She and her minder take one of the shuttle buses to catch the connecting flight to El Paso. He watches her pass to airside, then disappears. Another minder, not Thai but Texan, meets her off the plane in El Paso. He is red-faced and balding with bad skin, and a sour odor seeps from his body, but she can tell he’s a professional by the way he discounts her charms and gets down to business. On the way to the massage parlor he explains that the advantage of jet lag is that she’ll be fresh and alert in the middle of the night, so she’ll start working the graveyard shift in a few hours. Better get some sleep. He lets slip that she is the first Asian woman to work for this particular outfit.
The first Spanish word she learns is coño. It means “cunt,” a word women of her trade employ a lot, including in Thailand, but the Mexican women in the massage parlor use it all the time. It punctuates everything they say and sounds unspeakably filthy. Most of them are bilingual in Spanish and English but prefer to speak in Spanish. They tend to have families on the other side of the border and to know one another from Ciudad Juárez, where they have boyfriends and husbands who work as grunts in the narcotics trade. Chanya has mentally prepared herself for any kind of American man who hires her-she really hadn’t thought that the other women would be a problem. She sees at once it’s a cultural thing but has no idea what to do about it. She was lovingly brought up by poor but devout Buddhists, and she herself never violates any of the strictures except one. The Buddha requires of his followers that they find “right employment.” Chanya made a decision to postpone complying with that one because prostitution offered better money than any other work and made it easy for her to comply with some of the other Buddhist strictures, especially the ones that dealt with showing respect to one’s parents. In the Thai interpretation that meant providing for them if they were too poor or old to provide for themselves. It also meant providing for her siblings until they were old enough to work, an event that could easily be delayed indefinitely. Chanya never steals, hardly ever tells lies, cultivates good thoughts and lovingkindness, never takes drugs, doesn’t drink too much alcohol at this stage in her life, tries to see the best in people-including her customers-and most important of all keeps her mind as free as possible from defilements. All of which, together with her outstanding good looks and fantastic figure, infuriate the hell out of her colleagues, especially when more and more men ask for her services.
After a week she has made her first important decision: Whores here all demons.
In other words, they are impervious to compassion or any Buddhist salvation. When they die, they will return to the hells whence they came and remain there for tens of thousands of years before getting another crack at the human form, which they will probably make a mess of all over again. “Idiot compassion” is a novice stage in Buddhist doctrine. Chanya passed that phase a long time ago. She encloses herself in an impermeable mental shield that translates as aloofness but gains her some respect. The demons had seen her as something frail and pathetic, a tasty morsel dangling at the very end of the food chain. Now they see she is something else, a different animal entirely. Coño. She pays no attention to their religion, which seems important to them but strikes her as a barbaric product of one of the lower hells, full of torment and anguish that lead nowhere: Chanya fucks demons.
After less than a month the offers of marriage start to come in. It amuses her that the Texan male courts in a way that would be instantly recognizable in the East. He tells you how much money he’s got, shows you around his “spread” just like a bird showing off its plumage, and treats you like a princess in a cage. Some even had the sense to feign humility: “Aw, you know, it’s just a li’l ol’ spread, I ain’t rich exactly-but a’ course any woman takes me on full time is gonna get half sooner or later. I’m getting on a bit, you know.”
The frontier between marriage and prostitution was as hard to pin down in the United States as it was in Thailand, apparently. Some of the spreads were gigantic in the Texan tradition, but she doubted the owner had any real intention to share. As her fame grew, more and more red-faced men from out of the jungle (she is still very Thai; for her, anything that is not city or suburb is jungle) arrived in the massage parlor’s parking lot in big SUVs. Her boss doubled her fees and told her the five thousand dollars would be paid off in three months instead of six, when she would be free to leave. He was an experienced pro and realized she was just too hot to keep. The feds would be around sooner or later to take a more expert look at her passport, maybe check with the ID database in Thailand on which fingerprints were recorded.
Marriage, she now decides, is not out of the question, but she sees through the men. She sees the meanness behind the charm, their assumption of a future of unchallenged dominance that arises from her being Asian, serene, and eager to please. For her part, if she is looking for anything in particular in a man, it is a Thai sense of fun. Money is important, but without fun life simply is not worth living. Although she enjoys a laugh and a joke with some of the customers, she isn’t having a lot of fun, not with the Mexican women developing a homicidal rage toward her. The boss sees it too and hints that she should probably leave as soon as the three months are up-those women have mean connections. Anything can happen in El Paso. Maybe she could leave even sooner-he increases her hourly fee again. Within a record two months of her arrival, she is free to leave.
Vegas is the place to go for a woman like her. She knew this even in Bangkok. When she first sees the town from the Greyhound bus, she recognizes the vibrations. Using her connections within America ’s Thai mafia, she has no difficulty finding a job with the biggest of the city’s agencies. The agency is so well organized, American style, it even holds an induction course. Chanya sits in a seat in a conference room of a large hotel, along with about fifty other young women, most of whom are not Caucasian.
She has often heard prostitution referred to as an industry but has never seen it treated like one before. The platinum blonde who stands facing the new recruits is a masterpiece of modern surgery: tit enhancements, stomach tucks, nosejob, face-lift-the lot. She is over forty, though-way past active service-and has surely been shunted over to the human resources side of the profession. No surgery could do much about her voice, which is sandpaper and steel:
“It’s like this, and in this order. I don’t want to hear about any of you getting the order wrong, so if you have a learning disability or poor English, write it down. I provided paper and pencil on each desk.”
1. The john arrives in Vegas. He has heard about our services and asks the cab driver how he can contact us on his way from the airport.
2. The cab driver has one of our cards like this. [It shows a lurid Asian girl with huge bare breasts on one side, the telephone number on the other.] You will notice that there is a code number on the card. Each individual card has a different one.
3. The john calls the number, and the operator asks for the code on the card. This helps ensure it’s a real john and not a cop. It also means a payoff for the cab driver.
4. The john states his preferences, i.e., race, breast size, height, blow job only, hand job, vaginal intercourse, anal intercourse, special services, all of the above, etc.
5. The operator takes down his hotel details and calls him back in his room to make sure he’s really there.