Nok: The History of a Pattaya Bar Girl
By KorskiAs everyone who has followed Stick’s site for any length of time knows, there are scores and scores of farang—bargirl stories: of how this or that foreigner got involved with a bar girl, and then how just about everything went wrong. What is, I believe, so conspicuously missing from Stick’s site is a good set of bar girl stories. About how they got into the life. How they feel about what they do with customers. What they imagine they will do with their lives after leaving the life of prostitution. What they in fact do with their lives after leaving Pattaya or Nana or Soi Cowboy or Patpong or Phuket.
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The narrative that follows is factual. I have simply recorded in my own words what I was told by Nok (not her real name) over a couple of dinners and some drinks. I am sure as I am of any information that I get while traveling that Nok was giving me the facts of her life as best she could relate them. I mention all this because over the past three years or so Stick has posted some thirty or forty of my fictions (I don’t know the actual number), and because they are not identified as such on his site many people have trouble knowing when I am relating something factual, as with this narrative of Nok, and when I am simply using my imagination and a few pickup facts to tell a story. For example, one of my most recent stories on Stick, “My Life on the Quay” (27/5/08) is, with the exception of the description of the room in the Paragon Hotel in Phnom Penh (a room I was staying in when I wrote the story), a complete fabrication. Everything about the character and his life is a product of my imagination and nothing more. Several people wrote to me about the story, and they thought it was true.
Since I do not speak Thai, a reader will wonder how Nok could have communicated her story to me, for, as I note below, she had only been working in Pattaya for a little over three months when we got together. She is, by every measure, one of those extraordinary young Thai women who have picked up English quickly. She is energetic, she goes to her English grammar and vocabulary books frequently, and she is curious and wants to learn as much as possible. If she hears a new word she does not know, she asks what it means and she may even want you to write it down for her.
While Nok’s story is unique in the sense that I am sure all bar girl or farang stories have their own defining peculiarities, it is also clear that her story illustrates some well-known aspects of Thai life and the bar girl scene, and therefore this brief narrative of a single bar girl has elements of the universal about it.
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Nok is twenty-five. She is small and slender, under five feet tall, and quite attractive. She has an outgoing and vivacious personality that combined with an open and inviting smile, and a beautiful set of white teeth, make it obvious why she would have little problem catching the attention of a farang passing by the bar where she works on Soi Seven. The only reason Nok isn’t working in a go-go bar--where she would get better commissions on more expensive lady drinks and a larger barfine, and get more for going short-time or long-time--is that she has a very prominent scar from a caesarian birth that would be a considerable liability were she a dancer. Nay, it is so large and obvious that it would preclude her from being one.
Nok is one of three sisters, and comes from a family of poor rice farmers north of Korat. At the age of eighteen, she went to Bangkok and found a job working on an assembly line putting together hard drives. For more than five years she worked seven days a week and twelve hours a day, with one day a month off. For this grinding work schedule she received 10,000 baht a month, about $350 U.S. in mid 2008 (about $250 U.S. when she was midway through her factory career and the dollar had a much higher value against the baht).
It was on the job that Nok met her husband, who was working in a different part of the plant. They started dating, they fell in love, and they got married. The young man, about her age, and from a similarly poor family in Isaan, had to pay Noy’s parents 50,000 baht and three pieces of gold to marry her. About the only thing that Nok was insistent about with her future husband as a condition of marriage was that he get a tattoo on his upper left arm removed. He did as she asked.
Nok did not, and does not now, smoke or drink, and she has no tattoos and obviously dislikes them. Nor did her husband smoke or drink, or as many young Thai men are inclined to do, gamble and chase other young women. He was, according to Noy, faithful to a fault.
They did have one rather peculiar arrangement between them. Each of them took 2,000 baht a month from their factory job salaries (he made about the same amount she did) to use for food and other expenses; how they used this money for household food and other necessities was not clear. Nok did say, however, that they were free to spend the money anyway they so desired.
Early in their marriage, Nok’s husband’s parents needed financial aid, and they both gave willingly to help them. Nok said she gave from the heart, and without resentment. But then it was not too long before Nok’s parents needed some money for their farm, and at this point Nok’s husband rebelled. He simply did not want to give anything to her parents. Nok was extremely upset by his decision. Finally, the husband relented, but not enough, or convincingly enough, to bury the shock of his initial decision. She had interpreted his decision as selfish and as that of a person who simply did not like her parents. From all I could read into her words and gestures, Nok’s parents are more important than her husband ever was or could be (which suggests that it is not only farang who marry Thai women who find themselves in this sometimes hard to accept predicament).
Nok soon became secretive and deceptive with her husband. She found a way to save as much as 500 baht a month from her 2,000 baht allowance to send to her parents. But several months after she began doing this, her money-conscious husband found out about the deception. He expressed considerable displease at what she was doing. Nok was unrepentant.
