Travels in the Skin Trade: Tourism and the Sex Industry by Jeremy Seabrook

Author:Jeremy Seabrook [Seabrook, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Developing & Emerging Countries, Social Science, Political Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780745317571
Google: CDwEAQAAIAAJ
Goodreads: 1673302
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 1997-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

STORIES FROM A SEX INDUSTRY

I

The elderly woman works in a hotel. She wears a green smock and carries a dustpan and brush to sweep up the dust that collects in insubstantial grey curls and the cigarette butts that have left marks in the plastic floor covering. Her face is creased, her back slightly stooped. As she makes the beds in the room, the sheets form a white floating canopy in the air before coming to rest symmetrically on the base of the bed. Some of the mattresses beneath are stained, the ragged flowers of one form of incontinence or another.

Once she was in the bars, 20 years ago or more. She had plenty of boyfriends. Many Americans used to come then. They were generous. She had a baby with one of them, a little girl, half Thai, half American. Very beautiful. Suay, suay. But she worked in a bar. Her mother was in the village. She was sick. She could not leave the child with her. She gave her away to foreigners, people whom the American knew. They came to Bangkok, they came to the village. They were rich people. She didn’t want to part from her baby, but what could she do? She had to look after her mother. The man and woman who took her, they got papers, everything was done properly. She received no money. She never heard from them after they disappeared with her child.

‘Now I am old’, she says, ‘who will look after me?’ Every baby she sees, she looks at, thinking it might have been her own. But of course she is now a grown woman. It is no use looking at babies, she would have to look at women in their mid-twenties; sometimes, when she sees a woman of mixed race, she wonders. But she would surely not come back from America; no one comes back from America. Does she even know she has a mother, a mother who thinks about her every day? The people who took her promised to write, to send pictures. Nothing came. The father went back to America. She never heard from him again. The tears in her eyes do not fall but spread in the wrinkles of her old face, forming a damp patch on the cheek.

II

The boy in the park works in a Bangkok bar. He is also an athlete. Every day he comes at twilight in his dark blue silk suit, strips down to a white singlet and pale blue shorts. He wheels and leaps into the air, exulting in the youth and energy of his body.

An old Chinaman sits on a concrete bench each evening when the young man is due; a skinny, skeletal figure, leaning on a stick. The boy never looks at him but stares straight ahead as though absorbed by his daily practice. The old man looks at him with an intensity that equals the boy’s efforts to avoid his gaze. The athlete nevertheless seems to seek a greater perfection under the eye of the unacknowledged spectactor.

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