Rape-kissed by a ladyboy

Last night I was rape-kissed by a ladyboy, chased by mall cops, met a former Bon Jovi drummer who has returned from the dead, and discovered that it is possible for a woman to write using only her vagina.

I pressed the tuk-tuk driver on this last one. He was trying to lure us to one of Bangkok’s infamous ping-pong shows, where feats of vaginal dexterity shock and titillate the dregs of the tourist world. He handed me a card listing the various acts on the bill, every one of them preceded by the word “pussy” and all of them horrifying to imagine. (Pussy razor blades?) Aside from the obvious question about what sort of training a woman must undergo to start on such a career path, which the tuk-tuk driver could only shrug at, I wanted to know what sorts of things these women write with their vaginas. Poetry? Reflections on misogyny and the fetishizing of genital mutilation?

“Letters,” he said, “like, ‘Dear John, how are you? I love America.'”

The art form, apparently, is still in its infancy. Who knows, though? Maybe some enterprising feminists can co-opt this kind of lunacy and scare the hell out of misogynists everywhere by writing anti-patriarchal missives using only their genitalia.

I went to Khao San to help a new Canadian friend find a bookstore. He wanted to read Hemingway. Imagine walking down that infamous road, seething with drunkards, whores, pimps, and pushers of every illicit substance and brand of degeneracy invented by man, looking for a book shop.

Siren calls from every direction:

“Tuk-tuk? Where you going? You want boom-boom? Lady massage?”

“Hey man, what you looking for? Opium? Valium?”

“Hello, where you from? You handsome man.”

Such vultures speak English as long as you remain within the bounds of narrowly defined scripts. Haggling over the cost of a T-shirt or a prostitute, sure, no problem. Flawless English. Ask for a bookstore and you’ll get a blank look. Repeat it several times and they’ll nod as though they suddenly understand, then try to push you into the tuk-tuk. (God knows where that tuk-tuk would take you.) The only way to avoid all of these attempts to lighten your wallet and corrode your soul is simply to ignore them. My Canadian buddy told me to try speaking a language they wouldn’t understand, or even pure gibberish. So when a ladyboy grabbed me, I gave it a shot.

“Ooh, you handsome man, where you from?”

<<Я не говорю по английски.>>

“Huh?”

<<Вы не понимаете? Вы не говорите на русском?>>

“I no understand. How are you?” (Here s/he caresses my shoulder with one hand and tries to grab my junk with the other.)

<<Простите, я только хочу хорошую литературу. Где находится книжный магазин?>>

And without further preamble, s/he grabbed the back of my head and rape-kissed me, forcing her tongue past my clamped lips while I tried to push her away. S/he was pretty damn strong, too. I scampered away down the street, spitting and shuddering and considering myself more than validated in the “just ignore” approach. The Canadian, laughing maniacally, fled down some stairs into a shopping mall, and I hastily followed — not laughing. Turns out the mall was closed.

“Hey!”

A security guard appeared behind me, bearing down with a truncheon. We ran through the maze of corridors and barred shops, and now I too was laughing like a maniac. The guard pursued and probably radioed his buddies, because they were waiting for us when we came launching out of the entrance. We commenced with the Khao San equivalent of Red Rover — stern rentacops in a line, crazed North Americans sprinting toward their ranks. One of them grabbed me by the arm as I burst through, but he wasn’t nearly as strong as that ladyboy and I twisted easily away and ran off down the street.

We never did find the bookstore.

Later, when I got back to the guesthouse, safely removed from the madness of Khao San, I met another drinking buddy on the stairs — a Maori fisherman who is covered in tattoos and has shoulders as big as my head. He’s bald, with fangs dangling from his ears, and dark as an African. I noticed a cut over his left eye and asked him what happened.

“Man, I was stoned and some bastard jumped me. F***ing jumped me and tried to take my shit.”

