by Pico Iyer
She was indeed no different from all the others. Everywhere, at every time, it was the same: intimacy on the grand scale. Wherever I looked in this huge and hazy city, scattered harum-scarum along its main roads, were hundreds upon hundreds of short-time hotels, girlie bars, sex shows, massage parlors, “no hands” restaurants, pickup coffee shops, brothels, escort agencies, discos and—following as surely as the day the night—VD clinics. At one end of town gleamed the showy crystal palaces of the Patpong Road, at the other their tarted-up country cousins on a street known as Soi Cowboy. Between them, around them and on every side there seemed to be bars with videos, bars with shows, bars with dance floors, Swiss and American and German bars and special Japanese-language bars where businessmen from Tokyo could pay a flat $110 for a full night of entertainment, no holds barred, no strings attached. And in and out and all around were massage parlors, small massage parlors, back-alley massage parlors, massage parlors that were three-story pleasure domes as luxurious as Las Vegas casinos, each one equipped with one-way mirrors through which its customers could watch, unwatched, up to 400 masseuses seated in a huge glass tank, knitting, filing their nails or turning their deadened gaze to a TV screen. For the sake of convenience, these girls too had numbers on their breasts.
As a young, unattached foreign male, I found myself caught in a swarm of propositions. When I entered a taxi, the driver offered me “a private girl” (to which I was tempted to reply that I was a private man). When I stopped at a street corner, in the midst of a monsoony downpour, a shabby young man thrust upon me a soggy Polaroid of the girl he owned. When I peered into a barbershop, I was asked—nudge, nudge—whether I would like a private room. And everywhere I went, I heard from the shadows a busy, steady buzz of “Sex show. Sex show. Sex show” as ceaseless as the song of cicadas in Japan.
Nowhere, it seemed, was I safe. I checked into a tourist hotel and found that it was a “knock-knock” place, which provided girls, along with Cokes and pay phones, in the lobby. Many of these houses of good repute, I later discovered, took the liberty of sending spare girls, uninvited, up to the rooms at night. Even first-class hotels posted notices observing, with all regretful courtesy, that guests in single rooms would have to pay double since it was assumed that they would not, could not, be sleeping alone. And in the up-country city of Chiangmai, when I sat down to breakfast in my respectable hotel, video screens in every corner of the room began blasting out images of groping, groaning bodies squelching together in unfocused ecstasy. I had to take the moans of venery together with my toast and tea.
The search for a late-night bite was no less of a rude surprise. I had heard far and wide of the snack bar in the Grace Hotel, but its claim to fame had always remained obscure. No wonder. Walking around the corner from the Grace Clinic, I parted with $2 just to enter the hotel’s darkened basement. Inside was a coffee shop of sorts, but it was unlikely to be mistaken for Denny’s. For although the entire room had the All-American look of a high school cafeteria with the lights turned out and three jukeboxes blasting simultaneously, goodies were the last thing on sale here. On every side of the room sat girls of every shape and size, in miniskirts, leather pants, bulging sweaters and tight jeans. Some wore sun glasses in the near pitch-dark, some flashed smiles with gold teeth. One wore a T-shirt that said, quite simply, “Man.” And the girls did nothing except sit around. They smoked and smoked. They chatted without interest. They paced and listlessly prowled. They banged buttons and pounded knobs at an electronic game called Video Hustler. And all around them circled schools of men, mostly Arab, some in djellabas, some in threadbare jackets, some in shirts cracked open to the waist. Many were aged, or rheumy-eyed, or ill-smelling. One was a hunchbacked dwarf wearing huge, black-rimmed spectacles. All eyes were open for a smile. Nobody was drinking coffee.
What else did Bangkok have to offer? I turned to the official government tourist magazine. This Week in Bangkok. Four pages were devoted to such agencies as the Darling Escort Services (which provided “educated ladies who come in many different languages to help you get around or get down”), a smattering of cocktail lounges (“Welcome to our real paradise,” offered Madonna) and a bevy of massage parlors (“Experience unique courtesy only Thai girls can offer”). The next page featured a list of VD clinics, and the next a group of barbershops and beauty salons (“Guarantee full satisfaction,” “Expert lady barbers for men”). The following page listed eight more escort agencies (“For lonely visitors to find the most beautiful, sensuous or sexy partner,” cooed Eve. “So easy. Just call us”). Most of the rest of the tourist magazine was given over to a five-page listing of bars and clubs, and to such specialty clubs—Bangkok was nothing if not an equal opportunity employer—as Gentlemen (providing “gentle boys for gentlemen”). One entire page contained nothing but photographs of “special friends.”
