Jim Algie

by Bizarre Thailand Tales of Crime, Sex,and Black Magic

  Looking at the roll call of interviewees in Susan and Pornchai’s book—a bank teller, a fashion designer, a PR manager, an economist and even an entire pop group—shows that the Thai transsexuals of today have broader horizons and higher career trajectories than their dead-end ‘sisters’ of Nong’s day.

  The first transsexual to break through on a global level was the muay thai star, Parinya Charoenphol, better known by her nickname of Nong (‘Little Sister’) Toom. In 1998, during her first bout at Lumphini Stadium in Bangkok, the 16-year-old—wearing full make up—knocked out a much bigger male fighter. After the fight, she kissed him on the cheek. Soon, the beautiful boxer, whose goal was to make enough money for a sex change and to support her impoverished parents, was notching up knockout after knockout and making money hand over fist. From all over the globe, members of the mass media descended in droves to file features about her. Ever the show-woman, Nong Toom was fond of quips such as, “He was so cute I just hated to knock him out!”

  But in 1999 she hung up her gloves and underwent a full sex change. Her singing and acting career rarely got off the ropes. In 2003, the Thai director and Singaporean expat Ekachai Uekrongtham made her story into a powerful film called Beautiful Boxer that picked up a few awards at foreign film festivals.

  Susan and Pornchai interviewed her for their book.

  “I was thinking here was going to be very a muscular jock and aggressive woman, but she was quite the opposite,” said Susan. “She was very friendly and sweet and beautiful… sexy but in a tasteful way… a very trusting person too. She drove us back into Bangkok in her car and then took us to meet her parents. She even took us out to eat with her at a local street stall. Everyone recognised her, but she was so down to earth. I came away feeling like I’d made a friend.”

  The writers found out she’s had a few boyfriends but always practises monogamy. Nong Toom told them she was happy with the biopic and thought it was a fairly accurate depiction of her life. The plot, however, is almost like Rocky: through great determination, a poor kid rises above adversity to beat the odds. Not surprisingly, the film was more popular in the West, where stories of individualism and self-determination appeal much more to the Western mindset.

  In early 2006, she returned to the ring for an exhibition match at the training centre, the Nong Toom Fairfax Gym in Pattaya, where many foreigners come to study the martial art of muay thai. She bested the Japanese fighter in that match. In the same year, she starred in the Thai action movie Mercury Man (a critical calamity—with a villain named ‘Osama bin Ali’—that took a serious beating at the box office). Nong Toom’s role in this loony cartoon proved that her fighting prowess was still much stronger than her acting.

  The beautiful boxer’s international prominence has broken down the door for other performers, who were usually relegated to lip-synching and vamping it up in cabaret shows for tourists in Bangkok, Phuket and Koh Samui, or competing in the annual Miss Tiffany beauty pageant for transsexuals held in Pattaya every February. Following in the slinky footsteps of the first all-transgendered group, South Korea’s Lady, came Bangkok’s Venus Flytrap, a group of high-society women who wrested the gig from hundreds of wannabes. As you can tell from their stage names like Nok (Posh Venus) and Bobo (Naughty Venus), originality is not their forte. Visa for Love (Sony BMG Thailand, 2006), the group’s debut album of artificially sweetened R&B was not everyone’s cup of treacle. Most of the tunes, videos and dances traversed the same catwalk trodden by the Spice Girls. Declared personae non grata on the pop charts, Visa for Love was a commercial fiasco. The group eventually disbanded.

  But that curtain call may be premature. In late 2009, ‘Cool Venus’ (Tay Peeraya), who earned a degree in Textile Design from an Australian university, joined a new ladyboy troupe of singers, actresses and models called Shade of Divas. The leader and founder of the troupe is Teerawat ‘Tina’ Thongmitr. She told the Bangkok Post, “We hope to create a group or an agency for transvestites and transgendered women. For those film or television producers out there, if you are looking for a unique kathoey character, you know where to go.”

  One of the contestants for the annual Miss Tiffany Universe Contest held in Pattaya bares her ‘claws’ at the press conference. The four-day event features a number of different awards for the Media Favourite, the Friendship Beauty Queen and Miss Silky Sexy Skin.

