Thailand Confidential

Love for Sale

When I arrived in Bangkok in 1993, I was an aging, libido-gone-astray, Western male awash in The World of Suzie Wong, Thai style. Welcome to the Land of Smiles, indeed. Thailand had been the place for casual, convenient sex for farangs since the 1960s and America’s war in Vietnam, when the big, pale foreigners came to Thailand for the first time in large numbers for what was euphemized as R&R, and, thirty years later, I joyously joined the parade. Patpong and Soi Cowboy and Nana Plaza were places where nearly anything imaginable was available at an affordable price, where horny males could push “rewind” on life’s remote control and return to an unrequited adolescence… and this time, the girls would all say yes and make you think they loved it. I was reminded of something one of the literary McCourt brothers said: “You’re never too old to have a happy childhood, and I’m having mine now!” If, as the song promised, “dreams come true in Blue Hawaii,” fantasies came true in Bangkok. It was biology at its friendliest, gynecology with a beat.

Some farangs told sad stories about the girls they at first claimed to love and subsequently called gold-diggers and worse. In too many cases, the epithets were deserved. Wallets and ATM cards were stolen. Some of the men were drugged as well as robbed. Many bar girls convinced several men simultaneously to send money every month, employing one of numerous commercial services available to answer the letters that came to them, juggling their boyfriends’ holidays so that they didn’t overlap. (One of the services, located near the American, British and Dutch embassies, was called Language Lovers’ Translation Centre.) Money was solicited to pay for fictitious parental illnesses and other needs at home that bore no relationship to reality. Many of the women played their customers along though they already had Thai families. Some even married them just to escape poverty, divorcing them as soon as they were settled in a country where common property had to be shared and alimony—an alien concept in Thailand—was an accepted part of a marital split.

Still others had Thai boyfriends, many of whom took the women to work on their motorbikes and lived off their earnings. More than anyone would suspect actually preferred female companionship. Yet, none of this was revealed as the little darlings crawled all over their customers’ laps and whispered, “Number One! Lob you too much! Go hotel?” I had an attorney friend who worked in Phnom Penh and took his holidays in Bangkok who said, “I never knew any group of people who lied more than lawyers until I started spending time in the bars.”

Still, the tide of males rolled in, praise going where praise was generally deserved, the thousand-baht notes right behind them. Some of the non-complainers surely were the ones Tennessee Williams was talking about when he said that the city’s name said it all. There was no other way of putting it: if you weren’t happy at home in Sacramento, Manchester, Frankfurt, or Perth, you booked a flight to Bangkok, where young, beautiful women would give you the time of your life. Even if you were a geek or old or fat and couldn’t get or keep it up. Affordably. Paul Theroux wrote that in Bangkok, even the “most diffident” got laid.

But it wasn’t just quick and easy sex. Tens of thousands of the pay-bar-go-loom liaisons led to marriage, removing the women at last from the poverty that impelled most of them into the business to begin with. Many actually fell in love with the men, went home with their new husbands, stayed married and became parents. I knew several such couples, in Australia, Europe and the United States. One of them adopted the woman’s son, who subsequently became an avid cricket player. More, including me, remained in Thailand, building homes upcountry for our wives and the new families that usually came with them.

It didn’t always work out—how many marriages did?—but it was a nice arrangement, at least initially. And for the women who worked in farang bars with no interest in marriage, they kept whatever they got from the men with no questions asked or taxes paid. It wasn’t a profession that earned respect for the women— quite the opposite—and too often the exploitation, on both sides, ended in misery. But it was not an altogether bad deal.

No question, sex in Thailand was different from what these men got at home. There, affection didn’t come with the lap dance or fleeting (and expensive) assignation. In all countries, prostitution was a service industry, but in the West the emphasis was on the second word; it wasn’t just a business, the male often felt as if he were getting the business. In Thailand, on the other hand, the emphasis more often was on the first word. Service. With a smile.

Thai women were more compliant than Western women. They weren’t secretive about wanting the man’s wallet, but most seldom made demands they felt the man couldn’t meet. They rarely criticized or complained. They were playful, almost childlike, and however incompatible it seemed considering what they did for a living, they were touchingly (and refreshingly) shy. They didn’t mind holding your hand in public, making you look like a stud in front of all the other farangs in the hotel and its neighborhood, they laughed at any attempt at humor, and they were superb, intuitive actresses, convincing even the oldest, grossest, fattest and most alcoholic that they were the men they’d been sitting in that grim bar all night longing for. Then did it again the next night and the night after that, some of them for years before marriage, or age, or boredom, or fatigue, or AIDS, or something else retired them.

