East-West Station

My heart sank a little when I read that the identity of the notorious paedophile “Vico” has been discovered and that he has been revealed as Christopher Paul Neil, a 32-year-old Canadian and - yes - an English teacher.

And - worse - he is on the run in Thailand.

This will confirm an lot of gossipy prejudice about both “English teachers” and Thailand. Having been an English teacher all my working life, I am used by now to the occasional patronising comments: “Ah, teaching English are you? That sounds fun…and when do you think you’ll get a proper job?”,”That sounds like a good way to travel”, “Ah, so you couldn’t find a job at home then?” etc. And I don’t let it get to me because I like what I do and because most of the people who say things like this aren’t worth arguing with anyway.

Expat English teachers also have a reputation for being alcoholics, fruitcakes, and/or sexpats. Well, there is indeed no smoke without fire and, admittedly, a few of the colleagues I’ve had over the years have been a little eccentric and fond of a drink.

And I lived in Thailand for a couple of years and am forced to say that in some ways Bangkok deserves its reputation.

However, I could go on at much much greater length about how the overwhelming majority of my English teacher colleagues over the years have been decent, clued-in people and how most of the guys I met working in Bangkok were no more sex-crazed than men anywhere else…but that would be less interesting, although much more fair and accurate.

The point is that for whatever reason even educated and intellectually scrupulous people can let themselves lapse into massive generalisations about a group of people based on the behaviour of a minority of them.

There are gradations of course and I think that comments like “the Russians like a drink” is probably only unfair on about half of the Russian population. But what about stuff like “Catholic priests are kiddy-fiddlers” or “Muslims are terrorists”?

I guess we’ll never get rid of lazy thinking like this.

Some of these comments are meant as jokey/harmless/throwaway and I know it can come across as a bit pompous to call people on them too often. But most of the time it’s just annoying and encourages sloppy thinking and contributes to building up harmful and unfair stereotypes.

I guess the next time I get pissed off with Chinese telling me that “laowai can’t use chopsticks” or “western food has no taste”, I will remind myself how many similar comments get spouted in “the west” too. (Though I’ll also tell them what nonsense they are talking.)

A recent encounter in a bar with “One Night in Bangkok” that old chestnut from the musical Chess got me thinking about the city of sin again. I’ve been away from Bangkok for a couple of years now, so it’s about time for a fond look back.

It must be said that distance lends enchantment to the view. After a few months living there I had had about enough of its clammy embrace, and, hubristically, I thought I had got its number. I wasn’t exactly fed up with the place but I wasn’t much taken with it either and I started to spend more time on the beautiful AIT (Asian Institute of Technology) campus, which is a good 40 kilometers outside of Bangkok. Anyways, my job (teacher training work with Sri Lankans) was interesting, the pay was good, and the contract was for two years, so I wasn’t planning on going anywhere else until it was up.

In any case, just to remind you of the song’s premise…it’s an exchange between an aloof American chess player and a siren-song chorus trying to tempt him away from his cerebral concerns.

And it’s kind of snappy…how about this for example?

[COMPANY]
One night in Bangkok and the world’s your oyster
The bars are temples but the pearls ain’t free
You’ll find a god in every golden cloister
And if you’re lucky then the god’s a she
I can feel an angel sliding up to me

[THE AMERICAN]
Get Thai’d! You’re talking to a tourist
Whose every move’s among the purest
I get my kicks above the waistline, sunshine

In this exchange is the real dilemma of the Thai life for the western man. Do you succumb to the sensual surface or try to keep your wits about you? Oh, yes, it’s quite easy if you’re there for a week or so with your girlfriend, but just try living there!

Well, it’s not such a black and white choice of course, but there is something about Thailand that dazzles and dazes the long-term visitor and does not lead to much useful work being done. Let’s face it, it’s a leisurely kind of place.

It’s not that easy for the locals to concentrate either though. Where are the Thai novelists? Or scientists? Or inventors? Thailand, it seems to me, specialises in chefs, designers, artisans, beauticians, and kind polite smiling people with a pleasant, simple, sensual, and not particularly intellectual take on life. Even Thai Buddhism is not very thoughtful compared to some of the Chinese or Japanese forms of Buddhism, such as Zen. Thai monks spend a lot of time memorising the sutra chants and almost none pondering koans.

But “One Night in Bangkok” is not really about Thais, it is about what happens to westerners when they go to Thailand. In fact, almost all western writing about Thailand is really only interested in what happens to westerners when they go to Thailand. Think of “The Beach” or “Platform” or “The Big Mango.”

