Hookers: Never Funny

Last winter I was at a party with my friend JC, and I was telling a story about our time in Bangkok together. As a natural-born raconteur with countless astonishing experiences under my belt, I have a vast anecdotal repertoire, and so I do not remember which story it was. But since it took place in Bangkok, it naturally involved hookers.

I should probably state at this point -- I should definitely state at this point -- that neither JC nor I ever, uh, *partook* during our time in Thailand. But I guess I made a quip implying otherwise -- a transparently facetious quip, but still -- because a few nights later JC called me to discuss.

JC and I are Generation-Y males who live in the same metropolitan area. We therefore never call each other just to chat or “reconnect” or, certainly, to discuss anything of importance. That would be so gay. Our phone calls rarely progress beyond where and when to meet up later that night. Which is why I was surprised when JC called me the following Sunday night. “Homunk,” he says.

“Yeah?” I say.

“Do me a favor.”

“Sure.”

“Never say the word ‘hooker’ when we are around women ever again.”

Apparently JC had encountered trouble with his previous girlfriend when another girl, a mutual friend of theirs, (falsely) accused him of hiring hookers in Thailand. It took him nearly a week to put out the fire.

Skip forward to last month. I was out to dinner with M. (not her full name), a girl I was dating, and some other friends. The friends asked where M. and I met. “I picked her up on the street down in Far Rockaway,” I said. Funny, right? The guys around me thought so; they laughed. M. did not.

Five or ten minutes later, long after the discourse had progressed to other topics, M. leaned in towards me and whispered, not smiling, “No more hooker jokes.” I nodded, surprised that it was still on her mind, and continued on with my General Tso’s.

[M. and I broke up two days later, though it had nothing to do with the hooker joke, I assure you. She said my intellect, bank account, and penis were too large for her. (She wasn’t the first to complain on those fronts, but what can I say? -- I’m not going to stop being myself just to appease my bitches.)]

Anyway, clearly this is a touchier subject than I would have guessed. Having listened in on conversations in which female friends of mine earnestly discussed whether they could even date a guy who had slept with a prostitute, I am well aware of the stigma attached to men who have partaken. It takes a certain kind of dude to regularly solicit hookers. Lonely, perhaps. Ugly, insalubrious, weak-willed, fiscally irresponsible, or some combination thereof. (Think Eliot Spitzer.) Not the most attractive qualities, to be sure.

Still, it’s not that big a deal. Many men, including many men who possess none of the qualities above, have hired hookers. And anyway, we’re talking about the female side of things here, not the male: namely, women’s aversion to prostitution as a concept. For American women, that aversion seems to present itself as discomfort at best, disgust at worst. As JC said during our conversation, “Girls just look at it totally differently. The idea of it really bothers them.”

So, the question I pose to the ladies out there is: Why? Why do you seem so repulsed by hookers and the men who keep them in business? My own feeling, shaped, admittedly, by a small libertarian streak -- I believe prostitution should be legal, as should drugs, trans-fats, etc. -- is that, as services go, prostitution isn’t all that different from any other. It is the oldest profession for good reason: it’s a service people want. Maybe even one they need, not unreasonably. (Hierarchy of needs: water, food, clothing, shelter, sex/companionship.) And while it’s not a career path I’d recommend to my daughter (too much contact with lawyers and politicians), I recognize that not everyone’s life ends up the way they planned. It’s not like hookers dreamed, as little girls, of becoming hookers. It’s just how they get by, one day at a time.

Homunculus say, show those tarts some compassion. And have a sense of humor about them while you’re at it. Michael Scott once pointed out that there are certain topics that are still off limits to comedians: JFK, AIDS, the Holocaust. (“The Lincoln assassination just recently became funny: I need this play like I need a hole in the head.”) Homunculus say, let’s keep hookers off that list. “I hope to someday live in a world where a person can tell a hilarious AIDS joke,” Michael says. “Still one of my dreams.” Amen to that. And amen to hookers.

A hooker.

