The Naked Tourist by Lawrence Osborne

Author:Lawrence Osborne
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780865477094
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2007-06-12T04:00:00+00:00

Before long, I was making daily trips to Bumungrad Hospital to get my malaria, hepatitis, and dengue fever shots. To be nearer the hospital, I moved to the Conrad Hilton on Wireless Road and made the commute on foot. I would go there even when I didn’t have to.

I couldn’t help becoming intrigued by the recently changed SRSs wandering around Bumungrad Hospital. They were “tourists” too, in essence. They could even be called the quintessential tourists of our age. They set off looking for a transformation—and boy did they find it. Every afternoon I sat in the Bumrungrad cafés, playing the game of spot-the-sex-change. The SRS unit attached to Bumrungrad is called the Preecha Aesthetic Institute, named for Asia’s most famous plastic surgeon, Dr. Preecha Tiewtranon. Dr. Preecha, as he is popularly known, is also perhaps the world’s most famous SRS surgeon, a legend among transsexuals in the West. Preecha’s teams turn out a veritable production line of SRS patients. A fair number of these walking metamorphoses were to be found amid the recovering transplant patients and liposuction beneficiaries, and they were happy to tell me about their experiences with Dr. Preecha. None had a bad word to say about him. He was “the god” of SRS surgery, a “savior,” a sort of enlightened, kindly surgical Buddha. But he was also a prince of the beauty trade. Dr. Preecha, they said, had the eye. Although I had resolved not to go through the predictable routines of a journalistic interview with anyone, I decided to make an exception for Dr. Preecha. In a strange way, I was sure he would provide a critical insight into the inner workings of the Bangkok tourist machine.

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