what could possibly happen next?

2004-10-25

Research for Pixie's Paper

Here's some info for Pixie's project. At first I was doing it for a joke, but it made me kinda sad. Anyway, here it is.

Down in Pattaya recently, I was cruising the beer bars, as is my preferred way to party at the beachside Sin City, when I came across a young lady by the name of Air. There was something a little bit different about Air, something I couldn't quite put my finger on. Unlike the majority of girls, she kept my attention for a long time.
Air claimed to have been working in the Pattaya beer bars for three months (don't they all say that!). She started in a beer bar that recently went belly up, and when I met her, she had just started in a new establishment. As the evening went on, notwithstanding the screeching distorted sounds coming from the ageing sound system, I started to find out more and more about Air, and how she ended up in the bar environment. In some ways her story was typical, but in other ways it wasn't...

Air, the youngest in a family of six, is 22 and comes from Surin. She has an older brother and two older sisters. The parents are rice farmers who have a farm not far outside of Surin City, and the city can be reached from the farm in around 20 minutes. Her mother and father both work the farm daily, and their sole assistants are the three buffaloes that the family has had since Air was very young.

From the time that Air was 6, until the time that she was almost 15, her daily routine was much the same. She would wake up early to the sounds of dogs barking and the chickens howling, something that anyone who has overnighted in rural Isaan will know about. At the crack of dawn, all of the children would help her parents on the farm for an hour or two. When she was young, it meant carrying and collecting things for her parents, but as she got older, it meant an hour or two in the fields. After her morning duties had been done, she would head off to school. After she returned home each day, it would be another hour or two to help the parents, before she would have to go and do the huge amount of often worthless homework that Thai teachers cruelly inflict on their students. She would often fall asleep from exhaustion before her homework was complete. This would result in an inevitable scolding the next day from the teacher, and was sometimes accompanied by a slap too. Despite all of this, Air maintains that this was a happy time in her life!

Following her 15th birthday, Air was unable to continue studying at the local school as they only offered classes up to M3 level (9th grade). If she wanted to continue studying, she would have to go to a school in Surin City, a move that would put pressure on her dreadfully poor family. But the family saw the benefits in education and they managed to raise the money to send her off to school in the big smoke. Air dreamed of working in a hospital, helping other people and giving something back to the community. To do this type of work, she would need to continue her studies.

If you see Air in your travels, say hello.

Over the next three years, Air completed her studies with high grades, thoroughly enjoying her school days. But what next? The parents, well aware of the benefits of education decided that she should study further and Air enrolled into the local tertiary institute, what she termed as a university but what would probably be better referred to as a technical or vocational college. The first year went well and again, Air continued to fly through her courses but in the second year, a problem arose. It wasn't academic. It was financial. Air's parents were no longer able to finance her studies and reality dawned on her that she wouldn't be able to complete her studies. Half way through her second year of tertiary education, Air was forced to withdraw.

A bright spark in a poor town, realisation dawned on Air that she would not be able to get a great job in Surin. She applied for work at the local Big C and was offered the most prestigious of all positions, the job of checkout operator. Earning 4,000 baht a month, the bulk of her salary was given to her parents, allowing her just enough to get to and from work, buy food and the essentials that a young woman needs. This job went on for two years, but it was clear to Air that she was never going to get any further at Big C, indeed she was never going to get any further in Surin. She wanted to somehow continue her studies to give her the best chance at a good job, a real job.

And then it happened. That conversation that oh so many girls in Isaan and the other poor parts of the country have. Air, the youngest of four children was told by her parents that they were struggling financially. They were well aware of a friend of Air's who had told them about Pattaya, told them of the money that could be made. There was no need to explain what it involved as every young girl in Isaan knows what goes on in Pattaya. Air's parents told her that they needed another 7,000 baht a month on top of what they were already earning. Having only ever had one boyfriend, and hoping to save herself for the man she would marry, Air was horrified at her parent's suggestion. But as she protested to them that she didn't feel she would be able to go to Pattaya, her parents reminded her of all the money they had spent on her, sending her through school and then on to tertiary college. They also reminded her that she had two older siblings, both of whom had been married but were only just managing to keep themselves above the poverty level. As Air said, she really didn't have any say in what happened, her fate had been sealed.

After arriving in the world's biggest sex and sand resort, Air started off in a massage parlour as a service girl come chambermaid and basically ran odd errands, cleaning rooms, taking drink orders, a sort of dogsbody doing all the crap that no-one else wanted to do. While she had come to Pattaya to work, she just wasn't sure if she could go through with it. Receiving the same amount of money at the parlour as she did back in Big C, she finally relented, accepted her fate and started work in a beer bar.

Even after all that I have experienced with these girls, after the thousands of emails that I have received and the many stories that they have contained, I'm still touched by stories like Air's. Call me a cynic, but this girl's life has already been irreparably changed, and the odds are that she will never live her dream to work in a hospital. She will likely end up with a string of farang boyfriends, perhaps even making it overseas for a period of time. But she will come back to Thailand, because that is where her heart is, where her home is. Air truly believes that her role in life is to support her parents, her hopeless drug addict brother, and her other two older siblings, both of whom are married.

To me, this is abuse of the very worst kind, parents abusing their children. Air's parents survived before she ended up in the bar environment, and they'll survive afterwards. Their need for a minimum of 7,000 baht a month cannot be justified unless they are prepared to admit to themselves that "we sacrificed our daughter". The parents' decision to turn a blind eye on this girl's plight is not negligence, it is downright criminal. I can only hope that Air meets someone nice, someone to pull her away from the bar and away from her parents. But the damage has been done. She has gone way past the six week period* and while she may still have a certain innocent charm about her, she has been damaged. But she is not alone. Thousands of other girls suffer the same plight, sent to work as a prostitute by their parents. Is there anything more horrible?

Yes, Air really touched me.

* six week period - time frame that I believe it takes for the girls to start to change, though it may take a lot longer before they are marred.