Reflections on the Road: Red Lights and a Rose (Bangkok, Thailand)

The following story, based on a 2004 visit to Bangkok and set largely in a strip club, is one of the more sensitive pieces I've published on Gather (and I certainly understand if some readers wish to scroll down no further than this).  "Red Lights and a Rose" attempts two things: first, to put a human face on the women who work in this industry; second, to shift the way in which we normally think of "paradise".  The story is excerpted from my still unpublished Asian manuscript, and I learned just today that it was the Grand Prize winner in the Second Annual Solas Awards (for Best Travel Story of the Year).  It will also be published in The Best Travel Writing 2008, due in bookstores in two weeks.

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Nana Entertainment Plaza -- Bangkok, Thailand

I was thinking about paradise, a word so often flippantly tossed around in churches and mosques, at Club Med resorts and on Norwegian cruise liners. The word could be powerful, but we've made it soft.

It was 1 a.m., an hour before closing. A bottle of Heineken hung from my left hand and a pen from the other. And on the stage before me were six women wearing black high-heeled shoes and black thongs, dancing as if they thought paradise were far away indeed. They danced with remarkable indifference, each clutching her respective pole, moving their knees and hips with the same tired pep as an old Volkswagen about to break down. One woman kept her hand around her navel, self-conscious of her stretch marks. For her, the pole was a shield she used in a vain attempt to hide herself. This was anything but an erotic sight. It was more like witnessing a subtle form of torture.

Is paradise a place we stumble upon only after death, where, if we are to believe some Muslims, seventy-two virgins await, ready to indulge us in sensual pleasures?

"Pretty Woman" played on the sound system and I finished what was left of my beer. An American businessman-type with a Texas drawl sauntered in and found a seat. Now four of us guys were in a room with eight girls, six on stage and two sitting among us. It didn't take long for the Texan to find the prettiest of the bunch, a woman in her early twenties who had quit her job as a bank teller about two months before. She was not here because her family was poor; she was here because she wanted to be rich and men like the Texan would pay well to spend the night with her. She was quiet, polite, and intelligent, and I had no difficulty imagining her working in a bank. But now she looked so small next to this big man. Her dark eyes stared straight ahead -- straight into the wall -- as he put his arm around her and began to caress her shoulder. I thought of a quiet animal caught in the claws of a hawk, too frightened to move as it prepares to be swallowed. But she was here voluntarily.

Is paradise, if we are to believe some Christians, largely an individual enterprise where, by simply believing in Jesus but otherwise going about our lives as we normally would, we will find ourselves in celestial glory after we die?

Back on the stage another woman, Ann, was about to rotate off. A twenty-seven-year-old mother who speaks Thai, three tribal languages, and a few words of English, she had been working here one and a half years to earn money for her extended family, most of whom live in a poor village seven hours north of Bangkok. I had asked Ann if she likes her work -- I knew some women did -- and she replied with a tired smile that said she did not. She danced and prostituted herself only because providing for the needs of her family was her top priority. Her seven-year-old daughter remains in the village, in the care of her grandmother.

The lights were dim and the music loud, yet it was conducive to note taking (in Asia to write a book, I was taking a lot of notes about a lot of places). Just before Ann stepped off the stage and returned to my table so that we could continue our conversation, I made a note to ponder the idea of paradise as "right relationships." Later, back at my hotel, I would write, "Paradise is not indulging in selfishness, it can't be bought with money, it can't be had without including the poor. It will not descend so long as we sit on a couch watching television, or stand among pews singing songs. We enter into it neither by driving planes into towers nor by hoarding storehouses of grain. It is deeper than 'feeling good.' And it is wider-much wider-than personal salvation."

This was my second night in Soi Nana, a square three-story structure with the feel of a frat house. Or was it more like that ride at Disney World, Pirates of the Caribbean? Yes, that was it, Nana reminded me of a Disney World ride: Pirates raucously chasing screaming women, people living out of bounds, with ogling eyes, on a quest for ill-gotten treasure. Yo, ho, ho, a pirate's life for me! But here many of the swashbucklers were upper middle-class businessman from the West, strolling in and out of clubs with names like Spankys, Lollipop, Carousel, DC-10, and G-Spot. And at less than two dollars, which covered your first beer, it was considerably cheaper than Orlando.

Over a three-day period I would visit several clubs in Nana, all of which were pretty much the same. They were like trash compactors, all of us pressed too tightly together, fighting the heat and humidity, sensing that intimacy was strangely recyclable here. It was a raucous environment indeed, with so much careless movement that hearts were easily broken. At least this is how I read the looks on the faces of several women, and later what I would hear them say.