Short, White, & Hansuhm

A few weeks ago I was sitting alone in the teachers’ lounge at our office, finishing up an e-mail at the end of the night, when one of the newly hired secretaries walked in. Like the other new members of the admin staff, she was young and attractive, from the provinces, with a high school education and an English vocabulary that couldn’t have totaled more than five or ten words. Also like the other secretaries, she had no work to do -- because of a Thai quota law that requires companies to maintain an acceptable ratio of Thai-to-foreigner employees, our office admin staff is ludicrously overstaffed -- and so instead she pursued one of the secretaries’ favorite workplace activities: striking up a conversation with an American teacher. I was happy to oblige. The problem was that she didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Thai. (This has been a problem for me several other times too. And by “several,” I mean “shitloads.”) I think my Thai was actually better than her English, a statement that borders on numerical impossibility, considering that in nine months here I have only learned a few basic phrases (“Hello/goodbye,” “Thank you,” “Turn left/right,” “How much does that cost?” “How much do you cost?” etc.).

We thus engaged in one of those usually frustrating but occasionally amusing conversations that only take place in foreign countries. You know the kind I’m talking about -- those ridiculous slices of communicative best-efforts that consist of constant exaggerated gesticulations and speech slowed to the point where each person thinks the other will finally understand even though they absolutely never will. Except in this case, instead of trying to find a museum or bathroom, we were trying to learn about each other (which was more difficult than getting directions to the nearest bathroom, but which also made it amusing instead of frustrating). Ultimately we were able to communicate to each other where we grew up, where we lived in Bangkok, how much we liked our jobs, and how old we were, as well as the ages of our respective siblings. At that point I was content to declare the dialogue a success and return to my e-mail. Then she opened her mouth, rolled her eyes to their corners, as if searching for the words, and said, “You -- handsome.” I was caught off guard. All I could do was laugh and say, “Kahp khun kruhp.” I didn’t even know how to return the compliment. But I think I was smiling almost nonstop for the next two hours. Those two words -- two of the five or ten she knew -- made my night. Hell, they made my week.

No doubt about it: Bangkok is great for the self-esteem. As a white male, it’s tough to go a week here without being hit on in a club by a Thai woman (or man), complimented by a counter girl, or catcalled at by bar girls and street parlor masseuses. No matter that half the time (okay, most of the time) it’s coming from hookers. A compliment is a compliment is a compliment. If you don’t come to Bangkok for the sights, the food, or the women, I’d recommend a trip here for the ego boost alone.

I’ve had my own ego boosted three notches -- from Level 2 (Neurotic Self-Loathing Wannabe-Writer) to Level 5 (Occasionally-Confident Semi-Rich Dude) -- merely by living a normal life here for nine months. Bar girls run from their spots by the door to grab my arm as I walk by. “Come in, suh. Welcome, hansuhm gentleman.” “I have to eat dinner,” I tell them. “Come aftuh. Aftuh dinner, aftuh!” Beautiful Thai women in short skirts look me dead in the eye and smile as they pass by. (They almost certainly do this because the Thais value eye contact and have the disarming habit of staring you down, not because they find the random white guy walking past them irresistibly attractive. But a guy can dream, can’t he?)

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been called handsome here. I used to get my fruit shakes from an outdoor stand manned by three sisters. While one of them would blend my smoothie, all three would chatter at high speeds, shooting me furtive, guilty glances and giggling the whole time. Finally, one day, one of the sisters stopped the blender a moment and said to me, “My sister think you hansuhm,” and they all tittered some more. Last week, when I went to a dance club with Pen, a Thai girl I’m dating, I found myself surrounded, literally, by half a dozen of her friends. “You Pen’s man?” one of them asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

“You hansuhm,” she said, and kept dancing.