No one knew how big, or profitable, the business was. Bernard Trink, a longtime American expat who for decades had a half-page column every weekend in the Bangkok Post to report on what he called the “demimondaine”—something that never would have been allowed in the more politically correct U.S.—said there were three hundred thousand prostitutes in Thailand. Others said more, or fewer. But whether they were men or women or katoey (a term generally used to mean transsexuals or transvestites), there was no question they were numerous, and it was estimated that the “sex industry” contributed between eight and thirteen percent of the country’s visitor revenue, depending on which academic or NGO or bureaucrat was doing the wild guessing.

A businessman friend of mine who lived and worked in Asia for more than twenty-five years, all of his business in the travel industry and much of it in Thailand, said he didn’t like it that the country had an international reputation of being “a whorehouse with temples.” He wished the government would just ban public sex outright, close all the bars and massage parlors and so on, and keep them closed for two years, so everyone could see how much of the nation’s economy really was dependent on it. Not just in foreign exchange, but in jobs. Close the bars and other sex venues, he said, and you crippled airlines, hotels, travel agencies, restaurants, taxicabs, tailors and jewelry shops, and uncounted other categories of commerce, putting half a million people out of work in Bangkok alone. Then, my friend said, the government could legalize or decriminalize and regulate the trade responsibly or else maybe get serious about finding some other source of foreign revenue.

Maybe he was right. Thailand used to recognize prostitution as a legal trade. A law designed to fight venereal diseases in 1909 called for the registration of brothels and sex workers, along with mandatory health checks, but otherwise regarded the job without the condemnation that now seems so universal. Then in 1960, sex for sale was outlawed and in 1996 more laws were passed in an attempt to control trafficking, rape and child abuse. By 2003, the government started talking about making it legal again, or at least decriminalizing the trade, the idea being to eliminate the criminal element while opening up new sources of taxation.

It should be noted, by the way, that what my friend was talking about and I was a part of—sex tourism, and all the wonderful and horrible things it led to—comprised the most visible part of the sex industry, but only a small part of it. Although farangs and other foreigners frequently were blamed for creating this highly profitable industry, the truth was quite the opposite. Thailand’s sex market had been examined numerous times by sociologists, historians and many others, all of whom agreed that prostitution was an integral part of Thai society long before Vietnam, and that most of the sex business then and later was conducted by Thais and for Thais. Numerous international organizations such as the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) and various UN agencies concentrated their efforts not on the go-go bars and massage parlors and so on that catered to travelers, but on the brothels and other “local” sex venues and trafficking of Thai women overseas (as well as the “importation” of women to Thailand from Burma, China and Cambodia), because that’s where the more serious problems were. In the farang places in Thailand, the women were there by choice, and even if most venue owners treated the women like cattle, they still were free to come and go.

(Many, if not most, sex workers were given only two or three days off a month, there were no benefits, there was no sick leave, and fines were levied for missed days, lateness, and a host of other minor infractions. Some bars required a minimum number of “bar fines” a month—in the busier places, as many as twenty—and pay was deducted for every one they were short. So, too, with hustled drinks. Although some were promised salaries as high as US$200 a month, double what she might earn in a factory or as a retail clerk, few actually received it. Brothel workers and massage women had it even worse; most got no salary at all, shared their earnings with the boss, and had to pay off the cops. In the bars, that was the owner’s responsibility.)

In a book published just after the country’s economic crash in 1997, Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle, for my money the only book on the subject on a crowded shelf worth reading, the authors said the boom was “fueled by national and international development polices that deliberately functioned to impoverish certain regions of the country, in order to maintain a heavy flow of age- and gender-specific workers for low-paid unskilled jobs, including those in tourism.” This led, they said, to “more desperate families, more and younger women recruited to prostitution and worsening labor conditions, greater competition, smaller incomes, and more menacing health conditions, as safe sex becomes a luxury fewer girls can afford to insist on.” I thought this a cynical view, but not entirely off the mark.

