The Queen of Patpong (20 page)

Chapter 17
A List of Won’ts

F
our nights later, with a grinning Captain Yodsuwan cheering paternally at a corner table, Kwan stepped onto the stage for the first time and discovered it was helpful to be nearsighted. She couldn’t see the men’s faces. She could hear them, even over the music, and she could smell their sweat and their cigarettes, but they were a blur, and she could dance in front of a blur. She remained close to Fon on the stage, sharing a pole with her and keeping her distance from the women she didn’t like. After a few nights, she realized the women weren’t paying any attention to her; they were focused on the men. So she just danced and let her eyes roam the blurred faces, relaxing her own face whenever Fon said, “You’re squinting.”

On the sixth night, since Oom hadn’t come back, the mama-san put Kwan on the chicken-feed pole, near the door. A few of the girls muttered about it, but most of them accepted it just as they’d accepted her presence on the stage. To her surprise, over the next few weeks her life acquired a routine, one she could never have imagined in the village but a routine nevertheless: wake up at three or four in the afternoon, shower, eat something light with Fon, try to smoke a cigarette without coughing, go to see Tra-La to listen to scandals and have her makeup applied, pick up something else to eat, and go to the bar around six. Most of the girls did their makeup while they ate and talked, but Kwan just sat with Fon and a few of the other girls, talking, sharing food, and learning to smoke. She found she liked the bar when the regular lights were on. It was a little run-down, a little dirty, a little rubbed and scarred, with the ugly bits exposed, like a poor person’s house. It became familiar. She found a table she liked to sit at, a length of leatherette couch she liked to lie down on. Women she liked to be with.

Friends. She had friends.

At seven, the women who weren’t already in costume ran to the back room and dressed for the stage, and the fluorescents flickered off to be replaced by the colored lights blinking on the ceiling. The whomp and throb of the music kicked in, the mirrored balls began to revolve, the first men straggled in through the curtain, and she took the stage.

Tra-La and Fon were right. She made a lot of money. Being at the first pole helped; all night long, men would come in and stop just inside the door, gawking up at her and checking the number, 57, on the plastic badge she wore. Sometimes they called a waiter or waitress even before they sat down, pointed a finger at her, and ordered. When her set was over, she went and joined them, drinking watery colas and trying to follow their English, which even the Japanese tried to speak. She was almost always the first girl to be taken out of the bar, even if she turned down one or two men first. Fon taught her a set of hand signals that she and her friends had developed to tell each other that a man was no good, so Kwan spent more time squinting than she wanted to, since whoever was signaling was usually across the room. Several customers noticed the squinting and offered to buy her glasses. The third one to offer took her to an optics shop and got her contact lenses.

A WEEK AFTER
she started dancing, she sent her mother eight thousand baht, most of which had been given to her by Captain Yodsuwan as a parting gift. She mailed it from Soi Cowboy, a smaller area of bars halfway across Bangkok, just for the sake of confusion, although she knew that her father could find her if he really wanted to. She thought the money would appease him, ease his anger, maybe make life easier for her brothers and sisters. Her little sister Mai came to mind often. From then on, Kwan sent money every week, sometimes as much as five thousand baht. On the day the bar paid her the three hundred fifty dollars for her virginity, she sent twelve thousand baht to Isaan. She kept almost nothing for herself, just enough to pay her small share of the rent and eat the cheapest street food. She walked the city when she could instead of spending money on taxis and
tuk-tuks
. Fon bought her a small spiral notebook, and Kwan used it every morning to write down the name of her customer and how much he gave her, along with something—a mole, a big nose, crooked teeth, an animal resemblance—that would help her recognize him next time.

“That’s what they like most,” Fon said. “When you act like all you’ve been doing is waiting for them to walk back in. When you remember their name.”