Now seems the time to reveal, for the record, that I am not particularly “hansuhm.” I don’t think I’m ugly, but I’m not all that good-looking either: I’m short, with big ears, bushy eyebrows, and a crooked nose. In any country, I would describe myself as decidedly average. Apparently, however, not everyone agrees; and Thailand is not “any country.” Here I am not short -- 5’7” appears to be about average for a Thai man -- and although being white is no longer anything unique here, it still carries currency (as it were -- if you’re a farang, the Thais assume, generally fairly, that you literally carry plenty of currency). Back home I’m a short white guy with cheap clothes and a bad haircut. In Bangkok I’m a rich, in-shape, worldly American with a cool beard. “Mr. Face Hair,” one bar girl called me as I passed her on the street. (That may not sound like a compliment, but it was better than being “Mr. No-Hair,” the appellation she assigned my friend Shawn, who is balding. That was us, as we walked down Sukhumvit Road: “Mistuh Face Hair! Mistuh No-Hair! Welcome! Come in, suh!”)

Amidst the novelty of being considered handsome are two other novelties: that of being hailed as such to my face, and that of the word itself -- handsome. In the States, one is only called good-looking out of earshot or to a third party or, in my case, by his mother’s middle-aged friends. That the women here are so willing to hand out a compliment about me, to me, is very endearing; that they do so using a word, “handsome,” that is a virtual linguistic relic, somehow makes the compliment that much more charming. Clearly Thai children are taught in school that “handsome” is the adjective used to describe an attractive man. Even girls from the countryside, who had no English in school, apparently learn the word and make it a staple of their limited vocabularies.

When I explained to some Thai college students that “handsome” is no longer commonly used in America, they looked surprised and asked me what is used instead. “Hmm. Well, maybe ‘cute’ or ‘good-looking,’” I said. “So, like, Leonardo DiCaprio would be cute, and George Clooney would be good-looking.”

“Ohhh,” they said in unison, understanding.

Then, feeling bold -- the sort of boldness that can only come with a Level 5 ego -- I tried my luck. “So which one would I be?” I asked them.

They paused for a moment and looked at one another. It appeared they didn’t know how to respond. I got nervous. I wished I hadn’t asked the question.

Then they all burst out, “Good-looking! You good-looking!”

I’ll take it.

The Big Easy

[Note: Most of this was written on Wed., March 1, 2006.]

I’m writing this first entry from the distilled comfort of a plush Starbucks chais, in the well air-conditioned, brightly lit Ploenchit shopping center on Soi 2 off Sukhumvit Road, in Bangkok, at 3:00 p.m. on a Wednesday. I don’t have work today. I woke up at noon (11:59, actually, which, in the same way that $9.99 sounds like a better deal than $10.00, seems less pathetic than 12:00), not because I stayed up late or needed to catch up on my sleep but because I could. I returned on Monday from four days of relaxation on Ko Samui. Tomorrow I work from 10:00 – 12:00, then have three days to recover before leaving for another island, Ko Pha Ngan, on Monday morning. I will spend five days there, two at a swish resort (at about $50 a night) and three amongst partying backpackers, topless Swedish girls, and beachside bungalows, before returning on Friday night so that I can teach a class on Saturday.

So goes life as an ex-pat in Thailand. For the last two months, this is how it’s been: four hours a week of work (and getting paid for the “minimum” 50 hours per month anyway); drinking on Tuesday nights; awaking whenever; four-day excursions to the beach, to Cambodia; afternoon naps and all-day international film festival movie binges. You can see why I haven’t had time to get around to this blog until now.

In Thai, Bangkok translates loosely as the “City of Angels.” After four months here, however, I can make a pretty strong case for assigning Bangkok the nickname of a different American city: It is, more than New Orleans ever was, the “Big Easy.” On first glance, or even first visit, Bangkok appears to operate with the same organic frenzy of many of the world’s major megalopolises. It’s a “crush of humanity” and “assault on the senses” (as the countless tourist guides and travelogues might describe it), with honking horns and clicking high heels, stifling fumes and charcoal-hot food stalls blocking the sidewalks, buildings (and building) for miles in all directions, and people everywhere, everywhere -- chattering, smoking, cell phoning, laughing, hawking -- all day and night long, every day of the year. The legendary traffic -- along with the heat and the hookers, one of the only features of the city I heard much about before arriving (“Awful traffic,” my grandmother and parents’ friends would tell me, shaking their heads as if discussing a friend’s nephew who is in rehab) -- is, alone, enough to grant Bangkok “chaotic urban” status. (On their tour here a few weeks ago, my parents were informed that Bangkok has the third-worst traffic in the world, which, for anyone who has spent even one day here, is a surprising piece of trivia only because of the word third. First and second on the list, in case you were wondering -- and of course you were -- are Mexico City and Cairo.)

