Bangkok Boy Read online

  While my early life was idyllic in many ways, it was not as sheltered as one might think. I craved adventure and derived great pleasure from participating in daring games. From a young age, I revelled in the sense of belonging. My group consisted solely of boys, and our games were very true to our gender. Brandishing slingshots and stones, we hunted poor unsuspecting birds and then proudly brought them home to be cooked and eaten. We made ‘bullets’ out of small balls of clay that we would lay out to dry in the sun until they were sufficiently hardened. Armed and ready for war, we divided into two teams, firing our ‘bullets’ in an effort to defeat the opposition. While we had a lot of fun, many injuries were also incurred. Sometimes, we would get carried away and substitute clay bullets with actual stones to maximise the damage. ‘War’ was an aggressive and adrenaline-charged game but thankfully, no eyes were ever lost.

  Although I spent a lot of time with my peers, I was also fond of solitude. My favourite solo activity was hunting small lizards which required serious concentration and dexterity. I’d make whistling and clucking sounds to lure my prey down from the safety of the trees. The second they curiously poked their little heads into view, I’d capture them with a small hand-made rope noose. I often trekked into the forest in search of wild produce such as mushrooms and bamboo shoots, which I triumphantly brought home to Mae along with the birds and lizards I’d ensnared. Mae transformed my bountiful catches into delicious spicy salads, or fried them with basil leaves into my favourite dish. The most exotic treat I could hope to procure was an insect called maeng gut chi, which was to be found in the droppings of buffaloes. Once extracted and cleaned, it would be ground in a mortar, sprinkled with herbs, and then quickly devoured. In times of drought, we boys dug up root plants such as taro and cassava, which we ate as less desirable substitutes for rice.

  My childhood certainly was blissfully innocent. As I recount it here, it feels like the fragments of someone else’s life.

  Despite my innocence, in my early years I developed a very self-centred outlook that made me very proud and arrogant. My parents contributed to this by making no secret of the fact that they favoured me over my siblings; especially my father, who seemed intent on moulding me in his image. In both the Chinese and Thai cultures, being the eldest son is a privileged and enviable position. Parents tend to invest the bulk of their hopes and dreams in their firstborn son to help him achieve success.

  I was something of a model child whom the other parents used as an example to their errant children. My father assured me that if I continued in this vein I was destined to become a distinguished educator or a high-ranking civil servant, thus even surpassing his own achievements. Outperforming one’s parents was considered a great accomplishment: we even have a term for it—aphichattabut.

  Although teachers are respected, I considered the profession boring. Who wants to spend their days policing large groups of children? Certainly not me, that was for sure. I desired a bigger better-paid job. Before I knew it, my arrogance ballooned out of all control. I insulted fellow classmates when they didn’t perform as well as me by rudely informing them that they had the brains of fish. It didn’t take much for an impressionable young boy to become big-headed when all he ever heard was constant praise.

  CHAPTER 2

  Adolescence is a confusing period for most, and I was no different. I found myself struggling with a new attraction towards girls. Up to this point, I had only interacted with them in the classroom. I had never had a girl as a close friend, let alone been intimate with one. I became overwhelmed by my increasing attraction to these peculiar creatures. My body tensed the very second I began to talk to them and I began experiencing massive sexual urges for which I had no outlet. Sex education was unheard of back then and this left me ill-equipped to deal with these changes. Adults mistakenly believed that by openly talking about the facts of life they would encourage adolescent promiscuity, so the topic was extremely taboo. Instead, we would leak misleading information among ourselves—like the blind leading the blind.

  Looking back, it makes sense that my first sexual experience was with another boy. Anan, one of my closest friends, initiated our journey into this unknown amatory world. We had been chatting in my family’s storage house in the middle of our big orchard when suddenly, without warning, Anan began rubbing me through my shorts. He then unzipped them and started to fondle my penis until it became hard. In the past, he had already teasingly grabbed my private parts, as boys often do in jest; however, this time he had a hungry look, and his fondling was more deliberate and serious. He clumsily began to undress me—I didn’t know what to expect. I became highly aroused and completely yielded to his advances. So I helped him take off my remaining garments. He then rubbed his naked body against mine, making sure to focus particular attention on the contact of our genitalia. We squirmed excitedly and in unison as we stroked each other’s penises until we both ejaculated. I was 13-years-old.

  Not long after, I found another outlet to deal with my sexual urges via chak wao, or ‘flying a kite.’ This name for masturbation is derived from the repetitive motion of letting the string pass in and out of your hands as you fly a kite. With the help of pornographic magazines, my friends and I secretly competed to see who’d climax first. The most exciting chak wao experiences took place in the classroom. I lusted after Sai, a beautiful female teacher in her twenties who often wore fitting shirts and short skirts. She never seemed to notice her power to distract me as I stared at her beautiful smooth thighs. My fierce desires didn’t go unnoticed by Khomsan, a close friend whose desk was beside mine. He would stealthily reach under the table, take hold of my erect member, and begin to rub it. I tried to remain calm and exhibit a nonchalant expression as he deftly worked my penis through my school shorts. He had me so worked up that it never took long for Khomsan to reach his goal.

