Thailand Confidential

by Jerry Hopkins

  The next day, when I visited, she held up a jar of liquid. Inside floated what looked like the neck of a chicken with a penis top and two small eggs. “What do you think?” she asked of her abandoned testicles. “I can get them gold-plated, they’d made nice earrings, yah?”

  Five days later she was back in her hotel room, where I found her lying on her back, nude, silicone breasts standing erect like pale oranges, a dildo—a real one this time—inserted into her vagina (with a condom and KY jelly). Following the doctor’s orders, she did this several times a day, she said, to keep the cavity open and stretched.

  “Look how much I had in there!” she exclaimed as she pulled it out. It looked like six inches (fifteen centimeters). “I’m so happy!”

  That night we all went to a cabaret to see the drag queen show to celebrate and two months later, the engineer married the “new woman” in his life.

  The Country Club

  I met Hans two years ago in a bar in Chiang Mai, where we compared travel notes. After consuming several beers, he asked if I kept track of the women I took to bed with me. I said I hadn’t, although I could create a reasonable list, if pressed. I admitted it wouldn’t be a long one.

  “Do you know how many countries you got laid in?” “Every one I went to. I traveled a lot with my wife,” I said. He shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. You said you’re divorced now, right?”

  I nodded and ordered more beer.

  “So, do you know how many nationalities you fucked?” Hans asked. “You know. Japanese, Korean, German, Egyptian, Thai?”

  “Oh,” I said, pausing for a moment as I ticked off my modest body count, “—four: American, Thai, Vietnamese, and Indonesian. Five if you count Hawaiian, but she was an American citizen.”

  He said, “I’ve fucked seventy-three different nationalities, and this is my first time in northern Thailand, so I expect to add at least one hill tribe girl tonight, or maybe a Burmese. I hear there’s a lot of Burmese in Chiang Mai.”

  Thus I was introduced to a small but what appeared, in time, to be an expanding group of men engaged in a competition to see who could have sex with the most women, not counting in numbers but countries of origin. Men used to count such conquests numerically and with the worldwide explosion of the international travel class—another aspect of globalization—now some of them apparently counted nationalities.

  This was quite amazing to me. I’d met many people who collected visa stamps in some sort of geographical quest to see how many countries they could visit. But never had I encountered the same sort of activity determined by having sex in those places. It was, one of the men told me, sort of like collecting stamps. Another, somewhat older dude compared it to the country collecting of ham radio operators.

  Initially, I didn’t believe it. I thought it was an amusing notion, but I wrote it off to the sort of bragging you find in most bars when men get together and drink. Stamp collectors physically possessed the stamps and shortwave radio fans exchanged QSL cards. How the hell did anyone know who was telling the truth about getting laid? This was, after all, an area of male activity bursting with exaggeration and prevarication. Country club members could point to visa and immigration stamps in their passports, proving they’d been here and there, but what real evidence of sex was truly provable?

  “It’s done on the honor system,” a Brit named Kevin told me in a bar in Bangkok. “That sounds right ridiculous, but it works, because when we catch a bloke in a lie”—and the habitual liar always got caught, he assured me—“word goes out and he can put his stiffy in retirement.”

  It all sounded like wishful thinking to me. But, still, the notion rang true. For as long as men got laid, I was certain that some of them kept count. In recent times, porn stars and rock musicians and famous athletes admitted to fucking women in the thousands . Were the Roman legions or Ghengis Khan or Marco Polo counting?

  No one knows how many “members” are in the Country Club today, or even if the club exists. (A few insist it’s spelled Cuntry Club, by the way, giving me the shivers of more doubt.) However, it may be assumed that country collecting may be more than a lark, because over ensuing years in Asia from the time I met the first participants back in the mid-1990s, I met others, some of them “specialists” who focused their sexual pursuits in narrowly defined areas. Hans told me he was considering specializing in the hill tribes of Southeast Asia, as that could run the numbers up dramatically. He said Vietnam alone had sixty minority groups.

