The Queen of Patpong Read online

  A couple of the girls on the stage imitate the snipping, and one of them pretends she’s got an ax and is chopping Kwan down. Girls clap their hands once or twice and laugh. The beautiful girl in front pays no attention to any of it.

  The severe-looking woman stares up at Kwan for a long minute or two and then shrugs some sort of acceptance. Nana taps Kwan’s arm as though to say, Stay here, and she and the severe-looking woman disappear into the rear of the bar. Kwan stands there, using every fiber of her will to keep from bursting into tears. She presses her back against the wall, holding her arms tightly at her sides, taking up as little space as possible, trying to be invisible. But she can feel eyes on her, and not just the girls’. Around the room men have turned to regard her. Some of them have girls sitting beside them, and those girls tug at the men’s arms and toss sharp-edged glances at Kwan, not the glances of people who are eager to be friends. Kwan looks down at the floor.

  A chubby girl in the stage uniform of boots and shorts goes out of her way to bang into Kwan, hard, with her shoulder and says, “Oh, excuse me,” and some of the girls on the stage start laughing again.

  The room seems to shimmer and lose its focus, and Kwan is back at school, facing yet another bully eager to humiliate the tall girl. She knows she has to bring this to an immediate stop, no matter what Nana would say. She steps away from the wall and says, “You did that on purpose.”

  The chubby girl puts her hands on her hips and says, “Really?”

  Kwan brings up one hand, fingers curled and nails pointing directly at the girl’s eyes. “Do it again and you’ll have bandages all over your fat face.”

  The girl in the boots backs up a quick step, and the laughter on the stage stops. Kwan looks up and sees every woman onstage staring at her. Some look surprised, some look amused. A few seem angry. The beautiful girl, the one dancing alone right in front of her, turns the enormous golden eyes to Kwan and gives her the smallest smile Kwan has ever seen, more the idea of a smile than the thing itself. Then she returns her attention to the cloth hanging over the door.

  A moment later Nana and the mama-san are back. Nana has an envelope in her hand, which she tucks behind her when she sees Kwan looking at it. Trailing after them is a short, cute girl dressed for the stage. “You’re set,” Nana says. “You’ll start serving drinks tonight. Fon here”—she indicates the cute girl, who has a face like a child’s doll, with plump cheeks and a tiny nose—“Fon will take care of you. Just do what she tells you to.”

  “But you— I mean, where are you going?”

  “My bar.” She glances at her wrist and remembers she’s no longer wearing the watch, so she lifts Kwan’s wrist and peers at it. “I’ve got to get to work.”

  “You said I’d be in your bar. When we were talking, you told me—”

  “I don’t think so,” Nana says. “I’m at the King’s Castle. Nobody starts out at the King’s Castle. Only the best girls work there.”

  “But you said—”

  “We’re on the same street, that’s what I said. Got to go. Listen to Fon, okay? Glad you’re here.” She reaches up and pats Kwan on the cheek. “We’ll eat dinner together sometime.” Nana turns away from Kwan and obviously remembers the envelope she’s hiding behind her, because she shoves it into the waistband of her skirt. She pushes aside the curtain over the doorway and is taken by the current of the sidewalk. A second later she has disappeared. The curtain flaps closed.

  “What are you waiting for?” Fon says, and Kwan turns, but Fon is talking to the plump girl who bumped her. “Go find a lap. Drool on somebody. Do whatever you want, but do it somewhere else.”

  The plump girl glares at Kwan for a second, as though Kwan is the one who’s spoken, then lifts her chin abruptly, an angry, jerky motion, and whirls to go. Fon reaches out, index finger extended, and jams it between the plump girl’s buttocks. The girl jumps and squeals but keeps moving.

  Then Fon turns to Kwan and smiles. “Good,” she says. “You’ve made the right enemy.”