Upon closer inspection, however -- inspection, it should be repeated, that is being carried out by someone who works half as much as he did back home and still earns more per hour than many doctors here -- Bangkok offers, more than anything else, a cush respite from the stresses of life in the West. The farang flock here in droves, from every Western corner of the world -- America, Britain, Germany, Australia -- lured and then kept here by the warm weather, cheap goods, amazing food, and girls who are easy in every sense of the word -- easy on the eyes, easy with a smile, easy to amuse, easy to impress, and, well, just plain easy. (Why be coy? The girls themselves certainly aren’t.) A friend of mine here told me that there are about a million ex-pats in Thailand. Three-quarters of them must be in Bangkok. 750,000 ex-patriots in a city of about 7-8 million -- that’s one of every ten people. On Sukhumvit Road, where I live, it’s probably one in five.

It’s easy to see why. The Thais are friendly, welcoming, open-minded, and quick with smiles as warm as the beaches in the South. The food deserves its reputation -- it’s fragrant, fresh, healthy, spiced to perfection with an array of local herbs. As for the climate, yes, it’s too hot here, but constant sweating is still preferable to most (albeit not me) than winter in Berlin or Glasgow or New York. (I haven’t donned a sweatshirt since I got off the plane, five months ago.) But any discussion of the easiness of ex-pat existence here must begin, surely, with the lifestyle a Western salary in a developing country affords us. For all the talk of the inflation that has occurred here over the last 15-20 years, most things are still absurdly and irresistibly cheap. You can get a delicious, nutritious meal on the street for 25-30 baht -- that’s about 75 cents -- and a beer in a bar for a little more than a dollar. A perfectly good t-shirt or pair of boxers will run you about two dollars at a market, depending on your bargaining skills. Pirated CDs and DVDs go for $2.50 apiece; a movie in a lovely Cineplex theater, $2.00. It’s the one thing in Bangkok that never gets old. And while it’s true that many ex-pats aren’t incommensurately wealthy, even my farang friends who earn Thai salaries seem to coast by rather comfortably. Just go to any Starbucks or hotel bakery, where prices are comparable to what they are in the States: most of the clientele is white. Generally speaking, the only people in Bangkok who can routinely afford Venti lattes, rock concerts, and Italian dinners are tourists and ex-pats.

And then, of course, there are the women. Famous and infamous both, Thai women mostly deserve the reputation that now fully precedes them. They’re not all gorgeous. That’s a myth. (One that, in retrospect, I’m not sure why I believed before I came. I had this image of a land of genetically perfect beauty queens, which, of course, doesn’t exist anywhere. Except Sweden.) But they are all thin, which by itself separates them from half of all American women (who are also, it’s worth (chauvinistically) adding, automatically eliminated from beauty-queen-status contention by this fact alone). Thai girls also all have soft flowing hair, beautiful complexions, trendy tight-fitting clothes, and light-up-your-hour smiles made even more winning by flawless teeth. (Perfect genetics or great dental plans? I haven’t asked.) Most relevantly, Thai girls are more approachable and then more easily charmed than their fuller-of-themselves and fuller-bodied Western counterparts.

