The Queen of Patpong Read online

  The woman the children follow shimmers like an exotic tropical bird that’s landed among the rice sparrows. She wears a loose blouse the color of sunset—silk, from the way the air drapes and redrapes it—and a short, tight, glittery black skirt. Shiny high heels in a leopard-skin pattern puncture the dust of the road between the houses. The woman’s skin, paler than Kwan remembers it, looks polished, as though it’s been slowly rubbed smooth. The highlights in her shaped and tapered hair, bright enough to have been shellacked, are almost blinding in the slanting sun. She pays no attention to the kids, but as she passes Kwan’s house, she looks up and smiles.

  Kwan feels like she’s been caught spying. She pulls back, ducking behind the damp clothes that hang on the line strung above the deck around her sagging wooden house. The deck and the house are raised about a meter above the dirt to keep the floors dry in the rainy season. Kwan reads the name of the rice company printed on the inside of one of her mother’s dresses before she realizes how rude she’s being, and she pushes aside the stiffening and now-dusty clothes and does her best to return Moo’s smile.

  “We should talk while I’m here,” Moo says, looking up at Kwan Then, as though she’s remembering something, she says, more politely, “Are you well? Have you had rice yet?”

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Kwan says. She knows she’s blushing. Moo has never once spoken to her in the four summers since she went down to Bangkok, never even seemed to notice her. Now that they’re speaking, Kwan has no idea what to say.

  “Straighten up,” Moo says severely. “You’re tall. You can’t fool anybody by bending over like that. You just look crippled. Stand up and be proud of it. Some men will like it.”

  Now Kwan’s face is aflame. This is her least favorite topic. “Nobody likes it,” she says. “I look like a giraffe.”

  Moo nods, but she’s not listening. The nod is polite dismissal. “Maybe tonight,” she says. “We’ll talk.” She starts to move away but stops, and some of the kids who were already in motion behind her bump into each other. She reaches up to her left ear and fiddles with something for a moment. Then she mimes a little underhand throwing motion, and Kwan brings her hands up, and on the second pass Moo actually does throw something, something that flashes blue in the air as it flies and then lands, small, hard, and sharp, between Kwan’s panicky, hurriedly clasped hands. An earring.

  A sapphire earring.

  The stone is the size of a small raisin, dark blue as the new-moon sky, mounted on a straight gold post. A little tangle of gold wire that looks like one of the symbols in written music that Kwan has seen in school—a clef, the bass clef, for low music, Teacher Suttikul calls it—is stuck on the post, where it secures the earring to the lobe and holds it in place. The earring probably cost more money than her father earns in two years.

  Kwan says, “Oh, Moo. I can’t—”

  “Not Moo,” the woman says, and her smile goes muscular, just something her face is doing, with nothing behind it. “Not Moo anymore. My name is Nana.”

  “Nana,” Kwan corrects herself. She knows that. Moo has called herself Nana for years now, ever since the first time she came back. Kwan wants to kick herself. She never gets anything right. Tall, awkward, tall, stupid, tall.

  “Put it on,” Nana says. “After we talk, I’ll give you the other one.”

  “No, no. You don’t need to give me anything just to talk to me. I’m happy to—”

  “When somebody gives you something, you take it,” Nana says, without smiling. “They don’t teach you that in school, so I’ve made this whole long trip here to say it to you. And this way we’ll be sure to talk.” She makes a little side-to-side bye-bye wave, more brisk than friendly, checks the location of the child hauling her suitcase, and resumes her procession down the red ribbon of dust that separates the run-down houses on Kwan’s side of the village from the run-down houses on the other side. The children are towed into motion behind her, like ducklings.

  Kwan tears her eyes from the blue stone in her hand to Moo’s leopard-spotted shoes. Yellow and black, impossibly pointed in the toe, they send thin yellow straps spiraling almost all the way up to the knee. They seem to have been made by someone who has never seen a foot. How does Moo—Nana—how does Nana walk in them? The heels must be five inches high. The village road is uneven, with holes everywhere, hidden beneath the dust. How does she keep from breaking her ankles?