The magazine did, however, reserve a little space for mention of the Rotary Club’s annual fund-raising extravaganza, which it acclaimed as a must for the entire family and extolled in the tones generally reserved for folkloric spectacles. This traditional event came with the blessing of the city’s mayor and of a spokesman from the Prime Minister’s office. Ah, I thought, a celebration of some of the country’s distinctive customs.
Indeed it was. The charity affair was held in the Patpong Road. It featured an elaborate outdoor beauty contest involving a gaggle of lovelies from the area’s bars, undressed to kill. The bars themselves were thrown open to the daylight so that any pedestrian could peep inside, where a harem’s worth of damsels were wiggling and writhing on cue. The booths that lined the streets offered drinks with girls, dances with girls, or girls with girls. I could, I thought, be only in Bangkok.
The city, in fact, made me decidedly squeamish. Just to be exposed to such a society was, I thought, to contract a kind of social disease; just to be here was to be guilty. Not for nothing, I told myself, did “Thailand” mean “Land of the Free.” Taken in by Bangkok’s willingness to take one in, I felt myself outraged; Bangkok was dangerously easy, was my dangerously easy conclusion.
III
Thailand offered a good deal more, of course, than just the sex trade. My first week in the country, I took a night train to the north, watched darkness fall over the rice paddies, felt a hot tropical breeze against my face, saw great sheets of lightning break across the land. Next day, at dawn, I followed a vaulting, cross-eyed hill tribesman up steep hills and through a butterflied jungle, and that night, in an animist village, I watched, by the light of a single candle, as the local headman, reclining on pillows, filled himself with opium, then played a weird kind of bagpipes, while jigging his way through a discombobulated dance in the guttering light of the shadows. Never had I felt myself so close to mystery.
Yet even then, I could not help recalling the Dutchman I had met in Corsica the year before. When he had trekked into the Thai jungle, he told me with pleasure, the hill tribesmen, though conversant with no dialect but their own, had greeted his group by spelling out “Welcome” with the tops of Coke bottles. And in nearby Chiangmai, a quiet center of tribal handicrafts, there was little doubt that the West was coming through loud and clear. Teenage girls sat on the hoods of muscle cars on the town’s main drag, while Nike-shod jocks revved up their Yamahas. Singers in hot-pants were lip-synching Top 40 tunes on screens in the Video 83 store, and across the street from Burger House, a neon sign advertised a bowling alley. A local Christian girl invited me to dinner, then sat at the table reading Maupassant. And early one evening, as dusk began to fall, a lazy-eyed rickshaw driver gave me a guided tour of his hometown. “Ah,” he said as we bounced past a fallen hut where a wanton was combing her thick black hair, “no good place. Suzie Wong.”
In the capital, of course, the Western influence was even more pronounced. Like every tourist, I was fascinated by the city’s famous weekend market, a spicy department store of the subconscious that offered such niceties as rabbits for sale, and iridescent fish, crunchy grasshopper snacks a
nd an evil-smelling wizard’s brew of delicacies whipped up, so it seemed, from a recipe in the Wyrd Sisters’ Cookbook. But the locals who were crowding the narrow aisles had no time for such common-or-garden fare. They had come to savor the real exotica: bright orange toy guitars; a bowling shirt that read “Rick’s Carpet Center, Granada Hills”; and posters, fluttering along the sides of ramshackle stalls, of Jennifer Beals and Phoebe Cates—the newly canonized goddesses of the Orient—sitting in Mustangs, showing off UCLA letter jackets or simply carrying themselves as embodiments of the Promised Land. The largest crowd of all congregated around a craftsman who was meticulously brass-rubbing Maidenform ads onto T-shirts.