I should say now that I intend to go with the flow and focus on foreigners (farang!) in Bangkok, and not only that, I am going to add my footprints to the path most travelled by and write about western men in Bangkok. (Many Japanese, Koreans, Arabs etc go as well but theirs is a slightly different story.) It might be cliched but the thousands of men who come in search of sex/love/marriage are for most observers by far the most interesting foreign phalanx in Bangkok. I mean, they shop at the markets, stare at the temples, and rave about the food - just like all the other visitors - but they also go and get themselves well and truly entangled with the locals, and all sorts of interesting cross-cultural complications ensue.

So what happens when these guys get Bangkoked?

I guess the first thing that strikes tourists to Bangkok has got to be the heat. It’s a viscous proprietorial heat that oozes into your pores and into your personality, encouraging you to slow down and get sensuous. Bangkok does get “cool” for a scant few hours in some January/February evenings, but basically the place is an oven. An oven to bake the foreign tourists’ brains.

And most of the pasty whiteys wandering around this oven are well and truly marinaded in Thai alcoholic sauce. Thai beer is strong. Beer Chang is a hefty 6.4% and there’s even a special portmanteau noun “Changover” to describe the morning after a night out on that soupy brew…and then there’s the delicious Singha at a mere 5.8%. (Tsing Tao in the big bottles is 3.1% for comparison.) Most western guys in Bangkok seem to have beer bottles glued to their hands. There’s also the sweet and dirt cheap Thai Rum and Whiskey, with the only difference between them, as far as I can detect, being that the Rum is a slightly darker colour. Most white male tourist life in Bangkok takes place in a hot and sticky alcoholic fug.

But actually, it’s almost everything in Bangkok that conspires to make the western man swelter with its sensualism after a prolonged exposure. The spicey tangy food will make you sweat, the sharp olfactory attacks of sewage, chili, durian or jasmine will make you blanch, just let the Thai language seduce you with its songlike swoops and swirls, and the women, ah yes, the women will make your libido smolder.

For the man who likes to “rinse his eyes with feminine beauty”, as the Italians say, Bangkok is pretty much as good as it gets. You can walk around the shopping malls by day and salivate at the well heeled and unavailable (to you) svelte Sino-Thais with milky creamy skin and silky shampoo hair and then of an evening you can stagger in a horny alcoholic haze into the sex-for-sale areas to ogle at similarly stunning honey-skinned up-country girls whose favours can be secured for a couple of thousand baht a night. And for those of you who for whatever reason are not too taken with Thai women, remember that most of them are seen through jasmine-tinted beer goggles.

And so the story goes, and most people know it well by now. You can love it or hate it but it’s just a fact of Bangkok and will be for a good long while yet.

But just to push a bit deeper perhaps (yes, push it deeeepah hunsum maaan!) what is going on with all these booze-sodden, lust-driven men staggering around Bangkok?

Two wonderful writers, Michel Houellebecq and John Burdett see them as the result of a grand male sexual neurosis in the west that has found a vent in the economic disparity between certain developing countries and relatively well-off First Worlders. Indeed, Houellebecq’s Platform is more or less premised on the blackly comic notion that the sexual tourism of the first world will provide the solution to the economic ills of the third world.

But whatever their place in the grand psychosexualeconomic scheme of things, we shouldn’t forget they are individuals, and I’ve talked to a fair few of them in bars and read their ramblings in blogs. Some of them are in search of love, and get diverted; some of them are habitual whoremongers; and some of them are hedonists enjoying a change of sexual scene. But all of them are helping contribute to making Bangkok the hottest, lustiest, most desire-ridden place on the planet. In some parts of the city you can practically hear the panting and the libidinal groans licking like tongues of flame around the sun-baked buildings.

All of which is a little ironic if we consider that Bangkok is also the capital of probably the most devoutly Buddhist country on earth and that the central tenet of Buddhism is that in order to free yourself from this vain cycle of suffering existence, you must rid yourself of desire.