I couldn’t imagine anyone singling out this guy to mug rather than someone like me, so who knows if that story is true. Crazier things have happened in Bangkok, I guess.

Out on the guesthouse porch, I passed the former Bon Jovi drummer enjoying a nightcap or three. We had met earlier in the evening when he glared over at the Canadian and me from a neighboring table and growled, “Do you know who I am?” Neither of us did, but he was happy to tell us, in his sodden, mumbling way. I humored him and extracted some interesting facts. For example, he had a heart attack (from an OD) and was clinically dead for thirty minutes before being revived. He showed me a 10-inch surgical scar that ran along his sternum. He said that he had always heard you see a bright light when you’re dying, but he only remembers the world fading away into darkness.

I reflected on this, sprawled on the bare mattress in my hovel of a room. I listened to Tom Waits growl out of tinny iPod speakers and watched the smoke from my cigarette twist upward into the fetid air. The humidity of Bangkok is oppressive, even at night, and it carries a pervasive stench. It’s like the shit of humanity has evaporated, but, being too heavy to rise, lingers at ground level — it’s a fog that obscures your thoughts and makes all the insanity around you seem normal.

Well, I thought, I was rape-kissed by a ladyboy tonight. That’s beyond the pale of my small-town brain. That’s something to tell the folks back home.

New posts forthcoming

I am in Bangkok. My laptop is in Luang Prabang. It is still locked safely away at the hostel, so even if I can’t access it, at least no one else can, either. Obviously, this has hampered my blogging efforts. It has, however, led to a renaissance in my journal writing, meaning that at some point in the not-too-distant future, I can begin rewriting some of those entries into posts. But while I’m on borrowed time in internet cafes, with no privacy and no keyboard to call my own, this blog will continue to stagnate. Tomorrow may yield things worthy of communicating.

One quick note: I got to talk to a neuroscientist at a bar on Khao San Road, of all places, for hours last night. Incredibly fascinating. I could devote an entire post to that conversation, and I very well might.

School’s out in Luang Prabang

Usually when I pass the public school on my way to lunch, shouts peal from it in a rhythmic chant like battle cries or cultic formulas. The teacher bellows something in Lao, and the students thunder in response. Today, however, the walled compound stood empty and silent, and the kids loafed on the street corner in their white shirts and ridiculous bandanas. One of them, so dressed, caught my eye as I passed.

“Hello!” he said.

“Hi.”

“I am sorry!” he yelled, bright-eyed and eager.

“You’re sorry?”

He clapped a hand to his face, eyes bugging out in confusion, before his friends grabbed him and pulled him away, giggling. They were impressed by his nerve, but paid enough attention in English class to know that he had no idea what the hell he was saying. Without the shouted cue from an authority figure, the kid was lost.

Meanwhile one of the younger boys was gearing up to cross the street. He looked both ways, calmly, then let out a long, piercing shriek as he ran into the middle of the street, where he paused, looked both ways again, and let out another godawful howl while he pelted the rest of the way across.

It’s not the first time I’ve thought that kids are more like drunks than we’d care to admit, nor will it be the last. I can almost see why we lock them up in schools.

Homestay in a Hmong village: Part Two

The fishing net retrieved, the Thai soap opera watched, we headed down to the river. Along the way, we passed a school two of the guys used to attend. It was a big U-shaped building on stilts and had an expansive soccer field. I also noted a basketball court. We talked about sports in America, and I did my best to explain American football, but they remained mystified.

Hua’s older cousin had come with us from his uncle’s house to the river. (A clumsy ethnographical note here: Lao people make no distinction in their language between cousins and siblings.) She is 18 and has just started learning English. She was painfully shy, but the guys applied steady pressure to get her to practice what little English she had. So she and I stood knee deep in the river and tried to have a conversation. It became obvious that this was impossible with her level of English and her inability to understand my accent. Hua told me this is the main problem with people learning English in the countryside: their pronunciation is so bad that without native speakers to interact with, they can learn all the grammar and vocabulary in the world and still not understand or make themselves understood. I tried the simplest questions but could only get one or two monosyllabic responses. She was getting visibly stressed, her face tight and her hands reaching up to clutch at it every time she tried to think of a response, so I let her off the hook and waded back to shore.

