Noun, Verb, Kimchi: Part 5

Written by Clayton Foster

Preface One: I’m now up on the Twitter, @ClaytronGo. Would love to see you there.

Preface Two: This is a column about life in Korea, except that this particular entry is about Bangkok. In fact, it’s the second part of a two-parter, which began here. Confused? Don’t be. In the spirit of Bangkok: just go with it.

I love Bangkok. To me, being there is to be plugged into some universal source of energy. I’m like one of those cartoon characters who’s stuck a fork in a power socket, flashing black and white, my bones visible in silhouette, my hair on end. Sure, it’s sometimes shocking and sometimes it even hurts, but goddamn, you feel it.

Sammy the taxi driver’s proposition: he’d give me a free lift back to my Bangkok hostel if I accompanied him for five minutes to a local gentlemen’s establishment. It solved my problem of accidentally spending most of my money and being a long way from my hostel at one in the morning. He would get a kickback from the establishment, even if I didn’t purchase, which I couldn’t even if I had wanted to, which I very much didn’t. Perfect. It also played right into a lifelong character flaw of mine, the flaw that will kill me in the end, just as it did the proverbial curious cat, the flaw that looks at shady situations, and thinks “I wonder would happen if...”

But what was supposed to be just a few minutes away turned out to be a good 45 minutes in the opposite direction of the epileptic lights of the capital. What I had imagined to be an establishment not dissimilar to the multitudes I had walked past on every street in Bangkok turned out to a large, signless warehouse. Sammy was no longer looking at me; he had shown his hand to contain a few bluffs. My preoccupation now was figuring out how big the bluffs were, and whether any of them included knives and gullets - theirs and mine, respectively.

It wasn’t like in the movies. The parlour, that is. The foyer was a large room with makeshift walls and several doors leading off, like the abandoned set of a 1970s dating show. Rows of faded, torn sofas faced the doors. A dozen or so young Middle Eastern guys leaned or reclined, watching me. Sammy stood, smiling tightly but looking down, hands clasped in front; he knew them, but he didn’t like them. The only other guy was a large Middle Eastern guy whose name I never caught, hair slicked back and wardrobe adopted straight from the Clichéd Guys You Don’t Trust spring catalogue: wide lapels, chains and rings a shirt stretched over his voluminous belly. Let’s call him Jack, if only because I feel it is in my rights to refer to any man by name who has presumed to put his arm around my shoulders.

“My friend,” Jack says, leading me to one of the couches and gently pushing me down. “Welcome.”
“Thanks.”
“Would you like a drink?” Jack says. I follow his motion and spy what I suppose is a bar on the other side of the room; a fridge with a guy standing in front of it.
“Um,” I say. Sammy nods imperceptibly. I’m annoyed because he knows I only have a few Baht left.
“Sure,” I say.
“Wonderful.” Jack says. “Now, for the business.” Without any prompting that I can see, the door to the far right opens.

I don’t offer this next part as funny. There’s no way to watch a parade of 30 women enter a room and line up along a wall as anything but tragically sad. This sadness is etched into each woman’s stooped posture, in her lowered eyes and stifled yawns. But most of all, it was in the large wooden discs that hung around each of their necks, painted with numbers for easy selection.

What I can say, honestly, is that I was ashamed at the sense of relief I felt when I saw the women;: proof that this dark warehouse in the middle of nowhere was what I was told it would be, and not just a secret place to take naive westerners when they had run out of money. The women took their positions, and all 30 turned to face me. Some smiling meekly, most not. Several were resting their heads on their neighbour’s shoulder, eyes closed. Bruised legs and arms were numerous. Most of them would have been in their 30s or 40s, maybe older than that too. It wasn’t hard to figure out how it worked. The girls that would get picked would get paid. For those that didn’t get picked in a particular night, a funny feeling told me that Jack wasn’t the type of guy to offer a weekly stipend.

