Video Night in Kathmandu (47 page)

And there she was again, the elusive meretrix, in Japanese Mariko, the obsessive focus of John David Morley’s
Pictures from the Water Trade
, and there once more bodied forth unforgettably by half-Malayan Teena Chang, the girl at the heart of Paul Scott’s
The Chinese Love-Pavilion
who drives her lover mad, even after her death, with her teasing duplicities. In Manila too, courtesans become consorts in almost exactly the same fashion.

Yet between those two scenes was a world of difference. For in seedy and improvident Manila, the bars were the fast-buck stuff of a puritan’s nightmare; while in high-tech and prosperous Bangkok, they were quicksilver riddles, less alarming for their sleaze than for their cunning refinement, embellished by the country’s exquisite sense of design, softened by the ease of
Buddhism, invigorated by the culture of
sanuk
(a good time). In Manila, girls tried to sell themselves out of sheer desperation; in Bangkok, the crystal palaces of sex were only extra adornments in a bejeweled city that already glittered with ambiguities.

In Bangkok, moreover, the ambivalence of the girls only intensified the ambiguity of the bars. For no gaze was direct, and no smile clear-cut in the city of mirrors. And the mirrors were everywhere: one-way mirrors walling the massage parlors, mirrors lining the ceilings of the “curtain hotels,” mirrors shimmering in the bars, pocket mirrors in which each girl converted herself into a reflection of her admirer’s wishes. Look into a bar girl’s eyes, and you’d see nothing but the image of your own needs; ask her what she wanted, and she’d flash back a transparent “up to you.” Everything here was in the eye of the beholder; everything was just a trick of the light.

Even language in this scene began in time to resemble a dance of a thousand veils. The girls referred to themselves always as “ladies” and talked of their beaus as “boyfriends,” though many, in sad fact, were hardly boys and seldom friends. If they wanted money, the ladies asked their boyfriends, not to “pay,” but just to “help” them. And if ever a man gave his coy mistress a compliment—if ever he told her that her eyes smiled or her smile had secrets in it—she would brush him off, with a mixture of sadness and skepticism, and dub him a “sweet mouth.” Yet in her very next breath, she would gaily assure him that she had a “good heart,” and so did he.

In the netherworld of Bangkok, then, nothing was sure, nothing secure. Names changed, relations shifted, people and places evaporated. All certainties were dissolved in the soft city of hard questions; it was easy to say what it wasn’t, difficult to know what it was. Bangkok was a riddler who declared, in all candor, “I am a liar.”

One girl in the bars told me she was twenty-five, though she was really twenty-nine and was born, in truth, thirty-one years ago. She could not speak English, she told me in faultless English. “How old are you?” I asked a girl who was new to the scene. “She,” interjected another, “she only twenty-one.” “No,” said the first. “Twenty-three.” “But two days ago,” I protested, “you said nineteen.” And two days ago she had also told me that she did not like this job, that she was unhappy amid the city’s bluff
and bluster, that she missed her family in Chiangmai. Now she was clapping and dancing as enthusiastically as all the others.

I asked three dancers the time, and none of their answers matched. I heard one girl say she had worked in the business for fifteen days. No, two years. In actual fact, a year. I looked for a girl called Noy and was told by her best friend, Ead, that Noy was a false name based on a nickname, and her surname had changed anyway now that she was married. I went back to the bar where I had met her, to find the place gone, and all the people changed. And some of the girls here looked like boys, and the most impossibly feminine of all—long of leg and husky of voice—were not girls at all. Janjira’s hair in her photos was sometimes red, sometimes long, sometimes curly, sometimes black, sometimes short, sometimes brown, sometimes straight. “Who is that boy in all the pictures?” “My brother.”

Bangkok’s intricate blend of dynamism and languor had long intrigued me. But as I spent more time in the country, Thailand began to betray other combinations I found more difficult to square. For savagery and grace were so cunningly interwoven here that beauty often seemed brutal and brutality itself quite beautiful. At official performances of Thai classical dance, sketches that featured lissome girls making supple turns were juxtaposed with others that showed off bruising, but no less sinuous, displays of sword fighting. Meanwhile, bouts of Thai boxing resembled nothing so much as ritualized ballets, in which two agile boys bowed their heads before the spirit of the ring, then pounded each other to the accompaniment of weird pipes, ominous drums and a steady chanting.