  Chapter 13

  The Best-Looking Cut of Meat

  For a week or ten days, the city pushes at her. It ambushes her, surrounds her, presses in on her everywhere she goes, not just people but smells and sounds, the never-ending clamor of engines and horns and brakes and voices, the smells of exhaust and food vendors, the pressure of heat reflecting from the buildings, the brush of people passing too closely in the street, and the eyes of people—thousands of them each day, it seems—looking at her. If they’re Thai, there’s always the moment of surprise and then the amused smile and the turning head as Kwan passes. If they’re men—farang men, that is—the eyes are speculative, the eyes of someone considering a purchase.

  When she thinks about her village, what she sees is the barren, abandoned patch where she dug up her treasure, the one spot where she could be alone. She’s literally never alone here. The only time she doesn’t feel surrounded is in the mornings, and even then she’s not really alone, because there are women sleeping nearby.

  And they sleep most of the day, which isn’t surprising, considering what time they go to bed. Nobody heads straight home after the bar closes. The women who haven’t been chosen by a man, or who went for an early short-time and came back, cluster together at 2:00 A.M. and escape to the late-night clubs, discos, and bars. They’re known, often by name, and they seem to be welcome everywhere.

  This might, Kwan thinks, have something to do with the enormous amounts of money they spend—enough in a single night to keep a village family alive for a month. The endless stream of talk, rising and falling across the long nighttime hours, is fueled by alcohol, since some of the girls drink too much. Everybody seems to smoke all the time. They drink and smoke and chatter, and although they’ve just spent eight hours at the Candy Cane, they gossip endlessly about the bar, about who’s got a farang boyfriend who gives her money all the time, and who’s got a Thai boyfriend who takes her money all the time, and who got slapped around by a customer, and who got slapped around by her boyfriend, and who’s a bitch and who’s a prude and who would go to a hotel room with a dog if dogs could rent hotel rooms, and how the mama-san plays favorites, and how the bar cheats on drink commissions. In between talking to one another, they shout into their cell phones with other people who seem to be up all night.

  It’s immediately apparent to Kwan that the girls have turned the bar into a village, with groups that dislike each other. They’ve separated into two main camps, as wary of each other as the two packs of dogs that roamed opposite sides of the street in front of her house. Fon’s group is the smaller but more tightly knit of the two. The members of the other gang, which includes the plump girl who bumped Kwan, are generally less attractive than Fon’s bunch, although that doesn’t seem to mean they get taken out of the bar less often. In fact, the plump girl, who isn’t pretty even by the standards of Kwan’s village, goes with more men than almost anyone. When Kwan asks Fon about that, Fon says, with uncharacteristic sourness, “If you’ll do absolutely anything, there will always be someone who wants it.”

  Then there are the remaining girls—three or four of them—who aren’t members of either group, who keep to themselves or go back and forth, crossing the invisible divide as though it didn’t exist. One of the women who seems to be close to no one is Oom, the beautiful girl who’s always at the pole nearest the door when her shift is on the stage. The dancers are split into two shifts that alternate all evening, each dancing for about twenty minutes until the disc jockey calls for the change, when the women in the idle shift get up off the laps of the men they’ve been working on and shuffle back to the stage to replace the women who are climbing down to try to snare the same men. The most beautiful girl in each shift takes the pole nearest the door. Fon calls those two girls “chicken feed,” like the line of seed you lay down in a village to lure the poultry into the coop.

  Oom doesn’t seem to be friends with any of the girls, and she barely notices the customers. When she’s not da
ncing, she sits alone in the back room where the girls change into their show clothes. Ten minutes after Kwan began serving drinks on her first night, a customer waved her over and pointed to Oom and said he wanted to buy her a drink. Kwan stood in front of Oom at the foot of the stage, but Oom kept her eyes on the curtain over the doorway until Fon raised her arms and waved them back and forth. When Oom’s shift left the stage, she went and sat with the customer just long enough to drink one Coke, quickly, and then she got up and went into the back room. Kwan has seen her do it a dozen times.