  Tina, who said she has lost jobs as a graphic designer when clients found out about her ‘sexuality’, said her best offer so far came in early 2010 when a German theatrical director came to Thailand to stage a play called Ministry of Truth at the Patravadi Theatre in Bangkok. The play was based on the reality show Big Brother. “The show centred around a mixed group of Thais and foreigners who shared days and nights together in a house, with one to emerge as the winner. My role was to express my thoughts on being a transgender woman. I found it fascinating for a show to dig deeper into the issues of gender, going far beyond the usual portrayal of ladyboys. As my first professional acting role, it was a great challenge but I was so glad to be part of it,” she said

  After a successful run in Bangkok, Tina and the rest of the cast traveled to Berlin where it was restaged under the name On Air. Through her experiences working with the director and foreign cast members, she is hopeful that the third gender will find more mainstream acceptance abroad. “While working on the show, I learnt to appreciate foreigners in the way they respect you for who you are, regardless of your gender. If you have good ideas to share, they will listen to you.”

  The high-society domain that the members of Venus Flytrap and Shade of Divas inhabit is a penthouse above the seedy streets where many gender-blenders work. Around areas like Patpong, Nana Plaza, Soi Cowboy and Lumphini Park, they cater to the world’s oldest obsession. Their reputation, however, has been blackened by tales of thievery and violence. Some practice unsavoury tricks such as coating their breasts with sedatives or spiking the drinks of their customers. After the client passes out he is stripped of all his valuables. Even Aunty Nong complained to us that some younger ladyboys who use drugs and steal have given the third gender a bad name.

  On the so-called ‘Boys Soi’ off Surawongse Road, rammed with go-go boy bars and fronted by shirtless men pumping iron outside clubs to the tune of cavity-loosening house music, we sat with Bee, a young streetwalker, at the subtly named Dick’s Bangkok Café. Bee often stops by a couple of beauty salons at the end of street where sex workers congregate before their shifts.

  Strikingly beautiful with long glossy black hair and skin the colour of bone china, she was dressed for work in tight jeans and a cleavage-revealing top. Like many Thai youth, she wore fashionable braces with traces of pink. When she was growing up in northeast Thailand, Bee said she was a normal boy with no feminine or gay urges whatsoever. The turning point in her life came when she met a gang of cross-dressers who introduced her to Patpong and the gay scene. For her, becoming a ladyboy of the evening was a career move, a step up in the service industry where she had been employed as a waitress. Peer pressure exerted an influence, she admitted, as did what Aunty Nong said about how kathoey have become trendy.

  At first, Bee began dressing up at home. Later, she went to work at the King’s Castle 3 go-go bar on Patpong 1, where most of the dancers are transvestites and transsexuals. She began taking hormones to enlarge her breasts, but taped down her penis. It was incredibly painful, she said in a hushed voice that bespoke her fear of sounding too masculine. Many customers still want a sex worker with breasts and a penis, Bee said. At the same time, she figured she could make more money by having gender reassignment surgery. Because she was only 18 then, and Thai law stipulates that someone must be 20, her mother came down to sign the form for her.

  The sex change cost 120,000 baht and it was excruciating. Usually, the scars take about two months to heal, but the side effects can be chronic. Commons ailments are difficulty urinating and not being unable to achieve an orgasm. Bee said that she still experiences pleasurable
sensations ‘down there’—sometimes she will have a sexy dream and wake up moist—but she cannot fully climax.

  Almost every night, the 21-year-old scours the streets around Patpong for customers. At 1,000 baht a shot, she usually makes around 10,000 baht per month. “I don’t have any other opportunities and no education,” she said, reiterating a familiar lament among sex workers, while sweeping her long hair back. “And I don’t think much about the future.”

  What are the differences between real women and ladyboys?

  “Real women have uteruses,” she said, flashing a metallic grin.

  That’s it?

  Another grin. “That’s it.”

  It was a snappy comment intended to shock and amuse—hardly atypical among the young trying to look cool—but it was revealing on a deeper level: Bee and her friends do not think of themselves as being any emotionally or psychologically different than natural-born women. Sadly, this is generally not the way they are seen by the majority of the straitlaced world.