In the winter of 2001-2002, a new Minister of the Interior launched a campaign to create a “New Social Order” and dozens, maybe hundreds of entertainment venues (mainly bars) were raided by police looking for underage drinkers and administering piss-in-a-cup drug tests on the spot. [See “Piss in a Cup,” page 119.] Few were arrested, but the media invited to go with the cops on the raid dutifully reported how hard at work authorities were at cleaning up Bangkok.

At the same time, Bangkok and a majority of other provinces were zoned and if your business wasn’t inside one of the approved “entertainment zones,” closing time was moved, for many, from two a.m. to midnight. Dancers were told to put on their clothes and sex shows were shut down, as were a number of clubs. (Oddly, in numerous gay bars, open anal and oral sex continued undeterred.) Forecasts of gloom and doom followed, but I don’t think it meant much. It wasn’t necessary for a woman to shoot darts at balloons and smoke cigarettes with her you-know-what or disappear beer bottles and live frogs in the same cavities to get a traveler’s attention. A bikini on stage and a smile over a cola that cost a couple of dollars afterward was more than most men could find anywhere else.

Whenever I returned to the U.S., inevitably I was asked about AIDS. I always said most of the problem was not in Thailand’s tourist bars—although it is there, too—and that government studies showed that more generally it was in places that catered to Thai men, whose promiscuity was as well known as it was rampant. It was a cultural tradition in Thailand for young men to be taken to a brothel by an older friend or relative when they were teenagers as a rite of passage, I said, and it was accepted that they then returned to the brothels for the rest of their lives. Thai law also permitted a man to take a mia noi, or “minor wife,” and when the leading political party announced in 2004 that it would not allow their party members who were adulterers and polygamists to stand for re-election to Parliament, the protest was so vociferous, the proposed ban was dropped. [See “Shadow Wives,” page 65.] Thailand was, like so many “emerging” nations, still up to its hips in chauvinism and testosterone.

It was further shown in studies conducted in 2004 by Assumption University that Thai teens were having sex at a younger age, with one survey claiming that twenty seven percent of those aged thirteen to nineteen had had sexual experiences, and the average age was fifteen. More and more female university students admitted selling themselves by the hour in order to buy cell phones, clothing and other fashion accessories.

This was rarely reported outside Thailand. Instead, international media wrote almost exclusively about foreigners, thus it was the Western customers and pedophiles who got the headlines, not the Thai ones, who outnumbered the farangs exponentially. Because the media had clients to satisfy, too, and newspaper readers and TV watchers back home couldn’t have cared less about what Thai men did with Thai women, they wanted to hear about the bargirls of Patpong and Nana Plaza and the juveniles. So they became the subjects of countless “exposés” and news reports and documentaries and tedious academic tomes, and the hundreds of thousands of sex workers who served Thai truck drivers, fishermen and the military, three of the occupations that drove what surely was one of the nation’s biggest service industries, went largely ignored.

Meanwhile, in a quiet little side street not far from several five-star hotels in Bangkok’s Sukhumvit district, there was a bar that offered blow jobs starting at ten a.m. A couple of blocks away there was another where the women stood in a line against the wall; those on the left were available for anal sex and those on the right were not, and customers were encouraged to take two in any case; if you ordered a second drink it would not be served, because this was not a bar for drinkers. While in southern Thailand, in an attempt to win back tourists from Malaysia driven away by insurgent violence, open-air restaurants, cafes and go-go bars announced a new policy, allowing male customers to touch any part of the female employees’ bodies, including intimate areas, for up to ten minutes for fifty cents.

Shadow Wives

It’s probably a good thing that Thai soap operas don’t have English subtitles, because if they did, attendance at the Grand Palace and other tourist attractions might fall as visitors remained in their hotel rooms to watch the daily ration of domestic theater. Because however badly plotted and awkwardly acted these dramas may be, they offer a look at Thai society that is closed to outsiders and confirms quickly just how amazing the country can be.

There are numerous unusual aspects of Thai culture and life revealed on these programs—with ghosts and katoey, the term used for transvestites and over-the-top homosexuals, just two of the more obvious. Still, the one that intrigues me most and I think would entrance many visitors is Thailand’s peculiar take on marriage: the taking of multiple wives.

“What we have in Thailand is legislated monogamy but institutionalized polygamy,” Natayada Na Songkhla wrote in The Nation. “A man should only have one wife but often ends up with more. People in Thailand are obsessed by the concept of multi-wife households. The fact that we aren’t supposed to have them just makes the subject all the more compelling.”

