I traveled to Asia for work, covering psychiatry and science for American magazines, and I passed through Bangkok sporadically, in pursuit of research for medical articles which I could write in hotel rooms. Each time I went, the city had changed. I took in the opening of the Skytrain or the rising height of the billboards upon which iPods and sneaker brands and Italian swimwear appeared like fresh fruit, proving the city's desperate desire to be more contemporary than anywhere.
Here capitalism had been imposed upon new ground and was itself novel. A capitalism that was not merely "Asian" but Indochinese, Hindu-Buddhist, Sino-Malay. All along Sukhumvit Road the Skytrain stations had appeared, lifted above the street on cement columns, their arcades bright with organic fruit juice vendors, opticians, and travel agents. They were new urban spaces, cleaner and wider than those of the city below them. It was as if after centuries of chaos the city was yearning for geometry and order, and she was getting her wish.
There were times when I took a room for a week at one of the cheaper places on Soi 4 and tried to trace the men who had all left the Primrose and settled elsewhere. I rarely found them. I went to the dental clinic on Soi 49, had my crowns and fillings done, and then spent evenings alone playing pool with Arab punters at the Grace Hotel, a place that satisfies their every need.
I spent many nights wandering around Little Arabia on Soi 3/1, going to Al Ferdoss in the Schiller Inn to smoke a water pipe and watch the men in lamb's wool hats and djellabas filing with tarts through the lobby next to the dining room. Eating a fatoosh salad with an orange shish and watching such maneuvers, or simply taking in the restaurants with displays of plastic veal chops where men in tattersail jackets cry "Lam', Lam' " all night long.
The small elephants of Southeast Asia plod by with boys seated on their heads, ice picks dug into the animals' ears, because it is the elephants who do the begging and charming here. And I daresay one can be happy watching a Russian pilot stuffing his face with slices of watermelon, or scanning the crinkled posters of Crusader castles in Lebanon or the Thai ketchup bottles and plastic orchids that rise from the tables.
At four in the morning in the midst of Little Arabia, in all its steam and filth, the face of a painted kathoey, a transgender boy-girl thick with rosebud paint, appears through the neons with a scornful little smile. It is the Thai cult of beauty, mannered, like the art of puppetry.
A photographer based in Bangkok once said to me, "It is difficult here because of their obsession with beauty. They are the most beauty-obsessed people on earth. But it can't be photographed."
I began to change rooms from night to night, just to spread myself as widely as possible over the city. I remember rooms on Petchaburi Road, in hotels like the Livingstone and the Amari Watergate; hovels near Silom sprayed every night with insecticide. For a while I favored the Livingstone, on a small street off Sukhumvit 33. Its entrance was flanked by two enormous elephant tusks, and inside the decor was African Thatch. There was a sinister pool and a bar staffed with nymphs.
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There were times, too, when my medical trips to and from Bangkok threw that city into a strange relief. One of these was an expedition to Borneo to investigate an obscure mental illness known in Malay as latah. Latah is a "culturebound syndrome," a mental illness which is specific to a single culture. In the American Diagnostic Manual it is listed as a "hyper-startle syndrome": when a human being is surprised by a loud noise, he or she will go into a momentary trance. Typically they will flap their arms in a characteristic way, noticeable only in a slow-motion film, and utter a sexual obscenity of some kind. Technically, they go into a split- second state of hypnosis.
In Malaysia this momentary trance is experienced differently by old women, and by old women alone. For them the experience extends to half an hour, an hour, and sometimes even longer. No one knows why.
