Well, in the latest bizarre turn on events, Richard called me up yesterday and asked how I’d feel about being on the cover of Farang magazine (a Thai travel magazine targeted at backpackers)…they want me for the cover of their January issue (!). Needless to say, I said yes…so he’s put together a sample to send to them, and in a few days I should know if I’m going to be a cover girl or not. I’m pretty sure I will be, though–it’s a damn impressive photo. (Unfortunately I couldn’t get it on my web page due to technical problems–hopefully will work them out in cambodia.)

Tien

So, I’ve been spending a few quiet days in Bangkok taking care of little stuff before heading out on the Grand Tour…two weeks Cambodia, two weeks Vietnam, two weeks Laos, two weeks on the Burmese border working with at-risk hilltribe daughters, then to Chiang Mai and back down to Bangkok, thence to India. At least, that’s the plan…

I’ve been reading a book written by a Cambodian survivor of the Khmer Rouge, a woman my age named Loung Ung. It’s titled _First They Killed My Father_, ISBN 0-0609-3138-8, and is about her family’s attempts to survive through the five years of the Khmer Rouge. (She’s now in America, working for the Campaign for a Landmine Free World.)

What’s striking to me about the book is the ordinariness of it: starving is matter-of-fact, a piece of daily life. There’s one passage where she talks about how rations gradually decrease, until the rice gruel becomes rice soup. She is seven or eight, and she eats the broth a little at a time throughout the day, starting with the watery stuff at the top, hoarding the grains of rice at the bottom to eat last, knowing there will be no more food the rest of the day. She helps her mother in the shrimp farm; one day her mother calls her over and quickly, surreptitiously, hands her a small handful of mud, weeds, and live baby shrimp. She crams the handful–mud, raw wriggling shrimp, and all–into her mouth quickly, before anyone notices, then stands watch as her mother does the same. This isn’t abnormal; this is how life is. She remembers when it was different, and she hates the Khmer Rouge, but today, it’s how life is.

It reminds me of some of my talks with survivors of domestic violence. I used to wonder how people survived ten or twenty years (or even a few weeks) of abuse–but the answer is, it’s not ten years; it’s a week, a day, an hour. It’s ordinary. At any given time, you do what you can to make your life better, given the choices you have. Sometimes the choices are awful–many battered women, for example, know they’ll be beaten sometime over the weekend. So they deliberately provoke violence on Friday night–because that gives them the entire weekend for the bruises to heal, so they have a better chance of hiding them come Monday. Others return to their abusers because between losing their children (they can’t support them on a single wage) and being battered, being battered is better. Logical choices; crazy situation.

So anyway, what strikes me about this book is that it’s the same thing: it’s how even atrocity becomes ordinary. The Khmer Rouge soldiers come, take away fathers and entire families, and kill them. Those left behind don’t talk about it, and don’t show their grief, or they’ll be taken too. It’s ordinary. It’s survival. It’s perfectly normal people, trying to survive in a perfectly insane world.

This is also part of the whole third world travel theme–not in as terrible a way, of course, but the poverty here hasn’t bothered me as much as I thought it would. I think it’s because it’s not poverty, exactly–it’s “normal”. So there are street beggars, people with all their ribs showing lying in the dirty aisles of the marketplace, or with their skin rotting away from leprosy (I passed one last night in Patpong), or more prosaically women begging with their babies at the train stops. But, to the passersby, it’s normal, no more horrifying than (say) a homeless guy in Palo Alto. People in rural areas often live in corrugated tin shacks, but it’s not horrifying poverty–it’s simply how life is. It’s a different way of living. (Makes you think seriously about just exactly what “normal” and “good” are–does luxury really make that much difference, or is it just a slightly more comfortable way of re-ordering the social hierarchy? Relationships between rich and poor seem much the same throughout the world, regardless of whether “rich” means $200K/year and a Mercedes, or a tile roof rather than corrugated tin.)

* * *

To make up for the depressing reading, I’ve spent the last two days bar-hopping. (Hey, last chance before going to Cambodia…!) Two nights ago I went to see Calypso, the famous transvestite cabaret. Forget classical dance–you have not lived until you’ve seen Thai transvestite Marilyn Monroes (three of them!) dancing onstage with Michael Jacksons (also in triplicate) and a triple Tina Turner–all Thai transvestite professional dancers. It will seriously blow your mind.

