”), may have to content herself with stolen evenings and weekends, an apartment or condo, possibly a car, a mobile phone, a reasonable allowance, and whatever gifts and luxuries the man can afford.

  Polygamy has been practiced by mankind for thousands of years. Many of the ancient Israelites were polygamous, some having hundreds of wives; King Solomon is said to have had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Up to the seventeeth century, polygamy was practiced and accepted by the Christian church and more recently, the Shakers, Mormons and the Oneida utopian community permitted plural marriages in the United States. And while polygamy is banned by law in all fifty states, The Salt Lake Tribune (Apr. 23, 2000) estimates there are thirty thousand such families in the West. And as recently as March, 2004, the U.S. dropped its ban on polygamy as a condition for the resettlement of some fifteen thousand displaced Hmong people, refugees from Thailand. Earlier, male refugees who had several wives were asked to choose only one to accompany them to the U.S..

  Polygamy in Thailand was practiced openly hundreds of years ago, when kings, aristocrats, feudal lords, and wealthy merchants kept young, lesser wives as a symbol of their status. Customs changed with time, of course, and in 1935 the concept of marriage licenses was introduced and further multiple marriage was banned. However, almost seventy years later, the practice of taking more than one “wife” remained solidly in place and its illegality was, like many laws in Thailand, almost never enforced, as it continued to be popular with many military strongmen, powerful politicians, and leading businessmen.

  Asiaweek (June 6,1997) told a story about Sanoh Thienthong, one of the most influential men in Thai politics—head of one of the largest political factions and for a time an advisor to the current prime minister—when he was the Minister of the Interior in another administration. He was visited unexpectedly in his Government House office by his mistress Jitra Tosaksit, a former beauty queen who had raised three children by the minister. Although she had stayed in the shadows for many years, she was quoted now as saying she now wished some recognition. When Sanoh was told she was in his outer office, he fled the scene.

  Other beauty queens and actresses have played the same game. According to Asiaweek, Ladawan Wongsriwong, at the time a Member of Parliament, was disturbed by how ‘agents’ went to ministers with photos of the winners of a beauty pageant in her home district, touting the young women as possible mia noi . “Some ministers were very angry” when she brought it to public attention, she said. “The parliamentarian came close to naming philandering colleagues, but settled for listing the minister’s initials.” One former cabinet minister, found to be “unusually rich” by the National Counter Corruption Commission, in court testimony reported by The Nation (May 7, 2003) was said to have “squandered money on gambling and minor wives, prompting his wife to salt away some of his assets in case of divorce.”

  Is it any wonder the Thai public is enchanted by such goings-on? Or that the “other woman” plays a key role in many television dramas?

  How does this work? The answer actually is in the law. In Thailand, there are two kinds of marriage. One calls for a ceremony with a blessing by a Buddhist monk, and the other is officially registered with the government. Although many couples do both, many don’t bother to register, settling for the Buddhist ceremony. Thus, the union is sealed with a cherished and honored religious ceremony, and no law is broken because registration isn’t required by law. Of course, in many instances, religious rites are also ignored.

  Which leads us into the thorny garden of women’s rights. Although the situation is changing, and gender equality is enshrined in the 1997 constitution, in Thailand today, as in many other places, women are in many ways regarded as second class citizens, the under-educated and disadvantaged result of an entrenched double standard. There is no law forbidding marital rape and the number of sexual assaults against women has doubled in the past decade; domestic violence is so common, it is rare that police will answer a call. Abortion is illegal except in cases of rape or where the pregnancy endangers the woman’s health. Men may claim compensation from any men who had sex with their fiancées, but not vice versa. As is true elsewhere, discrimination in the work place is pervasive: the higher the level, the fewer the women, and women earn less than men in all levels.

  In addition, suing for divorce is a flimsy option for Thai women. Mee choo, the Thai term for “infidelity,” applies only to women, thus for a man to divorce his wife he has only to show a single liaison between his wife and another man, while the male is free to roam without legal consequence; under the Civil Code’s regulation for termination of marriage, the woman must prove that her husband not only had sex with another woman but also that he lived with her as her husband. As more and more women, and their supporters, were elected to Parliament, attempts have been made to change the law, but so far there are too many male legislators with mia noi or sympathy for those who have them to think any new law is likely soon.

  Nor is it clear that all mia noi are unhappy. Supatra Ratananakin, speaking for the Friends of Women Foundation, was quoted both in The Nation and Asiaweek as saying one out of every five counseling sessions she had with women seeking advice on family problems were about husbands taking a minor wife. Nonetheless, she said, “Today’s mia noi is not always someone who is living with a man just for the money. A lot o
f minor wives are financially independent women who choose to live with married men because they love and understand one another.”