  “She’s waiting for someone,” Fon says. “He comes back every three or four months, and he’s a little late. She’s crazy. Any girl who waits for anyone is crazy, but especially a girl who looks like her. For all she knows, he’s been in Bangkok for weeks and he’s with a girl from the bar next door.”

  After the Candy Cane closed on Kwan’s third night in Bangkok, she and Fon and half a dozen others went to a bar full of handsome waiters, and, to her amazement, one of the girls paid one of the waiters to go home with her. The next night they chose a dim, tiny place where women who were dressed like men waited on them and flirted with them. Two of the women in male clothing, whom the Candy Cane girls referred to as “tom-toms,” made a special fuss over Kwan, and when one of them brushed her fingers lightly down the side of Kwan’s neck, Kwan was so startled that she knocked over the drink of the girl sitting next to her. Everyone laughed, but some of the girls didn’t look happy about the amount of attention Kwan was getting. However they felt about her, though, Kwan had no choice but to tag along. No one had yet given her a key to the rooms Fon shared with two other girls, where Fon assigned her a sagging, too-short couch on the first night and gave her a blanket and pillow from her own bed. So Kwan goes where she’s led, trying to remain unnoticed, lagging behind the group. By the time she follows them through the door into their rooms, she’s so tired she feels like a ghost, and it’s usually almost dawn.

  Everyone except Kwan sleeps until 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, but in these first weeks Kwan still pops awake on village-girl time, at 7:00 or 8:00 A.M. Each morning she wiggles a little deeper into the cushions of the couch, which is much softer than the rag mat she slept on at home, and tries to sort out everything that’s happening to her. In front of the couch, where she barks her shins on it occasionally, is a three-legged table with a stack of beauty and fashion magazines holding up the legless corner. After a few minutes, when she knows that sleep will not reclaim her, she gets up, taking her blanket, and opens the curtains over the room’s one window—the other girls grumbling at the light and then dropping back into sleep—and then she sits in the patch of sunlight on the floor. Some mornings she eases out one of the beauty magazines from the stack holding up the table and looks at the wonderful girls, but most of the time she leaves the magazines where they are. As the patch of sunlight moves, she moves with it, the blanket draped loosely over her shoulders, bathing herself in the warmth and the silence. In her hand she holds the stone she picked up the day she left the village. It takes a long time, but eventually it becomes as warm as her hand.

  “OLD ONES,” FON is saying, sounding like a schoolteacher. “Not too old, but old. In their fifties or so. Not handsome. Stay away from handsome men.” She makes the face of someone who’s bitten her tongue. “Let the other girls have them.”

  “Why? Nana said—”

  Fon shakes her head. “Nana’s not as smart as she thinks she is. Nobody’s as smart as Nana thinks she is. Because the old ones have money. They’re more grateful. They’re easy to please, like little dogs. Treat them nicely and they’ll come back and come back. That’s good, because there’s always some risk—not much, but some—when you go with a new one, and if you’re extra sweet, the old guys will usually give you a present when they leave. One guy named Martin, from Switzerland, or maybe Sweden or Brazil, gave me ten thousand baht the night before he went home.”

  “Ten thousand?”

  Fon shrugs as though it were snack money. “I made him feel young. I told him he was handsome. The problem with the handsome ones is that they really are handsome.” She puts a cigarette between her lips. It looks so out of place in her baby-doll’s face that Kwan laughed the first time she saw Fon light up. “They feel like you should pay them,” Fon says around the cigarette. “They’re cheap. And they’re young, too, which means they can go for longer, maybe two or three times. Thanks anyway, once is fine with me. But the big reason is the money. The money’s with the old guys. But not too old, because they take a long time, too.” She laughs. “Different reason, though.”

  The two of them are sitting on the floor of the larger of the two rooms that Fon and now Kwan share with two other women from the bar. The others are out eating a very late breakfast. After her sixth night of serving drinks, Kwan put some tip money into the pool for the weekly rent, and the next morning Fon gave her a key. With the door locked behind her and Bangkok held at bay three stories down, she almost feels at home.