They did a 1.5-hour number covering virtually every tourist culture–one Chinese piece, one Japanese, one Korean, a couple of American (Britney Spears, believe it or not 😉 ), and even a French version of “Vive L’amour” at the end. The “girls” are serious about being girls–most of them have had breast implants, and except for the overly slim hips, you’d never know they were male. They’re also pretty darn good professional dancers. I had some photos taken with them–will post once I get a chance.

Anyway, Calypso was two nights ago. I spent last night in the Barbican, an expat bar in Patpong (one of the two major red-light districts in Bangkok). The Barbican is located on Soi Taniya, which is largely Japanese sex clubs–a crowded alley of neon signs, with pretty Asian women lounging around in evening gowns and skimpy lingerie, beckoning to passersby, and a well-dressed man standing beside every door, holding a battered piece of posterboard with forty or fifty female photos on it. Luxury cars with darkened windows pull up and disgorge fat, happy Japanese businessmen, who vanish into the clubs; if you aren’t Japanese, or escorted by one, you won’t be allowed in. The Barbican is one of the few non-Japanese places on the street, and is very popular with Western professional expats.

Think about that for a moment. When was the last time you saw a popular professional bar in the red-light district of any city in the U.S.? But in Thailand prostitution isn’t like that…in fact “prostitution” isn’t the right translation at all, since in English it carries connotations of criminal sleaziness that aren’t quite right for Thailand. It’s not that prostitution is respectable–it decidedly isn’t–but it’s not treated as criminal/dangerous either, as it is in the U.S. (I think this is because the idea of sin and retribution aren’t linked in Buddhist philosophy, as it is in Christian theology; sin and crime are considered a karmic matter, i.e. carrying its own punishment, not something that needs to be judged/punished from outside.)

At any rate, Patpong, girlie bars and all, is one of the major tourist areas of Bangkok, with little old European ladies and tourist couples shopping in the night market, five and six year olds along, right next to the girlie and expat bars, street beggars, etc.. Designer ripoffs, beautiful women, begging lepers, neon signs, street vendors, trendy bars, dance clubs, and sleazy brothels all crammed into narrow sois (alleys). While I’m not sure I’d support the girlie bars (the sex trade is worth an entire essay in itself), it is certainly a unique experience, unlike anything else you’ll find in Bangkok–definitely worth a stop.

At any rate, Kaew (a Thai friend, female, I met early in my sojourn in Thailand) and I went off to the Barbican together, to hang out and maybe meet up with Ben and some other folks.

I met some very interesting expats in the Barbican–which is a little too loud for good conversation, but passable with efort. Probably of no interest to any of you, but some very interesting conversation re national identity, being a foreigner in Thailand, Thai business culture, etc.–may write a bit about it later, if I have time. it is certainly making me rethink my perspective on integration; looking at the Westerner enclaves, I think I have a better understanding of why some Chinese immigrants choose to live in Chinatown and not integrate into American society (something I had never really understood, as my parents chose to integrate).

At any rate, in Thailand, if you’re Caucasian, you are farang (foreign) whether or not you were born there–much, much more so than Asians are considered alien in the U.S.. So cultural identity for Western expats is a complex thing; they may consider Thailand home, but they’re expats, not immigrants, and retain their Western identification. This is encouraged/enforced by Thai, who welcome them as residents/guests–but never Thai, not part of Thailand even if they’ve lived there for decades. My “feel” is that European cultures are like that too, though to a lesser degree; the U.S. is unusual in emphasizing ideology/culture so heavily over race and national origin. (One of the cultural things I have noticed here–in the U.S. kinship is ideological, which is to say that if you share the same values, you are family; in Asia, kinship is by blood–one doesn’t worry about ideology, it’s all about relationships.) I do feel somewhat alienated as an Asian in America, but not nearly as alienated as Caucasians in Thailand must feel.