Meanwhile, our haul from the net was comprised of a single, two-inch fish that we immediately threw back. The water was cold and the current deceptively fast. Once you got out in it up to your knees, you had to fight to stand in one place. The Lao guys leapt and splashed and sang, anyway.

My favorite memory from the walk back was of Hua wearing Stephen’s pink sunglasses and singing:

I am very handsome,

I am very handsome.

Yes, I’m sure.

We got back to Her’s house and climbed (in my case, painfully) onto our bikes to head over to Hua’s. The road we biked down is unfinished, so it’s not just dirt — it’s dust. Every time a car drives past, a huge cloud of dust kicks up in its wake and settles over everything in the vicinity. I learned from another villager that the road is set to be paved, but won’t be completed until next year. I can’t imagine what it will be like in the rainy season. One big sinkhole, most likely.

Hua’s house was a large one-room structure also built with cinderblocks. The floor was bare concrete with straw mats covering an area in the corner. We all sat on the porch for a while and tried to lure some of the kids over, but the entire gaggle of them remained at a wary distance, giggling and trying to hide behind corners or each other. Fortunately, none of them burst into tears this time.

Before long, we went inside one by one and fell asleep. I am only capable of power naps during the day, exhaustion notwithstanding, so after twenty or thirty minutes I got up and sat on the porch. Two little girls came up to the house, followed by a younger boy, and they kept stumbling over their own feet as they looked up at me and then quickly away again. They were hurling balls up in the air and trying to catch them. The boy waved at me and said “sabaidee” several times. Noticing his T-shirt, which featured characters from what looked to be a Thai science fiction show, I pulled out my iPod and started up a 3D starfighter game I downloaded months ago and forgot about. His mind was blown. He peered over my shoulder with silent rapture as I gunned down spaceships and laser turrets. I would have let him play, but it’s a motion sensing game that’s a little beyond me, even, so I figured the learning curve was too steep for him. He seemed content to watch, anyway. When I turned it off, he walked around in front of me and gave me a look of deepest awe before turning and sprinting away.

Felix came out and sat with me on the porch as the sun went down. He asked me about America and mountains and winter and above all, snow. I told him about the Rockies and making yellow snow on their peaks in the middle of July. I described snowmobiles and skiing and snow angels. He asked about the cities and asked if it was true that they are so bright you can’t see the stars. I told him that in Portland, many nights you could see four or five, but in bigger cities, none at all.

I went out into the trees to take a piss and heard a woman singing in Lao off in the forest. I stood there for a long time. Just when I resolved to go grab my iPod and try to record it, or maybe get one of the guys to translate it for me, the singing stopped.

By that time, dinner was ready and everyone else woke up. Hua’s mother had set the table and then tried to slip away, but we insisted, in three languages, that she join us for the meal. We ate rice, soup, fried fish, and chicken. We were all in raptures about the fish, which was oily and liberally seasoned, and kept praising it through our translators. In Laos, people take such compliments to mean you want more food and will keep feeding you until your gut ruptures, if you let them. So we ate fish, and then we ate a lot more. Finally, Felix told us that in the Hmong culture, fish is a more common meal than chicken — they eat chicken on their holidays and other special occasions. We offered a few compliments about the chicken, too, but emphasized how much it had filled us up.

Hua’s mother spoke to us quietly in Hmong, saying how honored she was by our presence in her home. It was a touching moment, and I spoke for the group saying how honored we were to be there.

About to eat some seriously tasty fish. Ignore the blurriness.