This is not to imply that the all men have more than one wife. In a story published in the same newspaper (Feb. 5, 2001), it was claimed by Prof. Nongpa-nga Limsuwan, head of the psychiatry department at Ramathibodi Hospital, that research studies showed that “only one-quarter of Thai male adults keep minor wives.” Only twenty five percent? As I write this, I can hear Western jaws hitting the floor.

“Thirty five percent of the Thai men surveyed said they saw nothing wrong with having more than one wife, while fifty five percent longed to have minor wives,” the professor said. How many of these might, by some, be termed adulterers and self-styled swingers was not revealed. Nor is the good professor saying Thai polygamists live with more than one wife, as usually is the case in Muslim societies, where the Koran (4.3) says, “Marry of the women, who seem good to you, two, three or four,” so long as the man can properly care for them. In Thailand, usually there are separate residences. Although Asiaweek, in a 1999 story on Thai “concubines,” identified a meatball factory owner from Nakhon Patho who said he and his seven wives and twenty children lived under the same roof, this type of arrangement is extremely rare.

As with so many things defining the social order in the Land of Smiles, in affairs of the heart, it pays to be first. Because it is the first wife and the children she bears who get the most respect from society at large and, significantly, all of the man’s estate when he dies, unless he has made other agreed upon or secret arrangements. Usually, the mia noi, or minor wife (the words translate “little wife”), may have to content herself with stolen evenings and weekends, an apartment or condo, possibly a car, a mobile phone, a reasonable allowance, and whatever gifts and luxuries the man can afford.

Polygamy has been practiced by mankind for thousands of years. Many of the ancient Israelites were polygamous, some having hundreds of wives; King Solomon is said to have had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. Up to the seventeeth century, polygamy was practiced and accepted by the Christian church and more recently, the Shakers, Mormons and the Oneida utopian community permitted plural marriages in the United States. And while polygamy is banned by law in all fifty states, The Salt Lake Tribune (Apr. 23, 2000) estimates there are thirty thousand such families in the West. And as recently as March, 2004, the U.S. dropped its ban on polygamy as a condition for the resettlement of some fifteen thousand displaced Hmong people, refugees from Thailand. Earlier, male refugees who had several wives were asked to choose only one to accompany them to the U.S..

Polygamy in Thailand was practiced openly hundreds of years ago, when kings, aristocrats, feudal lords, and wealthy merchants kept young, lesser wives as a symbol of their status. Customs changed with time, of course, and in 1935 the concept of marriage licenses was introduced and further multiple marriage was banned. However, almost seventy years later, the practice of taking more than one “wife” remained solidly in place and its illegality was, like many laws in Thailand, almost never enforced, as it continued to be popular with many military strongmen, powerful politicians, and leading businessmen.

Asiaweek (June 6,1997) told a story about Sanoh Thienthong, one of the most influential men in Thai politics—head of one of the largest political factions and for a time an advisor to the current prime minister—when he was the Minister of the Interior in another administration. He was visited unexpectedly in his Government House office by his mistress Jitra Tosaksit, a former beauty queen who had raised three children by the minister. Although she had stayed in the shadows for many years, she was quoted now as saying she now wished some recognition. When Sanoh was told she was in his outer office, he fled the scene.

Other beauty queens and actresses have played the same game. According to Asiaweek, Ladawan Wongsriwong, at the time a Member of Parliament, was disturbed by how ‘agents’ went to ministers with photos of the winners of a beauty pageant in her home district, touting the young women as possible mia noi. “Some ministers were very angry” when she brought it to public attention, she said. “The parliamentarian came close to naming philandering colleagues, but settled for listing the minister’s initials.” One former cabinet minister, found to be “unusually rich” by the National Counter Corruption Commission, in court testimony reported by The Nation (May 7, 2003) was said to have “squandered money on gambling and minor wives, prompting his wife to salt away some of his assets in case of divorce.”

Is it any wonder the Thai public is enchanted by such goings-on? Or that the “other woman” plays a key role in many television dramas?

How does this work? The answer actually is in the law. In Thailand, there are two kinds of marriage. One calls for a ceremony with a blessing by a Buddhist monk, and the other is officially registered with the government. Although many couples do both, many don’t bother to register, settling for the Buddhist ceremony. Thus, the union is sealed with a cherished and honored religious ceremony, and no law is broken because registration isn’t required by law. Of course, in many instances, religious rites are also ignored.