  With a little coaxing, Bee doled out a few blow-by-blow descriptions of her job with all the passion of a secretary talking about spread sheets. Business as usual, nothing to get excited about. More important, she said, after thanking us for speaking with her, was the chance to talk openly about her life for the first time with no judgments levied. For Bee, that opportunity was cathartic.

  As politely as Aunty Nong, Bee put her palms together and raised them to the level of her nose to bid us good night and wished us good luck in Thai. She disappeared into a crowd of body-builders, touts and hungry-eyed tourists massing and frothing around the mouth of Boys Soi.

  By then it was almost midnight. In an upstairs show bar on Patpong—where the women put on displays of ‘vaginal Olympics’ using props like darts, candles, cigarettes, razor blades and honking horns—we met Joy, a 30-year-old ladyboy. She was the most vivacious dancer in the bar, gyrating to house music with a 40-karat smile and a zest that went far beyond the zombie shuffle that is de rigeur mortis in Bangkok’s go-go bars.

  As a young buffalo-herder from rural Thailand, Joy was already trying on dresses and smearing ashes on her face to make mascara at a young age. She knew then she was not really a boy. Yet another exile from a state of poverty and provincial attitudes, she came to Bangkok to earn enough money to study dressmaking and subjects such as accounting so she could start her own fashion business and find a husband to settle down with. But lately, Joy said, she’d been doing some soul-searching by studying Buddhism. She wanted to know why she’d been born this way. Karma was the answer. Joy believed she’d raped or abused some women in her past life, and thus had been reincarnated as a ladyboy to know how women feel, and repent for the errors of her ways.

  Over the top of the throbbing dance beats (which is music that never rises above the groin), Joy said she didn’t want to have her sexual organ amputated because she worries about having her sex drive curbed, but in her work she has found a spiritual calling: giving pleasure to others is a good deed not so different from other acts of Buddhist compassion.

  Over the course of that hard day’s night, we had encountered a grandmotherly type in her 70s—scarred by memories of World War II and terrified of dying alone, and a striking young streetwalker who claimed ‘ladyboys’ is an oxymoron because, uteruses aside, they are much more feminine than masculine. We’d swapped anecdotes about a gracious celebrity kickboxer and a pop troupe of high-society singers with less ‘balls’ (but more testosterone) than the Spice Girls, and we’d discussed Buddhism and reincarnation with a seamstress-cum-business student-cum-bargirl, whose first experiments in cross-dressing were witnessed only by water buffalo on a rice farm.

  All of them were kind and decent folks. Any of the usual labels like ‘tranny’, ‘drag queen’ or ‘ladyboy’ had been stripped of their negative connotations and sleazy merchandising, because it’s always much easier to judge than it is to empathise. That’s what all the people we chatted with were looking for—empathy.

  Just like everyone else.

  Erecting a Tribute to a Fertility Goddess

  Thai vendors put them at the bottom of their plastic money baskets to reap a greater cash harvest. Some men wear belts strung with them under their trousers as a kind of supernatural Viagra. Magazines devoted to amulets advertise miniature ones carved from ivory and inscribed with Khmer incantations, and Buddhist monks will bless them for you. Tucked away behind the Swissotel Nai Lert Park Hotel on Wireless Road in Bangkok is a shrine that’s almost literally overflowing with them.

  Yes, the phallic symbol stands tall and proud in Thailand.

  Behind the Swissotel is an ‘alfresco hothouse’ of tropical flowers and shrubs, with a shrine devoted to the fertility goddess Tubtim. The walkway leading to it is studded with wooden phalluses in all sorts of shapes, sizes and shades. Some of them stand two-metres tall and one even has the hindquarters of a pig, which is a Chinese symbol of fertility. Many of these offerings have been placed there by both men and women whose wishes have been fulfilled by the goddess. Married couples come to ask the spirit-in-residence for a child. Single women pray for a husband who is prosperous and faithful. Men entreat her to help them rise above impotence.

  The Fertility Shrine in Bangkok gives rise to the spectre of phallic power.

