Miss Bangkok: Memoirs of a Thai Prostitute (2 page)

Rummy was
mae
’s favourite. I wished that my mother wouldn’t gamble so much, as we were constantly in debt. The women didn’t play for big amounts of cash, but when you lost as often as she did, it began to add up.

You should know that I never saw my father with another woman during my childhood. I did, however, witness the disintegration of my parents’ marriage. This was a slow and hurtful period of my life, one that I have since tried to forget, using the medicine of alcohol.

The frequent arguments were the first indicators that something was wrong. As a little girl, I found my parents’ fights distressing. Even today I hate any kind of confrontation and always fear that a row will lead to physical violence.

Whenever my parents quarrelled I would hide out at a neighbour’s house, and when a fight broke out there between the husband and wife, I would return to the safety of my own house. I couldn’t bear to see people losing their tempers with each other. At least my father never hit my mother; some of the other kids I knew weren’t so lucky. After a bout of heavy drinking, the wives—especially those who had gambled that day and incurred debts—would be left black and blue by their enraged husbands. The evidence was plainly visible the following day when these women returned to gamble some more, sporting black eyes, cut lips, and broken teeth. In our house it was different and it was
mae
who frequently thumped
por
during their rows.

Mae
was spending more and more of my father’s small wage paying off her gambling debts, and naturally this was a source of frustration to them both. She berated him bitterly for not earning more money, and he rebuked her for wasting the little money he did have. At the end of each month she would ask him for money, and more often than not, he had nothing to give her after settling his debts from the previous month.

He was never going to earn any more than he did. He had had a bad fall before I was born, and broken his leg. I loved to run my finger along the scar that stretched from his knee to just above his ankle. It reminded me of a centipede. He had needed a metal plate inserted, and as a result, he failed the medical exam he had to undergo in order to be promoted. However, he didn’t seem particularly bothered by this, which probably angered my mother more than anything else.

A man of simple needs, he could never be accused of being ambitious. He enjoyed his army life and drinking with his buddies. None of his three children got to know him very well, or maybe there wasn’t much to know.

One day I asked
por
for money to buy a snack, and he showed me his empty pockets. I got mad at him and asked him why he gave most of his money to my mother since he knew where it was all going. He looked at me and said, ‘How can I refuse her when she insists?’ How indeed!

Por
managed to keep us afloat by borrowing money from his senior officers or from welfare programmes for soldiers. He borrowed to buy luxury items like a little black and white television set and a motorbike. There were only two TV channels, but it became an important part of our family ‘quality’ time. More importantly, though, it helped him gain face.

Gaining face is done by displaying wealth, so even poor people like my father would rather borrow money to buy luxury goods, and gain face, than do without.

Fortunately,
por
’s bosses charged a much lower interest rate than the loan sharks. Those ‘official’ money lenders were bad news, and many a family found themselves squeezed mercilessly within their grip when, inevitably, they couldn’t afford the inflated interest, which only ever seemed to increase.

We always ate dinner together, sitting in a circle on a thin mat.
Mae
placed a few Isan dishes in the centre, and each of us had a small basket made of woven bamboo strips with a lump of sticky rice in it. The men and women sat together on the floor, the men cross-legged and the women with their legs modestly tucked to one side. It was fun when each of us tried to spoon up food while avoiding arm-clashing. My father would try to entertain us by bragging about how he tamed the new resentful recruits and bossed them around. As I grew older, sadly we ate dinner together less often.

Once my brother, sister, and I finished our homework, the TV was switched on. We watched cartoons, the news, and soap operas until our bedtime. My mother always got worked up during the soaps and would become impatient if she felt that the leading lady wasn’t sticking up for herself against the vixen who wanted to steal the leading man from her. Every evening she threatened to beat the living daylights out of these bad women.

There’s an exception to every rule and not all the families in the base were the same. There were just a few families who I thought were ‘proper’. The husbands didn’t drink too much, and their wives stayed away from the gambling parties. At the weekends they would pack up their cars and head off on trips with their lucky children. I longed to do the same with my own family.

It became a big issue for me that
por
never took us away for the weekend. A family that took holidays together seemed to me to have it all—money and the ability to enjoy each other’s company. When these families returned, I would quiz the kids on what they had done and what they had seen, and then select the highlights to tell
por
in the hope of persuading him to bring us away the following weekend.

Our family never seemed to have any fun together; tension over money was a constant undercurrent in most of our interactions with one another.
Por
rarely watched TV with us. When things were bad between him and
mae
, as they usually were, he went drinking with his buddies in the evenings and didn’t come home until we were in bed. He wasn’t a heavy drinker, though—let’s face it, thanks to
mae
’s hobby he couldn’t afford to be. It was just easier to be with his friends than to come home to a frustrated wife.

School failed to save me, or maybe I failed to be saved by it. I attended primary and secondary school in downtown Khorat. All the kids on the base travelled to school on our own school bus. It was a long day, from 8am to 4pm. The primary school was an unattractive concrete building. Every morning at 8am we lined up in front of the flagpole to sing
Pleng Chad Thai
, the national anthem. I enjoyed the hour-long agriculture lesson in the afternoon, where we were taught how to plant and grow our own vegetables. We even made our own fertiliser from weeds and dead leaves.

Other than that, though, I’m afraid I wasn’t a very good student, and rarely scored more than a pass mark in any of my subjects.

The English class was a particular source of terror to me. Each day we were given ten new words to learn for the next day’s class. The teacher would then begin each class by having students recite their words individually, and I never failed to make a mistake. I hate to think that I was just a stupid child; perhaps it was my painful shyness that prevented me from succeeding at the task.