Moving on…

After Barbican’s (where I left Kaew trying to pick up a cute Swedish expat–have to call her to see if she succeeded 😉 ), I stopped briefly through a girlie bar called “King’s Castle III”. This had been recommended as being populated primarily by transsexual women. (Apparently most of the tourist customers don’t know this–my contact thought that particularly amusing, so do I.) I think she must have been referring to the show dancers, not the regular workers–either that, or they’re better than I thought, since I couldn’t tell the difference. Anyway, it was a pretty standard girlie bar, which is to say both boring and depressing–a bunch of bored-looking women standing on a stage in black bikinis, waiting for men to pick them out, with loud blaring music and a lot of equally-bored-looking men sitting around the edges of the room. (Why do people go to these places, anyway?) I sat down and was immediately accosted by two or three women wanting me to buy them drinks.

The one who finally sat down by me (I did buy her a drink, mostly to fend off the others) chattered incessantly–unfortunately, between the loud music and the heavy accent, I couldn’t make out more than one word in five. I rather wish I could have had a longer conversation with her, as she was quite friendly and spoke pretty good English (from the words I could make out), but I wouldn’t have been able to understand her unless we went someplace quieter. This, however, would have required “renting” her for the evening–which would have led to a whole other set of probable misunderstandings (and politics) which I didn’t want to touch.

I do remember that she was happy because (for some reason i couldn’t make out) she was finally able to quit after three years–she was only planning to work for two more weeks–and was apparently engaged, though they hadn’t set a wedding date yet. (This is part of what I meant in Thailand, about prostitution not being respectable but not criminally unrespectable either–it’s perfectly possible for women to “work” and still have families afterwards, although generally CSWs aren’t married while “working”. The exception is bar boys, some of whom are supporting wives/children.) I may swing back through Patpong on my way back through Bangkok, in search of a quieter place where I can actually talk to someone.

off to run errands–tomorrow I leave for Cambodia.

Tien

So, after two months in Thailand, I’m getting ready for the grand tour of Southeast Asia: crossing to Cambodia through the land border at Poipet, two weeks in Cambodia, two weeks in Vietnam, two weeks in Laos, then back to Chiang Mai, Thailand, and two weeks of volunteer work on the Burmese border. Then I’ll be back in Bangkok for a few days before leaving for India.

In Cambodia, I’m probably going to focus on Angkor Wat, which is–from all descriptions and photos–one of the most impressive sights anywhere, and one of the top ten archaeological/historic sites in the world. Angkor Wat is one of about 100 temples in the Angkor area–at about 500 acres and about a mile on a side, it’s the biggest and most impressive one. But there are lots of other temples in the area, in many different architectural styles. The photos are stunning, and the complex itself is supposed to be more impressive than the photos. (Just as Ansel Adam’s best efforts don’t really capture Yosemite, I imagine–a photograph just can’t capture the scale.) There’s a fair amount of tourist infrastructure in Siem Reap (the gateway to Angkor), so I’m not too worried about traveling there. I plan to get a one-week entrance to Angkor and spend a week there, photographing and reading about the complex.

After Angkor, I’m planning to go to Phnom Penh, the capital–primarily to look at their Holocaust Museum. Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 suffered through the rule of Pol Pot, who (from the brief histories I’ve read) makes Hitler look positively civilized. During his brief reign, Pol Pot literally emptied the cities, slaughtered almost all the minorities in Cambodia (“ethnic cleansing”), murdered everyone with a trace of education, and destroyed most of the country’s infrastructure in an attempt to return the country to his rural ideal. (He even abolished money, because he thought barter was better.) It’s estimated that between 1/5 and 1/3 of all Cambodians died under the Khmer Rouge–many gruesomely. (Disemboweling, burying in sand, ripping to pieces, etc.) And all that was before the land mines.

So Cambodia today is still recovering from a nightmare. The roads are unpaved (“resemble a BMX track” says one guidebook), armed banditry is still a serious danger, corruption is common, there’s almost no money to do anything, and one out of every 250 Cambodians has lost a limb to landmines. There are so many landmines in the country that it’s estimated it will take 30 years or so to clear them all…since the government doesn’t have the money to do it, most of them will be “discovered” by Cambodians (thus the number of amputees). There’s very little infrastructure, and the sewage etc. systems are similarly undeveloped (back to cold showers…*sigh*). The good news is, the locals (at least the unarmed ones 😉 ) are very friendly, and the scenery’s supposed to be terrific. And, of course, there’s Angkor, one of the great sights of Asia.