  Something warm seems to flood through Kwan’s veins. Unconsciously, she slides her foot out of her rubber flip-flop, a man’s size medium, worn cardboard-thin beneath the ball of her foot, and points her toes straight down. How would it feel to wear shoes like that?

  Tall is how it would feel. Even taller than she is now. Tall enough to talk to birds. Tall enough to see the sun rise half an hour before anybody else, to eat the tender top leaves of trees. Tall enough to have men tilt their heads way back to look up at her and then grab their necks in pretended pain. And then laugh.

  Of course, they already do that.

  THE PARADE IS long gone, and the street is settling into the slow cooling that ushers in the evening. The warped, mismatched wood of Kwan’s house, and of the houses on both sides of the street, begins to rehearse its little orchestra of groans and creaks, just a tune-up for the ensemble piece of contracting and settling to come, when the sun is down. Her house makes so much noise that it seems to Kwan it must shrink two or three inches every evening. She wishes it were that easy for people.

  Longer shadows, stiller air. The late sun scatters reddish light across the tops of the trees. Some people are finishing the sleep in which they hid from the day’s hottest time, and a few voices, pitched low in conversation, create a sort of ribbon of sound, a little like the murmur of the stream behind the houses during the months it flows—here now, gone a moment later, then back again. No words, just voices, tones, laughter, lazy emotion. Across the street, above a sprawled dog, a sparse column of flies spirals slowly, its members probably half asleep on the wing. A sudden sharp smell of garlic tossed into hot oil.

  The weathered wood of the railing beneath her elbows is warm and smooth, but her back hurts. The railing, comfortable for everyone else to lean on, is too low for her. The tops of the village’s doors, some of them, are too low for her. When the young people gather in the evening to watch the village’s one television, Kwan is pushed to the rear so people don’t grumble. And she can barely see the screen from back there. She has a suspicion, growing stronger over the past few years, that she needs glasses. Glasses. They might as well be diamonds for all the likelihood she’ll ever get them.

  If it weren’t for Teacher Suttikul seating her in front of the class and to the side, she wouldn’t be able to read the blackboard either. The other kids call her desk “the Stork’s nest.”

  School. The thought cuts through her like a red-hot knife.

  The blue earring that Moo—Nana—threw to her is punching a hole in her palm, and she relaxes her fist. She doesn’t dare put it in her ear. Her father would probably rip it out to sell it.

  Kwan knows that the town is pitifully small and poor, not from having been anywhere else but from the few times she’s been able to get near enough to the television to turn the shifting, blurred patterns into identifiable shapes. She’s seen the bustling sidewalks and spiky skyline of Bangkok, watched the gleaming cars glide through the streets, seen rich, beautiful, unhappy people double-cross each other in palatial bedrooms and candlelit restaurants where she doesn’t even recognize the food. She’s seen other, even richer and more beautiful but equally unhappy people double-cross each other in a paradise that’s apparently called Korea, where all the women are ravishing and wear astonishing clothes, nicer even than Nana’s, and all the men are impossibly princely, and some of them even seem to be tall. Some of them—not the women, but the men—seem as tall as Kwan.

  How could people who have everything be unhappy? Kwan wants to know, but there’s no one she can ask, since no one she knows has anything.
/>   Except Nana, and she hardly knows Nana anymore.

  She has no idea how long she’s been standing there, but the stiffness in her back says it’s been an hour or more. So she’s not completely surprised when she hears the low voices from the other side of the house and then the feet on the steps leading up to the door.

  Her mother’s voice, raised in greeting, is unfamiliar in its bright friendliness. She’s using the voice that’s her version of dressing up for company. She never unpacks it for use with her family.

  They’re here.

  Kwan’s stomach knots as though she has to go to the outhouse, and her T-shirt is suddenly wet beneath the arms. Moving as silently as a breeze, she rearranges the hanging wash behind her so it completely covers the window, making her invisible from inside the house. She hopes nobody saw the motion. She wishes she were small enough to creep into one of the pockets of her mother’s dress, hanging a few inches away.

