Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

Kwan decides to think of the ladyboy as "she," since it seems polite to let her be what she wants to be. In English she replies, "Not understand."

"That hair." The ladyboy raises both hands chest high, palms out and fingers curved in, shaking them in mock terror, like a starlet confronted by the half-eaten corpse that's always lurching out of the closet in Thai movies. The gesture rattles the beads on the twelve or so bracelets that circle each wrist. "My God, my God-that's English, by the way," she tells Kwan in Thai, in a matter-of-fact tone, "and you should learn it. When anyone says something surprising or when you want to pretend some customer has impressed you by, for example, the size of his equipment, you say 'Oh, my God.' "

Kwan carefully repeats, "Oh, my God," and gets a nod of approval. Then she says, "Equipment?"

"Later." The ladyboy lifts Kwan's hair and drops it. "Terrible, terrible. Who did this to you, your mother?"

"Yes."

"Oh, well, excuse me. I'm sure she meant well. But look at you, just look at you." She puts her hands on the sides of Kwan's head and swivels her face toward the mirror. Kwan tries to look at herself but sees Fon reflected behind her, laughing, and she laughs, too.

"I don't want to hear any laughing at all," the ladyboy says. "This is serious, even tragic. There isn't enough beauty in the world to waste it this way. You may not be responsible for the fact that you're beautiful, but you are responsible for taking care of it. It makes people feel better, seeing something beautiful. Don't you want people to feel better, don't you want to lift them out of their gray, muffled, boxed-in lives for a minute or two and put a silvery little sliver of light in their souls? That's what beauty is, you know-it's tiny glimmers of light left over from the Creation. You're Buddhist, of course, but in the farang holy book, which is called the Bible, practically the first words out of God's lips, and I'm sure they were very nice lips, are 'Let there be light.' There was probably quite a lot of it, too, Him being God and all. Most of it's gone, now, of course-the light, I mean, we've pissed on the flame by living such dreary, cowardly lives-but there are still bits of it here and there. Sunsets, music, really good jewelry. A face like yours. Don't you want to share it?"

"I don't-" Kwan begins, and stops.

"What is her problem?" the ladyboy asks Fon.

Fon says, "She doesn't know she's beautiful."

"Ohhh." The ladyboy puts the tips of four straight fingers over her mouth as though warning herself not to say something unseemly. "How very unusual. Most of the time, I work on cotton that wants to be silk, and here I am working on silk that thinks it's cotton." She laces her fingers together and holds them in front of her chest, palms touching, like someone about to beg a favor. "Let's go slowly, shall we? Sit down, please." She turns the chair toward Kwan and makes a show of dusting the seat with her longest scarf.

"The hair first," Fon says, sitting on a plastic chair against the wall and picking up a magazine with a girl's face on the cover. "And, Kwan, this is Tra-La. Like singing."

"Of course the hair first," Tra-La says severely. "Do I come to your bar and tell you how to dance?" To Kwan she says, "But you are going to have to sit. I can't cut you on tiptoe."

"Sorry," Kwan says. She eases herself into the seat. "Nice to meet you."

"Yes, I'm sure it is." Tra-La swings the chair around to face the mirror. She puts her fingertips lightly on Kwan's cheekbones and tilts her head right and left, then up and down. "It really isn't fair," she says. "No bad angles at all. What's your name?"

"Kwan."

"Well, you'll have to do something about that, won't you?" She's taking out one pair of scissors after another, snipping the air with them once or twice, then replacing them in a black metal cylinder that's bristling with them.

"Why? It's my name."

"And it's a pretty name, but not for a bar." She finally chooses a very slender, very silvery pair and holds it, point upward, while she musses Kwan's hair with her other hand. She ruffles it, lifts it, and lets it fall. "It's the Kwan that means 'spirit,' right? Not exactly the world's sexiest name."

"I'm not sexy."

