by Benjamin Law
Then she did Alcazar. Nok and I laughed and cooed now over photos of that pageant. One showed her receiving the title in a beautiful gold gown, pinned with the number eighteen. For the talent section, Nok had dressed as a clown: not exactly sexy, she realised, but it worked with the judges. Nok said pageants like Miss Tiffany’s and Alcazar were necessary for trans-female visibility, but said she also had reservations. She paused to think about how she could phrase it so she didn’t sound conceited.
‘When I go somewhere,’ she said slowly, ‘and they know and respect me, they think, “Oh wow: pretty.” But I have much more than being pretty. You have to focus on other parts of us too. And there are people who were born in bodies that aren’t pretty. You know?’
I knew. For every conventionally beautiful Miss Tiffany’s contestant, there were dozens of trans women in Thailand who had difficulty ‘passing’ as female and were still saving up thousands of dollars for surgery. If beauty pageants were the only way these women could be seen and heard, it wasn’t surprising that most Thai ladyboys still felt invisible or shunned.
Just before her fake ID expired, someone – Nok still didn’t know who – told the police her card was counterfeit. It not only ended her modelling career but took her to court. She was sentenced to prison for a year, but this was lessened on appeal to good behaviour for two years. Nok couldn’t risk getting another ID, so her official ID now said Nai, or ‘Mister’.
A few years ago, Nok tried to mobilise Thai transsexuals to lobby the government into allowing them to change their official sex from Nai to Nang-Saww (Miss). Knowing trans women were such a tiny minority, she formed a coalition with divorced married women who wanted the right to change their name from Nang (Mrs) back to the unmarried Nang-Saww. Despite the combined power of fierce divorcees and transsexual women, the proposal was rejected.
‘They say, “It’s a very little problem. It’s a tiny problem.” They said, “You are a man who wants to live as a woman? But you’re not a woman!” They agreed for us to be a freak or a third gender, but it’s not the same. It was not a success.’
‘Thai people like ladyboys, though,’ I said stupidly.
Nok smiled. ‘You know, Thai society is like …’ She paused to think of an appropriate analogy. ‘You know pad thai, right? You know pad thai ho kai?’
I nodded. I had seen the dish: a thin, delicately crafted egg crepe parcel, stuffed with glistening pad thai noodles.
‘When you see pad thai hok hai, it’s beautiful,’ Nok said. ‘But when you open it, you see the pad thai is very …’ She made a face, like something had died.
‘Like it’s full of worms,’ I said.
Nok pointed at me and smiled. ‘That’s Thai society. On the outside, people say, “Oh, they accept us!” But when we said, “We have this problem,” they say, “It’s your problem.”’
We changed the subject and gossiped about boys. Like teenagers, we pored over photos of Nok’s current and ex-boyfriends and rated them all with commentary. One photo showed Nok in the arms of a toned blond man, a handsome Scandinavian who looked like a poster boy for the Aryan Nations.
‘Peter, the Finnish guy,’ she said. ‘He didn’t know.’
It was a delicate thing, deciding how – or if – to break the news. The first thing Nok told potential boyfriends was that she couldn’t get pregnant. When they asked why, she would sit them down and make a few things clear.
‘When I tell my personal secrets, I have to make sure they know: I am a girl, and you are a boy. I must make sure the guy understands that I’m female. I confirm, “I am a female and I am a lady. I can be your best girlfriend, but I cannot get pregnant.” And I have to confirm to him too, that he is not a gay. Because a guy is afraid that he’ll become gay – I don’t know why!’
‘Why do they think that?’ I said, thinking back to my conversations with Kristian the photographer.
Nok shrugged.
‘What about your boyfriend now?’ I asked.
Nok rummaged around on her hard drive until she brought up a photo of a handsome, baby-faced Thai guy.
‘Oh, he’s cute!’ I said.
‘He’s fat now,’ Nok said sighing, flicking through other photos on the monitor.
‘Nok, you can’t say that.’
She giggled conspiratorially. ‘He’s fat.’
‘He’s not fat, Nok. Jesus.’