  Shortly before turning 14 I started seeing Sirin, my first girlfriend. She left a crumpled letter in my desk drawer, describing a dream she had about us playing together in a shallow creek near our school. Sirin was a conservative girl, yet the dream note, while innocent, was also suggestive. Looking at her budding breasts and delicate, nubile features, I found myself consumed with desire. I’d grown tired of chak wao and I wanted Sirin to be my first lover. But although I was filled with desire, I never so much as touched her, and this was only because I didn’t know the first thing about male-female interactions.

  One summer, I was asked to house-sit during the school break for my paternal grandparents in downtown Sisaket while they were on business in another province. By then, my father had reconciled with his parents over his relationship with Mae. Ama and Agong were a big part of my life and had always been extremely kind to me. The house became a popular gathering place for my friends. Loed, one of our teachers who was in his thirties, used to frequently ride his motorcycle over to visit us. He would always come bearing gifts such as som tam (a type of papaya salad), grilled chicken, sticky rice, and money.

  My friends warned me jokingly by calling him a tut, which was a slang term for an effeminate man. However, they would also call him tua dut, slang for a man who sucks another man’s penis. So I knew exactly what these visits might entail. Surprisingly, a few of them boasted that they’d been to his house looking to release their pent-up sexual energy, and make money in the process. Apparently, he gave each boy one hundred baht per visit, which was a big amount of money for a country teenager at the time. My friends joked, ‘Don’t worry. You won’t get pregnant! There’ll be no evidence! It is a win/win situation. The teacher gets what he wants and so do we!’

  He courted us as a group and befriended us in a caring manner; then he began to single us out one by one, inviting us to his place.

  When it was my turn to be summoned to Loed’s, he quickly ordered me to undress, shower, and wait for him in the bedroom. I quaked at the thought of what was about to transpire. I considered making a run for it, b
ut I was overwhelmed with curiosity and desire at the thought of him performing fellatio on me. My friends had informed me of his unique talents while leaving many blanks unfilled, thus creating a longing in me to find out what was so good. In addition, I didn’t want to have to later confess to my friends that I’d chickened out. In my heart I knew it was wrong for a grown man to act in this way with me, a 15-year-old, but nevertheless I awkwardly lay down on the bed and waited. Loed positioned himself beside me and started stroking my penis expertly. I didn’t reciprocate as I was paralysed by guilt and fear. He then began to masturbate himself, before lowering his head to pleasure me with his mouth. I squeezed my eyes shut wanting to concentrate on the pleasure itself and not on the source of it. I became aroused. The sensation became intense; it was as if electrical currents were racing through my body. With every touch, my muscles contracted and twisted in absolute delight. He was bringing me a form of sensual gratification that I had never experienced.

  At one point I took a peek at Loed and realised the reality of the situation—an effeminate teacher was molesting me. Not wanting to lose the sensations he provided, I pulled back emotionally and began to think about Sai, my sexy, short-skirted teacher. I imagined it was her luscious lips that were wrapped around my manhood, and with that I exploded into his mouth.

  After he finished, Loed dressed and handed me my clothes.

  ‘I like your facial expressions.’

  I wasn’t sure what he meant at first.

  ‘The way your eyelids fluttered while I was satisfying you . . . I liked it a lot,’ he continued.

  He then reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a small bundle of notes.

  ‘Here’s 100 baht for visiting me. No one is to know about this though. It’s our secret. Whenever you need money you’re welcome to come over!’

  I took the money and left his house feeling pleased with myself. This tenuous connection to an adult made me feel important somehow.

  Over the following years, whenever we wanted money for nice meals, cigarettes, alcohol, or movie tickets, we paid Loed a visit. We found it both freakish and amusing that a grown man was so attracted to young boys. Looking back on those visits, I can’t really say that the teacher molested me because I remember the incidents as being more like business transactions. I was never attracted to Loed, but continued to see him and simply filled my mind with images of beautiful girls while he fondled me. I know that it was definitely wrong of him to take advantage of me, but then again, you can’t clap with one hand; I can’t deny that I was a participant. Perhaps these experiences contributed to how disastrously my life eventually turned out. It does seem plausible that there’s a link between my later career choices and those early transactions with my so-called teacher.

  Sin, a boy in my coterie of friends, became a regular partner of another male teacher named Pisut from our school. Unlike Loed, who rotated his affections, Pisut had a monogamous arrangement with Sin who confided that he was liked because he was well-endowed. Like the rest of us, Sin looked on the arrangement as a business deal, and one from which he made a handsome profit. Sadly, none of us took into account the incalculable cost all this was incurring to our innocence.

  You could say that my village was somewhat lawless. Occasionally men were killed and women raped—all off the record, naturally. Family members or witnesses of such crimes rarely approached the police because they were afraid of being labelled a traitor. Even when they did have the courage to make a report to the police, they weren’t very helpful afterwards, preferring not to get involved. The criminals in question were usually gang members who nobody wanted to mess with, and the practice of turning a blind eye only emboldened them.