Kwan also recorded in the notebook the amounts of money she sent home and the dates on which she sent it. When she’d sent exactly sixty thousand baht, she took a week’s worth of money and spent it on herself, buying clothes and jewelry and a phone of her own, although she didn’t plug in the charger or put any numbers into it, since she didn’t have anyone to call. She just hung it on a cord around her neck, like Fon’s, and felt rich. At the street market in Pratunam, with a pocket full of money for the first time in her life, she bought the kinds of things she’d wanted in the village: T-shirts with cartoon ducklings and bears and fawns on them; dark, stiff, unwashed blue jeans; big colored plastic bracelets and a ring with a plastic ruby in it. That afternoon she carried her bags home and hid them behind the couch, then waited to dress until Fon had left, so she could surprise her. Using the small mirror on the back of the bedroom door, she assembled the best outfit she could from the clothes and jewelry she’d bought, and went to the bar. The curtains closed behind her, and she stood there in her finery as the chatter of the girls died away. There were no admiring cries. Some of the girls who didn’t like her started to laugh. Kwan backed through the curtain onto the sidewalk, but Fon and another girl came out and got her. They were trying to be sympathetic, but Fon looked down at Kwan’s T-shirt and started to laugh, and then all three of them were laughing. The next day Fon and the two girls who shared their rooms took her to return the things she’d bought and then led her to the right places, to buy the right clothes. They were so expensive there was nothing left over for jewelry.

“You don’t want jewelry,” Fon said. “The girls will steal it, and you want the customers to think you’re poor. It’s good to be poor. It tells the men you haven’t been working long.”

“How long?”

“A month, maybe two. Say it no matter how long you’ve been here. Just don’t tell it to someone who took you six months ago. And if you do, by mistake, tell him you went home to your village after you saw him, and you’ve only been back for a short time.”

“A month or two,” Kwan said, trying it on. “But it’s—”

“You’re not really lying,” Fon said. “You’re just telling them what they want to hear.”

To her surprise, most of the men were all right. They treated her gently and tipped her well. Some of them bought her dinner, one of them at the restaurant to which Fon had taken her. Many of them took her three and four nights in a row, which eased Kwan’s mind, because she knew what to expect from them. Some of them paid her much more than the other girls said they earned, and Kwan instinctively kept quiet about the occasional bonanza.

A few customers bought her clothes, which she returned for cash the day they left Bangkok, or jewelry, which she hid inside the cushions on the couch. Almost all the men told her she was beautiful, and a few of them seemed almost embarrassed by her beauty, as though they’d never been with anyone who looked like her and didn’t feel worthy of her. These men made her uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as the ones who wanted to do things that she could hardly believe.

Fortunately, there weren’t many of those. After one especially bad experience—one of the three times she had to run from the room, naked and clutching her clothes until she could leave the fire stairs two floors down and get dressed again—she and Fon worked out a list of
won’ts
to be recited aloud and agreed to before she left the bar with any new customer. Most of the things on the list were things Kwan hadn’t known anyone did, ever, anywhere in the world. Just saying these things out loud embarrassed her when she first started to recite them, but once in a while a man would back away, disappointed, when she made herself clear.

With a twinge of malice, she started suggesting to those men that they take the plump girl who had bumped against her, and some of them did. Much to Kwan’s surprise, the plump girl began to smile at her. Kwan did her best to smile back, although what she really felt was an unexpected surge of pity.

Still, despite the precautions, once in a while she went with someone who forced her to do what he wanted, who hurt or humiliated her and wouldn’t let her get to her clothes. On those nights she left the hotel rooms feeling soiled and worthless, and that feeling lingered until Fon reminded her that it was the man, not she, who should be ashamed.

STILL, EVEN WHEN
the men weren’t abusive, even when they were people she enjoyed while she was talking with them or eating with them, the sex was a problem. It took her months to get over an almost paralyzing shyness when she had to reveal her body. She tried to get the customers to turn off the lights, or at least dim them, but only a few would agree. Most of them turned on everything, so the room seemed to her to dazzle with light, and she could feel their eyes like a touch, almost like a scrape against her skin.