The sanskrit word trishna can be translated as thirst, desire, lust, craving, or clinging, and for some of the hard-core Bangkok junkies the word “craving” seems more appropriate and accurate than desire. Bangkok seems to fan the flames of cravings and you can see these sex-starved/affection-starved alcoholics, dragging themselves through the Sois at night, looking for a horny fix. The craving often drives them to the edge of reason (who was it who said that for a male having an active libido is like being chained to a lunatic?) and here is longterm Bangkok resident Jake Needham on this subculture’s scene

In the empty hours it is this army of the dispossessed that takes control of Sukhumvit Road. Tuk-tuks, little three-wheeled motorcycle taxis, fly up and down the street most of the night ferrying carousers between the two clumps of bars that anchor the neighborhood: Nana Plaza on the west and Soi Cowboy about a mile to the east. They are all there: the lonely, the frightened, the guilty, the lost, the vulnerable, the depressed, and the psychotic. Soaked with sweat, they rush back and forth from one bar to another, reeking of that peculiarly sour, metallic odor habitually given off by the emotionally overmatched and underachieving. It is this floodtide of the adrift and abandoned that makes the hours after midnight some of the city’s busiest.

Well, it’s too easy to sneer perhaps, and actually the post night-club “Sukhumvit stumble” scene, as a friend of mine dubbed it, is not so seedy these days. Food stalls line the street and people sit around eating hot-pot and checking out the passing trade. The ratio of deranged to adjusted seems more or less skewed in the level-headed’s favour.

But make no mistake, most of these guys are still hungering for a fix, and could be compared to the hungry ghosts who wander exasperatedly around one of the Buddhist hells. A hungry ghost is said to have a large mouth and belly but only a tiny throat…though some are described as having “a mouth the size of a needle’s eye and a stomach the size of a mountain”. Whatever. The point is that hungry ghosts can never be satisfied and they are consumed by craving. They are (dead) metaphors for the futile attempt to fulfill illusory physical desire and haunting allegories for all those who suffer from addictions that control and dominate their lives. The addiction could be for drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, power, work, entertainment…or even religion. All addictions are simply an attempt to cover up the fundamental sense that life is suffering.

These guys are on fire in Bangkok.

One of Buddha’s most important sermons is called “The Fire Sermon” in which fire is used as a metaphor for dukkha, the state of suffering or dissatisfaction which characterizes the Buddhist view of everyday life. Here is an extract:

“Monks, all is burning. And what, monks, is the all that is burning? The eye is burning, forms are burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning, and whatever feeling arises with eye-contact as condition - whether pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant - that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of delusion; burning with birth, aging, and death;

The Buddha urged us to dampen down these fires so that they no longer drive us into a distracted dance. In a general sense, this is to be done through meditation and leading a virtuous life so that lust, hatred and delusion fade away and ‘the heart is liberated’. With this liberation comes knowledge and understanding. The word ‘nibbana‘ literally means ‘to become extinguished’. In nibbana, therefore, the fires of lust, hatred and delusion are finally put out and we can experience the cool peace of non-craving.

This is a big ask for a western dude in Bangkok, I think you’ll agree.

And of course it’s not just Buddhism that seizes on fire as a metaphor. In his brilliant books More than Cool Reason and Metaphors We Live By linguist George Lakoff amply illustrates how fire is used in western culture as a central metaphor for passion, anger, and unreason. All of which seems apropos to the currrent discussion.

You can also get burnt in Bangkok in the slang sense of getting ripped off or taken to the cleaners. Mr Stickman has the longest running and, in my opinion, the best Bangkok blog and much of it reads like an extended warning to visiting western men. Here is an extract from an interview with “Stick”.

One really has to question the decision making of some people who seemingly just have to touch the flame, knowing full well that it is going to burn them…A lot of the guys who get burnt are lonely, harmless guys who were at the front of the queue when the almighty was giving out gullibility tablets. Many of them enter into a relationship with a working girl with good intentions and not only do they lose their heart, in some cases they lose their life’s savings too.

Burnt in Bangkok. Burnt by Bangkok. Burning in Bangkok. All part of the fire in Bangkok.

But still and all…some part of me thinks that in the end Bangkok is just another place with the accompanying temptations,frustrations and advantages of any major Metropolis. It’s what you make of it that counts and I know there are long-term western residents of Bangkok who live uneventful, normal, and even monogamous lives there.

Yes, you can piss your life or marriage away in Bangkok or Berlin or Beijing. Granted, Beijing doesn’t have ladyboys or Nana Plaza but at the end of the day the fire in Bangkok, although a hotter, more intense flame than in most other places, is the same flame that burns all over the world. Desire and lust and infedelity and addiction wreak havoc in every country and we are all of us chained to a lunatic. We just have to learn how to talk to him (her?) and calm him down.

The wise old psychologist Jung once said that “A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them”. Well, that makes good sense to me, with the proviso that I think “passion” is very often just a fancy word for lust. I think that (with rare exceptions) people who get married to their first lover are asking for trouble later. I think monogamy is unnnatural and fiendishly difficult for many men, and for some women too, and I think we need to come to terms with that.

