Stranded with no money in Bangkok

Last night was the night before pay day. I was down to my last B50 baht, after giving boyfriend Maiyuu money at lunch.

I get paid every two weeks. Sometimes it is hard to make the money stretch, especially as I am supporting one other (the boyfriend).

He has worked half a dozen times or more in the last month, but he, too, does not get paid until the end of the month.

Yesterday he asked for money to buy cooking ingredients, and looked disappointed when I handed him just B200.

After work last night, I waited for a bus to take me home. It was due at 11.30pm but by 11.45pm, it had still not arrived.

The last bus of the evening had evidently decided not to turn up. I did not have enough money to get home by taxi, but that was the only way I was to get there.

I walked to a nearby ATM to check my balance. I did not have enough to make a withdrawal.

I called the boyfriend. 'Do you have B50 to pay the taxi if I catch one home?'

'No, it's all gone.'

I called a trader in the market where I live. She makes an order of food for me every night, which I pick up after I return from work.

'Can I borrow B50?' I asked.

This was embarrassing. I didn't even know her name, but desperate situations call for desperate measures.

I was stuck on a dusty motorway in an industrial zone of Bangkok. I was hot, and I wanted to go home.

'Of course,' she said.

On the way home, the boyfriend called to say he had borrowed the taxi fare from kathoey Bic, who lives upstairs.

When I arrived outside the condo, he was standing there waiting. He looked irritated, but forgave me.

'You should try saving money instead of buying drinks for handsome guys at Mum's shop,' he said.

I walked to the trader's stall, which is under a large canvas opposite my condo, and thanked her for her trouble.

'I won't need it any more...we borrowed the money from a friend,' I said.

A mother in her 50s, the trader looked disappointed that she was not able to help. 'I kept looking at the road, wondering when you would get out of the taxi, so I could race over with the money,' she said.

Her husband, who works with her, laughed.

This is not the first time they have come to my aid. Once, in the early hours of the morning before their shop had closed, her husband took me on the back of his motorbike deep into a soi (street) nearby to find an after-hours pharmacy - really, an ordinary shophouse - when I had run out of medicine for a headache.

Today, now that my pay has come out, I shall buy them flowers by way of thanks.

Master negotiator (2, final)

We took the girls back to their spot on the sidewalk.

They asked for B200 for wasting their time. Farang C ignored their request.

'I don't think you really want to do this,' I told farang C. 'Some of the girls are not pretty. Others look too young. You could lose you wallet.'

He agreed, and we abandoned the idea.

Kew was unhappy that he could not help farang C. 'You farang, you just want pup, pup pup!' he shouted. He brought the palms of his hands together in a pumping action, referring to sex, of course.

Farang C did not understand what was going on, which was just as well.

'Kew, please be good,' I said firmly from the front seat.

He fell silent.

I took Kew home. Earlier in the evening, as we drank at Mum's shop in Thon Buri, Kew told me that he had been diagnosed with a lung disease.

He had been to the doctor, who tested his blood. He was going back for a fuller diagnosis this week.

Kew, who is 24, has smoked since he was 15, and smoked again as we sat at Mum's shop.

'Will you miss me if I am no longer here?' he asked.

I stroked the back of his head. 'Of course.'

Kew wanted me to call the next day, so he could take me to his place of work. He now works for a firm close to my home, where he interviews workers for factory jobs.

Previously, he worked as a security guard, and before that as a bar boy in Pattaya.

He also wanted me to accompany him to hospital later in the week, to see his doctor.

When I called the next day, he did not answer. When I called the next day, his cellphone had been disconnected. Maybe he forgot to pay his bill.

I don't know what to think about Kew any more.

'If you wanted him to be your boyfriend, he would probably let you,' farang C told me later. 'He does the little-boy-lost act very well.'

It is interesting to get a foreign friend's perspective on Thai friends I have known for years. Thais who meet Kew are unimpressed. They think he looks rough and unscrupulous.

Where money is concerned, he does have a ruthless streak. However, where friends are concerned, he also has a soft side.

He calls me every few weeks, and often it is not about money. 'Don't worry, my doctor's visits are covered by health insurance,' he told me at Mum's shop.

Maybe he just wanted a free night out. I paid for his drinks and food, as I normally do.

If I ran out of money, and pulled the plug, would he still keep calling?

Master negotiator (1)

'Get out of the way!'

That was farang C. He and bad-boy Kew, my Thai friend who is aged in his mid-20s but finds it hard to grow up, were wrestling in the back seat of a taxi.

We were kerb-crawling, as the Americans say. Farang C, who was drunk, had expressed an interest in sleeping with a girl, but did not want to spend much money.

Kew, a former bar boy in Pattaya, was keen to impress upon my friend farang C how clever he was at negotiating with girls of the night.

When he worked in Pattaya, foreign and Thai women alike had 'off-ed' him, so he knew how these things worked.

He gave the driver directions, and we headed off to Wong Wian Yai in Bangkok, where girls of the night ply their trade from the sidewalk (along with Pin Khlao bridge, outside Thammasat University, and various other spots).

The taxi knew where to go, as customers in search of female company had taken him there before.

The girls gathered in groups of four or five, spread over a 100m stretch. Each time we came upon a small group, Kew, who was on the driver's side, told the taxi to stop. Then he would lean across the back seat and call to the girls out the window.

Farang C, who was sitting closest to the girls, could not see them, because Kew's body was blocking the view. Kew had to lean across farang C to bargain with the girls from the window on his side.