Other small issues began to fracture the marriage. One that bothered Nok a great deal was that one of her sisters, who was three years younger and lived about a kilometer away in Bangkok, was someone she was close to. When she had an hour or two free and wanted to visit her sister, her husband would throw a tantrum and forbid her from doing so. Nok had not given him any reason to be jealous, and yet it was clear that he wanted to know where Nok was all the time. Anything he could not control was off-limits for Nok.
More than two years into the marriage, Nok got pregnant. They were both delighted. Nok’s husband’s delight and pride at having a child did not diminish as she became large and put on weight, a time when many Thai married men seriously contemplate or begin to philander. There were some complications with the pregnancy and a caesarian delivery was required.
For the first three months after the daughter was born, a time when Nok was allowed to be at home and with the child, she found that she thoroughly enjoyed motherhood. But then the day came when she had to go back to work. Because she was working eighty-four hours a week, she obviously had no time to raise the child. She and her husband, who were trying to save money for their future, ruled out child care as a possibility. As an infant, it would have cost, Nok said, in the range of 3,000 baht a month for nursery care. Nok thought that the only reasonable solution was to have her parents take care of their daughter.
Nok’s husband didn’t like the idea at all. He wanted Nok to care for the child while working—which she quite reasonably saw as impossible. Nok insisted that the only real way to deal with the problem was to have their daughter stay with her parents. Here, as with the money given to their parents, it was clear that her husband strongly aligned with his parents, who he insisted should take care of their daughter. Nok prevailed and their daughter went to live with her parents.
A rift opened early in the marriage over the husband’s unwillingness to help Nok’s parents financially now grew larger when the daughter’s care became an issue. It had become too much for Nok to bear, and so she told her husband that they should separate. But because she still loved him, and he said he loved her, they would work at finding a way to repair the relationship. The husband tried hard for the first month, Nok said. He called her constantly, he professed his love repeatedly, and he insisted that he had changed his attitude. He wanted to get back together with her. But then New Years came and the husband agreed to go to Nok’s village and be with her family and their daughter. He did not go, and he gave no good explanation for not doing so. Nok gave him one more chance to show that he was sincere and wanted to repair their relationship. When he again promised to go to her parent’s village where the daughter was being cared for and did not show up, Nok ended the marriage.
Somehow the idea of continuing at the computer factory and working such long hours and having to support herself and send money to her parents for the daughter did not sit well with Nok. After three weeks and feeling very lonely and alienated, she quit her job. On the advice of a friend she went to Phuket to find work. She had no interest in being a bar girl or anywhere around that scene in Phuket. She got a job as a receptionist in a hotel. She could understand no more than a few words that the foreign men said to her. Two days into the job she quit, and then promptly got a job at Pizza Hut. But this job too proved short lived, and again because her ability with English was so minimal.
Nok returned to Bangkok, managed to get her job back at the computer assembly plant, and didn’t find the job any more satisfying or promising as a way to meet her needs than she had just before quitting. Within a couple of weeks, she quit again. The immediate precipitant for doing so was a persuasive argument by a close friend that she could make plenty of money if she moved to Pattaya and worked as a bar girl.
Before Nok went with her first farang, she asked the mamasan what she should do with a farang in the bedroom. She was told: Do everything he wants to do. That’s the only way to get business. And so the first farang who paid her barfine took Nok at her word when she said she would do anything in bed. She allowed him to enter her anally when he said that’s what he really wanted to do with her. Nok was sore for a week from the traumatic experience, and she greatly regretted what she had done. Now she began to seriously talk to other bar girls. They told her: If you don’t want to do something, just refuse. If the farang insists, leave and forget about the money. And this is how she has behaved since that very first experience that went so wrong.
Nok worked hard at learning English with grammar and vocabulary words. And she quickly became, as bar girls go, quite good at both understanding and making clear what she wanted to say. She also began to get a good sense of what kind of customers—as she and bar girls refer to farang mongers—she most wanted to go with.
She prefers men in their late twenties, and ideally above forty. Young guys, she says, are often crass and inconsiderate, and in many cases interested only in “boom boom” all night long. She had no interest in this, and not least for the reason that it makes her small vagina sore, a soreness that might last for days. She likes older men because she finds that so many of them will be satisfied with one session of sex if she goes with them for the whole night, and that a fair number of them really don’t even want sex, just the warmth they get from cuddling with her in bed. If she has a problem with older men because they have a hard time coming, or cannot come at all—because of age, alcohol, using a condom and taking Viagra—she will tell them she will be quite happy to suck them off until they come. She finds nothing objectionable about giving blowjobs, and in fact because she has a small and very tight vagina that does not easily accommodate anything more than a very average sized farang penis, or any man who insists on banging away without concern for how she feels, she increasingly has come to prefer getting her customers off with a blowjob.