What we should do is to get mature about it and curb our lusts to civilize ourselves. Otherwise it’s too easy to fall prey to addictions, diseases, and just simply get burnt out. So, with any luck I’m a wiser man than four years ago and if we can talk in psychotopographical terms and say that Bangkok is a state of mind, I am glad I don’t live in Bangkok any more…and so is my wife.

I’ve been an English teacher for a fair while now and over the years I’ve come to realize that one of the things that goes along with the job is being an ambassador for my homeland of England.

I realise that may sound a tad pompous, but what I mean is that in my experience a worryingly high number of people -and perhaps especially Asian people - will tend to form an opinion about an entire country and culture based on a couple of people they have met, and in extreme cases on a single random encounter with a complete stranger. So, whether I like it or not I am, to an extent, “representing England” out here in the far flung Orient.

And also, of course, I get a fair few questions from curious students asking me to explain this, that, or the other about England or Britain. They are usually sensible questions and sometimes thought-provoking…and occasionally totally off-the-wall. One Japanese university Freshman, for example, asked me “Do you have trains in England?” and I had to double check if she knew what she was asking and she did and had no idea why it was a strange question. Ho hum.

In any case, I am not a particularly proud Brit, otherwise I would live there I guess, but I do think it’s a reasonably civilized and definitely interesting country and when asked I always try to do my best to explain it -warts and all- to Johnny Foreigner.

All of which being a preamble to the fact that it has come as a bit of a surprise to me lately to find myself acting as an ambassador and apologist for Japan!

I had no idea until I came here how much dislike and often outright hostility many Chinese still feel towards the Japanese. And what surprises me most perhaps is that its the young who seem to get het up the most. I mean, I imagined they wouldn’t care so much about events that happened so long ago. I’ve often heard it mentioned that for young Chinese the events 18 years ago in Tiananmen are just too distant to remember….so why do they fixate on “what Japan did to my country” all those years ago?

Of course part of being young is having a cause to get excited about and part of being a nationalist is hating your enemy, and young Chinese come across as quite nationalistic to me. It’s the summer holidays now and in my part-time job at private school the little darlings are getting some extra English improvement in. So, when I have a class with a few youngsters in and introduce myself by saying that I have lived in Japan, or whenever Japan comes up in any discussions, I know what’s coming when one of them gets a spark in their eye and asks me “Do you like Japan”? I guess they are hoping I say “no I don”t” but from several experiences in the last few weeks I absolutely know they are waiting to tell me how much they dislike Japan.

Now, I lived in Japan for 3 years and liked it. Not unreservedly of course, for example I found many Japanese difficult to get to know and often a little bit too clannish and up their own arses about being Japanese. But, by and large, they are undeniably a polite, upbeat and helpful bunch and I felt welcomed and happy there. But also, even if I had had a shit time in Japan I would still challenge Chinese anti-Japanese comments because it’s basically ignorance and lazy nationalism.

So that is why I get a bit stroppy myself with some of these young Chinese with anti-Japanese characteristics. When they ask me if I like Japan I lay it on a bit thick with my praises of Japan. I like to watch their surprise and indignation when I say how friendly and kind and funny I found Japanese people to be and how much I think they would also get to like Japanese themselves if only they would put their prejudices aside and talk to some young Japanese people. And then I ask them if they actually know any Japanese at all, and they invariably don’t. So how can you say you don’t like them if you don’t know them then, I ask. I then tell them my wife is a proud Chinese but that doesn’t stop her from liking Japan and having Japanese friends.

Just occasionally the argument gets into deeper waters if they go on to mention how they hate Japan because “Japan refuses to apologise for what they did to China” and the Yasakuni shrine, high school history textbooks, comfort women etc etc comes up. This is a tougher one because it is well known that some Japanese politicians and nationalists refuse to apologise and indeed don’t think they have anything to apologise for (the twats) but I point out that every country has nationalists and in a country with freedom of speech (Japan is better than China in this respect I tell them) you have to put up with stupid nationalists spouting off their hate-based, half-baked, ignorant opinions. I then point out that actually many Japanese history teachers/academics/journalists do teach/write that the Japanese invasion of China was “a bad thing” and that many Japanese are apologetic about their recent history. This is true in my experience.

The Japanese are conformist in many ways, but there is definitely much more public debate going on over there about the pros and cons of teaching nationalism/patriotism in schools than is allowed in China.