(Not only that, but in Phnom Penh there’s a shooting range that will let you practice with AK-47s. Apparently you can buy them in the market there for about $20–yes, of course I’m tempted, but how on earth would I get it home??? It’s really too bad I couldn’t have brought one back to Thailand for the body painting–barbarian princess with AK47 would have been hilarious. However, I must of course try actually firing one of these things. )

Safety-wise, it’s apparently (mostly) OK to be wandering around Angkor and Phnom Penh, although they say that armed banditry is a real danger at night in Phnom Penh (no late-night bar-hopping for me in Cambodia…I’m SO disappointed… 😉 ) and that traveling outside of the three major tourist areas is strictly at one’s own risk. I plan to stay pretty much on the beaten track in Cambodia; as much fun as it would be to get kidnapped by bandits, I have a schedule to keep, so don’t plan on being sidetracked. 😉

(Actually it may not be that bad. Lonely Planet says it’s safe, Moon Handbooks says not. I’m not sure who to believe, but I figure I’ll inquire once I get there. In any event there’s almost no infrastructure, so *getting* to those places would be complicated anyway; and landmines are much more dangerous/common than bandits.)

From Cambodia, I’m moving on to Vietnam. Not sure about the itinerary there yet–it’s supposed to be very bicycle friendly, so I may try renting a bicycle and touring part of the country by bicycle. I think it’s better not to do too much preplanning, though, as, from experience, preplanning is largely useless. I’ll read through the guidebook, get an idea or two of the big attractions, and then see what turns up.

Someone remind me to write about Thai classic dance later–I spent yesterday morning watching a dancer taking lessons from her teacher, and it was really fascinating. Thai dance is a bit like T’ai Chi–in the hands of a beginner it looks mincingly overdone and a string of weird poses, but with an experienced practitioner it flows straight from the chi, and is beautiful in a very understated way. I also went to a dinner performance of Thai dance last night, but wasn’t nearly as impressed–I don’t think the dancers’ heart was in it; the teacher’s was.). I did take some good pictures of the costuming, though.

Thai dance in general seems to fit with the Thai perspective/approach, which could best be described as fitting oneself into a known format and merging with the format, whereas the Western approach is to create one’s own format. But that’s a much longer discussion, and I have to get to the Vietnamese Embassy today to get my Vietnamese visa…I’ll probably leave Bangkok early Thursday morning.

Tien

Okay, so you want to hear about the shower now, right? How I finally discovered the secret of getting hot water in Bangkok? No? Sheesh. Silly people. If you ever come to Thailand, you’ll regret not listening…but OK, fine. Have it your way…

Coming in from Chiang Mai: I arrived on the overnight train, second-class sleeper compartment. This consists of two spacious benches facing each other, each easily wide enough for two people (three if they’re friendly 😉 ). During the day, you sit on those benches. At night, the benches convert into a bottom bunk, and an overhead compartment (similar to an airplane’s overhead luggage bins) drops down to form a top bunk. (They put two straps on the top bunk to serve as railings, so you don’t accidentally fall out during the night.) This looks like a very civilized way of traveling, and is certainly better than a bus–but there’s a lot of bumping and quite a bit of light from the aisles, so it’s hard to sleep. I think next time I may shell out the extra $ and fly.

Anyway, I arrived in Bangkok, napped for a bit, then collected my fish spear, bow, big bag of assorted props, and headed out for body painting. (You would not *believe* the looks I got from the taxi driver. Apparently a 5′ rusty fish spear is not exactly standard equipment for a nice Japanese tourist lady. sheesh. what *are* these people thinking?? 😉 )

At the photographer’s studio, I unpacked my bags while waiting for Richard (the artist) to arrive. I’d done some shopping at Chatuchak Market (Bangkok’s Weekend Market, where almost anything can be purchased) and also in Chiang Mai, so the full set of props included:

1 rusty fish spear

1 four-foot bow

1 18″ jade/serpentine dagger

various small seashells

1 tribal-looking necklace ($7.50 in Chatuchak)

1 feather duster

misc. wood and silver beads

1 silver tiara

Once Richard arrived, we added an ivory opium pipe, a rusty sword, and a chunky red coral necklace to the collection.