Some of the men were impatient with her shyness, but more of them liked it. It seemed to Kwan that these men created a kind of drama out of it, a two-person play in which she was the novice, the just-arrived stranger in a new country, and they were the experts, the men with the map, who could lead her into hidden territory, show her the points of interest, introduce her to new sensations. They seemed to relish the role. When she pretended at last to enjoy herself, she could almost see them mentally patting themselves on the back. If they’d spoken their thoughts, she believed, they would have said,
She’ll remember me.

In fact, though, the individual man each of them had seemed to be when she first met him disappeared the moment the clothes came off. They became a kind of terrain to be navigated, some places more attentively than others. The person vanished, leaving a raspy chin, a sharp hangnail, an odor of butter or meat, too much hair on the body, fatness or flatness, a penis that needed more attention than a baby. The things Fon taught her, which she had thought of as tricks, became a kind of vocabulary, to be modified depending on the reactions they provoked. While she was doing them, she was focused only on the physical part of the man the trick involved.

She learned early not to call anyone by name during sex. While she was working on whoever it was tonight, he was indistinguishable from who it had been last night or who it was three weeks ago. Only later, when they were sitting up in the bed, he contented and satiated and Kwan with the covers tugged up to her armpits, counting the minutes until she could leave, would she venture the slightly risky Eddie or Jack.

She took Fon’s advice and went mostly with older men, so she was safe from youthful male beauty. Occasionally a girl talked about how she taught her customers to get her off, how many orgasms she managed with this one or that one. They passed the best-trained ones around, either handing them on to a friend or suggesting a threesome. Kwan had no idea what they were talking about. When, about three months after she began to dance, a customer unexpectedly coaxed her into the first orgasm of her life, she lay bewildered until a flood of guilt washed over her. She had to fight tears. It felt like a betrayal, although of what or of whom she couldn’t say. She guarded against it after that. For some reason enjoying the sex seemed worse than enduring it.

Most days, just after she woke in the early afternoon, she would roll over on the couch and reach down to the floor for the big leather purse she’d taken to carrying. She’d feel around in it until she found the notebook, and then she’d flip through the pages and pass her finger over all the names written there. Names, only names.

OVER TIME
the new world grew familiar. She learned its rules and pitfalls, and she made decisions about how she would live in it. She bought nice clothes, but not many of them. She kept to the first friends she had made and only occasionally added new ones. She sent money weekly to her mother. After a month of hesitation, she wrote a letter to Teacher Suttikul that was almost true, saying she was safe and well, living in Bangkok and working in a bar where she didn’t have to do anything bad. Teacher Suttikul wrote back, and after that they exchanged letters every month or so. Kwan asked her teacher to keep an eye on Mai. One month she sent Teacher Suttikul four thousand baht for pens and writing paper for the students. Teacher Suttikul wrote a letter of thanks but told Kwan to keep her money. Kwan knew that the letter meant her teacher understood where the money really came from and wanted Kwan to save as much as she could so she could quit as soon as possible.

And she did save money, even as she continued to send it home. Unlike Fon, unlike any girl she knew in the bar, she walked into a bank one day carrying a wad of cash and asked how to open an account. Twenty minutes later she had a passbook with her own name on it, making it official that she had thirty-nine hundred baht in her account. She hid the passbook beneath the couch when she wasn’t using it and gave the bank account its own pages in the first little spiral notebook, and then the second and the third. Every time she noted a deposit, she would flip back over the pages listing the earlier ones. She became adept at dividing the amount in the account by the number of days she’d been depositing into it, then multiplying ahead to see how much she’d have in six months, in a year. She thought of the American hundred-dollar units as “Franklins” in honor of the bald old man whose face was on the bill. She was accumulating Franklins at an impressive pace. The bank became part of her routine, but she only went there alone. Even Fon didn’t know about it.

Fon helped her economize by teaching her about makeup, showing her the things Tra-La had done to bring out her best features. As Kwan’s hair grew, though, she visited Tra-La once a week to have it shaped and trimmed. The spiky look disappeared, replaced by a tapering fall of thick black hair, perfectly straight, that gleamed as though it had been oiled. Slowly, it reached her shoulders and then a few inches below.