And for the occasional arseholes who won’t listen to anything I’m saying I deal the killer blow by saying (lying) that I much prefer Japanese food to Chinese food because Chinese cooking is too greasy and oily.

Shock! Horror! Denial!

“Hey”, I tell them, “I’m only joking! You guys don’t seem to have a good a sense of humour as my Japanese students.”

Actually, not all my students by any means are anti-Japanese (I’d say it’s about 50-50) but the more vocal ones usually are and that is why I feel a duty to argue against them when I can.

Now can I have my Peace Prize please, Mr Abe?

A recent post over at Sinocidal has this charming depiction of a prototype modern Chinese chick…

You little minx. You teasing little tart with your pink mobile phone plastered with stickers of you and your gal pals in silly poses taken at the local photo booth arcade and festooned with dangling Hello Kitty charms. You in your shorts worn with black stockings that run up to mid thigh and your t-shirt with cutesy but bizarre English phrases splashed across your budding chest. You’re 23 but you look and act 16 all while living with mommy and daddy and going to your mind numbing day job

Which strongly reminded me of my early impressions in Japan.

I went to Japan to teach at a small private university, near Tokyo Disneyland, and was quite taken aback in the beginning by the difference between Japanese uni students and their English (and Hungarian) counterparts. They seemed immature and innocent, and the girls especially so.

So I wrote a rant which I am hereby offering for your inspection and for your cross-cultural comparison with China. Dozo/Qing…

Have you ever wanted to blow up Disneyland and kick Mickey Mouse in the balls? If you’re a well-adjusted individual then of course you have. But this kind of healthy reaction to the hype and sickly sweetness of the Disney dream seems to be lacking in Japan. Even cynics and tough guys lap up Disney here. The culture of the cute, of which Disney is surely the most successful exploiter, is big in Japan.

Puppies and babies and the like are popular the world over, of course, and only the grumpiest of cynics would remain unmoved by cuteness. A little bit of cute can be…well, cute. But in Japan it is all too often much too much, like adding ten sugars to a mochachino.

It’s the women who bear the brunt of it, it’s the young girls who at birth are chucked in at the deep end of this pink and sparkly (Disney) sea. Japanese shops are stuffed with Kitty Chan, Miffy, and Disney characters. The average girl’s bedroom is stuffed with fluffy toys, and her mind is stuffed with cute.

Many Japanese young women are cute to the point of appearing seriously retarded to Western eyes. These J-girls wave with both hands, say “bye-bye” in squeaky baby voices, and run with turned-in-toes and spacky knock-knees as if they were still 6 years old. The average specimen will have innumerable little photos (purikura) in which their dappy smiles and raised two fingers are digitally fringed with brightly cheery images, and kitschy figures will dangle from their mobile phones - often so many its a wonder how they carry them. Journals I get as a teacher are adorned with smiley faces and cutesy cartoon stickers, and I teach at a University.

Japan is a cocoon in which Japanese girls are cosseted and coddled to an extraordinary degree. Outside of Japan is dangerous, so best not to go… hearing bad news is upsetting, so best not to read the newspapers. Jaunty J-pop has maybe the world’s most banal lyrics. The occasional sarcasm and cynicism that does crop up in the culture will fly right over their pretty little heads. All of which adds up to a thorough infantilisation of the Japanese young female, and all of which makes her the perfect construct for late capitalism: the type of person whose main hobby is shoppingu.

But look around a little and you can find a subculture that is reacting to and brutally subverting this culture of the cute. It is a male thing, of course, and it is in every high street conbini (convenience store) and video store. It is Japanese porn. J-porn can be split into two main types, one involves real women and one involves Manga figures, and it is the Manga porn that is maybe the more disturbing.

Mainstream Manga is enormously popular with the teenage consumer and is populated by feisty young crew-cut boys playing their hearts out at various sports and cutesy little girls with wide eyes and delicate bodies who simper around. With Manga porn, it is middle aged salarymen who are the main consumers, so what happens to cute little Manga girl when she’s subjected to a lusty male gaze? Brutal defilement, in case you’re unsure. Where else in the world, I wonder, can you walk into a corner shop and flick through rows of comics that depict teen - and pre-teen looking - girls being tied up, tortured, beaten, and raped? Sometimes by men, and sometimes by aliens with intruding tentacles.

In most pornmanga there is so much lovejuice spurting from every orifice that the pages seem to squelch. It is pornsex taken to comic extremes and that is what manga can uniquely do perhaps. It would seem that the sight of a young girl covered in come is something that really appeals to the Japanese consumer of porn. Perhaps it’s cute. In a genre known as bukkake, a woman is tied up or held down and squadrons of salary men will cover her with come.

