The Queen of Patpong (13 page)

“Because you’re ugly?” Nana continues, ignoring Kwan’s reaction. “Because men won’t like you?”

“It’s not—” Kwan says. “That’s not— I mean, it won’t happen.”

“It will, you know.” Nana sounds neutral, as though she’s talking about a third person, someone who’s not there and whom they know only slightly. She’s turning the steel stud over between the fingers of her right hand and combing the fingers of the left through her shoulder-length hair.

Kwan wants to argue but instead says, “How do you even know about this?”

“I didn’t until I got here. I’ll tell you the truth, though: I came back to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“What do you think? About going back to Bangkok with me.”

Kwan is searching Nana’s face, looking for a hint of the joke. “Me?”

“You don’t know,” Nana says. “Foreign men will go crazy for you.”

“You mean . . . I’d be doing what . . . what you do?”

Nana fills her cheeks with air and blows it out with a brusque little pop. “I was
exactly
like you,” she says. “I forget sometimes how much I was like you. How could those girls
do
all that? How could they dance around in front of men and go with them? To hotels, I mean. And in the rooms? How could they do that, with men they don’t even know? Aren’t they . . . ashamed? When they think about their lives, don’t they want to die?”

Kwan says, “Don’t you?”

“Actually,” Nana says, “I’ve never had so much fun in my life.” She holds the stud up between thumb and forefinger and sights the moon past it. “I was terrified at first. So they let me go slow. They had me stand outside the bar for two weeks, dressed like a schoolgirl, just trying to get men to come in. ‘One beer, eighty baht, have many beautiful girl, one beer eighty baht.’ ” She is speaking English. “Do you understand what I just said?” She takes a cigarette that’s been bent slightly, straightens it between her fingers, and fires it up.

“Most of it.”

“Well, I didn’t, not then. But that’s right, you’re good at school, aren’t you? All I ever did in school was think about getting out of this town. But the mama-san in the bar said the English words over and over again until I could repeat them, and then, after about a week, I got brave enough to take men by the arm and lead them into the bar. They’d be speaking English to me, or Japanese, or German, and I’d just say, ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ and sometimes, ‘You so handsome,’ which one of the dancers taught me, until one of the mama-sans got hold of the man’s other arm and took him away from me. Then I’d stand there for a minute and watch the girls dance, thinking how beautiful they were, until somebody waved me back out into the street.”

“You can do that?” Kwan asks. “That’s allowed? You just stand there? Without having to, you know, to . . .”

Nana is studying the side of the cigarette, where a tendril of smoke is escaping. She licks her forefinger and presses the wet finger against the tear in the paper. When she’s sure she’s sealed it, she says, “Sure. But a door girl doesn’t make any money. Just enough for noodles in the street and a bare room you share with six other girls. And they make you buy the schoolgirl’s uniform, too, and they subtract part of that money from your pay every week, so you wind up with even less.”

“Ah.” Kwan hugs her knees more tightly but remembers to keep her back straight.

“And you couldn’t do it anyway,” Nana says. “You’d look silly in a schoolgirl’s uniform.”

“I look okay,” Kwan says, stung.

Nana blows out, wafting the argument away with the smoke. “Oh, sure, for
here.
Who cares about here? Down there, where there are beautiful girls everywhere, you’d look stupid, like somebody too dumb to get out of seventh grade. With your height you need to be glamorous, not all little-girly.”

Kwan says,
“Glamorous?”

Nana faces her full on. “Kwan, you have to get used to this. You’re beautiful. With a little work, I mean. You’re tall, but in Bangkok that would be good. You’d stand out, and that’s what matters. There are a lot of girls, and you have to stand out somehow. The girls who work down there learn to make as much as they can out of what they’ve got. That’s their job. They have to figure out what their best look is. Some girls are short and plump, so they act cheerful, with little bows in their hair and big plastic bracelets, teddy-bear knapsacks, things like that. Some girls are little, and they try to look young, pigtails and bangs. A lot of men like young girls best. The prettiest girls get great haircuts—I know somebody who could make your hair look amazing, by the way, even while it’s growing out.” She reaches over and rubs the ends of Kwan’s hair between her fingertips. “Perfect hair.” She stops. “What was I saying?”

