Thailand’s Best Known Farang?

Who is the best known farang in Thailand? Could it be the American ambassador? Nope, I reckon 90% of Westerners resident in Thailand wouldn’t even know his name…go on, ask your mates and check… (The answer is Darryl Johnson). What about Bill Heinecke, the awfully successful farang businessman who is behind many businesses including a whole host of food franchises and who, I once read, made his estimated $US 100 million fortune almost entirely here in Thailand. (Who said farangs couldn’t be successful in Thailand?) What about Christopher Moore, the Canadian born author who has written more novels set in Thailand than any other farang author? As well known as he is, I don’t think even Chris’s popularity could compare to the man himself, Bernard Trink, the man behind one of the longest running columns anywhere in the world, the man we know both as Bernard Trink and as the Nite Owl, the man who is most likely the most well known farang in Thailand.

A couple of months back I ventured into the offices of the Bangkok Post awfully late one night to interview the man himself. While we had exchanged emails on a few odd occasions, we had never actually met before. Anyone who has been in Thailand for very long has an opinion of Trink and many people's opinions oh him are not that high. I didn't know quite what to expect so I was pleasantly surprised to meet someone who struck me as a real gentleman, someone who had maintained that old world charm that is becoming harder and harder to find in people these days.

We'd barely exchanged niceties when the interview got going, me asking the odd question and him responding at great length, my hands pounding on the laptop keyboard trying to keep up. I have transcribed the interview accurately and thus there are some grammatical errors, but I think keeping it exactly as things were said maintains the feeling of the interview much better.

Why do you work these hours? (I’m in his office and it is midnight!)

It goes with being the Nite Owl. Whatever I am doing is something you can only do at night. If I go to the clubs, they are only open at night. Look around. This place is full during the day. At night there are usually just 2 or 3 people on the whole floor. I enjoy the, no, not the solitude, but the ease, the quietness of it.

What has been the secret to maintaining the column for so long? 38 years and counting, right?

40 years. Cause I tried to make it interesting, I don’t stick only to nightclubs and prostitutes. I go off on different things and talk about historical things and the key is to try and keep it interesting and to change every few years so they don’t say that that is the same column I read when I was a baby. On my site I have changed it.

What changes are in the online version? How do you feel the column has evolved over the years?

I would say I would have made the changes anyway. I have been doing it for a few years. You would see in the paper I always began with letters from readers and pissy answers. I got many such letters and that went on for a while. I decided the time had come to stop or at least reduce the letters and go off and talk bout things that interest me, preferably with some reference to prostitution but not necessarily to that.

Why have you provided less and less coverage of the naughty nightlife in your column over the last few years. Has this been due to the column switching to a family audience, editorial control at the Post or your own loss of interest in al the naughty stuff, or perhaps something else?

My whole conflict with the Post has been that it is a family newspaper, which it is – as it should be, and really what is a prostitution column doing in a family newspaper. Now I tried to justify by the usual reasons – it is here, it is going to stay here, people want to know about it. And that wasn’t good enough. The main opposition to the column came from within, not form outside. There was resistance from outside although I got more complimentary letters than brickbats. The Outlook staff felt that I was degrading women by referring to prostitutes and though I kept saying that from my observations there has never been any field study and that only about 1% of all the women in Thailand are prostitutes. Outlook didn’t want me to talk about that 1%. All Thai women are pure. So I pointed out when I made my rounds, they’re not all pure! And unjudgmental. I didn’t try to reform these prostitutes. I didn’t say they should become dressmakers or something like that. That is not my function as I see it. Just to describe what they are. I think I have done that for a long time. As accurately as I could. Periodically, I get quite a few offers for people to interview, most of which I accept. I don’t want to use it as a pejorative but the feminist journalist who has preconceived notions that prostitutes are there because men force them into it and it is sexual slavery which it is not. I make a distinction. Those working in a brothel are sex slaves with no right to reject a man and no right to leave the premises.

