Love is not a commodity, but a gift

I like to say that I'm only have three really notable skills.  I was either born with these skills or developed them over time, I really couldn't tell you either way.  The first is the ability to effortlessly use words to form concise and artful sentences.  The second is the ability to establish intimate and long lasting friendships.  The third is the ability to make passionate love.  Ok, I'm only half joking about that last one: you'll have to confirm with my ex-girlfriends about that.

As I wind down my trip to Asia, I was ruminating recently about how many new friends I made here, how many old connections that were reinvigorated, and how many people I will miss when I leave.  This is something I've always been exceptionally good at: making friends, no matter where I go, and no matter with who, regardless of age, circumstance, or creed.  Give me a beer, two chairs, and a smile and I'll make a connection under most circumstances.

My trip ends in a week and most of my days are filled up with dinners I need to have, drinks I need to do, and we're not even covering time I'm spending with my two-week Thai girlfriend (more on that later).  I always joked that if I was as good with my romantic pursuits as I was with my fraternal ones, I could give up my day job and become a gigolo.

But then I wondered, is the process by which we make friends all that different from the process by which we pursue lovers?  While obviously they are not one and the same, aren't we just talking about establishing an emotional and social connection with someone?   I like to say that I don't make good sentences; rather, good sentences come to me.  I also never try to make friends, I just put myself out there and things tend to take care of themselves.

But when it comes to dating and romantic pursuits, I always considered this a deeply daunting task.  Going on dates, hitting on girls, going out on more dates, online dating, and onward and so forth.  Just thinking about it exhausted me, and I often joked that I could see the appeal of becoming a monk.  When Hannah and I broke up, one of my first reactions was, "Dear God, I need to get out there again.  I just don't know whether I have the wherewithal for getting back into the 'game' again."

As I thought more deeply about why I considered finding and making a romantic connection to be such a daunting task, I realized that it was due to a fundamental way I viewed the world of love.  That is that I viewed love as a commodity.  Not only a commodity, but a scarce one at that.  Love was something to be sought, and when "found", to be treasured.  If I think deeply, this might have to do with growing up in a family that saw the marriage between my mother and father slowly break down and dissolve over time.  The love they had for one another petered out and at the end, all that was left was sadness and recrimination.  Whether consciously or sub-consciously, I vowed to make all my relationships from then on "perfect."

Because of this, I put up requirements for all my potential lovers: they had to have these things in common with me, be of a certain type, be nerdy, be smart, be sweet.  But I think, most importantly, I put pressure on myself to "get it right".  Each interaction was a high stakes game of poker.  I either folded right away when I felt the hand I was dealt wasn't a winner, or I went all in and put my heart on the line.

When it comes to making friendships, though, I don't see things that way at all.  If I like you, I will tell you and I will want to get to know you.  I was at a train station off in the provinces of Thailand last week and I helped as translator for a man from New Zealand.  Afterwards I offered him my email address and told me to get in touch if he was ever in Bangkok and I'd buy him a drink.  He never did, but I didn't care: I was offering because I genuinely wanted to get to know him better.  I thought about this, and that's when I realized...

My friendship is a gift, and it's a gift I give freely and often.  I give it freely because I have so much of it.  I have an infinite supply of my ability and want to be your friend.  Why can't my love be the same thing?  If it's a gift that you have an infinite supply of, then you can't ever be mad if your gift is turned down.  If you give it freely, honestly, and genuinely, without a need for anything in return, then you can never be disappointed.

Dating and the pursuit of love can be seen like a game, but what I didn't realize before is that the stack that I hold behind my hand is as large as I want it to be.  People cordon themselves off because they think the love they have to give is finite.  It isn't.  My love is as big as I want it to be.  Anybody can be offered it, it's just up to me to package it and start giving it away.

And this leads me to my next two stories:  the story of the one night romance in Singapore and the only pick-up line you'll ever need, and the story of my two-week Thai girlfriend.  Stay tuned, dear readers, there is certainly more to come!