Foreign men come to Bangkok in the belief that what they do here doesn’t count. The myth you hear is that, in Thailand, prostitution is part of the culture, so it’s okay, it’s not like it is back home. I never bought that idea, before tonight or after. A local guide had told me another story on my first day in Bangkok. It wasn’t uncommon, I learned, for businessmen from Bangkok to visit poverty-stricken villages up north. They arrived with the promise of money – more money than the struggling families could realistically expect to have otherwise – for a simple trade in the future. As soon the family’s young daughter was of age, the men would return to collect her, the return on their investment. Years would pass after the first meeting, a girl would grow into a young woman, and then one day a car would appear on the horizon. I can only imagine what would be going through the mind of the girl, of her father and mother, on this day. And it was completely inconceivable to imagine what was going through those girls’ minds now, however many years later, as they stood like slaves on auction, staring at me.

I was angry. Angry at Jack and his associates, sure, but also angry at the people who would come here, angry at the compromise of the culture that offered these things, and the culture – our Western English speaking culture, predominantly – that created the demand in the first place. Based on what? A history of horny GIs and accommodating locals. I was angry at myself too, because I realised that for all my white-middle-class-abroad neuroses I had entertained tonight, nothing that happened or that was likely to happen to me was as awful as what these women had to live with daily.

A door to the side opened, a man exited. He joined the gaggle of Jack’s associates by the bar, none were real clientele, just bored hangers-on, maybe errand boys. Directly behind him, a woman emerged, repositioning the number around her neck, and immediately took her place in the sad line-up in front of me. The same guide who had told me about the sad plight of the villagers and their daughters, had also told me that once in the city, many of the girls would get addicted to opium, deepening their indenture to these businessmen. And from the glassy, unaware eyes that many of these women looked through, I judged that to be an accurate theory.

Jack was talking. “So, which one, my friend? You want one, two, three, boom boom boom? We have girls who speak English, girls who... whatever you like, my friend!”

With Jack’s arm still around me, I turned to look at Sammy, who returned my gaze out the corner of his eye. I mouthed the words “five minutes” to him, and surreptitiously tapped my $5 knock-off designer watch. He thought for a moment, weighing something up in his mind, and then he nodded, slightly.

I turned back to Jack. I didn’t say what I wanted to say to him, because this is real life, and because I’m not Jack Bauer. So, I swallowed my pride and morals, and I said, “You have a very beautiful establishment, and your women are very beautiful. But, I think, not for me tonight. Thank you.” Jack’s dazzling white smile disappeared. He looked past my shoulder at Sammy, as if to say “Are you kidding me?” I didn’t see Sammy’s response, but he said something in Thai, something that didn’t sit well with Jack. Jack looked back at me for a moment longer than I would have liked him to.

Then he shrugged, and stood. He didn’t say anything as he walked us to the door. Two of Jack’s men stepped up to either side of the door, and as the door was opened, I was still half-expecting to feel something sharp enter somewhere not made for sharp things.

Nothing happened. Of course.

Sammy and I returned to the safety of the cab. I hadn’t seen anyone handing Sammy any kind of money or voucher as part of his kickback. I asked him if he had received what he wanted, if I had done my job. He shrugged and said not to worry about it. I sometimes wonder what he had said to Jack in Thai. We backed out slowly, the old Thai men in the lawn chairs staring at us, and drove back towards the bright lights of Bangkok.

I’m eager, at this point, not to besmirch the name of the entire city with the story of one encounter with one sector of it. Like I said, Bangkok’s the city of stories. It’s an incredibly vital, uplifting, confusing, terrifying place. Ladyboy hookers share street-food stall benches with bright-orange-robed Buddhist monks. Businessmen duck and dive between street kids. Shacks lean against skyscrapers, and the residents of both wave to each other as they go about their business. Smiles are everywhere. Or, at least, they were a year ago. I tried here to write a love letter to a city, it came about a bit wonky and contradictory, a bit like the city itself. Perhaps, considering what we’ve witnessed in the news the last few months, it should have been a Get Well Soon card.