Nok prefers going with customers for the whole night, even though she can make more money by going with two short-time customers. Her rationale is that she dislikes the coldness and undiluted anonymity of a short-time arrangement, one where she and her customer repair to his hotel room, have sex until he climaxes, and then she is paid and leaves. She won’t rule out the short-time customer. But she much prefers to go all night and get the sense of warmth and affection that often comes with staying with someone that long.
In the three-and-a-half months that Nok has been working, and quite successfully as a bar girl in Pattaya, she has had one serious relationship with a farang. He’s a German man who she met in her second month on the job. He’s forty-seven years old. In their first time together he told Nok that he had a German girlfriend back home. But he found Nok nearly irresistible, and he was with her for three consecutive days after he first met her. Subsequently, he went on a short trip abroad, and when he returned he and Nok were together for five more consecutive days.
During his second stay with Nok, the German confessed that he had had a quite serious relationship with another Pattaya bar girl the year before. He had in fact gotten so serious with her that upon returning to Germany, he “sponsored her.” He told her that he wanted to marry her, and as a measure of his seriousness he sent her between 10,000 and 15,000 baht a month. This continued for several months, until quite by accident he discovered that this hooker he was madly in love with was simultaneously being sponsored by two other farang. At this point, he told the woman he was sponsoring that their relationship was over. And the reason it was over, he told her, was because he “felt sorry for the other two men who were sponsoring her.” (I found this a little hard to believe, but had little reason to doubt that he might well have said this to Nok.)
Nok said that she is sufficiently serious about this person that she can imagine marrying him, even knowing that at the moment he has a girlfriend at home. She has been in almost daily e-mail contact with him for some time. She claims that they “honestly share everything” with one another about their lives, even to the point of her telling him what kinds of customers she goes with. He would like her to stop working in the bar, but she has made it clear to him that she will not do so unless he sponsors her. Then and only then will she return to her village.
She has told this German man for whom she had considerable feelings that she has two major financial obligations. One is to support her daughter—the most important one. And the second one is to pay for her younger sister to go to university, a sister to whom she is quite close. He understands her predicament, she says, and recently he has agreed to send her money for the next couple of months if she goes home, a time of the year when business for bar girls is not that good in Pattaya (I talked with Nok toward the end of May). And then he will be coming to Thailand again to be with her and they will decide whether or not they might have a future together.
The German has expressed his concern that Nok could well deceive him when he is sending money to keep her in her village. Yet he has, according to Nok, convinced himself that he can tell the difference between a call made from or to a village and one made from or to Pattaya. Nok is aware that this is a fool’s take on reality; but she said—and convincingly so to me—that she is honest and would not deceive him if he sent her money. Nok prays for an hour each day to “my Buddha.” One of the things she asks of him is to help her know when she should be honest with a customer, and when it is quite okay to lie.
Nok is puzzled how this German man some twenty-two years her senior cannot see any kind of parallel between him having a girlfriend that he sleeps with all the time and Nok sleeping with customers she meets in the beer bar. Okay, there is the difference in the number of different customers she has sex with, but still, she reasons, why can’t he see that I should be as upset with him sleeping with his girlfriend all time as much as he is upset with me going with customers. It should be easier for him, she says. After all, none of the customers are her boyfriends and she quickly forgets most of them.
Nok does not know how long she will work in Pattaya, or will be able to. Foremost in her mind are the obligations to her daughter and to one of her sisters. Beyond this, she has vague thoughts of working long enough to make enough money to open a very small restaurant in her village, or perhaps sell fruits and vegetables.
Do her parents and sisters know what Nok is doing? She was vague about whether her two sisters know, but she wants neither of them to do what she is doing. She had told her parents that she sells clothes in Pattaya. But in talking to her father, she suspect he knows what she does and he does not approve. She does not want to address his doubts directly. She has simply told him that she must continue doing what she is doing to support her daughter and to help the family in ways that he and her mother cannot.
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After I had gotten Nok’s story, I asked myself this question: Would I want to see Nok nine months or a year for now if she was still selling her sexual services to farang in Pattaya. I’m not sure I would. I fear what she will become in a year if she continues working as a bar girl, the changes can be that dramatic.
Stickman's thoughts:
Excellent submission which raises more questions.
The way that Thai women put their parents ahead of their partner does seem to have a major (negative) effect on the longevity of marriages.
And this story also shows what I believe to be a trait of rural Thais and poor Thais - a willingness to leave marriage fairly easily. It is my experience that Bangkok Thais and wealthier Thais will try harder to mend a relationship gone bad but the poorer folk have a tendency to move on quickly (and seldom ever look back).
I would put serious money on it that in a year's time you would barely recognise her...
The author can be contacted at korski1@cox.net.
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.