To win Thailand’s biggest transsexual beauty pageant, you needed to fulfil a number of contradictory and near-impossible criteria. It helped if you were tall, but big hands and feet were a minus. You needed to look ‘natural’, even though judges often pulled losing contestants aside and consoled them by saying they should undergo more surgery for next year’s round. Above all, the judges wanted you to look like a ‘real girl’, even though the competition’s entire premise was that you were originally born male. ‘The whole idea,’ a Miss Tiffany’s publicist told me, ‘is that these “boys” look like girls. They just have to be beautiful, that’s all.’
On the night of the finale, the media were tightly controlled and quarantined from certain areas. An hour or so before the broadcast began, photographers and journalists were herded into the upstairs area of the auditorium and allowed exactly thirty minutes to interview, record or photograph the girls, who were stationed at their hair and make-up banks. With their blue ribbon numbers on their wrists, they recalled the bovine section of a royal agricultural show. At a signal, the reporters rushed them. Camera flashes exploded, people talked over each other and the place became more zoo than show.
‘Sawadee-krap!’ a male TV journalist yipped at one contestant.
‘Nadia, Nadia!’
‘Hello! Big smile for me!’
Flashes went off.
‘What would it mean if you won tonight?’
‘Are your parents here tonight?’
‘What do your parents think of this?’
‘Do you have a boyfriend?’
‘What is your secret weapon?’
‘What does this mean to you?’
‘Who did your hair?’
‘Who did your surgery?’
Some girls got no attention while others were lavished with it. There was something sad about the whole thing. Overlooked contestants smiled broadly, standing silently at their banks with big pleading eyes darting around the room for a journalist – any journalist – to come up and talk to them. In the far corner of the room, Bank – Contestant #1 – was working the crowd. She was still the odds-on favourite to win, having surprised everyone by narrowly edging out Nadia in the swimsuit round at Central Beach. Earlier in the day, I’d already put money down that either Bank or Nadia would win. Everyone agreed it was neck and neck.
‘This is the stage of such honour,’ Nadia would later say. ‘Whoever stood here before me, it has not been easy for them, either.’ It struck me as a beautiful, poignant sentiment. All the women who’d ever competed in this pageant were beautiful, but were also bound together by a shared and specific pain. Most were barely in their twenties (some were teenagers, I had to remind myself) and had only reached this point through a process of upsetting their loved ones, before raising towering amounts of money to slice, cut and bruise themselves into this shared idea of beauty. Unlike most beauty pageants, Miss Tiffany’s in some ways had less to do with ego and delusion, and more to do with personal obligation and familial responsibility.
‘If I win tonight,’ Bank told me backstage in Thai, through a translator, ‘it would really be a chance to upgrade my gender. I want to be an example for younger generations, change minds and laws, so maybe one day we can get married.’
‘Upgrade my gender’ was a catchphrase I’d heard a lot over the course of the competition. Earlier in the evening, I’d talked to a publicist from an agency that worked for the Miss Tiffany’s pageant every year. ‘It used to be that only make-up artists, dancers or costume designers would enter,’ she said. ‘But now, 80 per cent of the contestants are studying in college or universit
y. We’ve had a contestant trained in fire fighting. Last year, we had a nurse, someone who studied civil engineering, an accountant, and students of international business and law.’
The media scrum was over.
‘Okay: out-out-out,’ someone said, ushering us out to a media-only balcony that overlooked the audience and stage. The auditorium below was packed. Television cameras warmed up, ready for live broadcast in minutes. Across the country, Thai families watched Miss Tiffany’s opening credits while VTR tech-heads with clipboards gave sharp hand signals to camera men perched on cranes to go live any second.
Finally, the stage lights came on. Frozen and posing at the top of a steel pyramid staircase, Sorrawee appeared, surrounded by other transsexual dancers from the Miss Tiffany’s nightly cabaret show, all of them wearing tuxedos. The opening beats to ‘I Am What I Am’ pumped into the room. When they reached the climax of the song – I AM WHAT I AAA-AAMMMMMM! – Sorrawee and the dancers grasped their crotches firmly, and in one swift action tore their tuxedos off to reveal sequinned gowns. Up in the balconies, journalists hollered along with the crowd below.