After clearing the dishes away, we returned to the porch and sat talking while children orbited around at a safe distance. Stephen kept trying to get a little boy to give him a high five, but the kid beat a hasty retreat every time. Elias let some of the girls take pictures with his camera. They were wracked with nerves and giggles, holding the camera like some precious relic that might crumble to dust at any moment. A man came up to the porch and surveyed us in silence, and Her told us at length how the man was mute, but highly intelligent and capable of great eloquence by signaling with his hands.

As we said our goodbyes and climbed back on our bikes, the supposedly mute man called out, “Sabaidee!” The guys laughed.

Outside of Hua's house with some Hmong folks.

We trekked back down the road in the dark, the dust floating up in clouds across the beams of our headlamps. Her’s family had strung up mosquito nets, and Stephen, Elias, Felix, and I got cozy together underneath a bright pink one. Tired as I was, I can’t say I slept very well on the hard concrete, sandwiched between my two big farang friends. None of us were smelling our best, either.

The following morning is obscured by fog in my memory. I don’t remember breakfast apart from the fact that it did not include my junkie’s fix of caffeine. I do recall some discussion about the guys’ plan to take us up the nearby mountain to look at the villages from afar. This was a two-hour slog up a steep mountain road and although I tried to play it casually, my resistance was as fierce as my tailbone was bruised. Fortunately, we decided against it and set out for Tad Sae waterfall, instead, which had the added bonus of being on the way back to Luang Prabang.

The first leg of the ride passed uneventfully. We stopped at a market to buy barbecued fish and a big plastic bag full of sticky rice for a picnic lunch. Presently we made the turn onto the dirt road that would take us to the river, and had the good luck to run into a guy selling ice cream from a Styrofoam cooler strapped to his bike. Once at the river, we found ourselves back on the frontiers of Farang Land. Elephants lumbered down the banks with tourists bouncing on the platforms lashed to their backs.

Elephants!

A short boat ride later, we found ourselves at the entrance to Tad Sae. Next to it was an enclosure containing several more enslaved elephants.

Poor elephant.

The first thing Stephen said upon seeing the waterfall was that the stones were worn so smooth it almost looked like someone had poured concrete all over them. Soon after, we discovered a huge blue pipe running into the mouth of the falls and providing the entirety of its water supply. For all we know, those stones might actually be covered with concrete. “Tad Sae waterfall, all natural,” Stephen said. “To be completed in 2013.”

Waterfall under construction?

To be fair, it is the dry season and the waterfall is natural when the rains come. I can’t blame the people who own the place for wanting to cash in on tourists year-round, but still…

Behold the mouth of the mighty Tad Sae waterfall in all its natural splendor!

We ate our lunch Hmong style by rolling balls of sticky rice with our hands and plucking meat off the fish bones with our fingers. The rest of the farangeyed us curiously as they munched their salads. We became fascinated by the ants beneath our table as they performed stunning feats of engineering by carrying off massive balls of rice. And we took these pictures of the guys.

Hua

 

Her

Yeng, aka Felix

Her pushed Felix into the water, fully clothed, and before long they were rampaging all around the swimming hole and occasionally splashing those of us still at the table. When it came time to leave, Elias thought he had traced the ants back to their source at the foot of a large wooden sign that displayed a map of the park’s hiking trails. He rested his hand on it as he bent over to peer at the ground, and the whole thing toppled backward with a groan.

Oops...

We left after that.

Pretty well tired out by that point, Sabrina and I commandeered a songthaew to haul us and our bikes back to Luang Prabang. Elias decided to come along, since he had to get back and teach a lesson that night. We made plans to meet the guys at the hostel later that evening and said our goodbyes.

And that will do it for this two-parter. I hope you’ll forgive the over-abundance of details. My motivation was selfish in that I wanted to preserve as many of these memories as I could. Even so, I have already forgotten a wealth of information about the Hmong and their way of life. What stays with me is the underlying feeling of our experiences — a sense of cultural vertigo balanced out by the kindness and openness of our new friends. Their understanding of family is at the same time broader and deeper than ours typically is in the States, and I came away feeling like mine got expanded.