Bangkok, in fact, had a glamour and a sparkle that far outshone those of Bombay, Casablanca, even Athens; smartly done up in art nouveau restaurants and chandeliered super-luxury hotels, it glittered with a fast and flashy style that would not have been out of place in Paris or San Francisco. Yet more than anywhere else, Bangkok reminded me of L.A. Not just because its 900,000 cars were forever deadlocked, or because its balmy skies were perpetually smoggy and sullen with exhaust fumes. Not even because it was, both literally and metaphorically, spaced out and strung out, sprawling and recumbent and horizontal (where New York and Hong Kong, its true opposites, were thrustingly, busily, ambitiously vertical). Mostly, the “City of Angels” reminded me of Los Angeles because it was so laid-back (in topography and mood) as to seem a kind of dreamy suburban Elysium, abundantly supplied with flashy homes and smart-fronted boutiques, streamlined Jaguars and Mexican cafés, fancy patisseries and even a wood-and-fern vegetarian restaurant (complete with classical guitarist and James Bond on the video). Down every puddle-glutted lane in Bangkok lay pizzas, pizzazz and all the glitzy razzmatazz of the American Dream, California style: video rental stores, Pizza Hut and Robinson’s, pretty young things looking for sugar daddies and trendy watering holes with Redskins decals on the window and tapes of “This Week in the NFL” inside. In an inspired Freudian slip, one dingy hole-in-the-wall even promised “VDO.”
It had been during the Vietnam War, I reminded myself, that Bangkok had first become celebrated in the West as a factory of dreams, a cathedral of sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. So why should I be surprised that much of what remained resembled the bastard child of America and Indochina, a sad and shaming reminder of a difficult liaison? “My whorehouse,” says Paul Theroux’s Saint Jack, “was a scale model of the imperial dream.”
The skin trade did indeed seem to underwrite the metaphor. For although the Patpong Road and the Grace Hotel were not exactly offering Love American Style, they were tricked up, even more than every other hopeful business, in all the hard and made-up finery of America. The bar girls were clad in Lee jeans and K-Mart tops; the songs on the jukebox were American, and so were the shows on the video. This was not, like the Philippines, a former American colony. Yet on any given day, the flashdancers of Bangkok could saunter from the Travolta Boutique to the Patty Duke Barbershop, then move from the Manhattan Hi-Tech Store to the Club Manhattan to the Manhattan Hotel (or the Florida, the Atlanta, the Reno, the Niagara, the Impala or the Miami). And on any given night, I could travel from the Don Juan Cocktail Lounge to the Honey Hotel, and thence, by way of the Lolita Nightclub and Disco Duck, to the Je T’Aime Guest House. One typical bar in Chiangmai advertised that this was “where expats do it,” before sniggering, “Come once and you’ll come many times.” Another joint down the street featured a crooner who sang “The Streets of London,” but changed the words so that a lament for the plight of the poor, the lonely and the homeless became a lurid, blow-by-blow account of a Thai girl bringing a foreigner to orgasm.
And everywhere I went in Thailand, were even more graphic examples of the country’s relations with the West: here a ruddy-faced foreigner lumbering along the street hand-in-hand with a feather-skinned lovely; there a plump pale arm around slender brown shoulders in the back of a red-lit, three-wheel taxi; here a middle-aged executive cutting some deal on the sidewalk with a doe-eyed Lolita; there two sloppy-shirted, unshaven tourists nuzzling a pair of dancing girls in a restaurant, while the nymphs tittered fetchingly and put flowers in their suitors’ thinning hair. Whenever I visited temples or museums or silk shops or historical sites in Thailand, I saw almost no sightseers, no scholars, no hippies from Oregon or honeymooning couples from Manhattan—nothing, in fact, save these oddest of bedfellows. And this curious parade of Occidental Adams and Oriental Eves (to cite the clever title of a story written by a local Brit named John Cadet) seemed a moralist’s gift, a symbol-monger’s delight. For what more perfect emblem could be found of the brash and brawny West buying the favors of the gentle, fine-boned East? The shy, sleepy-eyed Siam that had once enticed rhapsodies from Coward and Alec Waugh had now, so it seemed, been reduced into nothing but the land of Thai sticks and the setting for Emmanuelle.
IV
My first reaction to Bangkok was shock; my second was to know that shock was not right, but I didn’t know what was. “Those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril,” wrote Wilde, and the more I looked at the bar scene, the more my vision blurred.