“About the pretty girls, how they—”

Nana pats the air to show she doesn’t need the prompt. “Right, they get their hair cut just so, and they find someone to teach them about makeup, and they just go out there and look beautiful. But you—you could be the star of any bar you worked in.”

“A
star
? You make it sound like the movies.”

“It is,” Nana says. “Sort of. I mean, it’s like there are stars and there are those other actresses, the ones you see all the time, but they never play the girl the hero loves, and then there are ordinary girls, the girls who stand around in the background in the big scenes. Some girls never get taken out until everybody else is gone. Other girls, girls as beautiful as you, they’ve got men fighting over them, they’re doing three or four short-times a night. Making big money.”

“What’s a short-time?”

Nana closes her eyes for a second, and Kwan has the feeling she’s reproaching herself for having said too much. “A trip to a hotel. With a customer.”

“Four of them in one night?” Kwan can feel how wide her eyes are. “You mean, with different men?”

“Honey,” Nana says, “if there’s a man anywhere in the world who can do it four times in one night, I hope I never meet him.”

“I have to go now,” Kwan says, and she puts both feet on the ground.

“Two hundred dollars,” Nana says. “Maybe more. That’s how much those girls make. In one night.”

Kwan’s head is ringing. “My father doesn’t make five hundred dollars in a year.”

“Three nights,” Nana says. “You’d earn more in three nights than he does in a year. And you can send most of the money home. Your parents could build a new house.”

“That’s . . . that’s
twelve men.
” A new house?

“Those are the best girls. And you might not have to do that. You might be able to get more every time. But I think you’d get that kind of attention.”

Kwan turns away, unwilling to let Nana look any more deeply into her eyes. “I could never do that. I’ve never . . . I mean, I’ve never even . . .” She can’t finish the sentence.

“I was going to ask you about that,” Nana says. “Have you or haven’t you?”

“Of course not.”

“Lots of us had. Before we went down, I mean. I had, twice. Well, okay, four times. But it’s better if you haven’t.”

“It doesn’t matter—”

“Oh, yes, it does. You could get five hundred, six hundred dollars, twenty or twenty-five thousand baht for the first time. Maybe more.”

Once again, for the fourth or fifth time during the evening, Kwan has the sense that people are speaking some form of Thai she doesn’t understand.
The first time? Six hundred dollars?
“That’s not what I meant. I mean, I’m not going.”

Nana takes the neck of Kwan’s T-shirt and gives it a sharp tug. “Listen. You have to think about this, because if you don’t, your life might as well be over. You can come with me, to Bangkok. Day after tomorrow, we have to go day after tomorrow. I’ll pay the train fare, I’ll lend you five thousand baht. You come with me, I’ll take you into a bar, and you can start out as a waitress. All you have to do is give people their drinks and collect the money. Smile once in a while. You don’t have to go with anybody.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“I just said you wouldn’t have to.” Nana’s voice has sharpened. She pauses before she goes on, and then she takes a corner of the blanket and drapes it over Kwan’s shoulders, too, so they’re both covered. She smooths it down gently. “You can see the way things work. Get to know the girls. I’ll be there. I’ll take you to the bar where I work, so you’ll already have one friend. You can watch the girls, talk to them, see whether you think you can do it. See how much money there is down there. You can’t
imagine
how much money there is. See how well the girls live.” She thinks for a moment, feeling the focus of Kwan’s attention, and says, “See how much it means to them that they can help their parents and keep their brothers and sisters in school.”

“Keep them in school?”

“If you’re sending money home, there’s no reason for them not to stay in school.”

“My sister Mai,” Kwan says slowly. “She’s very pretty. Not like me,
really
pretty.”

“Three or four years from now, your father is going to start looking at her and seeing money.”

“But he can’t,” Kwan says. “My teacher, she says that the police—”

“Forget the police. I’m telling you, you have to come down to Bangkok with me. And you need to make up your mind right now, because you have to leave the day after tomorrow.”

“But tomorrow he’ll get the money to keep me in school. Then I won’t have to worry about—”

Nana’s hand lands on top of Kwan’s. “Be quiet and listen,” she says. “Tomorrow he’ll get the money to keep you in school. The day after tomorrow, he’ll sell you.”