Which leads us into the thorny garden of women’s rights. Although the situation is changing, and gender equality is enshrined in the 1997 constitution, in Thailand today, as in many other places, women are in many ways regarded as second class citizens, the under-educated and disadvantaged result of an entrenched double standard. There is no law forbidding marital rape and the number of sexual assaults against women has doubled in the past decade; domestic violence is so common, it is rare that police will answer a call. Abortion is illegal except in cases of rape or where the pregnancy endangers the woman’s health. Men may claim compensation from any men who had sex with their fiancées, but not vice versa. As is true elsewhere, discrimination in the work place is pervasive: the higher the level, the fewer the women, and women earn less than men in all levels.

In addition, suing for divorce is a flimsy option for Thai women. Mee choo, the Thai term for “infidelity,” applies only to women, thus for a man to divorce his wife he has only to show a single liaison between his wife and another man, while the male is free to roam without legal consequence; under the Civil Code’s regulation for termination of marriage, the woman must prove that her husband not only had sex with another woman but also that he lived with her as her husband. As more and more women, and their supporters, were elected to Parliament, attempts have been made to change the law, but so far there are too many male legislators with mia noi or sympathy for those who have them to think any new law is likely soon.

Nor is it clear that all mia noi are unhappy. Supatra Ratananakin, speaking for the Friends of Women Foundation, was quoted both in The Nation and Asiaweek as saying one out of every five counseling sessions she had with women seeking advice on family problems were about husbands taking a minor wife. Nonetheless, she said, “Today’s mia noi is not always someone who is living with a man just for the money. A lot of minor wives are financially independent women who choose to live with married men because they love and understand one another.”

Others are content to be No. 2 because they believe it’s better than being No. 0, which is what they were perceived to be, and thought themselves to be, before Mr. Big came along. Studies on the subject are few, but there’s general agreement that the minor wife more often than not comes from a social class beneath the husband’s, with less education and few if any marketable job skills. In this fashion, becoming a minor wife may be regarded by some as not only a way out, but up.

Venus Envy

After putting on my operating room “scrubs”—a paper garment that came to below my knees and tied in the back, a hat, and mask—I was led into a brightly lit operating room at the spanking-new Bumrungrad Hospital, where a friend of mine, Kelly Lynn Deloito, lay on her back, anaesthetized, covered almost entirely by a leaf-green, cotton sheet. Her arms were supported at her sides as if on a cross (and strapped down to prevent movement), only her manicured nails on show; her legs spread widely and hung in slings at the knees (also belted into place, while still another strap held her waist). Except for her hands and her head, with a plastic pipe fitted into her mouth, to help her with her breathing, all that could be seen was her groin, where a penis lay limp on her abdomen.

Dr. Preecha Tiewtranon briskly entered the room, fresh from a mammoplasty (breast enlargement) in a nearby operating room. He was helped into a clean surgical gown and latex gloves. He called a cheery hello to me and slipped onto a low, stainless steel stool on wheels, rolled into position between the patient’s legs, and lifted her genitals to examine them. Seeming satisfied, he sketched a few lines on the flesh on either side of the penis in purple ink and then was handed an electric scalpel, with which he began to cut, initiating what was to be his five-hundred-andsomethingth sex-change operation.

In recent years, Bangkok had become a sort of Mecca for SRS, or “sex reassignment surgery.” This fitted the government’s campaign to make the city a destination for all types of health care and in the years following the region’s 1997 economic collapse, the city’s excellent hospitals were aggressively marketed throughout Asia and the Middle East as if they were five-star hotels. Bumrungrad even offered cybernet cafes on several floors, a McDonald’s, and a Starbucks, to make everyone feel at home, and the original building was converted into apartments for the patients’ families.

I’d met Dr. Preecha several times in his office, with transsexual friends or friends-of-friends, like Kelly, who came to Bangkok to complete their trans-gender metamorphosis. Before moving to Thailand, I’d had a live-in relationship with a transsexual in Hawaii and since then several of her “sisters” called me when they came to Thailand for the final cut.

