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Thailand: The Happy Bar
I was sitting alone in a club in Chaeweng, Koh Samui, when a Thai girl leaned towards me and said, "Can I join you?"
Her name was Nga. She was twenty. She had a petite, lithe frame - a slim face, a small forehead, a round mouth, unflinching green eyes, cheeks dusted with make-up, and short gelled hair slicked sideways. She made small talk. Her smiles revealed an impeccable set of teeth.
"You want sex?" I said.
"Maybe."
"For money."
"Maybe," she said. "Maybe not."
The club was full, a sweaty and drunken mix of Westerners and Thais. In two hours at this straight club, Nga was the third woman who had offered herself to me. I said, "You're wasting your time."
"Can't we just talk for now?"
Nga's ambiguity could be a subtly manipulative scheme: she would flirt with me until an overwhelming fever of lust turned me helpless, and in the least she would make 1,000B (œ15, the going rate). Or she could be truly ambivalent, taking her time to find out how my personal situation could be exploited for one gain or another, and not necessarily money that exchanged hands in a business transaction, but something more long-term - a boyfriend, a husband, a benefactor. Imagination was the only limit to what sexual arrangements could be forged in Thailand.
At first, like most Westerners who didn't indulge, I had been shocked by the great number of Western men with their young Thai women. Isn't this flagrant economic exploitation? Western men visiting Thailand for sex holidays certainly take advantage of the Thais' abasement and hankering for Western wealth and lifestyle - a blind yearning that turns many Thai women into active, if foolish, participants in their own exploitation. I'll explain, but first I have to make it clear that in this story I am writing about the minority of prostitutes that service Western visitors only - the rest are a different story. Of the sex workers in Thailand, which number anything from 200,000 to 500,000, it is estimated that ninety-five percent languish in near-slavery conditions in unseen brothels that serve single Thai men (who, according to government sources, visit a prostitute twice monthly) - the rest, or about five percent, are the visible minority that serve Westerners, foraging in bars and clubs and hotels and streets. These are freelancers, lured by the promise of material wealth in tourist-ridden areas: of all sex workers, these are among the highest earners. (By contrast, the Thai-serving prostitutes are often forced by brothel thugs to work incessantly and relinquish all their income.)
In Chaeweng, this class of prostitutes were more ubiquitous than taxi drivers and all other touts combined, and they were ever exploring different schemes to give them a competitive edge. A new, high-class hotel, for example, had put up a banner streaming across Chaeweng's main street to advertise that "Ladies can be availed in your room 24 hours a day." Also in the main street, a group of prostitutes had bandied together in a loose co-operative that ran The Happy Bar, a visible pick-up joint set among expensive restaurants and souvenir shops. The night I visited I was greeted by a confluence of rapacious hands who playfully and ceremoniously led me into the raucous blast of pop music inside. A dozen women were fussing over the handful of Western men sitting on stools, and a few writhed on the counter in a charade of pleasurable abandon. I chatted with Papen, the oldest in the bar, who had been married for seven years when she left her husband after he refused to finish an affair. Papen had decided to seek business in Koh Samui because it was over-run by holiday-makers. She had done this for eight months now, and she was already feeling jaded. To start with, at 34 she was on the borderline of saleability (average age is 21), and that was reflected in her earnings: she only made about 7,000B monthly, half of which was needed for food and rent, and the rest went to her mother in Bangkok, who looked after her son.
It had been Papen's mother who instigated her daughter's prostitution; the idea was that she would garner sufficient resources for her son's proper upbringing. This parental prodding is common: rural families are known to persuade a daughter to spent a stint as a sex worker, and when she returns home, she is shown more respect than ever, irrespective of whether she brings back any savings or not.
Economic opportunism or necessity alone doesn't explain the favourable perception of prostitution as something more desirable than rice-growing. An explanation could equally be sought in Thailand's unashamed attitude to sexuality, where sexual expression, as well as homosexuality, are accommodated and celebrated, and, more significantly, in the country's centuries-old tradition of concubines. Historically, most wealthy men and Thai kings kept at least one sophenii - a woman trained in the art of sexual love - and well-to-do men also acquired as many mia noi (minor wives, or, as we would call them, mistresses) as they could afford. Eventually, emulating the Western social model, polygamy and prostitution were outlawed in 1934, but the surreptitious acquisition of minor wives continues among the wealthy. Instructively, the first true prostitutes - those offering sex on a one-off paying basis - only emerged when polygamy was banned.
I used the word `instructively' because after various encounters I became convinced that these women, even today, still weren't true prostitutes - their mindset was that of a concubine. True prostitutes, like the ones in brothels serving Thai men, offer sex for a stated price. Meanwhile, the ones who target Westerners use prostitution as a cover for their quest for a Western husband - in fact, these women could be more precisely defined as `professional girlfriends'. It's not unusual for couples to start off on a paying basis and then became true lovers, which is what the woman would have been bidding for all along. Among my direct experiences, Papen, at The Happy Bar, had offered to sleep with me for free after I chatted with her for two hours. And on another night, Ya, a 22-year-old bartender (in the guesthouse bar) who had been flirting with me, asked me if I wanted sex for 1,000B, and when I made it clear I wouldn't pay for sex, she continued to pursue me with renewed earnestness.
The most telling incident was the brush with Nataya, a 29-year-old I met in a restaurant. Packed off by her parents to find a Western husband (as her sister had done), she had just moved to Koh Samui from Chiang Mai, and her enthusiasm for her mission was still high: she proclaimed her love after five minutes, and asked me to marry her after ten.
I said, "I am leaving Thailand tomorrow."
"Take me with you."
It might seem derogatory and undignified to us, but if you're at the bottom pile of the socio-economic hierarchy, becoming attached to a wealthy man as a concubine or mistress might be a shortcut to advancement. These tactics are additionally condoned by a culture where sex isn't a big deal and where women have historically functioned as sexually-trained mistresses. The master of choice would now be a Western man who, given Thailand's delusory yearning for Western wealth and sophistication, represents the ultimate leap ahead. Best of all would be a visa to the West. (Some other Third World societies - including Malta, where I grew up, and where my friends and I spent our teenage years seeking a coveted girlfriend from a wealthier and more sophisticated country - also desire a Western partner for the same reasons, but their cultural baggage would preclude them from offering instant bedroom slavery and kitchen loyalty, as the Thais do.) I said, "Take you where?"
"Everywhere!" She smiled gleefully. "My parents are going to be so happy that you will take me to England."
"I can't just take you with me."
She turned away from me, staring at the ground. "Can you lend me 200B for a taxi?"
If I wouldn't marry her, it was time to squeeze some money out of me, at least. Since we didn't have any sex, she could only resort to this type of veiled begging. I gave her some money, partly to shake her off and partly because I pitied her. Soon, I thought, she would run out of money, and then she would fall back on the last option: she would become a prostitute as a last resort, and all along she would continue her surreptitious search for a husband. Then, like Papen, she would realise that the money and glamour isn't as good as she had imagined; and like Nga and Ya, she would realise that Western men go to Thailand for easy and cheap sex, not for a wife. Those realisations, when they set in, would mark the beginning of the end of Nataya's mission. Research shows that these women only last in this job for two years.
© Victor Paul Borg
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