Prostitution-Patpong-Pattaya and Frustration

by Jay Patterson

I was always good at spelling. It’s nothing to be conceited about, as testing has shown that it is not, like ability in chess, mathematical calculation and music, related to basic intelligence or genius level creativity. Experts say some people can spell and some can’t. A friend who won a Pulitzer prize for musical composition, once asked me if ‘bottle was spelled ‘e-l’ or ‘l-e’.
But it can get one into trouble. In my eighth year of school, I had a science teacher who had trouble with English. He couldn’t spell or pronounce words. English was his native language and the only language he spoke.
One day we were studying various tissues and he pronounced ‘cartilage’ as ‘cartridge’. Many times. I finally raised my hand and corrected him. He pounced on me as if I had shot his mother and I was immediately sent down to the principle for ‘discipline’. During the long walk down the high, empty halls, I actually felt good because I would be able to clear up the problem. I was right. I had been polite. And he was wrong.
The principle’s office turned out to be a nightmare for a 13 year old taught that fair play was all. I was not listened to. I was not allowed to speak. The principle said ‘You think you’re really smart, don’t you?’ The teacher then walked in. He had left the class just to witness my humiliation. He looked on in grim satisfaction as the principle pulverised my sense of self until the tears were making my eyelashes stick together. This is what he wanted, the bastard.
My father came to my rescue. When called in for a conference, he came to my defence. The science teacher was talking to my dad, the astro-physicist, and that was enough to make him wary and he stumbled over a lot of words in trying to explain my ‘flippant behaviour.’
On the way home, my dad explained the fact the you have to look at people and determine if they really want to know something. He said most of the time they don’t. A sad lesson.
Sometimes this can be very painful. At present, Thailand is known for prostitution. Patpong and Pattaya are the two areas that get constant media coverage. The country is constantly pounded and reproved by a media that cannot get enough.
The Thai people are in a very painful position as what is said is the truth; now. Most of the time, they do not respond and are silent.
Do the people who criticise and offer facile solutions know what the Thais are thinking, though?
No, they don’t. Because the people who criticise them are just like the principle of my school; they are Powerful. They come from nations who dictate and decide what is good for the rest of the world.
I am not Thai. But I was born and grew up in this region and do not apologise for saying that I know what the Thai people think a lot better than most non-Thais.
In 1960, when I was 10 years old, prostitution was abolished in Thailand. Even though it had been legal before, there was no more and no less of this activity than in other countries. Even when legal, it was not considered honourable or moral. Women could be prostitutes, but they had to be registered and had to be willing to have the head of that low animal, the dog, stamped on their ID cards. This identified them and made their activities easier to monitor.
Then came the pressure from Western governments shocked at this immorality. The pressure was increased during the cold war and the government finally made prostitution illegal.
At that time, Pattaya was a total non-entity. I didn’t even know where it was. It was mainly a rest-stop between the gem mines in Chantaburi and Trat and Bangkok.
Patpong was known at that time. It was known as the most elegant entertainment area in Thailand.
The Patpong area was the home to large, world standard night-clubs such as the Cafe de Paris, which had resident and visiting shows from Paris and London. Josephine Baker, Peggy Lee, Rosemary Clooney and most of the big club stars of that era performed at the clubs in Patpong. Benny Goodman, Vaughan Monroe, Count Basie and many other big bands made yearly visits on their Asian tours.
For the Thai people and the very small expatriate community, a visit to Patpong meant a chance to wear tuxedos and evening gowns and enjoy world class popular entertainment in the most refined of atmospheres.
Bangkok had no visible prostitution scene at all. It was not an ‘industry’. It was there, but as in most other countries it was a netherworld.
Many Westerners may not know or may not remember this era. But the Thai people do.
Then came the Vietnam war. Then came the Americans. Then came adolescent soldiers, with rushing hormones and death hanging over their heads.
These young soldiers, far from home and knowing that they might be dead the next day, conducted themselves accordingly. They were also in a non-European country, with a non-European culture. There were no familiar cultural constraints or controls to which they could relate.
This may have been the reason that the GIs had the reputation among Thai and expatriate alike as being rude and unmannerly.
Our house was on a Soi behind an R and R hotel. My mother was constantly calling the military police because the GIs took great delight in throwing beer bottles at our servants as they were working in the back yard.
One day, my mother came fuming into the house.
“Can you believe it?” she said. “Two idiot soldiers were screaming at a little boy to go and get his sister for them. I had to chase them away.”
“Weren’t they rude to you?” I asked.
“Of course not! I’m white, so I’m a real person to them,” she said disgustedly.
The most fearsome weapon the GIs had, though, was money.
Storming into a country where one could live decently on a wage of 1,000 baht a month, prices shot up as money was poured in.
The GIs also wanted sex. They were willing to pay. A lot. The go-go scene began.
Just as the ‘freedom’ from cultural restraints had caused the soldiers to neglect all social responsibility, so money had caused upcountry people to flow into the city of Bangkok, where you could get rich overnight.
The main segment of the Thai population watched the degeneration of the city with silent distress. The invaders had come to rescue them from demon communism. If you said anything bad about the Americans, you could be accused of being pro-Communist.
Within two years of the GIs arrival, foreign teenagers who had lived here most of their lives were being approached by prostitutes on the streets. We didn’t know what to say. The administration at International School forbade students to have any contact with GIs and European girls were afraid to go out at night, something totally new. Bangkok was no longer the safe big city we knew as kids.
This was a new problem. There were no formula solutions.
The war ended. The GIs left. Most of the Americans left. The money wasn’t there anymore. But the problem still was. The rescuers didn’t clean up the mess they had made.
A whole generation of people from up-country Thailand had the idea that you could get rich in Bangkok. A whole generation of Europeans had the idea that Thailand was a sex paradise. They came. The money still flowed. But the rude, unmannerly people were Europeans, now.
Then came the plague. Sex became a deadly risk. Fewer people came for the “nightlife”.
The people with money who told the poor people from up-country that they were beautiful now looked at them as diseased cesspools. The whole world looked at Thailand.
Thailand was not “convenient” anymore. It was dangerous. The plague had made Thai people dangerous. The economy faltered.
Foreign publications now had a lot to say about Thailand.
It had a ‘sex trade’. Now the Westerners could talk about it. During the war, they couldn’t, because the war was more interesting. But now, the sex trade is not tacitly sanctioned by Western governments as a ‘necessary adjunct evil’ as it was during the war.
So the publications talk about ‘the Thai sex industry’ without fear of blame being thrown back on the Westerners.
You may not have known how Thai people felt about this issue before, but maybe you do now.
When Thailand is criticised for its sex industry, many Thai people would like to say “And before you came to our country? Could you write about us that way then?” “Search the media reports of the years before you came. Do you find we had a ‘sex industry’?” “You come and disturb our culture. Then you go, and blame us for what you have left behind.”
Thai people are very polite. They don’t like confrontation. And like my father, they know that it is wise not to say things people don’t want to hear and won’t accept.
Or is this just another example of American 1Manifest Destiny which I was taught in school?