The teacher lost her temper with me one day after I stumbled and stammered over the words for ages. This usually sedate, middleaged, bespectacled woman actually threw the blackboard brush at me in frustration, just missing my head by inches. My classmates were as shocked as I was as she yelled at me and angrily shooed me back to my seat. Imagine that! I was so stupid I had caused this woman to forget herself.

Back then teachers were still allowed to hit their pupils. We had to respect them as if they were our second set of parents. Today things are different; teachers can’t physically harm students, but they might occasionally tap them smartly to embarrass them.

I was shaking for ages after I sat down, but she wasn’t finished with me just yet. She asked the class to read aloud from the textbook and then hovered near me so she could hear my inevitable mistakes. How could I concentrate on what I was reading when I was busy praying that she would just leave me alone? She pounced on me and started jabbing me in the head with her finger, ‘Can’t you remember how to pronounce that? Can’t you remember anything I’ve taught you?
Or have I been playing the fiddle to a buffalo
?’

To my horror I felt my eyes well up with searing hot tears as the cockier of my peers began to giggle at my ignorance and discomfort. Being compared to a buffalo is one of the greatest insults in Thai culture. That was when I made another promise to myself: never to cry, or feel sorry for myself. I was going to get on with it, because that is what life is all about.

I was fortunate enough to have a lovely teacher when I was 13. She seemed to really care about the students and wasn’t interested in abusing her position as a figure of authority. Her classes were more serene. She always began them with a joke in order to settle us, and sometimes she would choose a lucky girl whose hair she would braid during the lunch break. She was a good listener, and if any of us had any worries, we found ourselves airing them in class under her gentle probing. I used to wonder if things might have worked out differently for me had she been my teacher all through my schooling because I was a timid child who couldn’t function under duress.

Though I was a very quiet student and never misbehaved, the teachers mostly scared me, especially the ones who couldn’t believe that I hadn’t retained any information from the previous class. At times, I was so terrified of saying the wrong thing that I would actually freeze when picked on to answer a question— nothing would come out of my mouth, even when I knew the answer, and the teacher would tut-tut in disgust and move on to someone else. When I didn’t understand something I dared not ask for fear that the teacher would scold me for not paying attention in class.

Students had to pass an entrance exam in order to be accepted for secondary school, and I will never forget the day the results came out. I was convinced that I wouldn’t get in, but nevertheless I prepared myself as best as I could and took examinations in the subjects of English, Thai, science, and mathematics. It was an anxious wait for the day when the list of triumphant students would be made public. It was also my birthday, which made it all the more dramatic.

Early that morning
mae
took me down to a roadside spot where the monks from our local
wat
usually walked by, on their morning rounds to collect offerings from the villagers. My mother and I were going to ‘make merit’ and add to our karma account with an offering. I was excited because I rarely did this. Our family didn’t have much to offer anyway. The sun was still orange as a line of monks appeared on the horizon. They kept a distance of several metres between them as they walked.

Each monk was accompanied by a
dek wat
, or temple boy, who walked behind him. Some of these
dek wat
s were children whose parents left them in the monks’ care because of poverty— the same way people left their unwanted dogs at the temples. I couldn’t help but feel lucky because despite how poor my parents were, they had never given me up to anyone.

Young monks walked past us, but
mae
didn’t ask one to stop. I asked her why she didn’t. She said, ‘Pumpkin, we need to find the humblest and holiest one in order to make the most merit out of our offerings.’

She was right. The higher the being you make your offering to, the more merit you make. For example, you can make more merit from feeding one person than from feeding ten animals because a human is a higher being.

‘Now help
mae
look for a sedate monk with bare feet and no
dek wat
,’ she said.

Serendipitously, a bald, middle-aged monk wrapped in a saffron robe appeared. My mother called, ‘
Nimon jao ka
,’ a formal greeting reserved only for monks. You have to call a monk to stop, or else he will walk on because no monk can stop to ask for offerings. It is immodest. He can accept only voluntary offerings.

We sat before him on our knees to show appropriate respect, as in Buddhism, men are considered higher beings than women. We gently placed food and a lotus flower into his bowl, and as we
wai
’d, he blessed us.

I made an offering to the monk in order to get my wish. It is the Buddhist way; you must do something good to have something good done to you in return. I went off to school, hoping and praying that I had made the list. And I had. I raced home after school to tell my parents. This is a particularly fond memory for me, as it is the one time when I felt that my parents were rooting for me and wanting something for me as much as I did.

I was thrilled with the meagre pass I had achieved—I came second-last in my class—and delightedly informed my father that I was very proud of myself. He smiled and told me that I had every reason to be. The exam hadn’t been easy at all, and there had been fierce competition amongst the students.

That day stands out in my mind as the last time that I had a real interest in my education, and that I wanted something from it so badly.

The only thing I really liked about school was that I got to hang out with my best friends, Veena and Somsri. We played together during the lunch break, which was, unsurprisingly, my favourite part of the school day. I envied Veena for her intelligence; she received A’s in all her assignments. Of course she got a lot of extra tutoring at home from her mother, who was a teacher. Somsri was more like me; poor and ignorant. The three of us got on very well and hardly ever argued.

It was certainly an innocent time for me, and our amusements were simple. Our favourite game was where we flicked tamarind seeds at each other.

During the twice-yearly school holidays, my brother, sister, and I were sent away separately to stay with our aunt and uncle on their farm in another province in Isan. We always enjoyed these visits, but I was a bit puzzled as to why we couldn’t ever stay at home. It is obvious to me now that it was for economic reasons. My mother’s gambling debts were increasing, and getting through a few months without having to feed us was a mercy on my parents’ meagre finances.