Boring girl issues

My new ‘straight’ friend looked at me, horrified. Did I really mean what I just said?

Yes, I did. So I said it again.

‘I have deleted your phone number since we spoke last,’ I said.

I must have been in a nasty mood, because this is just not done. You don’t delete your own friend’s phone number! Yet we are not that close. He is just imagining things. He is my ‘straight’ friend who happens to like men, but won’t admit it to himself.

A freelance graphic designer, Chin has money, his own car, plenty of freedom.

His Chinese-Thai parents expect him to find a girl. He wants one, too, because as far as he is concerned, he’s straight. But at 31, his time is running out.

Chin lives with his grandmother nearby. His parents are divorced. His mother has met a new man and now works in Malaysia.

Chin sees more of his Dad, who worries about how the family inheritance will be passed down, if his son fails to find a girl, get married and have children the way his parents did before him.

He dates younger girls, and some of the relationships go for a stretch. But he has yet to find the girl of his dreams…maybe because they look at him, and ask what’s missing.

Why does this boy like playing football, and talk so much like a real man – but look so sensitive, and well, gay? He’s an only child, reads comic books, and likes cooking. He went to Bangkok Christian College, and Abac university. His English is excellent.

The last time we met, at Mum’s shop, Chin asked for my phone number. I gave it, and called him several times over the next few days. He called me, too.

But then there were the unanswered calls, and half a dozen text messages which failed to find a mate. So I deleted him…scratched him off my list of potential admirers.

The night we met, I was sitting at Mum’s shop, reading and serving customers. He ordered a beer, and sat next to me with a handful of comic books. He said nothing for the first half hour, until I asked him what he found so interesting in them.

He loves the Japanese ones, he said – and showed me how to read them, from the back to the front, and right to left, the way Japanese read their language.

These ones were imported with the speech bubbles left empty. Thai cartoon artists put a Thai language version of what the characters are saying inside the bubbles before putting the cartoons on the market.

He went to his car, which he had parked across the road, and brought back a few more comic books – on cooking, no less.

‘When I read these, it’s almost as good as eating the real thing,’ he said.

His next most passionate interest is how to find a girl.

Unprompted by me, he said: 'I'm not gay. I hope you are not, either.'

What, is that the secret password to enter a Boy's Own world, where real men swap tales about those Great Unknowables - women?

No need for such secrecy...we were drinking alone.

That small formality out of the way, we spent most of the next four hours talking about Thai girls.

He told me his tricks. Rather than going out with his male friends to look for girls, as most guys do, Chin prefers to go alone to lounge bars.

He finds a girl he likes, they talk. When he goes back next time, they talk again, and eventually he might ask her out. But it’s expensive: at a lounge bar, he can get through B2,000 a night, just on alcohol.

When he is not working, he is chasing girls, or seeing his university friends, with whom he drinks and plays football.

That’s why he didn’t return my messages and calls, he said.

‘I’m too busy,’ he said, while scrolling through a lengthy list of numbers in his cellphone memory. My contact number was but one number in there among many.

Chin has a modern, expensive phone, and keeps pictures of his latest girlfriend in a laptop computer. He keeps the laptop in his car, but brought it out to show me his latest love interest.

I have a plain phone, and the list of numbers in there probably does not exceed 10. I do not own a laptop computer, still less a car. But I do have English, and am willing to listen to him practise the language.

Chin and I have now met twice. The second time, we spoke about two hours. As I went to leave, I told him the hurtful news that I had deleted his phone number from my memory, so would not call him again.

After getting over that shock, he told me he would buy two more beers to drink at home.

'You can drink alone?’ I asked.

‘Yes. I might just drink one, and leave the other for another day,’ he said, looking lonely.

'Fine...off you go, then,' I thought to myself. Is there another secret code for closing a conversation about women?

I didn't wait to hear it. I left.