All of which accounts for the very noticeable prevalence of white-guy-Thai-girl couples in Bangkok. Walking down Sukhumvit Road and its sois, it seems as if every other farang male is accompanied by a devoted (and generally much younger) Thai female holding his hand. The men are invariably overweight, bald, and sporting European soccer club jerseys. The women are skinny and fresh-faced, if not outright beautiful. Most of these couples are the ephemeral sort -- sex tourists or single-minded ex-pats (a.k.a. “sexpats”) and the bar girls they picked up the night or the week or the month before. I, for one, find the phenomenon endlessly fascinating. You watch the scene and the questions inevitably flood in. She barely speaks a word of English. Apart from the intermittent romps in room 2802, could he possibly be enjoying this? Or, That is one of the ugliest men I’ve ever seen outside Arkansas. Could she possibly be enjoying this? (Incidentally, the answers to these two questions are, respectively: intermittent beats the hell out of never; and: does a McDonald’s counter girl like serving fries?) (Actually, in all seriousness, it appears -- emphasis on appears -- that the women really don’t mind. They flirt, giggle, and sound out complete English sentences with egalitarian élan and charm -- that is to say, regardless of the age, infirmity, or unattractiveness of their men of the moment.)

The phenomenon isn’t limited just to bar girls and their concupiscent clients. I’ve lost count of the number of perfectly respectable middle-aged men I’ve met -- in short, guys who wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, be described as sex-pats -- who visited Thailand, fell in love, and ended up staying. I’ve also met guys who aren’t so much falling in love with limitedly intelligible young maidens as they are actively seeking it. I even met one who admitted it. His name was Danny. We were in the same TESOL (Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages) training course together. Half the class was there, ostensibly, because they had landed in Bangkok, run out of money, and now needed a way to earn some back. I think they had been pulled straight off Khao San Road by the company running the course. (“Hey you! Yeah, you with the tattoos and bead necklaces. You look English-speaking and shoeless. Wanna teach English to hot, young, impressionable, plaid-skirted Thai girls? The hiring criterion is that you speak English. …”) One Thai woman who ultimately got her certificate barely spoke English herself. I was there for the certification, the only way I could obtain my work permit. Danny, he told me, was there to meet chicks. More precisely, he was there to get his certificate so that he could teach English and meet chicks that way. But not the kind found on Cowboy or Soi Zero. He said he wanted to meet the respectable kind, and I completely believed him.

Danny was a software engineer from the Northwest who spent half the year as a private tech consultant and the other half in Thailand, as an aspiring ESL teacher and wife-hunter. He was in his early forties, moderately overweight, mildly intelligent, and personable in that slightly awkward way that makes you wish he wasn’t as outgoing as he was. He also had an awful sense of humor -- cheesy and unapologetic in its sheer dorkiness. Awful. During breaks, I would sit in the lobby and read. Danny would wander from classmate to classmate, looking for a victim more patient than the last to chat up or crack a joke to. Usually, towards the end of his wanderings he would amble up to me and ask things like, “So, you like to read?” Yes, I would answer. “I love to read too,” he would continue. “I read everything I can get my hands on.” Uh-huh, I would respond, nodding politely, and wonder, but not really, why such an avid reader spent all his free time in a constant quest for insipid small talk.

But I’m just being a dick. Basically Danny was one of those perfectly nice, generally harmless, transparently happy people you hope to God never sits next to you on an airplane. During one lunch, I found myself in the same cafeteria as Danny. He asked if he could join me, and I said yes because I couldn’t say no. We exchanged the standard one-step-beyond-introductory questions -- What do you think of the course so far? What was your life like back home? -- before inevitably arriving at the subject of how we each ended up on the other side of the world. I asked Danny why, if he had a good job back home and few prospects here, he chose to spend half of every year in Thailand. “Well, to be honest,” he responded, “I’m sort of looking for a wife.”
I said something like “I see,” or “Oh yeah?” or maybe I just raised an eyebrow and kept chewing.

“I don’t know. I don’t really like American women,” he continued. “I’m a little bit shy and they don’t seem to like me. They’re not very nice to me. I find Asian women more approachable, less snobby.”

More like less choosy, is what I was thinking. But in fact I found Danny’s childlike candor charming. His goal, along with the supporting rationale, was the same as that of so many other guys who also preferred Asian girls (or even Asian-American girls, back home). The only difference was that Danny was willing, or ingenuous enough, to admit it.