The tiara deserves special mention, as I’m quite smug about it. It’s a jade cabochon set in sterling silver, and surrounded by sterling silver leaves. It’s my work–at least the tiara part–I made it on the way to Chiang Mai, using my Leatherman and some wire from my repair kit. It’s quite beautiful, and I’ve already decided to bring it home with me.

Anyway, Richard arrived after an hour or so, and after an hour of initial setup (which I spent wiring spiky seashells to the coral necklace, putting together test strings of feathers for my hair, and so forth) we got started on the body painting.

Richard paints with a variety of tools: airbrush, brushes, sponge, and (sometimes) fingers. The brushes put on heavy lines, with a precise edge and heavy lines; the sponge produces nice opaque coverage sans brush marks (good for large areas); the airbrush gives highlights and soft edges. Fingers are mostly good as very small-scale erasers, although for removing smudges he uses clean wedges of makeup sponge.

We argued a bit about the initial design. He convinced me that metal claws (a la Witchblade) over the breasts would be better than cobras–we could use a cobra as a figleaf over the groin. (Later, we discarded it entirely.) He wanted to do a single armored piece off the shoulder (from a book he had)–which was fine with me. We both agreed that metal spiky bits along the body would be great.

Richard didn’t like the bone necklace, saying it looked “too feminine–like a shrimp shoot”. (A “shrimp shoot” is apparently trade slang for the topless Asian girl in a sarong–think “hawaii”.)) But we left it in, since it matched the tiara.

Anyway, he roughed in the design with a pencil, then put on an initial layer of gray paint with brush and sponge. (I’ve put a number of design-in-progress photos on the page–although unfortunately there aren’t many of them; Richard was busy painting, and of course I was busy being painted. I have better work-in-progress frontal photos, but you’ll excuse me if I don’t post them. 😉 ) This was plain, flat gray; but since he mixed each small batch of color individually, there was still enough variation to make it texturally noticeable.

I have to apologize here. I know almost nothing about painting, so while it was fascinating to watch, there’s no way I can write a description of the painting process. I did think it was really neat the way the paint built up: first a flat background, then dark shadows, then highlights, then medium shadows, then more highlights, and so on. it seemed like a process of overcorrection: the highlights made it too garish, then the shadows made it too dark, and finally the last lines threw everything into sharp focus. (The jagged lines on my back, for example, are actually four or five layers of paint: base gray, white highlight, dark brushed-on shadow, airbrushed shadow, more white highlight, dark lines.)

The cobra-esque brown bits around the breasts, for example, started as very dull brown blobs, then he added scale-pattern lines in black (which moderated to dark brown as the paints mixed on the body). At this point it was still quite dull; then he added highlights in bright yellow and suddenly it popped out with real three-dimensional color. At some point he decided that the metallic “claws” over the breasts were too sharp, so blurred it with the airbrush. That kind of thing.

(He also did some minor body modifications through strategic applications of dark paint, but since I’m feeling chivalrous towards the model (i.e. me 😉 ), I’ll leave out those details. I am obviously a physically perfect goddess. Yeah, that’s the ticket. 😉 )

All in all, the painting took six hours. This was a bit of a challenge, physically speaking, because body painting is not like other kinds of painting, modeling, etc.–the model can’t take breaks. Once the paint starts going on, you can’t sit down, go to the bathroom, or anything else–because if you touch *anything* (including your own arm, underarm, etc.), the paint’s going to smudge. So as soon as you start, you’re on for the duration.

(One also has to commit to full-body Nair, as even peach-fuzz, nearly invisible body hair interferes with an airbrush. Having tried it, I will reiterate my opinion that whoever invented Nair (or its relatives) deserves a place in the same torturous hell as the inventor of high-heels. (My private opinion on how women’s fashion got started involves some gay Spanish Inquisitors undergoing career burnout–corsets are just WAY more fabulous (and just as uncomfortable) as traditional methods like thumbscrews, branding irons, and the rack. But I digress.)