The thing about the bars is that the girls are free to move around, free to leave, free to stay, free to reject, free to reject offers. That is a different situation. The only question is when these feminist journalists practically put words in my mouth saying that “you could seriously believe that they could voluntarily become prostitutes”. Here you have a girl upcountry and one of her neighbours who had come to Bangkok and become a bargirl and returned to her village with gold necklaces and gems on her fingers and the least fashion clothes. How did that happen? I work in bar and make money and I spend it this way. Actually they spend a lot of money gambling, mainly card playing. They’ll get into these games with other girls. They’ll play games with other girls for 12 hours straight, I have heard 24 hours. They are really gambling addicts. And of course they play for the money but also for the excitement of gambling. That is where most of the money goes. Also for the TV and refrigerator. So this girl goes up to the village and the younger girls see it and they say that this how the money was made. What do these girls upcountry who spend their day with the buffalo react? They pack their little rattan suitcase, head for Bangkok and go to work in the bars. Which is not to say that a girl works in a bar becomes rich. But there is money they could have which they would never dream of and there was the great hope of these girls to meet a rich farang.

The thing that impressed me was that here you had a bargirl who married a rich farang and goes to his homeland, could be anywhere, Norway, Switzerland, it doesn’t matter. Tells the husband that she is homesick, goes home to see the family. He is working so he gives her money for travel and living expenses and expects her back in two weeks. What she doesn’t tell him is that she goes back to the bar and does what she did before she married him. Dancing with men etc., she enjoys the excitement. She may spend maybe a night, maybe two with family, which will be enough and at the end of the two weeks she will go back to her husband’s home and doesn’t screw around and acts like the wife or mother or whatever she is and waits until the next trip to Thailand. Mainly the husband doesn’t know what she is doing. Occasionally one of the husband’s friends may spot her as a friend. That will create problems and probable divorce. This is quite common. There is excitement there.

Have there been any defining moments over the years in the evolution of the column?

When the Post took over the World I essentially side-stepped to the Post which was good in the sense that the Post had a greater readership. What you must realise is that when I started at the World there were no rules from the editor. We want this. We don’t want that. They simply said write an entertainment column and let’s see if the readers go for it. There had been in fact a Nite Owl column in the World where the guy who was running it was an American and what he did was go to one place which had an English or Scottish entertainer called Sam Scutt, a piano player, who was one of these in the same league as Victor Borge with a combination of quips and stories while he was playing. And this guy before me they didn’t have for very long. He used to spend the whole column repeating his jokes. It wasn’t enough for the readers.

The editor came to me and asked me if I wanted to do it and they handed it over to me. If you can revive it and make it your own fine, if you can’t we’ll close. I was at that time the entertainment editor which basically meant writing film reviews because I started the writing part of my journalistic career in Japan. Lived in Japan for 3 years. Worked for two English language papers there and even before that in Hong Kong I had done proofreading for the South China Morning Post and even before that in India I was writing little stories. That is how I managed to exist in India. But it any case with the World I was able to fashion my own stories, my own style, and it picked up very luckily because what can I say, it was sexy and there were readers out there who wanted to know these things. This was interesting. Made my rounds. You see at the beginning, 40 years ago, Patpong was not an entertainment centre. It was a business centre and had just 2 or 3 bars. All the nightclub work was on New Road, not far from the Oriental. The other was Rachadarmnoen, not far from Democracy Monument. This was all Thai. New Road was essentially farang.

Even 40 years ago farang had their own area?