  When her teacher told her that she wanted to have this meeting, Kwan’s heart had leaped in hope. Now that the moment has come, though, the hope seems transparently thin, too thin even to hold a patch. If anything, the meeting will make matters worse, not better. It will put an end to the hope.

  She smells the whiskey on her father’s breath before she hears him behind her.

  “Stork,” he says. “Your teacher. And some farang man.”

  She doesn’t turn. She tries to stay away from him when he’s been drinking. For the past two years, that means all the time. “I don’t care,” she says.

  “Don’t talk to me like that. You’re big, but you’re not too big to hit.” He leans toward her, the smell growing stronger, and lowers his voice. “They want to talk about you, and they want you in there.”

  “There’s no point.”

  “They don’t know that,” her father says. “They need to hear you say it.”

  “Maybe I won’t say it.”

  “Maybe you won’t eat dinner tonight. Maybe you won’t eat breakfast tomorrow. It costs a lot to feed you.”

  Kwan’s clenched fist again drives the post of the earring into her hand. She squeezes harder, inviting the pain in, and then she wheels around and sidesteps, grabbing the clothesline and feeling her father’s hand slide over her back and down toward her rear. As it reaches the sensitive skin at the small of her back, she lets go of the rope and hears it snap against his chest.

  “Sorry,” she says without turning around.

  Rounding the corner of the small house, she smells smoke. Someone down the street is burning trash. She thinks hopelessly of the rooms she has seen on the television screen, the careless litter of nameless possessions owned by people who have forgotten they have them, and she wonders what could be useless enough, in this village where there’s a third and fourth use for everything, to feed to the flames.

  There’s a knot of brothers and sisters around the front door. Kwan pushes through them and enters the darkness of the single room they all share.

  Teacher Suttikul is short and wide. She’s not fat, just broad in the shoulders and hips, and she wears clothes that make her look even wider. Today’s outfit is a loose blouse with black horizontal stripes above a straight white skirt. Without ever having owned nice clothes herself, Kwan has known from the first time she saw her teacher that the woman dresses all wrong. Somehow it’s endearing that a woman who knows so much about so many things has no idea what clothes she should wear.

  “Here she is,” Teacher Suttikul says brightly as Kwan comes through the door. “Isn’t she pretty?” she asks the man who’s with her.

  One of Kwan’s brothers on the deck snickers.

  “This is Mr. Pattison,” Teacher Suttikul says, using the English honorific. “Mr. Pattison is from the Children’s Scholarship Fund.”

  Kwan, acutely conscious that her jeans end high above her ankles, conscious of her thin arms and sharp elbows, gives Mr. Pattison a respectful wai, palm to palm as though in prayer, at the level of her forehead. Mr. Pattison smiles. He is taller than she and frayed in the way some older people are, with peeling, papery skin, thinning hair, and eyes of a faded ghost-blue.

  “Very pretty,” he says in thickly accented Thai, followed by a pale blue glance that silences the laughing boy. “And she looks smart, too.”

  The room—the only room in which Kwan has ever lived—contains two large pieces of furniture: the bed on which her mother and father and the three youngest children sleep, and a table surrounded by mismatched molded plastic chairs in dark, scuffed primary colors. On top of the table is a scattering of chipped and faded dishes and bowls and a stack of spoons. Above the crockery hang two shelves lined with jars of spices, sugar, and oil, tightly closed against ants. A length of faded cloth dangles diagonally across the far right corner to create a cramped space for people to undress and dress in before and after a bath and, at night, a place for Kwan to sleep. The cloth has been pulled partway aside, and the thin, soiled mat of rags that make up Kwan’s bed is in plain sight. The sight stops her in the doorway. Why didn’t they just hang her dirty underwear in the middle of the room?