Chapter 10
The Moon Below

T
he colony of small frogs that makes its home in the little creek behind the houses, somehow staying alive even during the long dry season, chooses this moment to start a conversation. The two girls sit there, still as a painting, wrapped in the chirping and thrumming from the creek bed.

At last Kwan says, over the noise, “Before you say anything else, I want an answer to my question.”

Nana pulls out another cigarette, raises it halfway to her lips, and says, “You’ve asked a lot of questions.” With a practiced flick of the wrist, she lights it, taking the first drag in a businesslike fashion this time, no fancy inhaling techniques. She blows smoke and leans back slightly, and the movement tugs the blanket off Kwan’s shoulder.

“Why I should believe you. And . . . and how you know. About my father. About the sixty thousand baht.”

“When I got off the train,” Nana says, “somebody was there, somebody who probably knew I was coming. Not from this village, and you don’t know her. But she told me not to try to take you with me.”

Kwan says, “Because . . .”

“Because these people talk to each other, and somebody, most likely someone from my bar, told somebody else I was coming up here. Probably got paid five hundred baht for the information. So she—the woman at the train station—wanted to make sure I knew that you were bought and paid for.”

“But I haven’t been. Paid for, I mean.”

“You’re wrong. He’s already got some of it. He’ll get the rest when they come and take you.”

Kwan leans forward as though that would drive her words home. “He can’t. He’ll sign the paper tomorrow. He’ll take the money from Mr. . . . Mr. Pattison.”

“The scholarship fund,” Nana says, not even leaning back to reestablish the distance between them. She makes a
pfft
noise between her teeth and lower lip. “Small change.”

“But . . . but Teacher Suttikul, she said she’d tell the police if I wasn’t in school, and the police would come looking for me.”

“Oh, they will,” Nana says. For a moment Kwan thinks she is going to laugh, but she shakes her head. “They’ll be here in no time. They’ll drive a hundred miles an hour.”

“Well, then my father can’t—”

Nana’s hand comes to rest on the top of Kwan’s head. To Kwan it feels as if a circuit has been created between them. “Because they want the money. Your teacher will complain to the cops right away. That day. She’ll want to get you back fast, before anything happens to you. So your father will still have the money, all of it. The cops will come and demand to see you. Stamp around the house and scare everybody. There will be two of them, so one can keep an eye on the other, make sure he doesn’t pocket anything. When they discover you’re not there, which they already know you won’t be, they’ll tell your father he’s going to jail unless he gives them half. Thirty thousand baht, probably. It
was
sixty thousand, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Kwan says, more breath than voice.

Nana takes her hand away and turns a palm upward. “They’re getting a deal. If they could see how beautiful you are, your father could hold them up for a hundred thousand, maybe more. You’re a bargain because you’re tall.”

“But my teacher—”

Nana scrubs the air with the open palm. “Your teacher, your teacher. Your teacher can’t do
anything.
Didn’t you hear me?
The cops will take the money.
Then they’ll go and tell your teacher that they’re mounting an investigation. They’ll say they’ll find you wherever you’ve gone. They’ll throw your father in jail for a week or two, but he’ll get good food and they’ll treat him well because it’s just a show, because they’re going to want more money from him later. After a month or two, they’ll tell your teacher you’ve just vanished. By then she’ll have some other girl to worry about.”

The half-moon, cream yellow now, hangs at a slant just above the treetops. It looks to Kwan like it’s spying on them. Lanterns shimmer through the windows of the two nearest houses, but the ones farther away, at the village’s edge, gleam with the hard, bluish, skim-milk light of fluorescent bulbs. In the farthest of the houses, the light is snapped off. It’s getting late. The frogs chatter in amphibian, back in the dry creek.

Kwan reaches behind her and grabs the blanket and wraps it again around her shoulder. She is surprised to find that she’s shivering. The image of the wide, dark door, banished while she talked with Nana, yawns open again. “What . . . what will happen to me?”

