The first Thai female I met after I moved to Bangkok seemed thoroughly male to me, which was an honest mistake on my part. Aey had been introduced to me as a friend’s younger brother and nothing I saw made me question that. Later I found that the person who appeared to be a sweet-faced, willowy young man who wore the global unisex uniform of tee shirt and jeans transformed himself into improbable glamour and feminine desirability five nights a week at a transgender cabaret. Aey’s personal pronoun of choice was she, and she was thrilled when I gave her the Clinique samples I’d brought with me from Seattle to cement my prospective friendships with Thai women.
The man who owned the school where I worked introduced me to a neighborhood restaurant that was surrounded by a garden and furnished with antiques. I went there often; the food had flavor that made Thai restaurants in the states seem like ghostly imitations and the restaurant was a refuge of comfort in a city that often confused me. It was always filled with women, soft-voiced flowers and their strong-featured, stocky companions who exuded authority. But once in a while I spotted a few men, tall and slender with razorblade cheekbones and expensive haircuts.
“Who are those gorgeous men?” I asked one night and was told with great amusement that these GQ-model prototypes weren’t biologically male.
The women who came to this restaurant wore jeans, smoked cigarettes, and drank beer every night, puzzling contrasts to the ones I taught in classrooms and saw in shopping malls. My students and the women I observed in the rest of the city spoke in whispered tones that bats would be hard pressed to hear. They moved in baby steps that made me wonder if their feet would smash to bits if they were forced into a faster pace. They laughed in subdued giggles; even their sneezes were barely audible, emerging in the soft sound I’d heard only from the noses of newborn babies, until I came to Thailand.
No matter what age they might be, these women were all girls, a different species from the bohemian free spirits of the garden restaurant---in fact the two groups seemed to live in separate centuries. The conventional women were lovely to look at but when I was among them, I began to think of the Stepford Wives. Happy to have found other women who lived in a way I could understand, I stripped off my conservative suit and stockings the minute I got home from work, put on jeans and a tee shirt, and went off for a cigarette and a beer with my new female friends.
When I tried to expand that behavior beyond the restaurant’s garden walls, that’s when the trouble began. The neighborhood I lived in was an urban village and its inhabitants turned out to have community standards only slightly less restrictive than the ones in Puritan New England. Nobody actually hissed at me when I walked by brandishing my Marlboro Light but I began to expect that was going to happen each time I walked down the street.
Finally the man I worked for broke it all down for me. My free-spirited friends behaved as they did only when they were at the restaurant, which was a gathering place for local lesbians. Outside of that sanctuary, they conformed to traditional Thai codes of female conduct and were so successful that not even their parents suspected they weren’t heterosexual.
“If any of your students ever saw you smoking and drinking, they’d be so horrified they’d never come to your class again,” he told me, “and around here you’re already the neighborhood scandal.”
After a week of serious consideration, I moved to another apartment in a distant corner of the city. Carefully I took on a whole new public identity; studying the behavior of the women in my classes, I toned my voice down to a murmur and slowed my walk to a pace that could have easily been outstripped by any turtle. My room took on the ambiance of a longshoremen’s tavern because that was the only place where I ever lit a cigarette or drank beer, and as my outer behavior gradually became steeped in Thai femininity, I began to feel schizoid.
At the school where I worked, the other employees were all foreign men, except for Eddy and Elle, a Thai brother and sister team who ran the office. I ended up spending a lot of time with my male colleagues and decided the only code of behavior they observed seemed to have been crafted by Conan the Barbarian. They sprawled on the sofas in the school’s reception area, happily discussing the debauchery of the previous night, the immensity of their hangovers, and their plans to repeat the process as soon as they got off work. The only concession they made to Thai cultural norms were the suits, ties, and ironed shirts they wore for their classroom appearances. When I was with them, stifling in my cotton blazer, pleated skirt, pantyhose, and shoes conservative enough to be worn by England’s Queen Mother, I tried hard not to hate these men who seemed able to do whatever they wanted without public censure.
But my dress-for-Thai-success clothing and my new code of etiquette worked well enough that I became the most heavily scheduled teacher in the school. My workload erased any attempts I might have made at constructing a social life in a more forgiving community, my social life outside of a classroom consisted of time spent with Conan’s Disciples, and my schizophrenia grew worse.
When I went off to teach in the morning, I looked like a woman striving to achieve an executive washroom key in a Manhattan office. When I was with the male teachers, I trailed behind them, not out of deference, but because my newly-slowed steps didn’t let me keep up with the group. Once after we had lunch in one of the shopping malls, I almost followed them straight into the men’s restroom.
The day that I woke up with my predominant thought echoing Sojourner Truth, silently screaming “Ain’t I a woman,” I knew I was in trouble. Clearly I would never achieve the pinnacle of Thai womanhood, which was beauty, a feature so common in that country that it had become a leading national resource. Aey, my first female friend, could pull off that trick each night of her life, but not me, at least not without heavy cosmetic surgery.
Since I shrink from any kind of pain and feel quite attached to my over-sized nose, that option was closed. I would never have the cute little button in the middle of my face that made Thai women look like sweet baby kittens. And although the heat and a steady diet of Thai meals were making me slender beyond my wildest dreams, my body would never have the delicate bones of a twelve-year-old girl.
On the other hand, I detested the men I worked with and was tired of trying to fit in with their boorish humor and bad manners. Besides, there was something truly sick about making a valid point in a discussion at our employee meetings while using the soft and childlike tones that I’d assumed as part of my protective coloration. I was well on my way toward bending my head in deference and sidling up in mincing steps each time I approached them.