“What is all this juice and all this joy?” asked Gerard Manley Hopkins of the coming of spring and the rising of the sap of sexuality. So in manga, what is all this juice and all this pain? A subversion of procreative sexuality where there is never any impregnation because the semen is splattered all over the body and there is no pleasure for the female, only pain.

Well, it’s not exploiting women because these are only lines on a page, after all, but isn’t it degrading to everyone to have endless images of women being trussed up and savagely violated for sale in the local high-street store? This kind of thing is a part of the adult video market too, and Japanese porn-actresses certainly earn their money. The average video store will have a very large porn section and if you indulge in some “anthropological research” and rent a video, then it’s odds on you’ll hear a lot of high pitched squealing that sounds more like pain than pleasure and be treated to a lengthy gang-bang rape. The women cry dame (don’t) and yammette (stop), but usually end up enjoying it.

Here, of course, Japan is not so unusual….de Sadean tastes and nasty porn can be found easily enough in Europe and America, but in Japan all this sicko-male brutality is in symbiosis with the sickly sweet female cuteness.

And it’s not just the occasional otaku type, it’s mainstream. My small commuter town in Japan has no less than 7 adult video/sex shops. One of the mainstream video stores has an entire upstairs section devoted to porn.

Simone de Beauvoir would bring in “the gaze” here. The male (media) gaze is what turns the Japanese woman into an infant or a rape victim. I mean, on a very simple level, women don’t get raped unless men are around, and most women won’t try to act cute/retarded unless men are around. The male stare, the male gaze. The lascivious look and the approving attitude towards lovely little girls with sweet smiles and empty heads.

The mixture of the cute and the cruel can be seen as two extremes that have become intimately connected. Cold cruel Yang beating up on cute and cuddly Yin. Sex and Shopping. Shopping for fucking. Fucking the shoppingu. All part and parcel of a profoundly patriarchal and thoroughly materialistic society.

Old rant over.

Reading this again with the wisdom of a few more years I can see how sweeping it is in its generalisations and how downright silly it sometimes is, but hey, it’s a rant. And I wasn’t that happy in Japan for the first few months so I needed to get some stuff off my chest…to unbosom myself…and I needed to get a girlfriend! I ended up with my Chinese wife, we met in Tokyo during my second year in Japan.

Now I’ve been in China a few months I feel China is going that way a bit. More porn, more cutesy stuff, more money, more materialism.

More Japanese.

That should wind up the nationalists a bit

So far, almost every time I have mentioned to a Chinese person that I lived in Thailand for a couple of years I get the same response…Ah! Thailand has many “mangirl/boygirl/boylady/ladyman” and, just occasionally, “Ladyboy”.

This is something that Peter Hessler picked up on in “River Town” (yes, I love that book) and he saw it as one of those Chinese “buttons you could push”. Here’s the extract

foreigners always talked about how difficult it was to understand China, and often this was true, but there were also many ways in which the people’s ideas were remarkably uniform and predictable. There were buttons you could push - Hitler, Jews, the Japanese, the Opium wars, Tibetans, Taiwan - and 90 percent of the time you could predict the precise reaction, including specific phrases people would use…if you asked about Thailand, virtually all of them would say the exact same thing, that the Thais are famous for their “renyao”, or transvestites. (p235)

I am not going to say yet whether ladyboys push my buttons or not, but it must be a bit odd for Thais in China, or in contact with Chinese, to have their whole country indelibly and almost exclusively associated with ladyboys. And, also, it must be said, the second thing that springs to a Chinese mind when it comes to Thailand is probably hookers. Closely followed by Elephants, Durian and Mangosteen these days perhaps.

As some of you will know, my wife is Chinese, and one of the first things she wanted to do when we moved to Bangkok was to see a ladboy show. As any kathoey cabaret connoisseur will tell you, the best shows are in that surreally sleazy seaside town of Pattaya. So off we went for a weekend of sun, sand, sleaze, and ladyboy action!

We arrived in Pattaya late evening, and as we walked to our guesthouse past the endless rows of beer bars full of bar girls my wife drily commented “Now I can see the famous product of Thailand.” Which is not quite fair; Pattaya is about as representative of Thailand as Shanghai’s Maoming Lu is of China.

