Silpa: the Art of Love

Chapter 9
Informal Formality

Sittichoke meets me at the hotel and we take a taxi, giving me my first
chance to take a look around Bangkok’s downtown, an even better first
experience when it’s done at night and the city is lit up on display. It’s
a colourful city, and lively in that there’s so many people and so much
activity everywhere on the streets, with clothes vendors, curbside
restaurants, peddlers pushing carts, traders with stalls of every
description, and crowds of pedestrians spilling over the sidewalk onto
the road. And it’s so vast, with skyscrapers and the gilded spires of
temples and tapering stupas receding into the distance in all directions
for as far as the eye can see. Most Australian streets in contrast are
deserted by this time, people having retreated home to watch TV, surf
the Net, or play video games, unwilling to participate with each other in
life outside.

Sittichoke is quiet and humble, the same as his ajarn, Silpa, whose name
he speaks with such reverence whenever he utters it. Apparently, I’m not
the only one to fall under his spell. From what Sittichoke tells me along
the way, most of his students just about worship him. The way Thais
respect their teachers is nothing like in Australia, and based on what I’ve
seen in the galleries at Silpakorn, my impression of the Thai art teachers
is they’re the reverse of what they are in Australia: talented Thai artists
teach.

The streets are jammed with cars, three versions of buses, tuk-tuks, and
two stroke motorcycles, so we crawl along until coming entirely to a stop.
“Around the corner from here is Nana,” says Sittichoke, opening the taxi
door and paying the driver. We walk the rest of the way on the busy
footpath, easily outpacing the vehicles, blowing out chewable exhaust
fumes as they creep along. Instinctively, I cover my mouth with my bare
hands in a vain attempt to filter the big chunks.

Nana is packed with Thai sex workers and foreign men trying without any
difficulty to pick up. Sittichoke turns left into a courtyard surrounded by
three floors of ‘girly bars,’ except for the ground floor, where hundreds of
people from all around the world have come together to sit around and
swill beer. I can’t help but be personally appalled by the exploitation of
these young Eastern women by mostly Western men. I can’t see a single
other white female anywhere, and the men either glance at me with a
curious indifference as to what I’m doing here or ignore me entirely as if
I’m not a women at all.

“Lek and Moo work on the second floor. We speak to them first, then go
see three other friends who work at Patpong,” explains Sittichoke.

Upstairs we go to a bar with a garish neon outline of a naked figure flash
dancing on the wall out front. Inside is mostly what I expect to find,
young women dressed in g-string swimsuits, dancing unenthusiastically
around stainless steel poles. What surprises me more than anything is
they’re not at least topless. That’s what I’d anticipated. We sit down and
checkout the scene. Foreign men occupy nearly every table drinking with
‘bar girls.’ All of them, both women and men, Easterner and Westerner,
share one thing in common: a look of boredom. The women, due to
indifference and the repetitiveness of their profession, and the men, well,
they’re just boring.

While the women are at least trying to enjoy their own company to pass
the time and make being here bearable, the men can share no such
genuine companionship with them. They have to make do with the
predictable conversational and mechanical behavioural patterns of beasts
only capable of thinking with their genitals. What sort of mentality drives
the male species to herd in such places? It crosses my mind to ask one or
two, but I decide against it. They’re so uninteresting, and I’m sure their
answers would be predictably mind numbing. I’ve never seen such a
collection of dullards, and my strongest desire is to avoid contact with
them at any cost.

Sittichoke sips a scotch and coke while I nurse a vodka and orange. Two
of the women wave to him, Lek and Moo. They’re beautiful young women
with bright faces, obviously too smart to have been relegated to this
dustbin of sexual subservience. To see them and the others spreading
their legs around metal poles before being picked up to spread their legs
again is such a waste of whatever their innate talents must be, and it’s
just those talents I want to tap through art.

After their set, Lek and Moo come and sit with us. They’re genuinely
pleased to see Sittichoke and to meet me, agreeing straightaway to join
me for lunch at Silpakorn the next day.