Dr. Preecha, an Assistant Professor of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Chulalongkorn University, said he didn’t know how many of these procedures were performed in Thailand yearly, but said he did one or two a week, on average, with patients coming mainly from Japan, Taiwan, and the U.S., but also from Europe and Australia. Thailand’s indigenous katoey population— the word is a generic for the cross-gendered and more obviously gay—provided another patient base. The largest density of transsexuals was in Pattaya and, increasingly, in Phuket, where katoey cabarets were an entertainment staple. Dr. Preecha said his former students performed SRS in those cities, too.

Most transsexuals—people who actually make physical changes to their bodies, as opposed to transvestites or cross-dressers, who merely dress up convincingly (or not convincingly)—don’t have their genitals surgically removed, satisfying themselves with hormone therapy, which tends to discourage body hair growth and adds a layer of fat to cover masculine angularity. They get breast implants, let their nails and hair grow long, and try to learn how to walk and talk and live as women. Some keep their male genitals because they can’t afford the surgery, others because they don’t want to give up orgasms; many because they don’t want to take a step than cannot be reversed.

(Most Japanese transsexuals have their testicles surgically removed rather than take estrogen shots. The effect is the same.)

SRS is a growth industry in the world today. (A funny word to use when talking about what also might be called castration.) Check the Internet and you find surgeons in the United States, England, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Singapore, Taiwan and, of course, Thailand. The girls who come to Dr. Preecha say they do so because he has the most detailed and candid web page (he even gives hotel costs and warns of possible medical complications, which many surgeons don’t mention) and because of the artistry he’s performed on their friends. Kelly, a thirty-six-year-old Hawaiian-Portuguese who was engaged to an engineer, had examined some of Dr. Preecha’s earlier work on her “sisters” before making her own commitment. Another compelling factor was the cost—US$5,000 in Thailand as opposed to US$15,000 or more at home.

Thais paid about half what foreigners paid for SRS, as well as for other sex surgery. For example, a foreigner was charged US$2,200 for a mammoplasty, which could be done with either saline or gel implants, and locals were charged about US$1,000. Not long ago in Pattaya some poor katoey had condoms filled with a mystery goo inserted into her chest, which of course had to be removed. It was a field where some of the “doctors” were as phony as their surgical handiwork.

The night before taking her final step, I took Kelly and her friend Kalei out for drinks. Kalei had had her sex-change and breasts done by Dr. Preecha in years past and now she was back to have her hips and thighs built up with silicone shots, by another doctor in Bangkok. We went to Casanova, one of the katoey bars at Nana Plaza, a three-story congregation of mainly go-go bars in the city’s Sukhumvit district.

I’d taken others to the bar before, so when I walked in, the girls gathered around us and removed their tops to show off their breasts while urging Kelly and Kalei to do the same; they didn’t mind at all. Some of the girls even dropped their G-strings. More than just a “show-and-tell,” this was a hands-on experience as the girls squeezed and fondled each other’s implants for elasticity, amid squeals and oohs and ahhs. Pretty soon, Kelly was stripped to her underpants and heels, showing off her silicone hips and thighs, something the local girls rarely can afford.

For an hour, the girls talked about their body parts, swapped police stories and makeup notes, gossiped about where they bought their bathing suits and lingerie, and about which doctors did what to whom.

The next day at the hospital, after having her blood tested for HIV and getting an enema and going through the all the rest of the pre-operative rigmarole, Kelly said soberly, “I know that no matter what we do, we’ll never be the gorgeous women we want to be, we’ll still be pre-op or post-op transsexuals. But this means I’m doing all that I can do. This is my new birthday.”

In the operating room, an anesthetist sat near Kelly’s head. Five nurses were in attendance, along with Dr. Preecha’s associate, Dr. Sattha Sirithantikorn, formerly one of his students. After making his initial cuts with an electric instrument that simultaneously sliced and cauterized, the lower abdomen was peeled back on both sides of the penis. The testicles were removed, the skin left in place to form the labia majora and minora, and a hole was cut between the anus and where the testicles had been. The surgeon enlarged the cavity with his gloved fingers. The other physician introduced a stainless steel suction tube to remove the blood.

Dr. Preecha then turned his attention to the penis, skinning it and removing most of the interior and leaving the hollow flap of skin still attached to the body. The end and open side were then sewn to form a kind of sleeve, which then was pushed into the vaginal cavity, an act that gives this procedure its medical name “penile inversion.” A ten-centimeter-long object that looked like an oblong egg was slipped into the cavity as the sleeve was sewn into position around it. The “egg” was removed and the doctor inserted his fingers to feel if all was well.