I shoved my way into the audience seating downstairs so I could get a better look. Down here, the air was thick. The air-conditioning was working against a 32-degree night-time heatwave and everyone’s recycled oxygen. It smelled and felt like the locker room of an all-male gymnasium. The cameras rarely panned out into the audience. Home viewers would have seen us crammed into our chairs with our knees up, often with two people to a seat.
After the commercial break, the Miss Tiffany’s contestants strutted the stage in full evening gowns while a cabaret performer lip-synced to a Thai recording of Madonna’s ‘Frozen’. Acrobats in white unitards interpretive-danced their way across the stage alongside a giant transparent plastic ball, while two other dancers cartwheeled inside the ball. It was the most breathtakingly ridiculous thing I had ever seen.
After endless posing, catwalking and close-up staring into cameras, the judges culled the twenty-eight women to a final ten. Announced one by one, the finalists looked euphoric as their names were announced. Nadia and Bank were both called. Noon missed out. The lights dimmed to black on the eighteen eliminated women. They walked quietly off-stage during the commercial break, all of them with fixed smiles that were heartbroken and horrible to behold, as if some cruel dentist had set them with cement.
After a quick costume change, the top ten returned to the stage for the questioning round. This would be the first time the girls’ voices would be broadcast. Contestant #21 was first.
‘What,’ the male host asked, ‘is the most serious problem for Thai teenagers at the moment?’
Contestant #21 – a girl with the easy-going demeanour of a lifestyle TV host – responded immediately. She spoke in the triumphant tone of a student who’d been given the assignment question for which she’d prepared all night.
‘Drugs!’ she said in Thai. ‘Teenagers are so important to Thailand. If they get addicted to drugs, Thailand will suffer. We’ve got to help!’
Everyone applauded. The hosts moved on to Contestant #5.
‘If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?’
‘I wouldn’t change anything!’ she declared. ‘Because truth is the truth! And you have to live with the truth forever!’
The crowd ate it up. The hosts moved on to Contestant #24, the Nervous Wreck of the competition. She was cute, but had the shy mannerisms of an overlooked sister. Out of everyone, I noticed she had spent a lot of the competition wearing minimal make-up and keeping her eyes to the ground.
‘What is the biggest goal in your life,’ they asked her. ‘And why have you set this goal for yourself?’
Though she looked barely out of her teens, the voice that came out of her fine-featured face was both masculine and low with the occasional squeak. It reminded me of my voice as a fourteen-year-old.
‘My biggest goal is to earn money to help my mother,’ she said. ‘My mum sacrificed a lot for her children, so I’d like to earn money to help my mother when she’s older.’
More applause. Finally, they reached Contestant #2, full name Siripahawarin Mongkhonphanmani. She was a mousy-looking girl in a knockout green gown, with long eyelashes like a cartoon deer.
‘If you could change one law in Thailand,’ the female host asked, ‘what would it be?’
Siripahawarin smiled into the camera widely. Already, I could sense something was wrong. Siripahawarin moved her mouth a little, but no words came out.
‘If I could change one law …’
Siripahawarin stared out into space as dead air was beamed live to 15 million homes around the country. Across Thailand, people squirmed.
‘If I could change one law in Thailand …’
The audience leaned forward in their seats. Some people covered their faces, groaning softly, unable to look. Even though I didn’t know Siripahawarin, I felt like an anxious parent watching a daughter forget her lines in a school play. The silence was excruciating. I wondered whether Siripahawarin had experienced a seizure and needed medical attention. Finally, Siripahawarin relented. It was as though a valve had been released in her brain.
‘Every law in Thailand,’ she finally said, ‘is okay.’
Everyone in the auditorium sighed with relief. People applauded purposefully and slowly, the way people do when an ordeal is over. Smiling with pity, the hosts moved onto the far side of the stage, when, out of nowhere, Siripahawarin continued speaking, desperate to claw back ground.
‘What would I like to change?’ she asked in Thai, speeding up. ‘I would change the age people can drink and go to nightclubs. Yes! I would like to change it to twenty and twenty-two. Because eighteen and twenty is too young!’
