Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

The bar girls were as fresh-faced as the college students, though most of them were a bit younger, more like artful schoolgirls, and just as casually dressed, their small breasts pressing against their T-shirts. The masseuses in the red-light district, in their efficiency and charm, were almost indistinguishable from the massage therapists in the spas. There was nothing particularly whorish-looking about the whores or meretricious-seeming about the tarts; any of them could have passed for bookstore staff at Paragon or clerks at Robinsons Department Store, and their English was as good. Hostesses in the wildest saloons were as demure as hostesses at the coffee shops in the great hotels. Bowing and politeness were common to all these women, not as a sign of submission but a ritual show of respect, and self-respect. No matter their work, these women walked with upright and stately grace because Buddhists believe the head is sacred and should be held erect.

"Massage?" was the first question from every taxi driver. It was a question I was to hear hundreds of times over the next month in Southeast Asia from taxi drivers, rickshaw men, chair men, scooter boys, kids on the street, whisperers in bars, and touts in hotel lobbies. But they didn't mean the sort of massage I'd gotten at the Erawan or the Oriental. A massage was a euphemism for sex, any kind of sex, agreed upon downstairs, then negotiated upstairs.

Nokh—it means bird in Thai—had worked at Robinsons. She told her family in Pattaya that she still worked there. Her father was a farmer. She went home once a month for a ritual meal and to pay her respects and visit the temple. She had lived in Bangkok for two years. She was the eldest of four children, had just turned twenty-five, and had responsibilities.

One of her responsibilities was to pay for the education of her younger sister Boonmah, who (unlike Nokh) had finished school and was attending college. Nokh and Boonmah lived together in a small room in a northern district of Bangkok, Nokh paying for everything.

Clerking in the women's clothing department paid so poorly that Nokh couldn't make ends meet. "Small money," she said. ("A lot of Thai girls work at Robinsons to meet marriageable farangs" an American farang

told me.) One of her friends told her she could earn more money in a massage parlor, so she gave it a shot.

"You should talk to her," my friend said.

"Is she out of the ordinary?"

"No. That's why you should talk to her. She's typical. There are tens of thousands just like her."

She was small, slim, doll-like, fragile-looking. What appealed to me immediately was that when I met her for our appointment she was reading a magazine, with much the same absorption as the bar girl I'd seen in Istanbul. She didn't look up. The sex worker is attentive above all, restless, with a bird-like alertness, partly to look for a mark, partly for self-protection. Reading was not only unproductive, but because it caused inattention, it was dangerous. She had been startled into anxious giggles when I interrupted her. I said that to talk to her, I'd give her what a customer would.

She laughed. She said, "Customers give big man six thousand baht. Big man give me one thousand baht."

That was $25, so I doubled it, and she was happy and forthcoming.

"Does your sister know where you work?"

"I tell her I work in a karaoke."

"What about your parents?"

"I tell them I work at Robinsons. They be sad if they know where I work."

"Why doesn't your sister work?"

"She does small work. But she has to study."

"Is she pretty like you?"

"She very fat!"

"After she graduates, what will you do?"

"Save money. I want to have a coffee shop in Chon Buri."

Nokh looked at her watch, but was embarrassed when I asked if she had to go. It was five in the afternoon. She was due at work at six, which meant that she would pin her disk to her blouse, displaying her number. She would sit behind a wall of glass, in the fish-tank arrangement of the Bangkok brothel, and would wait, smiling, until a man chose her. She passed the time this way until two in the morning. And the man who chose her might go later to a restaurant and for his meal choose a fish from an aquarium in just the same way.

"I read magazine!" she said, as though to reassure me that she wasn't killing time.

I found her situation depressing. Nokh was wasting her youth in a whorehouse, not for her own gain but, because she was the number one child, to support her sister. She was so small, so polite and pleasant, intelligent too. I asked a few more inconsequential questions and then off she went, into the cruel world.

***