  I also met someone whose activity followed his studies in anthropology, who spoke knowledgeably about Abyssinian Galla girls in East Africa (now Ethiopia) who during the nineteenth century were famous in published anthropological writings for vaginal muscles so skilled they could sit on a man’s thighs and induce orgasm without moving any other part of their person. He said his “thing” was to recreate the sexual experiences reported in such classics of sexual literature as the Kama Sutra and Arabian Nights .

  Another member of the club called himself a “sex war correspondent,” said he traveled from one disaster area to another in much the same way that the guy who wrote The World’s Most Dangerous Places tempted his fate. It started in South Africa, he said, and took him to Bosnia, Haiti, Cambodia, East Timor, and Afghanistan.

  “You know [Nelson] Rockefeller died in the saddle,” he said, “but that was in boring New York. Imagine the final cum in Iraq.”

  Still another, who told me he was a Hollywood music producer, said he planned to lease anthology rights to songs for a CD he hoped would finance his future travels: David Bowie’s “China Girl,” Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto’s “Girl from Ipanema,” the Coasters’ “Little Egypt,” the Beach Boys’ “California Girls,” etc.

  Of course, history complicates and enlivens matters. As worldwide travel became more convenient and affordable, the score potential of the Country Club ballooned, assisted by recent politics. Not so long ago, a Russian was a Russian (or Soviet citizen); today, she might be Ukrainian, Azerbaijanian, Kazakhstanian or, giving a nod to my friend who likes danger with his sex, Chechnyan.

  Similarly, because it’s possible to pick up several countries in one location—in Bangkok, for example, there are prostitutes from many nations at work, and in California there are recent immigrants from dozens of nations—another group of collectors, who call themselves purists, insist on scoring in the nation of origin; no migrant whores or boat people allowed.

  Actually, I discovered that the guys didn’t argue that much about the numbers or criteria. Occasionally, they did quiz each other, trying to find a flaw in the competitor’s boast, looking to cut the guy out of the game. But generally I found that the Country Clubbers mainly argued about which nationalities were “best,” bickering about preferences for perky Asian breasts and wispy pubic bush vs. the appeal of the hairier, blonder voluptuosity found in, say, Scandinavia.

  “It’s just good fun, mate,” one said in Bangkok. “Did I tell you, I’m writing a book?”

  “What’re you calling it?”

  “Well, first I was gonna call it Around the World in 80 Lays, but I decided that was a bit daft. I was in the fifties at the time and wondered what if I got past eighty? Maybe eighty would be common and other blokes would say I was a wimp.”

  He was silent for a moment as he pulled on his beer. “So what are you calling it?” I asked “The United Nations,” he said, proudly.

  “I think the name’s been taken.”

  “You’re right, mate,” he said, “but I mean it. And I figure I’m a piece-keeper. That’s a joke. You get it?”

  Acquired Tastes

  Rotten Fish, Yum Yum!

  My dictionary tells me that anything “rotten” is undesirable. It says “rotten” is “foul-smelling, putrid…wretchedly bad; miserable.”

  That doesn’t sound like anything I’d want to put in my mouth. But around the world, many do. And usually it’s rotten fish they eat.

  I’ve made a study of the unusual things some
people eat in books titled Strange Foods (1999) and Extreme Cuisine (2004). My message, if I may use such a weighty word, was that what is called weird in one corner of the planet is merely lunch in another. In my research and travel in six continents, I encountered several places where fish was deliberately allowed to rot and then wolfed down with a lot of smacking of the lips, followed by requests for second helpings. For an American raised on meatloaf and mashed potatoes, this seemed very strange, indeed. But interesting. It is my curiosity that’s driven my quest, and in the process I’ve discovered some very tasty dishes.

  The locations that got the most credit, or criticism, for putting rotten fish on the menu were in Scandinavia, Iceland and Alaska. In Alaska, the Inupiat and Kobuk tribes traditionally caught what are called sheefish with hooks made from bear teeth and buried the catch ungutted in a leaf-lined pit, where it decayed in its own juices for several weeks. It should come as no surprise that the aromatic result was known, colloquially, as “stinkfish.” In northern Scandinavia, the dish is called surstromming . In this case, the herring is salted in brine and allowed to ferment and age a few months. The fish is then tinned and ready for consumption.