  Behind the sanctuary, shaded by a natural umbrella of foliage, is Khlong Saen Saeb. Until the mid-1970s, this canal was one of the area’s commercial bloodlines where floating brothels once trawled for customers, to and fro from different piers. When the hotel was constructed in the late 1980s, they renovated the decades-old spirit house, right beside the canal, under a sacred ficus tree garlanded with sashes. One woman who prayed for a child there became pregnant, which—for fertile imaginations—gave birth to the shrine’s legacy.

  The ficus or bodhi tree (held sacred by many Thais because it’s the tree that Buddha sat under to attain enlightenment) is still there. As with many Thai ghosts—especially the female ones—Tubtim’s spirit is said to reside in the tree. That’s why there are offerings such as women’s clothes hanging from the branches. Around the trunk of the tree are other gifts such as make-up and dolls of classical dancers.

  Smaller versions of these phallic totem poles are known as palad khik. One of my regular motorcycle taxi drivers keeps one attached to his keychain for good luck. The palad khik are the ones advertised in Thai magazines devoted to amulets; the more elaborate talismans sell for thousands of baht. But the market beside the Tha Tien Pier in Bangkok, close to the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, has a whopping selection of them, most costing only a handful of spare change.

  Fertility goddesses, however, demand bigger tributes, like the ones at the Swissotel shrine, or the poles wrapped with colourful sashes in the Princess Cave on Krabi’s tourist hotspot Railay Beach, where there’s a spirit house dedicated to the ghost of a drowned Indian princess whose ship sank off the coast. She later became something of an oceanic fertility goddess—local fishermen began to leave offerings so she would help them reel in a big catch. The phallic symbols left for female apparitions are also meant to provide them with sexual gratification.

  But if these shrines are supposed to be presided over by female deities, then why are their only feminine aspects these offerings of clothes, dolls and make-up? That’s because, in phallocentric Thailand, where men won’t walk under a laundry line strung with female undergarments for fear of losing their virility, the dick has been deified and the vagina turned into a hot commodity.

  The Swissotel’s sanctuary in Bangkok for the limp, lovelorn and luckless is mostly visited by Thais, primarily on weekends, but it also attracts a few travellers. “For some reason,” said one of the security guards, “a few of the foreigners think the shrine was built by desperate, horny women. So they come here and wait for them.”

  The renovated spirit house is buttressed by an ancient Khmer design which reveals how the shrine is rooted in the Hindu faith, as does the formal name used in Thai for these talisman
s: shiwa leung (literally, ‘Shiva’s penis’). Which means they’re offshoots of Shiva’s lingam. Centrepieces and objects of reverence at many Indian and Khmer temples, the lingam (Sanskrit for ‘symbol’, ‘the image of a god’, ‘phallus’ or ‘the mark of a disease’) represents the invisible omnipotence of God as well as the thrust of primal energy which started the world, and the human race, with a big almighty bang.

  One of the most prominent Hindu scholars of the late 20thcentury, the American-born Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami defined the lingam in his book, Dancing with Shiva, as ‘the most prevalent icon of Shiva, found in virtually all Shiva temples. It is a rounded, elliptical, aniconic image, usually set on a circular base, or peetham. The lingam is the simplest and most ancient symbol of Shiva, especially of Parasiva, God beyond all forms and qualities’.

  The late sage notes that these symbols are often carved from stone, but can be made from wood, precious gems and metal, or more temporary structures can be formed from a variety of substances, from rice and cow dung to butter and flowers.

  On a quest for the roots of these phallic fetishes, I launched a few research trips to Cambodia. Anchana refused to accompany me. She was vehemently anti-Cambodian as many Thais are. The two countries and peoples have a long-running blood feud that goes back centuries. As many know, the name of the town Siem Reap, near the temples of Angkor, means ‘Siam Conquered’. And the temples were finally abandoned to the jungle because the Siamese kept razing and sacking them so often. The Khmers were no angels either. One of their favourite ways of dealing with enemy troops was to carve out their eyes while they were still alive, and then pack the empty sockets full of spices, before burying them alive. Most of the temples of Angkor, like the pyramids of Egypt, were built on the backs of slave labourers.