“When I first saw you, I felt already like we are family,” Hua told me.

I felt the same way.

Homestay in a Hmong village: Part One

I shot pool with three Lao kids on Friday night. The table sits outside in front of the hostel, and if it was ever in good condition, it’s hard to imagine now. Half of the felt is coming off, four balls are missing, and the remaining ones are scratched and dented all over. I hit a ball down to the opposite end of the table and watched it curve to the left and pause before rolling back all the way to its starting position.

We didn’t mind. Passing the one cue back and forth, we took a turn whenever we felt like it and hit whatever ball presented itself. The Lao guys were more concerned with practicing their English, which was already quite good. They are students from Luang Prabang, all around 16 years old, and they came to the hostel to visit their English teacher, Elias, who is staying here while volunteering at the language center. I’ve never seen more enthusiastic language students. They were genuinely thrilled to have so many farang to talk with. They kept checking with me, excitedly, to verify their pronunciation. Yes, excitedly.

Their names are Hua, Yeng (or Felix), and Her. They are Christian, Buddhist, and animist, respectively.

Hua began talking to me about his dream of becoming a doctor. He grew up in a nearby village and two of his older siblings died when we was young. He told me he was angry at first because they wouldn’t have died if the family hadn’t been so poor. But then he decided that, since there was nothing he could do for his siblings, he would dedicate himself to the rest of the villagers who couldn’t afford healthcare. He would become a doctor himself and open a free clinic in the mountains.

I would later discover that Hua is a huge clown, but my first impression of him was of pure intensity and focus. The fact that he can be the former while retaining the latter should tell you something about his character.

After we had been chatting for twenty minutes or so, Hua invited me to come with them to their village the next day. Elias was going, along with two other guests here at the hostel, Sabrina and Stephen. The plan was to rent bikes, ride the 25k to the village, stay the night, and come back the next day. I wasn’t crazy about getting up at 8 the next morning, but I could hardly pass up on an offer like that.

The next morning, we ended up actually leaving at ten. Hostel-goers aren’t exactly known for being early risers. We followed our three guides through Luang Prabang, bleary-eyed, and in my case, trying hard not to swerve into passing cars and motorbikes. They pointed out the sights, such as they are, including an enormous stadium they said is used for soccer and cock fights. I found it hard to picture the stands packed out for a cock fight, but they repeated it several times, so I guess I’ll trust them.

Elias, Hua, and Felix take a break at the top of a monster hill.

The road we were on is supposedly the main highway through Laos, but you would never guess it based on the traffic, or lack thereof. I could hear the guys clearly as they raced ahead, belting out Celine Dion at the top of their lungs: “I seeee you, I feeeeeel you!”

Her dropped back and we got to talking about Muay Thai. He told me there is a Muay Lao practiced by the hill-tribes. He called it magic boxing. According to him, practitioners of magic boxing can never become rich or they will lose their powers. More problematic, they can’t touch anybody with their right hand or that person will die. This includes their wife and kids. If a magic boxer is attacked, he can take off his belt and it will straighten into a sword. If he takes off his shirt, it becomes a tiger. Her had never met a magic boxer, saying that they lived only among the most remote villages.

Our first stop was at a Kamu village at the bottom of the last big hill. Our guides explained that Lao houses were typically built on stilts, whereas the ones we were approaching had earth floors. We bought water from the store next to the road. The bamboo structure had a thatched roof and a dirt floor, and also doubled as the family’s home. They invited us in, even those of us smoking cigarettes, and sat us down at their table. It was cool inside, and simple but well-kept. Everything was tidy and in its place.

Kamu family who invited us into their home.

As we were leaving, the mother took Sabrina by the arm and gestured toward the snacks on display. “Please, you buy something,” she said. “For my daughter.” Sabrina looked stricken and asked the guys if she was serious. The woman gave a false laugh and said she was only joking. I bought a couple bags of peanuts that totaled about fifty cents.