  The champ in this twisted, gastronomic Olympiad generally is acknowledged to be the Icelandic dish called hakarl . This is cured shark meat that is cut into strips and, again, buried in the ground (preferably a gravel bed) for several weeks. Washing and air drying follows—although that doesn’t diminish the smell— and it, like all the others, it is best served with whatever local alcohol might be available. In quantity.

  What has this got to do with Thailand? Not much, except that when it comes to rotten seafood, the Land of Smiles tops all of them. Here, fermented fish is not a specialty served seasonally or on holidays, it is an essential part of the diet and an indispensable ingredient for its cookery .

  I’m talking about nam pla . This and its many Southeast Asian variations is made from rotten seafood and is produced by packing small fish—usually anchovies, but sometimes other fish, or even shrimp or squid—into barrels or crocks with salt or brine, and leaving it to ferment for at least a month and for up to a year, after which the liquid is drawn off and matured in sunlight before being bottled. It is then used in the same way salt is used in the West, or soy sauce is added to dishes in China and Japan. Unlike table salt, however, the brown liquid is highly nutritious, rich in protein and B vitamins.

  (Crystallized salt is never used as a table condiment in Thailand, but may be added during cooking. Salt also may be added to some fruit juices or used as a dip, with or without sugar and chilis, for green mango, pineapple or other fresh fruit.)

  What puts fish sauce into the why-in-the-world-would-anyone-want-to-eat-that? category is its smell. Bruce Cost’s Asian Ingredients (1988), erroneously likened the taste to “encountering Camembert for the first time.” In fact, Camembert is a mild cheese with a faint smell of mold, which is one of its ingredients, but Bruce knew fish sauce when it came into olfactory range. It took some getting used to, he said, “for those who haven’t grown up with it.” Others have made far ruder comparisons redolent of outhouses and the you-know-what that’s always found in them.

  What few realize is that this pungent sauce has been around for a lot longer than Thais. In Classical Greece and Rome, virtually everything was seasoned with what they called liquamen, or garum, made from anchovies and other fish in much the same manner. Anchovies packed in salt, which lend their dizzying fragrance to numerous Italian dishes, are another inheritance from this kind of ancient fish pickling.

  Nowadays, the stuff is found mainly in Southeast Asia, added to numberless dishes during the cooking stage, or after serving, or next to the main dish as the base for a dipping sauce, in Thailand usually combined with chopped chilis, fresh lime, and other ingredients. Variations on the same salty theme are manufactured in Vietnam, where it is called nu’o’c ma’m, in Cambodia tuk trey, ngan-pya-ye in Myanmar, and patis in the Philippines. In the United States, usually in shops in a city’s Chinatown, I find competition from producers in Vietnam and the Philippines, but everyone agrees that it is Thailand that exports the translucent, brown sauce in the greatest quantity. It probably doesn’t have to be said, but fish sauce keeps indefinitely on the shelf, without refrigeration. It’s already rotten, so what else could happen to make it worse?

  What is not found so widely is pla ra, a runny paste created when fish is abused in the same fashion, this time with rice husks thrown in, and the whole sticky mess is eaten, usually using the fingers, with rice. I’ve been exposed to this quite a lot recently, now that I have a house in Surin, a province in northeastern Thailand where a jar of the stuff is never far from the dinner plate. I confess I have a jar of it in my kitchen in Bangkok as well, its lid screwed on as tight as handcuffs applied by a sadistic cop. Even so, I swear I can see an occasional bubble rise through the glop to the top and when my Thai-Khmer wife Lamyai opens the jar, the “fragrance” fills the kitchen like a hyena’s burp, the birds go silent in the neighborhood and geckos fall from my apartment walls. As I watch her dip her fingers into the stuff and lift a smear of it with rice to her lips, I remember that rice and fermented fish were the K-rations that sustained the Vietcong.

