Bangkok—I got here two nights ago, out of Taipei into Bangkok’s
new airport, Savannapun. It’s huge, well-designed, classy. As always
when I come to these parts I think, “Holy rikshas, Batman, this place
is on a roll.” Just so. There is a dynamism in much of Asia that you
don’t see in Latin America. Below the Rio Grande you find a couple of
modern countries, Argentina and Chile for example—almost the only examples.
Yet the whole region seems stagnant, as if it already is what it is going
to be. Not here. Asia rocks. Peoria hasn’t noticed but, I promise, it
will, and that before long.
We hear that China is booming. It is. But so are other places. Thailand can
no longer be called a third-world country. The Sky Train, the elevated rail
system, swooshes above the city in air-conditioned comfort, efficient and
built by Thais, not some international contractor. The new subway works. The
normal Third-World attitudes have left for other climes. Call this place Second
World and climbing.
Some things don’t change. The city still has its three notorious Disneyland-for-gringos
districts, Patpong Road, Soi Cowboy, and Nana Plaza. All are internationally
celebrated as sex parks, and are. They, some of them, are also expat hangouts.
In bar after bar by day you find nothing but male round-eyes, some of them
ballsy young journalists battening on the latest floods in Burma and flying
off to cover this tsunami or that rebellion. It’s a fun life. I did
it for a few years.
By night the clubs abound in sleek lovely Thai girls preying on the gringos.
Or the other way around: It isn’t always clear. They are so very pretty
and make Western women look like camels by comparison—this being the
universal view of Caucasian men here.
In general, prostitution runs from not-pretty to ugly indeed. As practiced
in Bangkok’s gringo bars, it is perhaps as benign as it gets. The regulars
among the expats at any rate get to know the girls at their favorite joints
and the atmosphere is pleasant, almost familial. The problem is what happens
when the girl gets too old for it. She has maybe a kid, no income, and no
obvious way of getting one. Another problem is sadistic Japanese sex tourists.
Life is not all ham hocks and home fries for the expats. In the bars you
find the aging drunks who show up on the same stools day after day, talking
about the old days. They bore me unutterably. You hear the same stories about
the same people, mostly extinct spooks with this or that special-ops group
or intel agency or Air America: Lansdale, Jack Shirley, Tiger Rideberg (however
you spell him) of the now-gone Lucy’s Tiger Den, on and on. They can’t
let it go. It’s all they have. Occasionally one dies of cirrhosis. He
then becomes one of the stock legends.
I don’t fit here any longer. A friend in Mexico, formerly of various
misadventures of my life, was here to do something or other involving television.
We went to the Foreign Correspondents’ Club for a beer.
Reporters don’t change. They always exhibit the same assertive, self-involved
shallowness, the same readiness to charge off to any disaster with a camera
crew. They are gutsy, resourceful, smart, and very good at what they do, which
isn’t quite journalism. Brash and egotistical, they go for spectacular
footage, not for the truth, which isn’t a journalistic concept. Thoughtful
they aren’t. They are usually good-humored and have good stories to
tell, but maybe I’ve just heard, and told, too many.
I met Father Joe, a Catholic priest who works with people with AIDS. This
sounds cloyingly virtuous, unless you have AIDS. More on him in another column.
But I thought, “A Christian who acts like one. What a concept.”
I’m accustomed to thinking of Christians as mean fundamentalist Protestants
who want to kill anyone they can find in the name of Jesus. I realized that
I had grown to think of the whole religion as a species of fraud. Here was
a guy who apparently took the New Testament seriously. Tough as a boot sole,
razor smart, swears like a sailor. If he isn’t careful, he’s going
to give Christians a good name.
I mentioned Thai women. Despite the sordid reputation arising from the sex
industry, Thai women are no looser than any others, and in fact most of them
aren’t accessible at all to westerners who don’t speak Thai. To
a close approximation, this means no westerners. But the Thai women are, well,
ladies. By this I mean not that they went to finishing school, but rather
that you can distinguish them from drunken sailors or abandoned mattresses.
They are not crass. They dress well. They seem to regard themselves as women,
not as wannabe men, and even to think that being a woman is a good thing.
Thank god.
This could equally be said of Mexican women or Chinese women, of most women
everywhere, except North America.
Now, if I were the only man who took a very dim view of American women,
it would be reasonable to dismiss me as a crank. In fact it would be unreasonable
not to. It becomes more interesting when the judgement is nearly universal
among large numbers of men—and it is.
Everywhere I go outside of the US, the American men I meet speak of their
horror of sexless, hostile, ill-bred American women. Sure, there are exceptions
and degrees among the gringas. Most unfortunately, exceptions is what they
are. The delight with feminine foreign women is given, over and over, as a
major reason for expatriation. (The other big reason is disgust with governmental
regulation of everything in the US.) I have friends married to Thai, Filipina,
Chinese, and Mexican wives, all delighted. Me too.
How did this come about? I don’t know, but I’m not imagining
it.
Come evening I went with a long-time buddy who lives here to run the bars.
I didn’t greatly want to drink nor was I interested in the rows of bored
and probably drugged-up peasant girls gyrating around brass poles. I was just
returning to the scene of the crimes of my youth. The roaring and clanging
of bad music on worse speakers must appeal to someone, but I’m not sure
who.
We ended up in one of the quieter clubs where my friend knew the waitresses
and barmaids. I really like the Thais. Allowing for the low base-line of humanity,
they are good people, and theirs is a fine country. But I no longer belong
here.