(Dr. Preecha explained that years ago, the skin of the penis was discarded and skin was taken from another part of the body to form the vagina. This technique was abandoned because of scarring where the grafts were taken and because the skin had no elasticity, whereas the skin of the penis was highly stretchable. In some cases, he said, the penis was too short to be practical as a vagina and a second operation was necessary, using a piece of the colon to extend the vagina’s length. This was especially true in Asia, where penises were generally shorter than in the West.)

A catheter was pushed into the urethra, so that the patient could urinate during the first days of recovery. The doctor stitched the catheter into place, using the root of the penis and the shortened urethra to form a clitoris. Or, at least, a reasonable facsimile; there was no guarantee it would be sensitive to stimulation. Ninety minutes had passed.

Suddenly, the doctor was up and gone, off to another operating theatre for another mammoplasty, as Dr. Sattha slipped onto the stool to begin the final sewing up, forming the labia. Two small drains were inserted in the labia ridges to take away seepage during the five days that Kelly would remain in the hospital. The vagina was rinsed with a huge syringe of water and a funnel-like instrument was inserted with a condom pulled over the end of it. A surprising length of gauze soaked in antiseptic was then pushed through the funnel and into the condom, filling the cavity, to keep it open and clean. The funnel was removed, the condom was tied off and stitched to the patient’s flesh to keep it in place.

Dr. Sattha invited me to examine his and his mentor’s handiwork. Did it look like a vagina? There was some swelling and discoloration, natural following any surgical procedure, and the stitches and drains and catheter distracted from the beauty of the surgeons’ creation, but, yes, I said, it did. Next, the whole vagina area was packed with gauze that was then taped into place with ten-centimeter-wide adhesive. Now only the catheter and a second tube for blood drainage remained. Kelly was wheeled out and taken to a private room.

The next day, when I visited, she held up a jar of liquid. Inside floated what looked like the neck of a chicken with a penis top and two small eggs. “What do you think?” she asked of her abandoned testicles. “I can get them gold-plated, they’d made nice earrings, yah?”

Five days later she was back in her hotel room, where I found her lying on her back, nude, silicone breasts standing erect like pale oranges, a dildo—a real one this time—inserted into her vagina (with a condom and KY jelly). Following the doctor’s orders, she did this several times a day, she said, to keep the cavity open and stretched.

“Look how much I had in there!” she exclaimed as she pulled it out. It looked like six inches (fifteen centimeters). “I’m so happy!”

That night we all went to a cabaret to see the drag queen show to celebrate and two months later, the engineer married the “new woman” in his life.

The Country Club

I met Hans two years ago in a bar in Chiang Mai, where we compared travel notes. After consuming several beers, he asked if I kept track of the women I took to bed with me. I said I hadn’t, although I could create a reasonable list, if pressed. I admitted it wouldn’t be a long one.

“Do you know how many countries you got laid in?” “Every one I went to. I traveled a lot with my wife,” I said. He shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. You said you’re divorced now, right?”

I nodded and ordered more beer.

“So, do you know how many nationalities you fucked?” Hans asked. “You know. Japanese, Korean, German, Egyptian, Thai?”

“Oh,” I said, pausing for a moment as I ticked off my modest body count, “—four: American, Thai, Vietnamese, and Indonesian. Five if you count Hawaiian, but she was an American citizen.”

He said, “I’ve fucked seventy-three different nationalities, and this is my first time in northern Thailand, so I expect to add at least one hill tribe girl tonight, or maybe a Burmese. I hear there’s a lot of Burmese in Chiang Mai.”

Thus I was introduced to a small but what appeared, in time, to be an expanding group of men engaged in a competition to see who could have sex with the most women, not counting in numbers but countries of origin. Men used to count such conquests numerically and with the worldwide explosion of the international travel class—another aspect of globalization—now some of them apparently counted nationalities.

This was quite amazing to me. I’d met many people who collected visa stamps in some sort of geographical quest to see how many countries they could visit. But never had I encountered the same sort of activity determined by having sex in those places. It was, one of the men told me, sort of like collecting stamps. Another, somewhat older dude compared it to the country collecting of ham radio operators.