Late one evening, as I wandered through the streets of Chiangmai, I came upon groups of men flinging themselves through a game of volleyball played entirely with head and feet. Their suppleness was a marvel. They somersaulted and pirouetted, making corkscrew pivots in the air; they lunged and twisted high above the ground; they dazzled with their slinky acrobatics. Yet all the while, feet kicked faces, heads banged nastily together. And all around the dusty floodlit square hung a cockfight air of menace.

The Thais, wrote le Carré, are the world’s swiftest and most efficient killers. Yet executioners would shoot their victims through gauze so as not to offend the Buddha, and monks would strain their water through their teeth so as not, by chance, to harm a single insect.

But at least, I thought, there was one clear-cut division here, in the Manichean setup of Bangkok. The city’s two most common and appealing sights, after all, were its holy men, in spotless saffron robes, and its scarlet ladies. By day, the monks evoked a vision of purity, of hallowed groves filled with golden novitiates; by night, the whole grimy city felt polished, renewed and transformed as sequined girls sang the body electric. At least, so I thought, this day-and-night division would ensure that good was good, and evil evil, and never the twain would meet.

But no. For after a while, I began to notice that, as the whores were engagingly girlish, the monks seemed endearingly boyish. I saw them poring over Walkmans in electronics stores with shopping bags slung over their shoulders, puffing ruminatively on cigarettes, playing tag with their friends in temple courtyards. Once, on venturing inside a monastery on a drowsy afternoon, I chanced upon a group of monks, with beautiful faces, huddled, in the cool shadows, before a TV set that was blasting out cartoons. Then I registered a deeper confusion: some monks, I gathered, were criminals on the lam, while others scattered blessings each night upon the go-go bars; many bar girls, for their part, paid regular visits to Buddhist temples, joined palms together whenever they passed a shrine and knelt in prayer before undertaking their bump and daily grind. Finally, quite flummoxed, I was coming to see the girls as something close to martyrs (“72 prostitutes rescued,” proclaimed
The Nation)
, and the holy men as something close to con men (the Bangkok
Post
told how five monks had killed one of their fellows with axes and knives, because he dared to criticize them for shooting another monk during a party).

Thus the real sorcery of this dizzying place was that, before one knew it, it could work on one not just a physical but a moral seduction. For here was decadence so decorous that it disarmed the criticism it invited; amorality expressed with the delicacy of a ballerina’s nod. And amid such a guiltless marketing of love, righteous indignation could only bounce off the mirrors and the
shadows. Slowly, I saw, the city would unbutton your beliefs; gently, it would unbuckle your scruples; coolly, it would let your defenses slither to the floor. Buddhism did not forbid pleasure, the Thais kept saying—just the infliction of pain. So why find shame in enjoyment, and why take enjoyment in shame? What is so harmful or unnatural in love? Must sweetness be seen as a kind of laxness? Why not see sex as an act of communion?
“Mai pen rai”
ran their constant refrain. No matter. No sweat. Never mind. “Everyone make love,” cooed sweet-smiling Nitya. “What is so wrong? No problem, dahling, no problem.”

And for all my unease in Bangkok, I could not deny that it was quite the most invigorating, and accommodating, city I had ever seen—more lazily seductive than even Rio or Havana. For elegance here was seasoned with funkiness, and efficiency was set off by mystery. Sugar was blended with spice. On Sunday mornings, I often went early to the Temple of the Dawn, and spent several noiseless hours there, surrounded by Buddhas and gazing at the gilded temples that lay across the river like slumberous lions; the minute I grew hungry, however, I could jump into a ten-cent local bus and savor a delectable lunch of watermelon juice and spicy chicken while watching Eurhythmics videos in a spotless air-conditioned café. In the evenings, I would sip Twining’s tea from porcelain cups in an exquisite teak-tabled restaurant, soothed by the sound of George Winston, then saunter outside to find the wind blowing around the sleeping canals and three-wheel
tuk-tuks
puttering through the tropical night.