  Although I think Scott and Kristiaan Inwood, authors of a small but delectable book called A Taste of Thailand (1986), overstated the case, I know what they were talking about when they said it recalled the “accumulated stench of putrefying corpses, abandoned kennels, dirty feet, stagnant bilges, and fly-blown offal.”

  Lamyai calls this blasphemy, says such opinion smells worse than the goopy gray stuff clinging to her fingertips and lips.

  Thai Aphrodisiacs: Food That Makes You “Strong”

  Before getting into the hard facts, a caveat: what follows was performed at the direction of a magazine’s editorial staff; as I told my wife as we ventured forth on each expedition with firm resolve, “Honest, honey, I’m just doing research.”

  What I learned, in a nutshell, was that Viagra and other pharmaceutical pick-me-ups may have acquired a sizeable following in the Land of Smiles, but there remained a number of gastronomical boosts that defied any challenge from a laboratory in Switzerland, or from all the counterfeit factories in India. At least that was so if you listened to the true believers, most notably the people who captured, cooked and sold the stuff.

  Before venturing into one of the countless restaurants that specialize in birds’ nest soup—clustered densely in Bangkok’s Chinatown and in southern Thailand where many of the nests are “harvested,” from the Phang Nga Sea south to Hat Yai—I did a little reading on the subject. This led me to wonder why the first person to climb to the top of a dark, bat-infested sea cave on a rickety bamboo ladder and saw nests made largely of bird saliva, thought this messy bit of housekeeping would make a yummy bowl of soup. Rhino horn, at least, was phallic in shape, more or less, and it wasn’t too long a reach to think that a tiger’s parts might convey the strength and stamina of what the Guinness Book of Records called the most dangerous man-eating animal on earth. Why the nests of birds that, just before their breeding season, fed on gelatinous seaweed that made their salivary glands secrete a glutinous spit, with which they constructed their nests, was added to this aphrodisiacal list may forever remain a mystery.

  All that said, on a visit to Hat Yai I happily ordered a bowl and while waiting, talked with the restaurant proprietor. He told me that the dried nests took up to a full day and night to clean, soak, and rinse, and that there were myriad ways of cooking them, but all required the addition of other ingredients—minced chicken and egg white, ham and wine, chrysanthemum petals and lotus seeds, for example, to replace the nutrition totally removed by the cleaning, soaking, and rinsing of the nests. This then was baked inside a coconut or pumpkin, or stuffed inside a chicken and double-boiled, or merely simmered as any other soup.

  Although there was a market for dried and packaged nests in Asian groceries and Chinese herbal shops, where it cost upwa
rds of three hundred dollars for about an ounce, making it nearly worth its weight in gold, it sounded like a lot of work and I wasn’t surprised when I was told that virtually all birds’ nest soup was consumed in a restaurant. However, I was assured, with the customary grin and wink, that the stuff delivered what was promised. So it wasn’t a dinner-and-a-movie date, but dinner-and-then-go-back-to-the-hotel-as-quickly-as-possible experience. On the way home, my wife apologized for giggling.

  My experience with shark’s fin was, sadly, quite similar, and was further tempered by warnings that some species were now threatened with extinction and reports of “finning,” the cruel cutting off of the fins and release of the crippled fish to a slow and gruesome death. I also learned that, in much the same manner as the birds’ nest, after a long soaking, boiling, and rinsing, the fin was rendered without nutrition and nearly tasteless, contributing only a gooey consistency to the soup. It was chewy and had a pleasing texture, but it was the crab meat, roe, shrimps, sweet-smelling mushrooms and other vegetables, ginger, bamboo shoots, thinly sliced ham, shredded chicken and ginseng that gave the soup its flavor and anything approximating nourishment. Once again, I rushed home with my wife, who after a while said, “Ho hum.”

  It was time to take a break and review. As I understood it, an aphrodisiac was any substance, animal, vegetable, mineral or, in the modern age, pharmaceutical, that was believed to stimulate a man’s or woman’s libido, increase sexual energy and performance, and in whatever way possible, enhance the enjoyment of sex. That sounded good to me, but was it reasonable to seek such warming support in food and drink?