Initially, I didn’t believe it. I thought it was an amusing notion, but I wrote it off to the sort of bragging you find in most bars when men get together and drink. Stamp collectors physically possessed the stamps and shortwave radio fans exchanged QSL cards. How the hell did anyone know who was telling the truth about getting laid? This was, after all, an area of male activity bursting with exaggeration and prevarication. Country club members could point to visa and immigration stamps in their passports, proving they’d been here and there, but what real evidence of sex was truly provable?

“It’s done on the honor system,” a Brit named Kevin told me in a bar in Bangkok. “That sounds right ridiculous, but it works, because when we catch a bloke in a lie”—and the habitual liar always got caught, he assured me—“word goes out and he can put his stiffy in retirement.”

It all sounded like wishful thinking to me. But, still, the notion rang true. For as long as men got laid, I was certain that some of them kept count. In recent times, porn stars and rock musicians and famous athletes admitted to fucking women in the thousands. Were the Roman legions or Ghengis Khan or Marco Polo counting?

No one knows how many “members” are in the Country Club today, or even if the club exists. (A few insist it’s spelled Cuntry Club, by the way, giving me the shivers of more doubt.) However, it may be assumed that country collecting may be more than a lark, because over ensuing years in Asia from the time I met the first participants back in the mid-1990s, I met others, some of them “specialists” who focused their sexual pursuits in narrowly defined areas. Hans told me he was considering specializing in the hill tribes of Southeast Asia, as that could run the numbers up dramatically. He said Vietnam alone had sixty minority groups.

I also met someone whose activity followed his studies in anthropology, who spoke knowledgeably about Abyssinian Galla girls in East Africa (now Ethiopia) who during the nineteenth century were famous in published anthropological writings for vaginal muscles so skilled they could sit on a man’s thighs and induce orgasm without moving any other part of their person. He said his “thing” was to recreate the sexual experiences reported in such classics of sexual literature as the Kama Sutra and Arabian Nights.

Another member of the club called himself a “sex war correspondent,” said he traveled from one disaster area to another in much the same way that the guy who wrote The World’s Most Dangerous Places tempted his fate. It started in South Africa, he said, and took him to Bosnia, Haiti, Cambodia, East Timor, and Afghanistan.

“You know [Nelson] Rockefeller died in the saddle,” he said, “but that was in boring New York. Imagine the final cum in Iraq.”

Still another, who told me he was a Hollywood music producer, said he planned to lease anthology rights to songs for a CD he hoped would finance his future travels: David Bowie’s “China Girl,” Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto’s “Girl from Ipanema,” the Coasters’ “Little Egypt,” the Beach Boys’ “California Girls,” etc.

Of course, history complicates and enlivens matters. As worldwide travel became more convenient and affordable, the score potential of the Country Club ballooned, assisted by recent politics. Not so long ago, a Russian was a Russian (or Soviet citizen); today, she might be Ukrainian, Azerbaijanian, Kazakhstanian or, giving a nod to my friend who likes danger with his sex, Chechnyan.

Similarly, because it’s possible to pick up several countries in one location—in Bangkok, for example, there are prostitutes from many nations at work, and in California there are recent immigrants from dozens of nations—another group of collectors, who call themselves purists, insist on scoring in the nation of origin; no migrant whores or boat people allowed.

Actually, I discovered that the guys didn’t argue that much about the numbers or criteria. Occasionally, they did quiz each other, trying to find a flaw in the competitor’s boast, looking to cut the guy out of the game. But generally I found that the Country Clubbers mainly argued about which nationalities were “best,” bickering about preferences for perky Asian breasts and wispy pubic bush vs. the appeal of the hairier, blonder voluptuosity found in, say, Scandinavia.

“It’s just good fun, mate,” one said in Bangkok. “Did I tell you, I’m writing a book?”

“What’re you calling it?”

“Well, first I was gonna call it Around the World in 80 Lays, but I decided that was a bit daft. I was in the fifties at the time and wondered what if I got past eighty? Maybe eighty would be common and other blokes would say I was a wimp.”

He was silent for a moment as he pulled on his beer. “So what are you calling it?” I asked “The United Nations,” he said, proudly.

“I think the name’s been taken.”

“You’re right, mate,” he said, “but I mean it. And I figure I’m a piece-keeper. That’s a joke. You get it?”