"Just look how your hair falls. Like it was blow-dried by angels before you were born. Darling, if you're not sexy, I'm an army sergeant. You just give me half an hour here and we'll discuss it further. Oh, my goodness, I'm so distracted I forgot to cover you up. Can't have you getting hair all over your awful clothes." Tra-La puts down the scissors and grabs a length of white cloth, which she tosses over Kwan's shoulders and fastens at the neck with a hair clip. Then she picks up a spray bottle, says, "Close your eyes," and begins to mist Kwan's hair.

"Smells nice."

"Lavender," Tra-La says. "I make it myself. One must do the little things, you know. Otherwise we might as well live in holes and eat roots. Have you honestly never looked at your hair and thought, 'What does my mother have against me?' "

"Never." Kwan feels a surge of loyalty toward her mother. "At school everybody's hair looks like this."

"Yes, but I was at school, too, as hard as that may be for you to accept, and believe me, darling, most of your classmates deserve hair like this. Oh, I wish I had another five or six inches to work with, but we'll do what we can, and then later we'll play with it some more." She begins to snip, and bits of cold, wet hair land on Kwan's cheeks.

She opens her eyes and sees herself staring back from the mirror beyond Tra-La's busy hands. "I don't want to look."

"Whyever not?"

"I don't like to look at myself."

"Fine with me." Tra-La turns the chair ninety degrees so Kwan is facing the window. "The light is better this way."

From her chair against the wall, Fon says, "Didn't they have any mirrors in your village?"

"Yes," Kwan says. "I just didn't look in them." To Tra-La, who seems sympathetic, she says, "Everybody called me Stork."

"Well, honey, fuck all of them and the dirt they sit on. You're in Bangkok now, where people can tell diamonds from dung. Lift your chin." Tra-La is snipping, very quickly, the hair that falls over Kwan's forehead, holding the scissors almost vertical, and a fine rain of hair sifts down past Kwan's eyes. "This works," Tra-La says, nodding agreement with herself. She backs up and cocks her head with her eyes narrowed and her lips tight, then wields the scissors again. "This works just fine."

As Tra-La busies herself, Kwan watches people go past the window, which faces onto Patpong. Here and there she sees groups of bar girls dart through the crowd, their hair wet and gleaming from their afternoon showers, shiny as fish, all talking at once as they go to one of the neighboring restaurants for food to take to the bar. They'll eat as they put on their makeup, and discuss last night's dreams and the lottery numbers they're playing, and say awful things about the women who haven't arrived yet. The metal pipes that frame the night-market booths have been clamped together, lights are snapping on in bar doorways, and neon is beginning to add its acid sizzle to the night. Kwan feels Fon's eyes on her and realizes that her friend has lowered the magazine and is watching with fascination as Tra-La works.

Tra-La turns and follows Kwan's gaze, and when her eyes meet Fon's, Fon smiles. "Oh, yes," Tra-La says, eyebrows arched. "I'm exactly that good."

Kwan says, "What? What does that mean?"

"You just sit there, Miss Thailand, and let me do my magic." The scissors snick near Kwan's ears, and the short, straight snips of hair accumulate in her lap, and after fifteen minutes or so Tra-La steps back and says, "Hmmmm." She lowers the hand with the scissors in it, takes several more steps back, then tosses the scissors onto the table in front of the mirror, where they land with a clatter. She attacks Kwan's hair with both hands, fluffing it, tugging it, yanking it on top so vigorously that Kwan feels her eyebrows lift. Tra-La keeps toying with Kwan's hair as she circles the chair, and Kwan realizes that the ladyboy is humming. Tra-La leans across Kwan to get the scissors, moving so fast she bumps the back of Kwan's head without even noticing, and waves the scissors around until she finds a spot to improve, just a snip here and a snip there, while Fon watches the process, not even noticing when the magazine slips from her lap. Finally Tra-La gets a dryer and spends a minute or two grabbing hold of bits of hair, stretching them out, curling them around her finger, hitting them with the hot air, shaping Kwan's head in a way that reminds Kwan of the way she patted her bag of treasure back into its teardrop shape.