And yet it was here, in a minefield of flesh and dreams, where black cats prowled on sheet metal awnings in search of geckos, where satellite dishes pulled in ESPN that overweight German tourists watched as girls nestled compliantly into their girth, where sound systems belted out the likes of Billy Ray Cyrus so that girls could rock their bodies to the rhythm of "Achy Breaky Heart"...it was here that I stood on the verge of discovering something new about paradise.

*  *  *

With few exceptions, Nana was not a place of desperation. It was something more playful and ambitious than this. When the ladies weren't sitting with patrons they were often in the back room giggling together, as though they were kids enjoying a late night at a friend's house. There was an atmosphere present that would have had an appeal even if everyone had been fully clothed.

Nor was Nana merely a place where money was exchanged for sex, since hundreds of women brought their dreams to work. They sought a quality Western man, someone with whom they might live happily ever after. And so a clearly demarcated border between business and friendship did not exist. It was easy to see why men who might not seek a prostitute at home might do so here. The girls radiated playfulness and innocence, and made you think you simply had a friend. You never knew when you'd be met with real affection.

But, you never knew a lot of things, and vision is difficult when the lights are dim. There was something unsettling about all this flesh, as if it had been so exposed that it managed to become ghostly. The music was the most real thing here, or at least the clearest, and so I tethered myself to it in an effort to see well. The musicians and I were old friends, friends I hadn't heard from in ages, and I listened to every word they had to say because they reminded me of a place and time that tonight I couldn't afford to forget. Music is rarely as potent as when it is heard in a strip club.

In its moral ambiguities and brokenness, Nana was a place where you saw everything in a new way. Flesh wriggling on poles was an unusual teacher, not the kind that demanded rote memorization of facts and figures but one that instead employed the Socratic method, asking questions of the student to which the student had to craft an answer. And the women were not merely teachers from afar. They often came over to sit awhile. They were scantily clad, sometimes naked, but many of them were keen on leaving sex behind and simply sharing a story and hearing one in return. The place was all about human connection -- its possibilities, failures, and dangers -- and this is precisely why I sensed that something of paradise was here, just waiting to take shape.

I recalled my first visit to Bangkok four years earlier. I don't remember her name anymore, but she was a go-go girl in Patpong, another adult entertainment district, and it was there that we met one night and sat in a corner of a club. She was completely nude, as were the other thirty-some women in the room, and I think this may have been why her eyes were so striking -- with no clothes, the body was left unadorned, and her eyes, so earnest and intense, contained a power they otherwise might not have. I could think of only one parallel in my experience: looking into the eyes of a Saudi woman, who was fully draped in black fabric except for a slit at the eyes.

She was in her mid-twenties and had seen many men, she said, but I was different -- why? I fumbled over an answer. It might sound strange, I told her, but after watching so many men who did not seem loving enter these doors, I decided to enter them as well, and invite someone out for dinner. "Would you like to join me for pad thai?" I asked. She said yes, but her shift wouldn't end for three more hours. After about one hour, she was called to take the stage, where she would join three other ladies to (there is no delicate way to describe this) shoot bananas from her vagina and then pop open bottles of Coke, also with her vagina. For the last hour her eyes had looked broken -- broken, but not defeated -- and now they begged for trust. "Please don't go," she pleaded, "I come back soon." Of course I would wait, I said. Then she stood up to leave. With her eyes looking at the stage, she appeared nervous, perhaps even pained, and for several moments she didn't move. When finally she did take a step it was not toward the stage, though she would be up there in only a few seconds; rather she turned back toward me. She leaned close to say something, her eyes still begging.

"Please don't watch," she whispered.

For the rest of the story, click HERE

A bartender puts on make up at the ground floor of the Nana Entertainment Plaza

		Joel Carillet, Gather Travel Correspondent
	Joel's column, "Reflections on the Road," is published every other Thursday to Gather Essentials: Travel. His articles, based on extensive travels in Asia and the Middle East, seek to shed light on humanity, both our own and that of others.   They aim not merely to entertain and inform but also to develop a sense of connection between the reader and the world. Joel's writing and photography have appeared in several magazines and newspapers, including the Kansas City Star and Christian Science Monitor.  Currently his agent is seeking a publisher for a book manuscript entitled Sixty-One Weeks: A Journey across Asia, and in February 2008 he began selling photographs through jcarillet.imagekind.com. When not on the road, he happily calls Tennessee home. Keep up with Joel's article series by joining his network, or subscribing to his content.