Anyway, standing up for eight hours turns out to be no joke–walking for eight hours is bad enough, but for body painting you’re not walking, you’re standing there in one place without moving, so there’s no relief for your feet at all. The floor was bare hardwood, which made it even worse–fortunately, we did find a rug to put under my feet eventually (which helped some), and also some Advil (much more helpful).

We were also painting with a good bit of infrastructure. The photographer brought two helpers (they all sat around very bored for six hours while we painted) and Richard brought along his secretary/girlfriend (I wasn’t sure which and didn’t want to inquire), Mai. Richard’s assistant, Nung, was also supposed to be there, but he didn’t turn up. Apparently he’d been panicking completely over the prospect of painting me (“very gay” was Richard’s phrase) and so Richard wasn’t sure whether he really was trapped at his home studio, or had just decided to bail. (In Thai culture, if you’re late and turning up will create an embarrassing scene, you simply don’t show up at all; that way next time you see the person, everyone can pretend that nothing happened. Something about “saving face”.)

At any rate, it would have been nice to have an extra painter (we could have gotten more detail on the gauntlets, etc.) but it worked just fine without him. Mai was great–she put together the beaded feathers, the coral-and-shell necklace, and so on, while we were painting, which was really helpful.

Anyway, six hours after the painting was done, we finished, turned loose my hair, and got to the photo shoot. (The hair, by the way, is the end result of my braiding it and wrapping it in a bun for a day and a half, then undoing it and spritzing it with hairspray.) The overall effect was *amazing*. I looked in the mirror and a warrior princess looked back at me.

The photo shoot was more or less a standard photo shoot–which is to say, they set up a backdrop, stuck me in front of it, and then proceeded to do a lot of very boring things with light-meters, exposures, Polaroids, and so on before getting to the actual shoot. Tried a lot of different poses, props, etc.–swapped out the barbarian coral necklace for the jade tiara–and eventually, over 2 hours, managed to shoot 6 rolls of 120mm slide film. (We’d only paid for 5, but the photographer got caught up in the artistic spirit and threw in an extra roll free.) It was infinitely fun–imagine all your secret superhero fantasies suddenly gratified! which is to say, I got to try out all those wonderfully melodramatic poses usually sheepishly reserved for the bedroom mirror. 😉 And, it looked great…Richard did a *fantastic* job on the painting. I really hated to wash it off.

But, of course, you can’t go walking naked (even painted) through Bangkok, and clothes would have smeared it immediately, so I hopped into the shower and de-painted. Six hours on, ten minutes to swirl down the drain. (Cold shower.) *sigh* I wish I could have figured out a way to get it back to the hotel. It was amazing.

So, anyway, I’ve finally found a use for being 5’0″ and heavy-set; it’s the perfect build for a barbarian-warrior. (A useful skill in today’s society, you must agree. 😉 ) I’m also pleased that we got at least one good shot of my bulging post-AIDS-Lifecycle calves; I admit cheerfully that I’m quite vain about them (and the quads of steel, too). But then, if you’d ridden 2,000+ miles to get them, you would be too. 😉 I just hope I don’t lose them before this year’s Lifecycle; retraining is going to be a stone-cold bitch, especially coming in “cold” from Asia.

Well, that’s it so far. After the body painting I went home and crashed–between no sleep, standing up for eight hours, and way too much caffeine, I’ve pretty much been out of it the last day or so. Tonight I’m going off for dinner with Kaew (my Thai friend whom I met at the Barbican with Ben)–I’m trying to convince her to go see Calypso, the katoey (transvestite) revue with me–and then either Monday or Wednesday I’ll leave for Cambodia. The current plan is Angkor Wat, possibly followed by the Cambodian Holocaust museum in Phnom Penh, and then on to Vietnam, with a possible trip through Laos on the way back, or maybe straight to Bangkok. All of this is up in the air, though; the only thing I’m reasonably certain of is that I’m leaving for Cambodia, sometime next week. And that I’m going to try shipping the bow and fish spear home. Heaven only knows what DHL is going to make of the package. 😉

Tien