My Adventures as a Red Light District Spy and An Interview with a Thai Hooker

I hold a dual-Thai and American citizenship and am 100% Asian, but Thais rarely think I'm Thai.  This can be both irritating and useful.  Irritating because Thais are often talking to me like I'm a clueless Korean tourist and, for whatever reason, it makes it so I'm not as good of a vendor bargainer as I could be.  Useful because I can sometimes sneak into places where I normally couldn't go, like the famous (or rather infamous) Soi Cowboy red light district in Bangkok.

A little background: Soi Cowboy is an alleyway in the center of Bangkok that features a row of strip clubs and go-go bars, replete with beautiful Thai women and western tourists looking to check out the legendary "ping pong shows", a little cheap love with an exotic beauty, or maybe some of both.  It's called "Soi Cowboy" because many of the bars are western themed, but also because of the main catch: the place exists exclusively for foreigners.  Bouncers do not allow Thai locals into any of the establishments.  If you even look Thai at all, they stop you at the door and ask you for your passport.  Why this is, I'm uncertain.  From what I hear, it may be because the girls don't want their real life boyfriends coming in and causing a ruckus.  Or it may be because the girls want to preserve a degree of anonymity with their chosen professions.  In any case, the norm is generally strictly enforced.

So this is where my ability to seem so naturally foreign comes in handy.  Not that I frequent the red light district often (or ever), mind you, but one of my good friends was in town recently and wanted to see a famous show and maybe get a little female attention while we were at it.  So, I put on my American accent and went off to one of the seediest places in Bangkok, for the first time ever.

To say that Soi Cowboy is ostentatious would be an extreme understatement.  It is a place that stands out even among the bright lights and crowds of the massive metropolitan known as Bangkok to where it's absolutely unmistakable.  Bright red neon lights flood the street, which, at the later hours, is lined with heavily made up girls in four inch heels, beckoning passers by to stop inside the establishment of their employ and have a drink.  Cries of "Mister, mister, come inside" trail us as we walk down the the brightly lit street.  Interestingly, one of the girls is wearing these super cute hipster glasses and, aside from wearing a tube top about two sizes too small, is a girl that I'm surprisingly very attracted to.  Her shy grin wins me over, and that's the place we decide to go.

Inside, we see a line of foreigners seemingly in a trance staring at pole dancers dressed in nothing but cowboy hats and boots doing an acrobatic dance.  We sit down and order ourselves a drink: 400 baht for a beer, which is about US $12.50, normal club prices in the US, but absolutely exorbitantly expensive in Thailand.  And that's when the fun really starts.

Two girls immediately come over and start talking to us, trying to get us to buy them drinks.  One of the girls is a dark skinned beauty and she seems to have taken a special liking to me, for whatever reason, as she tells me in broken English that I'm hot and starts grinding against my leg.  First, it takes all of my conscious effort to respond to her in American English instead of Thai, and second, she must be an extremely good actor because I really did get the impression she thought I was hot.  I guess they don't call it the land of smiles for nothing.

While me and my friend are sharing our exorbitantly expensive beers with our new found groupies, I'm noticing that the girls on stage have changed from the acrobatic dancers to a row of girls who are just sorta club dancing to the music and who have numbers pinned to their tops.  At first I was a little confused, but then I realized that there were actually two types of girls who work at the club: dancers, and "company girls", or girls who are there for patron company.

The idea is this - if you see a girl who you like, you call over the hostess and tell her their number.  The girl then checks you out: if she likes what she sees, the she comes over and has a drink with you.  If she doesn't, you're told to try someone else.  Most girls there can speak decent enough English.  They come over, flirt with you, and if you really want to, you can take them out of the bar... for a price.

And, I think it's safe to say that the girls here are stunning, even for their chosen profession of dancer/hooker.  If there's a stereotype about Bangkok and Thailand that's true, it's that you really can get a beautiful girl for the right price.  