Anyway, next day we had a great lunch (Thai food!), kicked back on the beach, and come the evening, it’s ladyboy time! The two big Cabarets are “Tiffanys” and “Alcazar” and we tossed for it and got “Tiffanys”. If I remember well, the show cost 400 baht each (about 10 dollars) and it was a great show. The “singing” is all lip-synched but the dancing, the choreography and the costumes are fantastic…imaginative and obviously a labour of love…and of course the main point, the frisson d’être, of the show is watching these (for the most part) amazingly beautiful and feminine boys and thinking, “Jesus…that’s a dude!” and having tingly misgivings about sexuality. Or maybe that’s just me, hem hem.

And, as luck would have it, my wife and I were seated next to a coachload of mainland Chinese. Yes, Thailand is on one of the biggest circuits for Chinese foreign tourists, the notorious “SingMaThai”, (SingaporeMalaysiaThailand) where mainlanders get bussed around some tropical exoticism. A day in Bangkok on a SingMaThai package usually involves a visit to the snake and crocodile farm, shopping, the Tiger farm (where baby tigers are suckled by pigs and “looked after” by Africans dressed in full Disney-does-Africa regalia), shopping, more shopping, and then a ladyboy show in the evening. Anyway, after a few songs, one in Chinese, one in Korean, and one in English, the couple next to us started a loud conversation that set my wife a-snorting. One of these guys, let’s call him Mainlander 1 had obviously been snoozing when their tourguide had been giving them the background info on the coach. Luckily, Mainlander 2 was a bit more clued in and was ready to set him straight, so to speak.

Mainlander 1 “Where are these singers from? They can sing our Chinese well!”
Mainlander 2 “They’re not really singing! It’s lip-synched”
M 1 “Ah! Oh, I see! Bu hao yi si!”
M2 “And you know they’re not women, right?”
M1 “What do you mean they’re not women?”
M2 “This is a ladyboy show! They’re renyao/transvestites”
M1 “What! These ones! No way!” etc etc…
M2 “Ah, so you like them do you?”
M1 “No, no, I mean yes, but no”…a bit later “Ah, yes, I see now, obviously men”

When the show ends you can have your photo taken with one of the performers, for about 40 baht/1dollar and, if Richard Totman author of “The Third Sex - Thailand’s Ladyboys” is to be believed, this is where some of them make most of their money for the night! The cabaret is big business, but the performers don’t see much of the makings. If you wait around for another half and hour you can take one home for the night…again according to Totman I would like to stress.

Ladyboys are not really a Chinese thing, are they? In the Middle Kingdom you are either Yin or Yang, though there is a quite well known transsexual ballerina called Jin Xing, who used to be a PLA colonel! This Jin Xing is a bit exceptional, and has had quite an extraordinary life…and she knows it. In a Spiegel interview she acknowledged

“Today I serve as both an advertisement and an alibi for the party…Whenever a foreign politician talks about human rights problems in the People’s Republic, about record executions or about the cultural destruction of Tibet,” Jin Xing explains, “our people respond: Yes, but we have a transsexual colonel, whom we allowed to obtain a sex change, and who now performs as a prima ballerina.”

But I guess the reason that most Chinese are fascinated with Thai ladyboys is because it IS so exotic for them. Hell, it was pretty damn exotic for me after the British versions of Julian Clary, Boy George, Margaret Thatcher, and Dame Edna Everidge. The only remotely feminine looking one amongst that lot was the young Boy George but even then he was never that attractive, just feminine looking. Whereas many Thai ladyboys are very attractive and after the show I couldn’t help gawping a bit.

So, as I was living in Thailand for two years I had some time to do some more “ladyboy research”. The easiest way to do this is to go to a ladyboy go-go bar, where you will get practically mugged when you walk in. The deal is you fight your way through the attention, sit down and 6/7/8 ladyboys will pout and preen at you until you choose one to sit down next to you. I asked for the mama san and said I would like to have the one that spoke the best English. Seconds later a charming, if slightly chunky, ladyboy is fondling my leg and asking for a drink. There is not much bashfulness in these kinds of places so after having assured her I didn’t want to fuck or be sucked or suck or be fucked that night, I was asking if she could tell me how the ladyboys get like that, and who has what, if you catch my drift. “Ah..you curious man? Ok…” she points at a waif like Kate Moss type figure “that one..have big cock! That one..no have cock,” she kept on pointing around the room “have cock…have small cock… no have cock…no have cock!” All in a strong Thai accent which makes “cock” sound like “caaaaark”! Pretty funny, and well worth the price of a ladyboy drink. What kind of customers do you get, I asked. Mostly middle aged and older men, a fair number of middle-easterners, and the Japanese have a thing about girls who’ve had the snip, apparently. And do they ever get men who don’t realise this is a ladyboy bar? “Yes, but we tell them. Not good for them, not good for us if they take home a mistake.”