We continued on, stopping every once in a while to rest. Several of us got stuck with gearless bikes so climbing the hills was kind of a haul. I was fortunate in that I rented a mountain bike. Theoretically, it had 21 gears, but I had to cycle through a few gears at a time before I found one that worked.

We took a photo/donut break in another village that offered a view of the river. I should add that the donut lady who comes to our hostel has acquired legendary status among its denizens.I suspect that this reputation is due more to the amount of week smoked here than to the quality of the donuts, per se, but the donuts are pretty good, I can attest from a perspective of sobriety. Felix tried a donut for the first time in his life, one of many important cultural exchanges of the day, and he approved, as well.

Taking a photo/donut break by the river.

Finally, we arrived at Her’s house. The main structure was built out of cinder blocks and had a metal roof, although I noticed the front of it had been started with red brick. Nearly one whole side of the house was filled with sacks of rice. Her said it was enough to last the family a year. The floor was bare concrete, with a thin straw mat in the corner. Her’s mother sat on this, along with his four-year-old sister and the newly arrived baby, just one month old. We greeted her in clumsy Hmong (“leunong,” if I remember correctly, and I probably don’t), and made the requisite fuss over the baby. We sat on little wooden stools that stood maybe three inches high and were surprisingly comfortable. It’s interesting to think of the amount of wood and metal and fabric we could save back home if we were content to sit on three-inch stools.

Her in front of *his* kitchen.

We went outside to eat sugar cane while Her’s sister prepared lunch. The guys laughed at our attempts to peel it with the big knives before coaching us on how to do it properly. They hadn’t even considered that peeling sugar cane could be difficult, having done it since they were, well, at least four, since I saw Her’s little sister hacking away at it with her own miniature knife.

We asked the guys if it was okay to be gay in Laos. They seemed confused by the question. “Yes, why not?” I encountered this same attitude in Thailand and am told it is common throughout Buddhist cultures. No one makes a big deal out of it one way or the other. None of them betrayed any trace of embarrassment when Hua said he might be gay, because he wasn’t interested in girls. But he also said he would probably like to get married one day.

The kitchen was directly next to the house and had a low, thatched roof which I kept brushing my head against as I walked by. Inside was a fire pit and kettle, shelves, tools hanging on the wall, and a low table in the corner. We carried our stools inside and ate a lunch of noodle soup, rice, and eggs, while the farang among us dripped with sweat from the heat of the fire. Her’s sister disappeared demurely as soon as we entered. It seemed like I only ever caught glimpses of her as she swept around a corner or hurried across the yard to do some chore or another.

Sabrina, Felix, and Hua getting ready to chow down.

After lunch and more sugar cane (I had a horrible suspicion we were eating too much of it, but our guides kept insisting), we struck out across town to visit Hua’s uncle, who had a fishing net the guys wanted to borrow. We, the farang, insisted on walking, or at least, Sabrina and I did. I was pretty sure my tailbone was bruised and the last thing I wanted to do was hop back on the goddamned bike.

It should be mentioned that Stephen is quite an accomplished cyclist. He started his journey in China and rode a bike all the way to Laos, and he talks casually about continuing on to Cambodia. While the rest of us panted and cursed our way up the hills, he pedaled comfortably on, even with his bike weighed down with all of his belongings. People back home keep referring to my travels as an “adventure,” but as far as I’m concerned, that term would be applied more readily to journeys like Stephen’s.

Anyway, we arrived at the house and hung out for a while watching Thai television. The place was packed with kids, most of whom gaped at us and kept retreating behind each other, but some of whom offered a brave “sabaidee” and a smile. One of them, a little tyke still in diapers, took one look at me and burst into tears. If I’m lucky he’ll remember me as the first farang he ever saw: a pale, stubbly ogre in glasses.

And on that note, I will chop this entry in half and post the rest soon. To be continued…

Chopping up some sugar cane.