  Knowing that injustices wouldn’t be dealt with, a group of villagers took action after a gunman killed a prominent citizen in broad daylight. They chased the offender down in the street and savagely attacked him, before turning him over to the police and thus forcing them to press charges.

  To me, the police were amongst the worst wrongdoers. Growing up, I heard stories, whispered over drinks, of policemen raping village women and others they’d taken into custody. Others would blatantly abuse their position by asking girls to sleep with them. These girls often consented either out of fear or because of an ambition to become a policeman’s wife. The police were also notorious for helping the big guys cover up their tracks and for accepting bribes in return for making ‘it’ all go away—whatever ‘it’ might be.

  Many of the villagers owned M16s. From a young age, I was privy to the details of the weapons smuggling along the Thai/Cambodian border. Thai merchants developed relationships with the Khmer Rouge by trading legal goods in order to open the way for other dealings. Once a sense of trust had been established, the Cambodians began selling guns to the Thais—mind you, many of these same weapons had originally been sold to the Cambodians by other Thais. Such weapons were readily available and cheap, and were sometimes even traded for liquor and cigarettes. Those who couldn’t afford the real deal made do with homemade rifles. Thanks to my mother, I was able to speak Khmer before I learnt to speak either Isan—the northeastern dialect, or Thai, our official language. My mother was of pure Cambodian descent, yet she’d been born in Thailand so she considered herself Thai. But she had the foresight to teach me basic Khmer in case I ever did business with our neighbours. In fact, the villagers usually conversed in Khmer and Isan rather than Thai.

  Security along the border was lax at best and nonexistent at worse. The Khmer Rouge and the Thais could travel freely into each other’s territory. My own village lay in close proximity to two Cambodian camps in which the inhabitants were a wild bunch. During New Year celebrations and other occasions, instead of fireworks, rounds of ammunition would be shot into the air. Under normal circumstances, Thais were generally civil to the Cambodians who shared their border.

  I saw the Khmer Rouge as normal folk in every respect except for one—I was convinced they had enormous stashes of guns hidden in their bases. I accompanied my father to these villages on a number of occasions when he had produce to sell to them. They were in the process of trying to fight back Heng Samrin’s soldiers, yet their camp was always open and unguarded. I witnessed many boys my own age carrying guns that were bigger than themselves. In my naiveté I thought they looked cool.

  Occasionally fighting broke out on the Cambodian side between the Khmer Rouge and Heng Samrin’s soldiers. My classmates, hearing volleys of gunshots being exchanged, would glibly joke that surely it was only a matter of time before the artillery found its way over to us.

  My parents owned a large plot of land, which was given to them by my maternal grandparents. They had occupied the land, having been among the earliest settlers in my village. Mae’s father had earned himself the nickname ‘Tiger’ on account of his desperado lifestyle. He was once a member of a bandit gang that made regular forays across Phanom Dongrak Mountain, into Cambodia. They would loot Cambodian villages and take whatever they could carry off with them, from fermented fish to cash.

  Many of my grandfather’s friends were either killed or jailed over the years. On one particular looting mission, one of Ta’s friends was killed by a Cambodian sniper, causing Ta to abandon the criminal lifestyle long before I was born. He initially occupied a vast area of land but he gradually sold it off over the years at a very small profit. The land’s infertility, the poor roads leading to it, and bad irrigation ensured that no great financial earnings were to be had.

  I don’t remember Ta being the criminal type, but rather as a conscientious worker who tended his jute farm right up to the day he passed away peacefully at the age of 84. Having Ta as a father probably explained why my mother was willing to marry a man with a shady background—she didn’t grow up in a law-abiding family at all. The family’s wild streak clearly rubbed off on her because once, in a fit of rage, she chased my father with a butcher’s knife after s
he found out that he’d cheated on her with a younger woman. Fortunately, nobody was hurt and my father eventually came out of hiding. He pleaded her for forgiveness, claiming that as a man it was only natural for him to want other women.

  ‘That’s what men do,’ he said.

  At the front of our grocery store we had a bamboo bench and a table where customers were free to sit and enjoy themselves while drinking rice wine. Books and teachers at school all claimed drinking was a terrible vice, yet as a child my impression of alcohol was that it bound people together in happiness. Drinking and gambling were the main sources of entertainment for farmers during the dry season when farm work ceased, and my family was no exception.

  I wonder if a tendency towards certain addictions is genetic because my father’s father was also a heavy gambler. Unfortunately, I’ve far surpassed my entire family in terms of addiction. My first taste of gambling came when I was about ten years old. I took great pride in beating the adults at games of chess on which bets were always placed. At the time, it was more the adrenaline charge of winning that drew me towards betting rather than the financial reward. My parents loved to play the underground lottery and muay tu, which were the televised boxing matches. The TV station Channel 7 used to broadcast live kickboxing matches and villagers would place their bets on either the red or the blue fighter. This type of game was a particular crowd-pleaser, and neighbours would congregate in front of our TV set, drinking and smoking heavily while they heartily cheered.