We had all moved on. The hosts were already addressing the cameras to introduce the next segment. I watched Siripahawarin register the fact that she had blown it. Her mouth continued smiling, but her eyes held the truth. Any last traces of hope flickered briefly before being finally snuffed out.
It was only much later, after the pageant was over – after Siripahawarin was knocked out; after the ten finalists were culled down to three; after Nadia communicated her answers in sign language to wild, feral applause; after Contestant #26, a short, cute-as-a-button nineteen-year-old named Nalada Thamthanakorn, came out of nowhere to secure the winner’s crown and a car she was barely legal to drive – that I thought about it properly: Siripahawarin had been given an impossible question to answer. As a transsexual woman, what laws did she think should have been changed in Thailand? The obvious answer would have been to give women like Siripahawarin proper legal recognition as, well, women. But it was an issue that no one cared about, and it would have taken all night to detail the finer points of that legal mess.
The next day, Bangkok’s newspapers ran stories about the pageant. Reuters syndicated dramatic photos of Bank – who came second – being hauled off-stage unconscious after fainting from dehydration, with Haruna Ai and Sorrawee Natee trailing in her wake. Costumes were packed away, hair extensions and wigs were sealed up and make-up poured down the drain. The girls retreated back to their hotel for a final night together, consoling each other and congratulating the winner, bracing themselves for the return to their regular lives and jobs. Besides Nalada’s, no one’s life would change. Not really. Back at the auditorium and across Thailand, all the lights on these women had been dimmed. They’d had their evening. It would be another year before the lights came back on or anyone even thought about them again.
CHINA
In which we discover a parallel universe version of the internet and a parallel universe version of marriage where gay men marry lesbians or unwitting straight women (who become understandably upset). Key quote: ‘In China, homosexuals don’t have any kind of publicity, apart from websites. So when you say “homosexuals”, it’s like a ghost. Something that doesn’t even exist.’
IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG to get used to the pollution in Beijing. On
good days, it was barely noticeable. On bad days, I’d ride my bike from Peking University past Google’s Beijing headquarters, cutting through fumes that hung in the air like a white cataract of fog. The effect was like looking at the world after too many hours in an over-chlorinated pool. After a while, you just lived with it. The snot I blew out of my nose at the end of the day wasn’t always black.
On a good day like this one, I could head to Liufang subway station, walk a block and look up through clear skies to see a permanent rainbow. It was formed by the curtains of Beijing’s LGBT centre, thick vertical blocks of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple that – when pulled right across – formed a pride flag. You’d think a giant gay rainbow would be conspicuous in a grey cement city like Beijing, but rainbows were only a beacon if you were looking for one, and most Chinese people weren’t aware a local pride movement existed, not knowing that rainbows were used to represent it.
Beijing’s LGBT centre sat on the twenty-first floor of XianTianDi Plaza. Like a lot of apartment blocks in the area, the building’s corridors didn’t let much sunlight in. The floors were sticky. Apartment 2108 stood out from the others only because of four coloured paper squares discreetly stuck onto the door. One was a rainbow, another was a blue square saying ‘No Smoking’ in Chinese and English, and a third square said, ‘Free Wi-Fi.’ The last simply said, ‘One Coin, One Join.’ I checked my jeans pocket to make sure I had coins, then knocked on the door.
Inside, it was less like the headquarters of an underground gay resistance I’d been expecting, and more like a bachelor pad styled by IKEA – bathed in light with blond wooden panels and shiny new appliances. A choir of young gay men was warming up, singing doo-baah, doo-baah, doo-baah, doo-baah in an ascending scale. Other young men lounged on the sofa reading novels while women typed energetically on laptops in the kitchen. They looked up briefly to smile at me. It was like walking in on a friendly sharehouse where no one knew you, but no one minded you being around. If you pulled aside the rainbow curtains, the 21st-floor view was impressive: you could see the scalps of Beijing’s buildings and a rooftop basketball court where teenage guys had stripped out of their tops to shoot hoops. If you were a young gay dude in this city, I could see a few reasons why you’d want to spend time here.