  Kwan says, “But most of the girls want to go with the younger ones.”

  “Girls are crazy,” Fon says, looking for the ashtray. She gets to her knees and hobbles dwarflike toward the three-legged table, stretching an arm out, and Kwan knots a fist in the back of Fon’s T-shirt to keep her from falling on her face. Fon laughs and leans farther, and Kwan has to use both hands to keep her upright. When Fon has a grip on the ashtray, Kwan pulls her back, and when Fon lands on her rump, they’re both laughing.

  “It’s a job, not a date,” Fon says. “Some girls never figure that out. They keep going after the young, handsome ones, and when they get one, they lord it over girls like me, girls who make three times as much money as they do. It’s as if they have to fool themselves every night that it’s really about love, like the only reason they’re up there is because it’s the natural place to meet the solid-gold man, the handsome, good-hearted young farang with the big bank account who’s waited his whole life to fall in love with some worn-out bar girl so he can marry her and support her whole family for the rest of his life.”

  “But that happens,” Kwan says, feeling very young. She waits, but Fon doesn’t respond. “Doesn’t it?”

  “Oh, honey,” Fon says, putting her free hand on top of Kwan’s and tapping the ash from her cigarette with the other. “Not you, too. Yes, it happens. Maybe eight or nine times a year, but it never works. The guys lie about how much money they have, or they lie about not being married already, or they lie about when they have to go back home. So some dumb girl goes through the marriage ceremony, and promises her mother and father they’re going to be rich, and gives it to him for free for three or four months, and then one day she wakes up and he’s in Australia. Not even a note.” She takes an ambitious drag. “And then there are the girls who marry a guy just so they can steal everything he’s got. They get the fool to buy a house, which has to be in her name because he’s not Thai, and one day they sell the paper on the house for half of what it’s worth, empty out the loving hubby’s bank account, and run north.”

  Kwan says, “It never works?”

  Fon turns the coal of her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray with great delicacy, shaving off a fine film of ash. “It didn’t for me.”

  “Oh,” Kwan says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know—”

  “How could you? I didn’t tell you. No reason to. It didn’t matter. No broken heart. I didn’t love him. I loved the idea of a passport, and a house in wherever it was, and money going up to my family every month. When he disappeared, the only thing that really upset me was that I hadn’t been sending money home. I’d stopped working, and he kept telling me it took time for his bank in . . . in Germany, I think, to transfer everything he owned here. He couldn’t even give my parents a dowry payment until the money arrived, and it didn’t, and then it didn’t some more. After a couple of months, he said he’d have to go home to handle it. And I went to the airport with him and hugged him and even managed to cry a little. And he never
came back to me.”

  “You never saw him again?”

  “Oh, sure. About a year later. I’d changed bars, but he didn’t know that. He figured he was safe as long as he stayed out of my old bar. And I was in the back room when he came in, so he sat at the edge of the stage without having any idea I was there.”

  Kwan glances at the window. The afternoon is starting to fade, and the evening looms ahead of her, bright and full of noise. “What did you do?”

  “I went onstage like always, but I changed places with the girl who was dancing in front of him, and then I leaned down and picked up his drink. He looked up and saw me, and I gave him a big, friendly smile and spit in his drink. I’d been saving spit since I saw him walk in, so there was a lot of it. Then I put the drink down and went up and down the stage, telling every girl that he was an asshole and pointing at him so he’d know what I was doing.”

  “What did he do?”

  Fon drags on the cigarette, squinting against the smoke. “If he’d been smart, he would have left right then, but he couldn’t let me see that I’d chased him out, so he waited until my shift was over and I’d left the stage, and then he threw down some money and almost ran out. By then I’d put a wrapper over my dancing clothes, and I counted to ten or something and then went out and watched him go into the Play Pen. I gave him a few minutes, just to make sure he was staying, and then I followed him in and told the manager—” She breaks off, looking doubtfully at Kwan. “Have you been into the Play Pen?”

  “I’ve never been to any of the bars except the Candy Cane.”