'I can't see if they are pretty or not, because his body is in the way,' he complained.

Some girls came over for a better look at who was in the taxi. Others just called out from where they were sitting.

Kew negotiated over prices, and the number of girls. At each stop, he asked for two girls, and offered them B450-500, which included the tariff for a short-stay hotel.

'Some girls will only let you do it once, or you have to pay again,' said Kew.

I assume that is why he asked for two girls. Maybe he wanted to sleep with one, too. He can't possibly have thought I was interested.

In the end, he found two girls who agreed on his price. Kew took us to a short-stay hotel, which I had recalled seeing many years before, but only in passing.

The taxi took us up an off-road ramp, and into the back of the hotel. It stopped, and farang C, the girls and Kew went in to the office.

Five minutes later, they were back. 'We don't serve foreigners,' said the owner, a man in his 50s told us. He came out accompanied by the others.

We left. Traffic on the ramp is one way, so we kept going the same way we came up.

It took us past many small, squalid-looking rooms. Outside their room, customers can park their car. If they don't want their vehicle to be recognised, they can draw a large curtain across the vehicle to conceal it.

now, see part 2

Me, new phase, Thai life!

The boyfriend is back, after two days at work. His employer alters or adapts clothes, lampshades, and shoes to order.

Customers bring in clothing or furniture items, wanting braid, flowers or other decorative bits and pieces put on them. Can do!

That information is more than six months old, dating from the last time I asked the boyfriend about his work.

When he goes to work, he tends to go for at least a day and night. This time, he went for two days and two nights. He sleeps over at his boss's place.

I tried calling a few times on the phone, but he was too busy to answer. Until recently, we sent text messages to each other. I used to send one just before coming home from work, prompting him to do whatever household tasks I asked him to perform while away, such as washing the dishes.

Now, I don't bother. I know the job will get done eventually, and life is made of bigger things.

We must have reached a new level of understanding in our relationship, where we both know that those tiresome SMS messages are no longer necessary.

Apart from that, I have made a new farang friend at work, who calls regularly at night, after our shifts end and we have returned home.

We work the same shifts, on the same days. We have hit it off, even though he is irredeemably straight. We have been drinking at Mum's shop a couple of times, and talk almost every night during the working week.

He is the first foreigner I have befriended from work in years - maybe the first ever. Before, I turned up my nose at the company of foreigners. I wanted to immerse myself in Thai life, so all my friends became Thai.

Later, I realised that this was not working. Most of my Thai friends are at least 10 years younger, are still studying, or busy carving out careers.

We have nothing in common, outside Mum's shop.

When Thais see two farang, laughing and enjoying themselves, they want to join in the fun.

They come over, hold up their glass, and say 'Cheers!'

We clink glasses - then they walk back to their drinking table, to rejoin the relative safety of their Thai friends.

My Thai friends and I talk better when my farang friend has gone home, and we are alone. But I don't call my Thai friends during the week, and they rarely call me.

Before, I relied on the boyfriend for company, when not with my drinking friends at Mum's shop. Now, thank God, I have found someone else, who couldn't give a toss about my boyfriend, or life outside work.

We haven't reached that topic yet. We are still too busy talking about life in the West, good novels, work, our shared profession...

Thai halfie threat

The company where I work is taking on more Thai-Caucasians, which might be a bad thing.

Thai half-breeds - look kreung in the local vernacular - are a potential threat to foreign migrant labourers such as myself.

Thais born to foreign parents have a distinctive look. They also tend to have good English language skills.

Like most foreigners working in Thailand, I am employed for my native English skills. Some employers hire foreigners no matter what their background or experience, as long as they have English.

My company is guilty of that sin occasionally, but on the whole tries to hire people with relevant experience and qualifications, like me.

It is obliged to do so under the labour law, but that is almost beside the point. This is Thailand, after all.

Employing foreigners involves paperwork and expense. If my company could find fluent English speakers among Thais, it would not need me.

That is why I regard the presence of look kreung in the office as a potential threat. I don't want one to supplant my job one day because he happens to have been educated overseas.

I am not privy to this company's employment strategy. Beyond the small corner of the huge open-space office which I occupy, I know little of what is going on. But I have noticed more young Thai look kreung wandering into my ambit of vision.

I saw one just now, dressed in scruffy jeans and a dark patterned shirt. 'You know what's going to happen on Monday,' he said in a broad American-accented drawl.

He was talking to a Thai guy in his 20s who wears a telephone earpiece all day. At any moment, he can start talking to himself, as he sits in front of his computer. That's what it looks like, anyway. 

This young man gets many visits from look kreung staff, perhaps because they work in the same specialist area.

They do creative, design-oriented tasks. As a mere migrant labourer, I just fix people's English.

No look kreung have yet penetrated my department, perhaps because fixing English is not seen as glamorous enough.

Some look kreung have lousy Thai, maybe because they spent too long overseas, or lost interest in their language while they were there. They insert so many English words into their Thai that they may as well make the change to talking wholly in English.

Do employers consider this lack of Thai fluency a drawback among look kreung? I have no idea.

If they work together, and have limited contact with Thai-speaking staff, then possibly not.

I suspect they are paid more than ordinary Thais without their English language skills, but less than foreign workers for whom English is their native tongue.

If the company could find more of them to hire, I am sure it would. I cannot assume that my skills will be needed forever.