“Here’s what will happen if you go with me,” Nana says. She puts the cigarette on the edge of the platform, spreads the fingers of her left hand, and ticks them off with her right index finger as she makes her points.
One.
“You’ll work in a bar.”
Two.
“You’ll take your time before you have to get up on the stage.”
Three.
“You’ll make friends with the girls who work there, and they can be like your map, they’ll show you what to do and what not to do.”
Four.
“Once you decide to dance, you’ll go with men once in a while, if you want to. Some of them are even handsome. The way you’re going to look, you’ll be able to pick and choose. You’ll be able to get the men all the other girls want to go with. And you won’t have to take the ones the other girls don’t want. Remember, you don’t have to leave the bar with any man you don’t want to go with. If he’s too fat or crazy or too drunk or anything, you can say no. Nobody can force you.” She waggles the spread fingers at Kwan’s face like a spider and then remembers the cigarette. She picks it up and takes a leisurely inhale. “In fact, you don’t really have to go with anybody at all. You won’t make much money, but you can live off the commission on the Cokes the customers buy you. You’ll get fined part of your salary if you don’t go a few times a month, but you’re going to be so beautiful they’ll never fire you. You just won’t have much money to send home. You won’t have money for fun.”

“I don’t need fun.”

Nana shrugs. “You’re not there yet. There are more ways to have fun than you can imagine.”

“Maybe. But I’m not going.”

“You’re even thicker than I was afraid you’d be.” Nana takes a long, angry drag that turns the coal on her cigarette a brilliant, hellish red. Kwan looks away from it, letting the darkness soothe her eyes. “You haven’t asked the important question.”

“What is it? What’s the important question?”

“What happens if you
don’t
go with me. And don’t talk to me about your wonderful teacher. She can’t do anything.”

Kwan lifts her feet again and puts them on the bench, her long legs folded vertically in front of her, knees as high as her chin. She puts her hands, fingers spread, on top of the familiar curve of her bent knees. Nothing there comforts her. Her knees feel like they belong to someone else. “What happens?”

Nana looks down at the cigarette in her hand and then drops it into the dust. She shifts the blanket a little, making sure Kwan is covered, and slides closer, so that Kwan can feel the other girl’s body warmth and smell something sweet and flowery on her loose, thin clothes.

Nana sighs. “Day after tomorrow, on your way home from school, three men will grab you. They’ll wait until you’re walking alone. They’ll cover your mouth with tape and put these tight things on your wrists that will hold them behind your back. They might do that to your feet, too. They’ll throw you into the back of a car and drive you to Bangkok. One man will drive. Two will sit in back. They’ll touch you any way they want to, but they won’t do anything that would cost their bosses the money they’re going to make from selling you as a virgin. But they can think of plenty of things to do without that. By the time you get to Bangkok, you’ll feel like filth.”

“My father wouldn’t do that to me.”

Nana doesn’t say anything. Kwan closes her eyes and listens to the frogs as they sing the songs she’s heard her entire life. She feels a tear slide down her cheek. She says, “Then what?”

“You’ll be taken to a house. It’ll be dirty, and it’ll have windows that don’t open. Some of the rooms will have bars on the windows.”

“Bars?”

“What do you think this is
about
? You think you’re going to work in a flower shop? You’re going to be in some filthy, rat-filled cement house in Bangkok with bars on the windows and a lock on the door. You’re going to get put into a room with a bed in it and a bucket to pee in, and you’re going to stay in that room for months without ever going out. You’ll get fucked, you’ll rest, you’ll get fucked again. They’ll bring you some food, and then you’ll get fucked again. At night you’ll sleep in the same bed you fucked in all day, with the sheets still dirty from all those men, and whenever a new man comes, no matter what time it is, they’ll wake you up and you’ll have to fuck him. Doesn’t matter if he’s fat, filthy, drunk, mean, ugly, smelly, toothless, diseased. Doesn’t matter if he wants to slap you around. You’ll fuck him. Every day, seven days a week, all year long. For two or three years, until you’ve paid back the sixty thousand baht they paid your father, and they’ll cheat you on that. They’ll charge you rent for the room they lock you in, they’ll charge you for sheets and towels, for food. Whatever it costs them, they’ll charge three times as much. Until you’ve paid back every baht of the sixty thousand, plus interest.”

Nana has been whispering fiercely, but Kwan hears the creak of wood down the street. She puts a hand on Nana’s wrist, and Nana goes silent and throws a protective arm around Kwan’s shoulders.