Yes, this was in fact before the Vietnam war. Things were beginning to pick up. The GIs hadn’t quite turned this place into a rest and recreation destination. You see I came here even earlier because I was traveling around the world and I first arrived here in 1962. I didn’t settle anywhere, stayed a few months here and there, worked around, India for quite a while, but that was not a place you wanted to settle, but you wanted to see everywhere you could including Nepal. Remember going to Pattaya. Hahaha, there was nothing there. A nice beach with maybe 2 or 3 guesthouses. Maybe one or two restaurants. But it was nothing you would ever think to yourself that this would develop into a tourist attraction. I have been to over 50 countries. I travelled around, went to Japan which was the first time I decided I was not in any hurry to leave. It was interesting, the people along my travels I met, different women with whom I corresponded. I did many things include teach English as we all do. When I had been in Thailand in '62 I was teaching and I liked one of the students very much. I’m not one of the teachers who letches after students but this one was special. There were other women in other countries I corresponded with but when I was in Japan I decided the student in Thailand – she was more mature and in fact she became a teacher. Said alright something I hadn’t really thought of. Come over and let’s see if we are compatible enough to marry. We did and we married. My wife now is a student teacher. I married her in Japan.

Were there many Thai women in Japan then?

I never counted. We didn’t really have anything to do with Thais. Japanese farangs. Had nothing to do with Thais except at the embassy if I wanted a visa or something. When my wife became pregnant for the first time she decided quite understandably that she wanted to return to Thailand and have the baby near her family so she came back here and I came a few months later to return to her, still in time for the birth and as I had been writing for the English language version of the Japanese papers. I had scrapbooks and I went to the Bangkok World with the scrapbooks and the editor in chief or publisher, he was all sorts of things, he said leave the books with me and come back tomorrow and I’ll see what I can do for you. When I came back he said that you are our entertainment editor. 40 years later I still have that title. I was writing movie reviews and we were doing supplements and hotels were opening. Was offered money for extra supplements. Little but little things added on, books were added on. I began doing the restaurant column. On top of that I was doing an interview column.

The man himself, Bernard Trink, the Nite Owl.

Who did you interview?

Marlon Brando, Robert Mitchum, Sean Connery, Loretta Young. One of the most interesting people I have ever met was one of the Three Stooges. I went to interview thinking what an idiot he must be with the films he makes and he spent an entire day giving me a history of comedy on the screen. I am good at the movies. But this guy was an expert. He came up with things I really didn’t know and it was fascinating. Interviewed no local stars. You see as the Vietnam War picked up, entertainers were coming over to entertain the troops. I would interview them Bob Hope. I went around with Bob Hope as he performed upcountry. Not when he went to Vietnam. Interesting guy. The most intelligent man I met was Sean Connery. He started talking about James Bond and ended up talking about the world economy which is not my strongest subject but he knew it all really well. There were so many.

I understand that at some time in the past you upset someone influential when you ran a restaurant review and while what you said was apparently justified, some big guy got well pissed off to the point that he wanted to close down the entire Bangkok Post! Is this true?

That was my last restaurant review. I’d been writing it for years. There was a restaurant. There were always restaurants opening. I went to this one which was opened by a woman who told me straight away that she was from a rich Thai family. The name, if you heard it, you would know immediately. I had a meal which was, let’s just say it was piss poor! And that is basically what I said in the review. I am a fairly honest fellow. Once the review came out the shit hit the fan and the woman went ballistic. She kept taking about how I had made her lose face in front of her family. She said I was nothing more than a hippy. I was never a hippy! This is a standard insult in Thailand. When they call you a hippy it means you are a bum which I was not. She kept saying that her uncle was the patriarch of this clan and he is going to pull all the ads from the Bangkok World, destroy the paper unless they got rid of me! Well, the paper immediately killed the column and told me to keep a low profile but do the other things you do and that was it. That was my last restaurant column. I remember most how quickly the paper caved in. Every paper has an editor who likes to posture himself as putting things first and stating that they print the truth and to hell with those who want to guide their opinions and we’ve got that now. You always have it in a paper, usually one person who would rather go to jail than reveal their sources. I believe in the truth and nothing will change that. I was amazed that a guy who had been saying all of this just caved in. That is something you realise after a while that these chief editors are lying through their teeth. It is not that they change stories so much but they lie about their attitudes, bravery in the face opposition and adversity. So that killed that.

That's the first half of the Trink interview. The second half will run next week and includes his opinions on the internet, his online column and amongst other things, his future.

Please note that his column can be found online at: idontgiveahoot