It was becoming clear to me that my new life was giving me all of the disadvantages of being female and none of the advantages, apart from my spotless reputation. While I passed for a well-behaved lady in public, in truth I was hybrid, a whole other gender, and an angry one at that.
Although I didn’t know it at first, I wasn’t alone. In Thailand, the two sexes, male and female, come in many variations, and quite a few of those are quickly altered to fit the needs of any given moment.
There were girls who were born boys, and boys who were born girls, and they all seemed to have switched to their true identities with a civilized lack of drama. Aey wasn’t an anomaly, but neither was his older brother. Somchai was a handsome, well-muscled ex-soldier who, in under an hour, could become a dazzling long-legged, sequin-clad diva any time he decided it might make a nice change for an evening. One of my students, Arun, who looked like the Thai version of Jimmy Dean, frequently had vicious, screaming fights with his French boyfriend over whether Arun’s visits to his wife and two young sons had been ones in which he’d exercised his conjugal rights.
A young man who seemed to have captured the sexual attentions of all the gay foreign men in Bangkok turned out to have a girlfriend stashed away in the background, while a floral designer with whom I shared a house for a while claimed he was gay but lived the bland, ascetic life of a man who was thoroughly asexual. The exquisite woman who cut and colored my hair in a neighborhood salon had accumulated her grubstake to start the business by fighting in Thai boxing rings back when she was a boy, and a cute guy who approached me in a gay disco told me later in the evening that he had given birth to two children before he finally became the man he always knew he was meant to be.
Places I thought were potential refuges from attention turned out to be hotbeds of sexual scrutiny. I was hit on by men in gay bars and by women at Thai boxing stadiums. And I’m still bemused by what took place on a rainy afternoon at one of the city’s most famous temples, when I took shelter under an overhanging roof and waited for the pelting drops to go away. Suddenly a monk popped up beside me, umbrella in hand, inviting me to come with him and speak English with him until the storm was over.
We sat on the floor of his room in the monastery’s living quarters while he showed me a notebook that he’d filled with handwritten song lyrics in English. “I was a musician before I came here. Look,” and he gestured to an inner room which was almost empty except for a large electronic keyboard. We ended up sitting in that room where he played old rock and roll classics, we both sang and smoked cigarettes, and I fell in love with a ouple of kittens who curled up on my lap.
This was one of the best afternoons I’d spent in Bangkok but although my new friend asked me to come back often, I never saw him again. My Thai friends, when I told them this story, all looked horrified and said, “That wasn’t a real monk.” Realizing that the last thing I needed in my life was another public scandal, I, in true Buddhist fashion, let this pleasure go.
It was a profound relief to learn that within the world of straight Thai women, there were many different shades of appropriate behavior. I once got in a conversation with a conservatively dressed young woman in the outside seating area of a Starbucks, where I was having a cigarette with my coffee. She asked if she could use my lighter and I managed to avoid fainting from the shock.
“I don’t know many Thai women who smoke cigarettes,” I said and she replied, “Nobody at the bank where I work knows that I do. But I’m not really Thai. My mother is from Cambodia so she’s not as strict as the mothers of my friends. She even knows about this, although nobody else does,” and she pulled up the sleeve of her blouse. On her upper arm was an intricate tattoo.
There was, as this woman showed me, a vast difference between the public and private faces of Thai women. The women I’d met early on in the garden restaurant weren’t the only ones who did as they pleased when they were away from scrutiny. One of Elle’s closest friends swore fluently in English and knocked back countless cigarettes and bottles of beer when she was safely inside the room where she lived in sin with her boyfriend.
In Bangkok’s most affluent shopping malls I saw young high-society women dressed like designer-clad hookers who’d stepped out of a Helmut Newton photograph. When I went on vacation to a nearby island, I met bargirls who wore bikinis for a living but swam in tee shirts and cut-off jeans when they went to the beach with men who had bought them for a week or two. And I discovered the truth of the words spoken by a languid, elegant flight attendant early in my Bangkok life, “Oh Janet. You’re a foreigner. Nobody expects you to do more than 70 per cent.”
After I moved into a part of the city where my neighbors were more sophisticated than the community that had cast me out, I was able to find a way to live that didn’t replicate a severe personality disorder. I learned to accept that I would never truly understand what it was to be female in a kingdom where the Queen was honored for being one of the world’s most beautiful women while her fat and dowdy daughter was the best-loved of all the Thai princesses. I concluded that if there was one thing that Anna and the King of Siam got right, it was the moment when Yul Brynner sang, “It is a puzzlement.”
I wasn’t the only foreigner who was puzzled, Years later I ran into one of the men I’d worked with long ago and we chatted over a friendly beer.
“You once told me something I’ve never forgotten,” he remarked as we were finishing our drinks, “You said in Thailand there are two sexes but many genders and I thought that was the craziest thing I ever heard. But you know something? I never forgot it because I found out you were right.”
I looked at him and smiled. Many years earlier when I was still fresh off the boat, I would have asked him how he had come to discover the truth of my observation. But after living in Bangkok as long as I had, not only did I know that would be rude, I no longer cared. We all had our learning curves in this city and I didn’t need to hear another interminable story of how one man had finally achieved enlightenment. Still it made me happy to know that back in the days when my colleagues had looked through me as though I were nothing more than a dusty windowpane, this guy had actually been paying attention. ~Janet Brown