Another creak, and then the slap of a rubber sandal. It’s coming from the dark rectangle of Kwan’s house fifteen meters down the street, its flat blackness broken only by the single window, a hazy patch of light thrown by the lantern on the far side of the room. The sound came from above the street, from the wooden deck that surrounds the house. Nana’s breath catches, and Kwan whispers, “Shhhhhh.”

The creaking continues, and then there’s the confused thump of a stumble, followed by a slurred, muttered curse. And then Kwan hears the sound of her father’s sandals on the four steps that lead down to the street.

“Stay here,” she whispers, her lips practically touching Nana’s ear. Kwan throws off the blanket and eases herself back so she can slip off the edge of the platform that faces away from the street. From there it’s just a few fast steps to the darkness beneath the house that’s behind the platform. Kwan has to bend almost double to squeeze into the space, and the rough, unfinished wood above her snatches at the threads of her T-shirt, but she keeps going until she’s well past the midpoint of the house, two meters or so beyond the moonlight’s milky edge. She drops to her knees, scoops dirt into her hands, and rubs it on her face. When she finally breathes, it feels as if a stone is caught in her throat.

Nana sits on the platform, one knee drawn up like someone who could sit there forever. She is humming.

“Well,” her father says from somewhere to the right, out of Kwan’s line of sight. “Look here. It’s little Moo.”

“Nana. I stopped being Moo a long time ago.”

Kwan’s father lurches into view. He stops in front of Nana, swaying slightly. He is as drunk as Kwan has ever seen him. He blinks heavily down at Nana as though to clear his vision. “Still Moo. Got nice clothes now, got pale skin, not so fat, but you’re still dirty.”

“And you’re still a drunk,” Nana says, with a calm that amazes Kwan. She could never talk like that to an older man who’s not a member of her family.

Her father takes half a step back. “Little whore. Up from Bangkok, waving around your hundred-baht ass.”

Nana laughs. “A hundred baht? For a hundred baht, I wouldn’t show you the bottom of my foot.” She waves him off, left-handed, like she’d shoo a chicken. “Why don’t you keep going wherever you were going? There’s probably another bottle there.”

Kwan’s father clears his throat loudly and spits. Kwan thinks the spittle may have struck Nana, but Nana doesn’t move a muscle. Beyond Nana’s black silhouette, Kwan can see half of her father’s face, rendered in pastel by the moonlight. After a moment he says, “Your round little ass.” He lifts his chin imperiously and stumbles back a step. “I got money.”

Kwan’s heart is suddenly pounding at the side of her neck.

“Not enough,” Nana says. “No matter how much you have, it’s nowhere near enough.”

“Got a lot.”

“Fine,” Nana says. “Thirty thousand baht. Special price, just for you.”

Her father pulls his head back, as though someone has swung at him. “Thirty— ’At’s a joke, right?”

“For thirty thousand,” Nana says sweetly, “I’ll let you lick my shadow. It’s right down there, on the dirt.”

“Little
bitch.
” He takes a step toward her, raising one arm.

“Hit me,” Nana says. “And then I’ll scream, and when everybody comes, I’ll explain how you offered me thirty thousand baht to sniff my butt. And then I’ll ask where you got thirty thousand baht. In fact, you don’t even have to hit me. I’ll scream anyway, just for fun.”

“No, no,
no.
” Kwan’s father looks reflexively in the direction of his house. “Don’t.”

“Two thousand baht,” Nana says. “Right now. Two thousand baht or I scream.”

A pause. “You said what?”

“Village men,” Nana says, spitting the words as though they’d caught in her throat. “I always forget how
slow
they are. Two thousand baht right now, from your pocket into my hand, or I scream. Was that slow enough for you?”

Kwan’s father squeezes out a bleary laugh. “Who’s going to believe you? Everybody knows what you do down there.”

“You’re probably right. So it’ll be twenty-five hundred. For reminding me.”

Her father sways in the moonlight, looking down at Nana.

“All right,” Nana says. “Here goes.” She takes a deep breath and raises both hands to her mouth.

“Stop.”
Kwan’s father digs into his pockets, pulls out a handful of bills, and fumbles blunt-fingered through it. “One thousand, fifteen hundred, two thousand five hundred.” He puts the other bills back. It’s a thick wad, and Kwan’s eyes follow it, something in her chest threatening to break into sharp pieces.