“We’re happy to help,” says Moo speaking quickly.

“Thanks for asking us,” adds Lek. “But right now we have to talk to
some customers who want to buy us a drink.”

“What about if I offer to buy you a drink?” I try.

“It wouldn’t be the same thing,” replies Moo.

“We have to go, the boss is watching,” says Lek, glancing at a well-
dressed Thai man on the other side of the room with his eye on them.

They sit with a couple of huge hideous sex tourist looking types. I feel
depressed at the thought of the terrible ordeal these petite women will
be forced to endure when these mammoth misogynists mount their tiny
frames. I doubt they would view themselves as woman haters, indeed,
no doubt they see themselves as woman lovers, but they are misogynists:
they must hate women to subject them to such abusive treatment for
nothing more than their own selfish sexual gratification. I’m just about to
get up and go rescue Moo and Lek, fighting off these beasts, their Thai
boss, the bouncers, and anyone else who tries to stop me getting them
out of here, only Sittichoke must be able to sense my tension and says
we should leave for Patpong.

We take another cab that lets us out at the end of a pedestrian-access-
only street with two lines of stalls between two rows of girly bars. As
with Nana, here is bustling with revellers, only there’s a more balanced
mix of the general tourist population and Thais, with women and children
come to take in Thailand’s most internationally famous nightspot. I follow
the path cut by Sittichoke through the swarm and go up a long set of
stairs leading to a second floor bar.

Inside is worse than the bar we’d been to in Nana. Here, a group of bare
breasted nymphets gyrate on stage with nothing more than a g-string
and a modicum of feigned enthusiasm for their job, while others mingle
with the crowd, letting the customers strip off their g-string and publicly
grope them. Sittichoke points out the three we’ll be meeting who are
dancing on stage.

He orders some drinks and I survey the scene afraid the dancers will drop
their g-strings and begin blowing trumpets and shooting ping-pong balls
into the audience at any moment like I’d read about on the Internet. I’m
relieved when the set finishes and they mingle with the audience as
another group comes on stage. I can’t stop myself from saying something
to Sittichoke, even the most feeble remark, just to vent a little of my
frustration. “God, they’re such promising individuals,” referring to the new
batch of dancers, “it’s such a waste of womanhood.”

Sittichoke nods and pulls a face, “Yeah, but they’re not women. See their
necks? See their Adam’s apples? They’re katoi: lady-boys.”

I look closer, but still can’t tell the difference. The thought of involving
one or two transgenders in the exhibition crosses my mind. “And what
about who we’re meeting?”

Sittichoke laughs as he replies, “Don’t worry, they’re original women.”

Before I can take it further, Sittichoke introduces me to Rat, Rin, and
Tear. I feel like a fish out of water stranded in this sea of near-naked
flesh, pointing nipples, and leering men. The three are oblivious to their
state of undress, perhaps considering it a costume and themselves as
acting a role, playing out men’s perverse patriarchal fantasies of
stereotypical subservient Asian sex slaves. Like Moo and Lek, they have
intelligent faces and laugh easily among themselves, putting on their
passive masks when they have to please the paying foreign and local
clients.

These women also agree to meet me at midday tomorrow without any
fuss or hesitation. Sittichoke must have already told them about the
project on the phone and, having already established a relationship with
them based on something other than paid access to their genitalia,
meeting tonight is no more than an informal formality. A couple of drunken
German tourists barge in on our conversation, chatting up Rin and Tear
brusquely with such classic Bangkok pickup lines as ‘How much for the
whole night, honey pie?’ and ‘Do you charge by the hour, baby doll?’

“We got to go back to work,” says Rat.

At the table next to ours, the women drop their g-strings and lean into
their customers. We leave as quickly as we can and head back to the
road, hailing a taxi. Sittichoke says as we settle onto the backseat, “I
don’t like to go to places like these.”

“Thanks for going through it for me and introducing me to your friends.”

“You’re welcome. Is there someplace else I can take you?”

“I think I’ve seen enough. Unless there are more of your friends to meet,
I’d like to go to my hotel.”