My friend is smitten with a dark skinned beauty on the stage and asks me to pick out a girl to make our party a foursome.  As a side note to all this description, at this stage I'm absolutely overwhelmed with the sensory overload that has been this place so far.  Soi Cowboy is really smack dab in the middle of the city: one instant I'm walking through the rainy Bangkok streets and the next, I'm in a strip club with a girl grinding up against my leg (I wasn't that into her so we sent her off).  I decide to play along, but mostly because I'm curious about the experience, and so I pick a very cute girl with a bubble booty (Asian girls with booty, now that's a rarity) and the next thing I know I have a pretty girl on my arm.  

I'll be upfront: I've never been into the sex for money thing.  I just don't believe in spending money for something that really should be free, but I also decline to pass judgement on consenting adults who do decide to partake in this commercial transaction for sex.  Not that I don't think it's part of an inherently exploitative patriarchal system, but I think that with two consenting adults at least it's an honest one.

So my friend decides he's so smitten with his girl that he wants to take her out of the bar.  This necessitates a fee that we have to pay the bar to take the girl outside.  It's how the bar ensures their take from these girls, and I'm assuming that the girl gets to keep whatever money her client gives her that night for herself.  This fee is about 800 baht (or 25 bucks) per girl, and my friend pays the fee for both his girl and mine.

All of a sudden we're off to a hotel and I'm thinking, wait a minute, I'm going to a hotel... with a hooker.  An extremely pretty girl, but a hooker none the less.  Am I actually going to go to bed with her?

The answer to that is... no.

We go to a local hotel right there in the red light district, which charges by the hour.  My friend goes into his personal room, and I go into mine and I have sort of a Holden Caulfield moment.  I'm sitting on the side of the bed and she's wondering what's wrong.  That's when I lay out my cards: I start speaking to her in Thai and I tell her she's a beautiful girl but I'm just not into the sex for money thing.  She is surprised when I start talking to her in Thai instead of English and I'm relieved to find out that she's actually pretty happy when I say I don't want to do anything with her.  After this, we head down to the hotel lobby, buy ourselves a couple plates of pad thai from the mobile pad thai stand (which might be the most awesome invention known to man kind) and I do what I do best: I talk to her.

And that's how I came to have an interview with a Thai hooker.

She turned out to be a pretty sweet girl really.  Unlike most of the girls she works with, she's actually from Bangkok.  Most Thai hookers/dancers are from the northern regions of Thailand which are much poorer.  Girls come to Bangkok telling their families that they're taking a corporate job, but end up turning tricks instead to make money and send back to their poor families in the provinces.  

My girl tells me she does pretty much the same thing, only her family lives in the Bangkok area.  Her working at Soi Cowboy makes sense: the foreigner only requirement means that she never runs into anybody she knows at work, as her profession is a shameful secret.  She tells me that hooking is actually very lucrative, and in a good month she can turn out as much as 80,000 baht a month, which is an upper income level for Thais.  

The work sounds grueling though.  She said she works 6 days (nights?) a week and only gets one day off (and gets required days off when she's on her period).  She said she chose me because she actually prefers Asian clients.  She likes the way they look and her ideal scenario is to meet a wealthy Korean businessman who will take her away from this job that she wasn't thrilled to have.  She said she almost had this and actually went to Korea to live with a client of hers once.  Alas, it didn't work out and she had to come back.

She said she has a boyfriend, who, of course, doesn't know about her extracurricular activities.  He thinks she works a late night job as a waitress.  Even more amazingly, she told me that he is an Asian Muslim!   She said she liked him but wasn't sure it could ever work out between them.  

Overall, it was an interesting and sort of sad tale from a decent pretty girl.  In a way, her job makes her a good deal of money and she feels empowered because she's essentially an independent contractor.  But on the other hand, she's a girl with little education and no experience so hooking is about the only thing she thinks she knows how to do.  

At the end of our interview, I asked her for her number or email, which she declined to give me.  I gave her my email address and asked her to keep in touch: I genuinely liked her and wanted to see what happened in her life.   I haven't heard from her yet, and I suppose I won't be hearing from her at all... and it makes sense I suppose.  After all, she is a Thai hooker, and I'm just some weird Thai-American guy who asked her all sorts of odd questions.  But it did make for a nice story, on my part at least.