They take a lot of hormones, of course, and have breast surgery as soon as they can afford it. Did I want to feel? Well, OK… and all I can report is that it’s a miracle what surgeons can do these days. And did I go back and take one home? Well, that’s really none of your business, but it’s exactly what you’re wondering right now, is it not gentle reader?

What I did do was have the English-speaking ladyboy give me a guided tour of some Thai markets and famous Bangkok monuments. Her English was indeed very good and she had some nice stories to tell. Apparently, when Thai ladyboys go to Singapore to make “big money” they run the risk of having their long locks lopped off there and then if caught by Singapore’s no-nonsense cops. “Your ID says you’re a man, you should have hair like a man…la!” And of course there’s the stories where a western guy hits on a ladyboy and falls for her, and then gets a big shock. Typical “har har” stuff, but the surprising thing is how many men then go on to decide that it doesn’t really matter that much if their inamorata comes “avec schlong.” Yes, Bangkok is a bendy kind of place it would seem.

And she claimed that kathoey are for the most part relentlessly materialistic…Bangkok life is already all about the money and the designer gear but for the kathoey, more so apparently. Which was why it was nice to hear the Miss Tiffany 2007 come out with this

The winners of the Miss Tiffany pageant, now in its 10th year, are often showered with entertainment deals, but Ms Siraphatphakorn said she wanted to return to the impoverished Issan region where she grew up to become a social worker.

“Many people, particularly in Issan, do not have many opportunities, so they need help from teachers and social workers to improve their lives.”

Well, that’s a bit more specific than wanting world peace (like me!) anyhow. And most ladyboys are not sex-workers either, surprise, surprise.

My guide also told me what ladyboys really are…the third sex. Yes, this means that if you like ladyboys it does not mean you are gay. Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay, it’s just a different vibe, but it’s bound to worry some men of course. So, you can have absolutely no desire to sleep with a man, but still like ladyboys…. what, even tooled up ones? Yes, daaaarling! She told me to read the wise words of Captain Outrageous of http://www.third-sex.org who has the following agony-aunt style guidance on his website

The funny thing is that those who like ladyboys are usually regular people, like me. I get emails asking if liking ladyboys means you are gay. No, it doesn’t. I have no attraction to masculinity at all. I love women and I love ladyboys. They really are the third sex. When you are with a ladyboy, you’re with a girl who has a dick, and the rule book goes out the window.

Good old Captain, breaking all the rules!

And basically I could not care less what people do with their genitalia, or whatever else, in the pursuit of pleasure, as long as it’s consensual of course. All the big fuss about transgender issues and homosexual marriages makes me wonder when and if the human race will grow up.

“But what if your son wanted to be a ladyboy?” I can imagine someone asking. Well, he’d have a few issues with his mum, I guess, but none from me. What’s wrong with understanding and support, I wonder? Does that make me weird or something?

And the last word on this topic should go to “Beautiful Boxer”, the extraordinary film about the extraordinary Thai kickboxer “Nong Toom.” If you haven’t heard of him, this was the guy who became a kickboxing champion in the face of all the boxing macho culture. He used to put on make-up before his bouts and would kiss his vanquished opponents! Hah! And he made enough money to get his longed for sex change. The film’s catchphrase is unimprovable “He fights like a man, so he can become a woman”, and it’s a wonderful film. Sensitive, moving, serious, and brilliantly acted by the main star Asanee Suwan.

There’s a marvellous moment towards the end of the film where Nong Toom has fought his last fight and is sitting in front of the mirror dressed as a woman and wearing make-up. In the mirror he can see his former self in Thai boxing gear who has come to say goodbye to him. They talk, and boxer gives his support to beauty, then “I have to go” he says. “I…” she chokes with emotion and can’t finish her response…and he leaves. But the great, and untranslatable, thing about this exchange is that in Thai the first person singular pronoun changes for gender. What he - the boxer - says is “Pom have to go” and she replies “Chan…” which is the first time the character uses the feminine first person in the film.

A subtle and well rendered transition.

A shame then that ladyboys will mostly have to bear the brunt of smutty jokes and ignorant ogling for a good long time to come. Mea Culpa too here a little, of course, but at least I’ve made an effort to understand them, and not just laugh at them.

And you?