  Kwan’s mother has pulled the two best chairs away from the table for the teacher and the farang to sit on and has claimed the edge of the bed for herself. She looks up at Kwan and, with her eyes, indicates the high metal stool that’s been positioned in the middle of the room. Kwan goes and sits on it as Mr. Pattison and Teacher Suttikul take their seats. Perched there, halfway between them and her mother, she feels like the pile of small money that her father and his drunken friends play cards for, sitting all day on the raised wooden platform outside, next to the street. She catches a glimpse of herself in the cracked mirror hanging beside the door, averts her eyes from the geometrical schoolgirl chop that cuts her straight hair off just below her ears, making her neck look even longer than it is, and ducks her head apologetically, with no clear idea of what she’s apologizing for.

  “Thank you for letting us come,” Teacher Suttikul says.

  “Don’t thank her.” Kwan’s father comes into the room, rubbing his chest as though it stings. “If you’ve got to thank somebody, thank me.” He takes a small, inadvertent jog to the right but stops himself before it turns into a lurch, raking the visitors with his eyes to see whether they noticed it. Both of them are looking at Kwan, whose gaze is fixed on her lap, her spine as curved as a cello. Her father goes to the bed, waves his wife to move down although there’s plenty of room, and sits heavily.

  Teacher Suttikul smiles so appreciatively he might have spouted poetry. “We want to talk about Kwan,” she says. “You know, you have a very smart daughter.”

  “So what?” her father says. He’s at the near edge of very drunk, and his consonants are approximate. “She’s a girl.”

  “There are lots of good jobs for girls these days. She’ll earn plenty of money if she stays in school.”

  “What good does that do anybody? If she makes money, it’ll go to her husband’s parents, not us.” He lifts his chin toward Kwan, not even bothering to look at her. “If she can ever find anybody to marry her.”

  Teacher Suttikul keeps the smile in place, although her eyes have gotten smaller, an expression that has chilled many classrooms full of children. “She’ll always take care of you. And I know she can get a good job. Someday she’ll—”

  “Someday,” her father says heavily, as though the words are in a foreign language. “Someday. My children need food now. The roof needs to be fixed before the rain comes. We need money now.”

  The words ricochet back and forth, past Kwan, who ducks her head and tries to sink farther into the stool, which is high enough to make her almost as tall as she is standing up. Nana’s earring feels so hot in her hand that she wouldn’t be surprised if its glow were visible through her skin.

  “Now,” her father repeats, as though the word were an unfamiliar one.

  “We’re talking about now,” Teacher Suttikul says. She has locked eyes with Kwan’s father, and she holds his gaze for a
moment before politely dropping her own. “Mr. Pattison can tell you what he wants to do.” She adds, as an afterthought, “For you, I mean. What he can do for you.”

  “The money in the scholarship fund comes from people all over the world,” Mr. Pattison says, very much with the air of a person who is beginning something that could go on for a while. His Thai is slow and badly pronounced but correct, and he speaks like someone who is unused to being interrupted. “They give us money so we can help promising students stay in school—”

  “While their families starve,” her father says.

  Mr. Pattison puts up a hand, and the gesture startles Kwan’s father so much that he stops talking. “We understand that families need money,” Mr. Pattison says with weighty geniality. “We know they want their children to begin to work as soon as possible.” A slow blink. “So they can help the family.”

  “It’s their duty,” Kwan’s father says, jumping into the pause and holding tight to the edge of the bed as though he’s expecting to launch himself into an argument. “We’ve taken care of her her whole life.”

  Pattison nods. “Of course you have. But we also know that in the long run it’s better for children to be educated, so they can make even more money.”

  “That’s for sons,” Kwan’s father says. “Weren’t you listening? Daughters leave. They take care of their husband’s—”

  “If you’ll let me,” Mr. Pattison says without raising his voice, “I’ll tell you how Kwan can start bringing money into the house right now.”

  Kwan’s father rubs the bristles on his chin with the backs of his fingers, then nods to Mr. Pattison to continue.

  “What we do,” he says, “is give small amounts of money to the families while the children are still in school, in exchange for them letting them continue—”