Travels in the Land of Hunger

BACK IN BANGKOK

Sunday, May 16, 2004

The bus arrived in Bangkok at five in the morning–an hour ahead of schedule–and stopped at Khaosan Road; an infamous, ghetto-like street lined with cheap hostels, guesthouses, food stalls, restaurants, bars, persistent touts, pirated and assorted goods, and crap catering to the needs and wants of backpackers. I didn't like the atmosphere so I took a metered taxi to Siam Square to stay at any of the guesthouses along the street of where I had stayed the last time I was in the city. When I arrived, it was 5:20 a.m., I paid the taxi driver and walked up and down the street, but all the night security men and women of the guesthouses explained that they were full and that I had to come back at noon to see if there were any vacancies. I walked to the end of the street, to the guesthouse I had stayed in before, sat on an outdoor chair, and read. By 7:00 a.m. the owner of the guesthouse arrived and told me that she had a room. I quickly realized that the security man of the guesthouse (including all the other security men and women I had spoken to earlier) had told me to come back at noon because it was not his responsibility to check me into the establishment. Regardless, I was pleased to get a room. I went to bed and woke up at about 10:30 a.m.

After taking a shower, getting dressed, and eating breakfast I decided to visit and photograph the three notorious streets that catered to sex tourists in Bangkok. I took the BTS train to Ploenchit Station and walked to Sukhumvit Soi 4, which is also known as Nana Tai. The other two infamous roads in Bangkok are Patpong and Soi Cowboy. As I walked to Soi 4 I saw an increasing number of foreign men either speaking to a young Thai woman or walking with a Thai woman or two. And when I arrived to the intersection of Sukhumvit and Soi 4 I saw a man in his forties with a Bangkok guidebook to sex tucked into the back pocket of his khaki pants.

Soi 4 was lined with several bars that had open-air seating facing the street. The patrons were all foreign men ranging in age from twenty to sixty, and wrapped around them were young Thai women. I continued walking and saw more bars with Thai prostitutes standing outside trying to attract men into their establishments to drink and play billiards. And then to my left I saw an entrance gate with a large unlit neon sign that read Nana Plaza. I walked through the gate, passing bars on each side of the entrance, and stopped in the courtyard of Nana Entertainment Plaza and found the three-storey, U-shaped red-light district building complex–that had short-time hotels that rented rooms by the hour on the second and third floors–to be a hole. In the light of day, it looked beaten up, filthy, and caked in grime. It was here that men attempted to fulfill their sexual fantasies since the early 1980s.

Right across the street from the plaza was the two-star Nana Hotel. There was a world of difference between the ultra-clean, modern hotel and the decrepit Nana Entertainment Plaza. But it was symbolically fitting from a Dorian Gray point of view. To one side of the street you had the Nana Hotel, which was posh, beautiful, well groomed, and catered to middle-class to upper-class foreign professional men. And then across the street you had the filthy, abused, battered, and impoverished Nana Entertainment Plaza. This was literally a visual representation of a demand and supply diagram. The demand was composed of foreign men from developed nations who had come to Bangkok to buy sex from the supply of poor, uneducated Thai women who typically came from the northern countryside (Chiang Rai, Phayao, and Nong Khai)1 as a result of having been lured, coerced, and/or sold into the sex trade by members of their own family to pay down parental debts or as a means to increase familial wealth.2 Here on the grounds around me Western men continued to exploit poor Southeast Asian women.

"Sex tourism makes tangible a small part of a global relationship, where the rich depend to an increasing degree for their comfort and advantage on the labour of the poor."3

I exited the plaza and continued walking down Soi 4 where I saw more hotels with "massage parlors" located between them. I also saw a modeling agency, which appeared to be a front to fool naïve, young Thai women into believing that they could work as a model in Bangkok when instead they would actually be working in the sex industry. Soi 4 stopped at a dead end where the Thailand Tobacco Monopoly compound was located.