To me Danny epitomizes the Bangkok ex-pat ethos, if not the Bangkok ex-pat himself; it’s a subnation of men and women (mostly men) who stay here because -- quite simply, and to discard with euphemism -- they can’t hack it anywhere else. Can’t afford that downtown high-rise apartment you’ve always wanted? Move to Bangkok. Only wanna work twenty hours a week? Try Bangkok. American women don’t like you? Come to Thailand! And if you can’t earn your way into the upper decile or find a beautiful girl who likes you in Thailand, I’m here to tell you, buddy: it ain’t happening anywhere else either. It’d be wise to take heed the inverse of Sinatra’s famous apothegm about New York: if you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere. It’s a phenomenon my friends and I have dubbed the “Bangkok Trap,” and the result is a city with the biggest ex-pat population in Asia, many of whom never plan to return home. In the end, Bangkok ruins you not as New York does, with its unwinnable rat race, but rather with its accommodating languor and tantalizing combination of first-world amenities at third-world prices. It chews you up this way and then spits you out, returning you home spoiled and lazy and unfit for Western life.

Two of my fellow teachers, one of whom is approaching middle age and the other of whom is already there, are perfectly content to spin the proverbial hamster wheel as long as that wheel is here. When they arrived, they had planned to stay a few months. It’s five years later now, and here they still are, teaching test prep, chasing Thai girls, smoking weed and hitting the bars on weeknights, living the dream. Call it the Un-American Dream. Another colleague of mine, a young woman earning a salary that would barely keep her afloat in any major American city but which made her rich here, could hardly bring herself to leave despite a job that had gone sour and a group of friends that had turned on her. (That’s a story for another day’s blog.) She told me that she still considered the States her true home, but that it was hard to give up the lifestyle her salary allowed her here. She finally returned home to Chicago four months ago. Rumor has it she now plans to return. The Bangkok Trap strikes again.

If I sound a tad judgmental in my assessment of the easy life, that’s because I am. I can’t help it. It’s the neurotic Jew and Protestant work ethic in me, combining individualistic forces and rearing their collective ugly head. More to the point, it’s the American in me that I can’t seem to (or perhaps don’t want to?) shake -- that entrenched and constant desire to always be both on the move and moving forward. Ultimately it will be my ability to reconcile these two competing ideologies -- not so much East vs. West or Zen vs. Judeo-Christian as Type-A-striver vs. Type-B-backpacker-slash-beach-bum -- that will largely determine how happy I am here and how well I adjust when I get home. Should I sign on for extra hours at work, some curriculum development, which would bolster my resume, or should I spend those hours napping and reading my book out by the pool? Should I go to the beach, or should I take a more “cultural” trip, one that will fascinate and edify and make me a more interesting person, a more dangerous writer? How many more structureless days before the torpor that has overrun me like a virus becomes a character trait rather than a temporary side effect of my environment? Will I bring it home with me? Will I be spoiled, lazy, and unfit for American life, to be judged unfairly by others like me? Would I be content casting aside my Type-A-striver values, buying up some property on Ko Samui, and living out the remainder of my days in a breezy beachside bungalow, as that Vietnam vet we met last month did?

No. No was the simple conclusion I reached during my third consecutive day of Type-B doing-nothingness on the beach in January. I was enjoying my book and the thrice-a-day naps, but I needed more. More action, more conflict, more direction. More “on the move” and forward movement. The American in me craves goals and achievement -- concrete, striven-for destinations to go along with the journey. For better or worse, I need to have something to show for my time. Witness this essay, composed at the expense of time that could have been spent exploring Bangkok’s canals or talking to locals.

In December, a friend and I were lounging out by the pool at our gym. It was a sunny, breezy day -- clear-skied, about 85 degrees. And it was 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday. We were both done with work for the day, and neither of us had to go back in until the following evening. I was reading The New Yorker; he was about to take a nap. “This is the life, isn’t it?” he said.

“Definitely,” I agreed. But now, as I’ve said, I’m not so sure. Yes, I worry about the consequences of so many lazy Tuesdays. On the other hand, they certainly have their appeal, don’t they? I wouldn’t mind falling into the trap for a while, as long as I had a way out.

It may not be the life, but it’s certainly an easy one.