1Manifest Destiny: (American history) a term implying divine sanction for U.S. territorial expansion. It was coined in an 1845 issue of the “United States Magazine and Democratic Review’, edited by John L. O’Sullivan. (The New Lexicon Webster’s Dictionary, Volume 1.)

Oh, what a summer holiday!

by Ayrada

In Thailand we always have summer, or almost all the time at least. Not like in Europe. During the winter months (or even spring or autumn), everybody walks around with a long face. But as soon as the sun’s out all’s right with the world... or is it?
Recently, my brother and his wife visited me in Pattaya. He looked a bit worn out and I asked him for the reason. “You know, it’s not easy to explain but, mind me, I’ll tell you the whole story”:
“When the screaming began, I knew vacation was here. My wife was standing in front of the mirror dressed in her bikini. ‘Oh, I’m huge!’ she wailed. ‘If I go swimming in Pattaya looking like this, David Attenborough will follow me in a dinghy! I am a shipping hazard.’
“She began clawing my shirt. ‘Admit it, my legs are like traffic bollards!’ I chuckled, “don’t be silly! Traffic bollards have arrows on them.” Ahhhhhh!
“My wife is a summer-vacation disaster. Usually she gets a cold on the first day from the air-conditioner. It turns her into a giant leaky nostril. She wanders around with a bag of drugs, wheezing: ‘Does this swibsuit bake be look fat?’ After a few hours at the swimming pool, she’ll totter in, red-faced, wailing: ‘I’m sudburd!’
“I hate sunbathing, you know that. I always did. Yet I always do it. I think: ‘Hmm. My skin’s looking a bit pale and healthy. Think I’ll turn it into a mass of irradiated blisters.’ So I do. Then I lay awake, glowing, for the last weeks of my vacation. There’s no escape! Especially at night. I lie sweat-glued to the duvet, then: Wheee... Mozzie attack. They always bite my ankles. If I had no ankles, they’d still bite my ankles. I click on the light. Silence. Only my wife’s soft snoring. My eyes scan the room. It’s gone. Click. Wheee! Click. I jump out, shake every curtain and wait. Lamp off. Wheeee! Soon, I’m smashing pictures with a shoe (which I will have to pay for at my departure) while a voice from under the duvet yells: ‘Kill it, kill it’.
“It’s the same every summer, every vacation. The sizzle of flesh on molten restaurant seat plastic, the embarrassing flap of the flip flops my wife bought me, the thud of my big toe colliding with the kerb. And isn’t pool- or beach beds the pits? Have you ever wondered, as your head flops into the sand yet again, why can’t they make a collapse-proof sun lounger?
“Of course, you always can make a few excursions. Except you never arrive; you’d be roasted in a traffic jam instead. Last year, remember, we were in a snarl-up near Bangkok when we originally wanted to drive to Chiang Mai. We’ve never made it.
“There is nothing nice about a summer vacation. Even pubs are no-go areas. There’s always someone around you who smells like he hasn’t showered for at least five months. Too many tourists hanging around. The beer is never cool enough and the waitresses don’t understand what I am saying. You know what I mean? Do you? I’d like to be back home, feel rather chilly than sweating and don’t have to listen to my wife’s permanent complaints about her body.”
There. She came, my sister in law: “And this top makes my arms look flabby, doesn’t it? Be honest.” My brother turned around to me and whispered: “Can’t we change our flight back to an earlier day?” Poor brother - it’s just wishful thinking. There are no more flights available until the low season.