  Others are content to be No. 2 because they believe it’s better than being No. 0, which is what they were perceived to be, and thought themselves to be, before Mr. Big came along. Studies on the subject are few, but there’s general agreement that the minor wife more often than not comes from a social class beneath the husband’s, with less education and few if any marketable job skills. In this fashion, becoming a minor wife may be regarded by some as not only a way out, but up.

  Venus Envy

  After putting on my operating room “scrubs”—a paper garment that came to below my knees and tied in the back, a hat, and mask—I was led into a brightly lit operating room at the spanking-new Bumrungrad Hospital, where a friend of mine, Kelly Lynn Deloito, lay on her back, anaesthetized, covered almost entirely by a leaf-green, cotton sheet. Her arms were supported at her sides as if on a cross (and strapped down to prevent movement), only her manicured nails on show; her legs spread widely and hung in slings at the knees (also belted into place, while still another strap held her waist). Except for her hands and her head, with a plastic pipe fitted into her mouth, to help her with her breathing, all that could be seen was her groin, where a penis lay limp on her abdomen.

  Dr. Preecha Tiewtranon briskly entered the room, fresh from a mammoplasty (breast enlargement) in a nearby operating room. He was helped into a clean surgical gown and latex gloves. He called a cheery hello to me and slipped onto a low, stainless steel stool on wheels, rolled into position between the patient’s legs, and lifted her genitals to examine them. Seeming satisfied, he sketched a few lines on the flesh on either side of the penis in purple ink and then was handed an electric scalpel, with which he began to cut, initiating what was to be his five-hundred-andsomethingth sex-change operation.

  In recent years, Bangkok had become a sort of Mecca for SRS, or “sex reassignment surgery.” This fitted the government’s campaign to make the city a destination for all types of health care and in the years following the region’s 1997 economic collapse, the city’s excellent hospitals were aggressively marketed throughout Asia and the Middle East as if they were five-star hotels. Bumrungrad even offered cybernet cafes on several floors, a McDonald’s, and a Starbucks, to make everyone feel at home, and the original building was converted into apartments for the patients’ families.

  I’d met Dr. Preecha several times in his office, with transsexual friends or friends-of-friends, like Kelly, who came to Bangkok to complete their trans-gender metamorphosis. Before moving to Thailand, I’d had a live-in relationship with a transsexual in Hawaii and since then several of her “sisters” called me when they came to Thailand for the final cut.

  Dr. Preecha, an Assistant Professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Chulalongkorn University, said he didn’t know how many of these procedures were performed in Thailand yearly, but said he did one or two a week, on average, with patients coming mainly from Japan, Taiwan, and the U.S., but also from Europe and Australia. Thailand’s indigenous katoey population— the word is a generic for the cross-gendered and more obviously gay—provided another patient base. The largest density of transsexuals was in Pattaya and, increasingly, in Phuket, where katoey cabarets were an entertainment staple. Dr. Preecha said his former students performed SRS in those cities, too.

  Most transsexuals—people who actually make physical changes to their bodies, as opposed to transvestites or cross-dressers, who merely dress up convincingly (or not convincingly)—don’t have their genitals surgically removed, satisfying themselves with hormone therapy, which tends to discourage body hair growth and adds a layer of fat to cover masculine angularity. They get breast implants, let their nails and hair grow long, and try to learn how to walk and talk and live as women. Some keep their male genitals because they can’t afford the surgery, others because they don’t want to give up orgasms; many because they don’t want to take a step than cannot be reversed.

  (Most Japanese transsexuals have their testicles surgically removed rather than take estrogen shots. The effect is the same.)

  SRS is a growth industry in the world today. (A funny word to use when talking about what also might be called castration.) Check the Internet and you find surgeons in the United States, England, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Singapore, Taiwan and, of course, Thailand. The girls who come to Dr. Preecha say they do so because he has the most detailed and candid web page (he even gives hotel costs and warns of possible medical complications, which many surgeons don’t mention) and because of the artistry he’s performed on their friends. Kelly, a thirty-six-year-old Hawaiian-Portuguese who was engaged to an engineer, had examined some of Dr. Preecha’s earlier work on her “sisters” before making her own commitment. Another compelling factor was the cost—US$5,000 in Thailand as opposed to US$15,000 or more at home.

