A LOT OF CREEPY OLD WHITE GUYS GO TO THAILAND TO FIND YOUNG FEMALE COMPANIONS. I’M NOT GOING TO JUDGE ANYONE FOR THEIR QUESTIONABLE MORAL BEHAVIOR, OR GET INTO THE POLITICS OF THE INTERNATIONAL SEX TRADE, BUT I CAN ABSOLUTELY TELL YOU THAT MY THREE—AND ONLY THREE—FAVORITE THINGS ABOUT THAILAND ARE AS FOLLOWS, WRITTEN OUT FOR YOU IN A HANDY TRAVEL-WEBSITE-STYLE LISTICLE:
1. Thailand is literally the cheapest international vacation you can take. I mean, you can see a lot, eat a lot, and not really break the bank . . . Seriously, it’s cheap.
2. People are so nice and honest here. No sarcasm. No joke. Thai folks are about the nicest people you will ever hope to meet. I remember mistakenly thinking someone had stolen my camera. Instead of ignoring my plea for help, they helped me find my camera!
3. Thailand is home to one of my all-of-my-lifetime (and should-be-yours) favorite desserts. And I just happened to have discovered it with the help of a prostitute. Let me explain.
At the end of 2005, my future in-laws persuaded me and Thi to join them on a trip to Hong Kong to visit family. We also planned to go to Thailand on their recommendation, where they Asian-parent-insisted (which is more of a command than a recommendation) we join a tour, which I DEPLORE AND STAND VEHEMENTLY AGAINST when I travel. But tours in Thailand are unlike tours anywhere else in the world. That’s partly because being a tour guide in Thailand requires a full-fledged degree one earns at school. And we’re not talking about a six-week course. We’re talking a full-time, four-year program, like a bachelor’s degree here in the States. Tourism is the BIGGEST business in Thailand, which also makes the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) one of the—if not the—most powerful governmental bodies in the country. Even if you loathe tours like me, you have to take tours in Thailand seriously; they’re definitely worth your consideration.
About a month and a half later, a film I was working on called Journey from the Fall was selected for the Bangkok Film Festival. I was excited to return to Thailand, now that I was a veteran of the Thai experience—you know, because of all of the five days I had spent there LOL. We stayed in an area right next to Siam Paragon, a famous shopping center that attracts a lot of expats. Though I didn’t notice it much at first, the overwhelming presence of tourists in our district tipped us off to the fact that there was a club in the basement of our hotel. And that club had literally one guy for every twenty to thirty girls, who I realized were prostitutes—ex-pat town!
One night, after eating, drinking, and karaoke-ing our hearts out at the film festival, my curiosity got the best of me and I ventured into this unknown clubland filled a-plenty with hookers galore—oh boy!
I should mention here that my previous trip to Asia had changed the way I viewed myself. Up until that point, I had always been insecure about my looks, basically because I’m not a tall, chiseled white guy. I’m kinda sorta gaysianly (oh, it’s a thing if you don’t know already) youthful looking, and I didn’t know this was a thing any woman was into because Asian males are frankly emasculated in the Western world. (I could write a whole book about my insecurities on that topic, but I won’t because Asian males are the hot ticket these days, kid—*high-five*.) But when I had walked around Asia two months before, I had been propositioned, cat-called, and hit on everywhere I went, usually right in front of Thi.
This was at the front of my mind as I entered this club. Which meant that I walked into it with the clear intention of FUCKING with these prostitutes. I don’t mean in the sexy-time sense, but in the sense that I knew they thought they were the predators and I was their unsuspecting prey . . . but no, I was the game master and they were my pawns in a game I made up, “fishing for hookers” (I know, I’m twisted). It was pretty simple: I would walk in, looking all innocent, let these women chat me up, and when they tried to proposition me, I’d just coyly laugh and walk away. Now in hindsight, this was pretty cruel, something that I realized by the end of the night, given everything that transpired. But at that moment, with nothing else going on, I was having a great time.
For some reason, one young and seemingly more-impressionable-than-I-looked prostitute piqued my curiosity. She and I started talking, and when she propositioned me, instead of walking away, I shook my head, rubbed my tummy with my left hand, and used my right to mimic eating, and told her I was “hungry!” So I made her a proposition. If she didn’t go home with any guy that night, I’d buy her dinner, on one condition: She had to take me to her favorite late-night spot, one I never could have found on my own. Like most professionals hoping to separate you from your money, she agreed.
That club wasn’t huge, but it was so packed full of women that if you didn’t scoop up the one you liked right then and there, you would probably never find her ever again. Nonetheless, about forty-five minutes later, I miraculously found the girl I had propositioned in the ocean of perfume, pushed-up boobs, short skirts, and enough latex hidden in those little purses to cover a football field. She propositioned me one more time, and I reiterated that I was “hungry.” We left the club and jumped into a tuk-tuk.
Now, if I could even remember where in Bangkok we ended up, I still wouldn’t tell you. This was one of those experiences that is never meant to be replicated or revisited ever again. The driver dropped us off at a random street stall in the middle of a quiet and deserted Bangkok neighborhood in the shadow of the city’s beautiful skyline. I told the girl to order whatever she wanted, that it was my treat. Though she didn’t speak much English, and I didn’t speak a lick of Thai, after much awkwardness I figured out that she was from a small town about an hour outside of Bangkok outside of Bangkok and that she had a South Korean boyfriend who traveled back and forth from Seoul to visit her. The most heartbreaking and human part of this conversation was that neither her mom nor her boyfriend knew she was a prostitute. She didn’t know how or when she would ever tell them. She knew it would break her mother’s heart, and she had no idea how her boyfriend would react. YEAH, I literally gathered ALL that without being able to speak her language. This was not what I was expecting.
I also wasn’t expecting what came out of the kitchen shortly after our heart-to-heart. My horrible phonetic-ization of the Thai would be karam-pang-song-ka-ya. The end of that is the part that many Westerners might recognize—kaya, or kaya toast, or in this case, kaya bread. It’s a mix of egg yolk, coconut cream, and pandan, a long green leaf in Southeast Asia that’s like vanilla but a little nuttier, used in sweet and savory dishes alike for its incredible aroma and because it changes everything to a super pretty bright green color. And all of that is married to create a thick custardy delicious spread in a bowl served with triangular pieces of white bread. It’s kind of a sweet dish, kind of an appetizer, and all you do is take the super-moist bread and dip it into and drench it in the kaya and stuff that deliciousness into your mouth.
HO . . . LY . . . FUCK! It was SO GOOD . . . SO TASTY. So satisfying after a night out. It’s so simple, and so comfortingly delicious. And I’m sure that being under the stars in Bangkok with my non-sexual partner in crime for the night didn’t hurt either.
This surreal night was incredibly influential in my life because I discovered one of my favorite things in the world (so much so that I sought it out in Thai Town in LA immediately after I got back).
I have that young woman to thank—for sharing with me, an arrogant stranger. She gave me more perspective on the world in a short conversation than I ever expected and sent me away with inspiration.
After we finished eating, I put her in a tuk-tuk and sent her home. I looked up at the sky, took everything in, and then went back to the hotel, thinking about that young woman, hoping she would someday marry her South Korean boyfriend and make her mom proud with lots and lots of grandchildren.