Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

"You remember the tricks?"

"Yes."

"One more time. Can you do them?"

Kwan looks down at her lap. "I can try."

"Good. Because you're going to have to." Fon gets onto her hands and knees and crawls into the other room. When she comes out, still on hands and knees, her cell phone is hanging from a cord around her neck. "I love waking her up," she says, dialing. She waits. "Mama-san. It's Fon. Yes, I know, sorry. Kwan's here. She wants to go with Captain Yodsuwan again tonight." She listens, holding the phone away from her ear. Kwan can hear syllables but can't string them into words. "No, not too good," Fon says. "But we've been working on it, and she wants to see him again, to make everything right. For the bar. Yes, she was a virgin. Hold on." To Kwan she says, "Did you bleed?"

Kwan says, "Yes."

"Yes," Fon says into the phone. "So he should be happy about that. Maybe you could call him and tell-" The mama-san is talking again, and Fon points her index finger straight up and makes circles in the air. "It'll be fine. Yes, she will. And then, later, if he'll let her-if he doesn't want to keep her to himself for a while-she'll dance."

Kwan says, so softly she barely hears it herself, "I'll dance."

Four nights later, with a grinning Captain Yodsuwan cheering paternally at a corner table, Kwan stepped onto the stage for the first time and discovered it was helpful to be nearsighted. She couldn't see the men's faces. She could hear them, even over the music, and she could smell their sweat and their cigarettes, but they were a blur, and she could dance in front of a blur. She remained close to Fon on the stage, sharing a pole with her and keeping her distance from the women she didn't like. After a few nights, she realized the women weren't paying any attention to her; they were focused on the men. So she just danced and let her eyes roam the blurred faces, relaxing her own face whenever Fon said, "You're squinting."

On the sixth night, since Oom hadn't come back, the mama-san put Kwan on the chicken-feed pole, near the door. A few of the girls muttered about it, but most of them accepted it just as they'd accepted her presence on the stage. To her surprise, over the next few weeks her life acquired a routine, one she could never have imagined in the village but a routine nevertheless: wake up at three or four in the afternoon, shower, eat something light with Fon, try to smoke a cigarette without coughing, go to see Tra-La to listen to scandals and have her makeup applied, pick up something else to eat, and go to the bar around six. Most of the girls did their makeup while they ate and talked, but Kwan just sat with Fon and a few of the other girls, talking, sharing food, and learning to smoke. She found she liked the bar when the regular lights were on. It was a little run-down, a little dirty, a little rubbed and scarred, with the ugly bits exposed, like a poor person's house. It became familiar. She found a table she liked to sit at, a length of leatherette couch she liked to lie down on. Women she liked to be with.

Friends. She had friends.

At seven, the women who weren't already in costume ran to the back room and dressed for the stage, and the fluorescents flickered off to be replaced by the colored lights blinking on the ceiling. The whomp and throb of the music kicked in, the mirrored balls began to revolve, the first men straggled in through the curtain, and she took the stage.

Tra-La and Fon were right. She made a lot of money. Being at the first pole helped; all night long, men would come in and stop just inside the door, gawking up at her and checking the number, 57, on the plastic badge she wore. Sometimes they called a waiter or waitress even before they sat down, pointed a finger at her, and ordered. When her set was over, she went and joined them, drinking watery colas and trying to follow their English, which even the Japanese tried to speak. She was almost always the first girl to be taken out of the bar, even if she turned down one or two men first. Fon taught her a set of hand signals that she and her friends had developed to tell each other that a man was no good, so Kwan spent more time squinting than she wanted to, since whoever was signaling was usually across the room. Several customers noticed the squinting and offered to buy her glasses. The third one to offer took her to an optics shop and got her contact lenses.

A week after she started dancing, she sent her mother eight thousand baht, most of which had been given to her by Captain Yodsuwan as a parting gift. She mailed it from Soi Cowboy, a smaller area of bars halfway across Bangkok, just for the sake of confusion, although she knew that her father could find her if he really wanted to. She thought the money would appease him, ease his anger, maybe make life easier for her brothers and sisters. Her little sister Mai came to mind often. From then on, Kwan sent money every week, sometimes as much as five thousand baht. On the day the bar paid her the three hundred fifty dollars for her virginity, she sent twelve thousand baht to Isaan. She kept almost nothing for herself, just enough to pay her small share of the rent and eat the cheapest street food. She walked the city when she could instead of spending money on taxis and tuk-tuks. Fon bought her a small spiral notebook, and Kwan used it every morning to write down the name of her customer and how much he gave her, along with something-a mole, a big nose, crooked teeth, an animal resemblance-that would help her recognize him next time.

"That's what they like most," Fon said. "When you act like all you've been doing is waiting for them to walk back in. When you remember their name."

Kwan also recorded in the notebook the amounts of money she sent home and the dates on which she sent it. When she'd sent exactly sixty thousand baht, she took a week's worth of money and spent it on herself, buying clothes and jewelry and a phone of her own, although she didn't plug in the charger or put any numbers into it, since she didn't have anyone to call. She just hung it on a cord around her neck, like Fon's, and felt rich. At the street market in Pratunam, with a pocket full of money for the first time in her life, she bought the kinds of things she'd wanted in the village: T-shirts with cartoon ducklings and bears and fawns on them; dark, stiff, unwashed blue jeans; big colored plastic bracelets and a ring with a plastic ruby in it. That afternoon she carried her bags home and hid them behind the couch, then waited to dress until Fon had left, so she could surprise her. Using the small mirror on the back of the bedroom door, she assembled the best outfit she could from the clothes and jewelry she'd bought, and went to the bar. The curtains closed behind her, and she stood there in her finery as the chatter of the girls died away. There were no admiring cries. Some of the girls who didn't like her started to laugh. Kwan backed through the curtain onto the sidewalk, but Fon and another girl came out and got her. They were trying to be sympathetic, but Fon looked down at Kwan's T-shirt and started to laugh, and then all three of them were laughing. The next day Fon and the two girls who shared their rooms took her to return the things she'd bought and then led her to the right places, to buy the right clothes. They were so expensive there was nothing left over for jewelry.

"You don't want jewelry," Fon said. "The girls will steal it, and you want the customers to think you're poor. It's good to be poor. It tells the men you haven't been working long."

"How long?"

"A month, maybe two. Say it no matter how long you've been here. Just don't tell it to someone who took you six months ago. And if you do, by mistake, tell him you went home to your village after you saw him, and you've only been back for a short time."