  Thais paid about half what foreigners paid for SRS, as well as for other sex surgery. For example, a foreigner was charged US$2,200 for a mammoplasty, which could be done with either saline or gel implants, and locals were charged about US$1,000. Not long ago in Pattaya some poor katoey had condoms filled with a mystery goo inserted into her chest, which of course had to be removed. It was a field where some of the “doctors” were as phony as their surgical handiwork.

  The night before taking her final step, I took Kelly and her friend Kalei out for drinks. Kalei had had her sex-change and breasts done by Dr. Preecha in years past and now she was back to have her hips and thighs built up with silicone shots, by another doctor in Bangkok. We went to Casanova, one of the katoey bars at Nana Plaza, a three-story congregation of mainly go-go bars in the city’s Sukhumvit district.

  I’d taken others to the bar before, so when I walked in, the girls gathered around us and removed their tops to show off their breasts while urging Kelly and Kalei to do the same; they didn’t mind at all. Some of the girls even dropped their G-strings. More than just a “show-and-tell,” this was a hands-on experience as the girls squeezed and fondled each other’s implants for elasticity, amid squeals and oohs and ahhs. Pretty soon, Kelly was stripped to her underpants and heels, showing off her silicone hips and thighs, something the local girls rarely can afford.

  For an hour, the girls talked about their body parts, swapped police stories and makeup notes, gossiped about where they bought their bathing suits and lingerie, and about which doctors did what to whom.

  The next day at the hospital, after having her blood tested for HIV and getting an enema and going through the all the rest of the pre-operative rigmarole, Kelly said soberly, “I know that no matter what we do, we’ll never be the gorgeous women we want to be, we’ll still be pre-op or post-op transsexuals. But this means I’m doing all that I can do. This is my new birthday.”

  In the operating room, an anesthetist sat near Kelly’s head. Five nurses were in attendance, along with Dr. Preecha’s associate, Dr. Sattha Sirithantikorn, formerly one of his students. After making his initial cuts with an electric instrument that simultaneously sliced and cauterized, the lower abdomen was peeled back on both sides of the penis. The testicles were removed, the skin left in place to form the labia majora and minora, and a hole was cut between the anus and where the testicles had been. The surgeon enlarged the cavity with his gloved fingers. The other physician introduced a stainless steel suction tube to remove the blood.

  Dr. Preecha then turned his attention to the penis, skinning it and removing most of the interior and leaving the hollow flap of skin still attached to the body. The end and open side were then sewn to form a kind of sleeve, which then was pushed into the vaginal cavity, an act that gives this procedure its medical name “penile inversion.” A ten-centimeter-long object that looked like an oblong egg was slipped into the cavity as the sleeve was sewn into position around it. The “egg” was removed and the doctor inserted his fingers to feel if all was well.

  (Dr. Preecha explained that yea
rs ago, the skin of the penis was discarded and skin was taken from another part of the body to form the vagina. This technique was abandoned because of scarring where the grafts were taken and because the skin had no elasticity, whereas the skin of the penis was highly stretchable. In some cases, he said, the penis was too short to be practical as a vagina and a second operation was necessary, using a piece of the colon to extend the vagina’s length. This was especially true in Asia, where penises were generally shorter than in the West.)

  A catheter was pushed into the urethra, so that the patient could urinate during the first days of recovery. The doctor stitched the catheter into place, using the root of the penis and the shortened urethra to form a clitoris. Or, at least, a reasonable facsimile; there was no guarantee it would be sensitive to stimulation. Ninety minutes had passed.

  Suddenly, the doctor was up and gone, off to another operating theatre for another mammoplasty, as Dr. Sattha slipped onto the stool to begin the final sewing up, forming the labia. Two small drains were inserted in the labia ridges to take away seepage during the five days that Kelly would remain in the hospital. The vagina was rinsed with a huge syringe of water and a funnel-like instrument was inserted with a condom pulled over the end of it. A surprising length of gauze soaked in antiseptic was then pushed through the funnel and into the condom, filling the cavity, to keep it open and clean. The funnel was removed, the condom was tied off and stitched to the patient’s flesh to keep it in place.

  Dr. Sattha invited me to examine his and his mentor’s handiwork. Did it look like a vagina? There was some swelling and discoloration, natural following any surgical procedure, and the stitches and drains and catheter distracted from the beauty of the surgeons’ creation, but, yes, I said, it did. Next, the whole vagina area was packed with gauze that was then taped into place with ten-centimeter-wide adhesive. Now only the catheter and a second tube for blood drainage remained. Kelly was wheeled out and taken to a private room.