Kuching, in Sarawak, is even hotter than Bangkok—a sluggish town built around a dark green river. There's a strong Chinese presence in coastal Sarawak, but the Dayak presence is equally evident. The British were here, as evidenced by their squat cream arcades, but they didn't have the energy to build seriously. From there I drove to Lundu, on the border of Indonesia. It's even hotter than Kuching, a place of torpor and bewilderment dominated by Chinese merchants. I had spent some wonderful afternoons in Kuching with the anthropologist Peter Kedik as we met women in the suburbs who claimed they had been made latah by being poked too much. "Repressed sex," Kedik would say as we drank hot chocolate with them in their sitting rooms. We watched them jump up and down on one leg like pogo sticks, shocked into a latah fit by a simple clap of hands. I think both of us felt a surprising calm before this scene, but Kedik had studied it many times. "The old men, you see, have an outlet for their sexual drives. They can always go to some discreet brothel somewhere. But the women, after a certain age—"
Outside Lundu, my Iban driver found us a place called Kampung Seberang, a small village straddling the road. He knew of a family named Suut whose grandmother was latah. When the woman's son brought in a black cat and slipped it behind her, she went into a seizure. Imitating the sumo on the screen, she put her own foot into a wrestling lock and rolled on the floor in a ball. I asked the driver what she was shouting and, mortified, he leaned down to my ear. "She is saying 'cock,' sir. 'Cock.' It is what she is saying. 'You fuck me big fat cock,' sir. I am sorry to say."
It is what latah ladies always say. The trance opens a sexual door through which all the mind's debris flows, and the mind of a Dayak grandmother and a white sex tourist in Bangkok are essentially the same.
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I traveled around Malaysia, to Penang and Kuala Lumpur, always looking for doctors who would talk to me about latah.
One night the doctor I was interviewing took me with his wife to the village of Kampung Kuantan, just outside Kuala Selangor, on the Selangor River. The couple were youngish ethnic Malays, conscientious Muslims, with an oddball, sultry charm heightened by their buttoned-down fashion sense; he had interned at Addenbrooks Hospital in Cambridge and spoke an English that was far too perfect by half. The river is narrow, running between jungles, and Malaysians came there to watch the famous synchronized fireflies, which they call kelip kelip. Indians punt you down the river on long boats, wielding their poles with suave expertise, and saying, "Look, fireflies," every time a firefly appears, which is every five seconds. The doctor and his wife lounged in our boat like figures from Renoir, except that there was no sun. I told them about latah in Sarawak, and they looked at each other in amusement.
"You don't understand much about Asia," the doctor said. "You may have thought you saw something called latah, but you didn't."
"You mean it was a show?"
"Not necessarily. But that doesn't mean that Western medicine has identified it correctly. You have been reading Ronald Simons of the University of Wisconsin, have you not?"
I stammered, "But he is the authority."
"Not here he isn't. Here in Malaysia we do not all read Ronald Simons. Not at all. We do not necessarily think that latah even exists. We think that madness exists, though."
"But those old ladies? You mean they are just mad."
"Dayaks, my friends. It's another world."
"Is it really another world?"
But they were adamant. "We Malays," the wife said gravely, "would never behave like that." She lowered her voice. "Cock?"
"Oh, Miriam, really."
But what about koro? Koro is the delusion that your penis is being made to retract inside your body until it has disappeared altogether. It is disappearing-penis syndrome, and is related to "penis-theft syndrome" in some parts of Africa, in which men believe that their penis has been stolen through witchcraft. People were jailed for penis theft in Nigeria. A prison had even been stormed by penis-theft victims when one of the so-called witches had been held there. But everyone concerned still had his penis, of course.
Koro existed all over Southeast Asia but was most famous in Malaysia. Singapore's infamous race riots in 1969 were reputed to have erupted when Malay men suspected Chinese influence in their disappearing penises.
The doctor coughed politely.
"That is all past and done with. There is absolutely no more koro in Malaysia, I can assure you. If there was I would have heard of it."
"Isn't it illegal?" the wife asked.
"It is," he said uncertainly.
So, I thought, our cocks are safe from the Chinese. We punted on silently, the kelip kelip flickering on and off in synchronicity, and the subject of stolen and disappearing penises was quietly dropped.
"Sir," the punter cried, "fireflies!"