Bangkok was the heart of the Orient, of course. But it was also every Westerner’s synthetic, five-star version of what the Orient should be: all the exoticism of the East served up amidst all the conveniences of the West (“It seems to combine,” a fascinated S. J. Perelman once wrote, “the Hannibal, Missouri, of Mark Twain’s boyhood with Beverly Hills, the Low Countries and Chinatown”). And all the country’s variegated Western influences seemed, finally, nothing more than decorative strands that could be woven at will into the beautiful and ornamental tapestry of the country’s own inalienable texture (“We provide attractive Thai, Australian, Japanese, Chinese, Swedish, Dutch,
Danish, Belgian, Austrian and French girls,” offered one escort agency. “Also handsome and nice boys [gay] entirely at your service”). The Thais, moreover, seemed to know exactly what their assets were—melting smiles, whispering faces, a beseeching frailty, a luxurious grace—and exactly how to turn those virtues into commodities that the West would covet. The carnal marketplace known as the Grace Hotel was, to that extent, aptly named. “Experience unique courtesy only Thai girls can offer.”

In the end, then, the lovely doubleness with which the bar scene enthralled its foreign votaries seemed scarcely different from the way in which the stealthy East had often disarmed its visitors from abroad. For had not the Buddha himself said that all that we see is illusion? And had not the war in Vietnam turned on much the same conflict between straight-ahead assault and tricky depth? Perhaps its truest representation, Tim O’Brien’s
Going After Cacciato
, had, after all, suggested that the struggle on the battlefield, as in the mind, opposed the usual hard slog of war with the phantom forms of imagination. And in the war too, the result had been the same. Bombs could not annihilate shadows; guns could not demolish mirror images. Strength could not deal with what it could not understand. Throughout the fighting, the Americans had held their own by day. But the Vietnamese had ruled the night. So too, it seemed, in Bangkok.

Ultimately, then, it began to seem no coincidence that Thailand, the most open and most complaisant of all Asian nations, was also the only one that had never been conquered or colonized. The one woman who
never
gives herself away, D. H. Lawrence once wrote, is the free woman who always gives herself up. Just so with Thailand, a place, quite literally, more ravishing than ravished. For though it was known as the “Land of Smiles,” the smiles here really gave nothing away; Thai eyes often seemed to laugh, and Thai smiles shone with the light of all that was left unsaid. Many years ago, some Americans had tried to unravel the mystery by calling the Thais “the nicest people money can buy.” But even that seemed too simple a summary of the country’s opacities. And even now, the Thais, with a gentle smile, continued to confound their visitors from abroad. A Westerner was not exactly in the dark here; just always in the shadows.

The effects of this silken sorcery were clearest, perhaps, in the
alien residents who studded the country. For the expats I ran into in Thailand were very different, by and large, from the industrious yuppies who crowd Hong Kong, the vagabond artists who drift through Bali or the beaded seekers who traipse around India. A surprising number of them were underground or marginal men—professional renegades, mercenaries, free-lance writers, drug dealers, proprietors of girlie bars, men (and only men) whose wanderlust was spent. And all of them, in their way, seemed to have slipped into the city’s resistless lifestyle as into the tempting embrace of a goddess. By now, therefore, they seemed almost stranded here, immobilized by their addiction to cheap drugs, to memories of the war or to the same “soft beds of the East” that had once seduced Mark Antony away from his official duties. “This,” said Emmanuelle, “is a place where doing nothing is an art.”

Yet the hardened expats were at least victims of their own worst selves; visitors to Bangkok with even a touch of naïveté were more likely to fall prey to their better impulses. For the bars provided a perfect setting in which susceptible visitors could lose themselves in thinking they had found themselves, shadow-loving their mirror girls, playing hide-and-seek with their consciences. They tempted their subjects to exchange ideals for fantasies. They teased them into circles of self-doubt. And they invited them to ignore the prudent spinster’s voice of reason, in favor of the coquettish flirtations of pride—I am the one who can save her, I only think of her as a daughter, she really does care for me. Girls with dreams trigger daydreams in men, and make them feel like boys again.

One man, Ead told me, had stayed with her for five weeks, and had never laid a hand on her; when he left, he had given her a video-machine. Others I knew invariably kept up two girls at once, in the hope that they would fall in love with neither. But even that seemed something of an illusion. And on my third day in Thailand, the Bangkok
Post
, ever sagacious about the salacious, ran on its front page a pointed warning from Auden: “Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.”