The system of kept women was no import, an English-educated Thai lady indignantly assured me; it was an honored tradition for men here to relieve their wives of certain pressures by spending a few nights now and then with concubines. Many husbands, in fact, participated in a kind of “scholarship” system whereby they paid a young lady’s way through college in exchange for her occasional services.
Nor was the system new. Peter Fleming had come upon a Grace-style coffee shop while traveling through Manchuria in 1934, I read. And a few years later, well before the war in Vietnam, his brother Ian had noted that while tourists in Bangkok were courting trouble by escorting Thai girls in the streets, the problem was that they didn’t understand the right procedure: if they went to the nearest police station, an officer on duty would gladly provide them with suitable names and addresses. Nor did the system pander exclusively to the West: a recent American guidebook, choosing its verbs carefully, pointed out that by 1983 “Asian [single male] visitors to Thailand outstripped American.” Besides, the girls of Bangkok always insisted, nothing could be more exciting than a boyfriend from abroad (“Thai men no good” was their constant refrain). Queen Sirikit herself once told a friend of mine that the word for foreigner, farang, was synonymous with all that was wondrously exotic.
Before very long, in fact, I began to discover that the ubiquitous couple of Bangkok—the pudgy foreigner with the exquisite girleen—was not quite the buyer and seller, the subject and object, I had imagined. In many cases, I was told, the girls did not simply make their bodies available to all while they looked at their watches and counted their money, they chose to offer their admirers their time, their thought, even their lives. The couple would sometimes stay together for two weeks, or three, or thirty. They would travel together and live together and think of themselves as lovers. She would show him her country, cook him local delicacies, mend his clothes, even introduce him to her parents and her friends. He would protect her from some parts of the world, teach her about others. For the girl, her Western suitor might prove the mature and sophisticated companion she had always lacked; for the man, his Eastern consort could be the attentive, demure and sumptuously compliant goddess of his dreams. He would obviously provide material comforts and she physical; but sometimes—in subtler ways—their positions were reversed. And as the months passed, sensations sometimes developed into emotions, passions settled down into feelings. Often, in the end, they would go through a traditional marriage in her village.
Thus my tidy paradigm of West exploiting East began to crumble. Bangkok wasn’t dealing only in the clear-cut trade of bodies; it was trafficking also in the altogether murkier exchange of hearts. The East, as Singapore Airlines knows full well, has always been a marketplace for romance. But Thailand was dispensing it on a personal scale, and in heavy doses. It offered love in a duty-free zone: a co
ntext in which boy meets girl without having to worry about commitments, obligations, even identities. Love, that is, or something like it.
V
As I returned to the bars, I steadied myself against their mounting equivocations by noting that at least some of the girls were as hard and fast as their propositions. These creatures of easy virtue were indeed no more than what they seemed: all artifice. Their pleasure was strictly professional, their “darlings” dangled in all the wrong places. They could be touched in any place except inside; they would extend themselves to any man who entered. When money was mentioned, their soft gaze turned hard; when a fat cat came in, their eyes irresistibly wandered; and when the closing hour finally arrived, they took off their glass slippers and turned off their tricked-up charm. In all of a second, these temptresses could shrug off or reassume their serviceable grace; in a single night, they would sleep with three or four customers. Did she enjoy what she did? “Ah,” croaked one husky-voiced young girl who had been dancing with extraordinary abandon. “It’s a job.”
Kai too was bracing, almost reassuring in her toughness, her freedom from questions and qualms. Managing her life with brisk efficiency, she delivered a breakdown of all the relevant figures—bottom lines, profit curves, spreadsheets and the rest—with the scrupulous poise of a recent graduate from the Harvard Business School. Her body, she explained, was a worthwhile investment. She made $10 an hour teaching Thai classical dance. By comparison, she took home only $4 an evening from working in the bar, seven hours a day, seven days a week, twenty-eight days a month. But if she managed to snag a partner for the night, she could get $20 at least, more than an average Thai worker makes in a fortnight. And what job offered better perks? She could stay in the finest hotels, learn about—and sometimes travel about—the world, be wined, dined and feted, procure free tickets to every disco in town. Bright lights, fast cars, affluent white knights from abroad who were prepared to whisk her hither and thither—she could have them all. In return, she had to do very little. Just dance, flirt, kiss a little and sleep much of the day. “It’s a business,” she concluded matter-of-factly. “You understand me, I show you good heart.”
