Daughter of Isaan

I meet her at the Swan Bar, so far down Soi 4 that the street is almost getting respectable again. I have some trouble finding it, as on the phone she described it as the "Su-wan bar" and nobody I asked has a clue. I sit on one of the many empty stools and order a beer, but she declares that she wants to go dancing. I assume she means the disco up the road, but no, that closes far too early. Instead we turn right after the train tracks on Sukhumvit and head one block over.

Pulling into a run-down parking area, I imagine we will be walking to the nightclub, but no, this is it. There are no signs at the front and the entrance is around the back. At 2am they close the gates, but the bar is open until the sun comes up. We're early, arriving at 1am, so things are just getting going. Interestingly, despite ignoring the closing hour rules, they do enforce no smoking.

The alcohol is cheap for BKK. 450 baht gets us a full bottle of whiskey, to which we add six bottles of Pepsi and a bucket of ice. We're sitting with another friend of hers, who came with her boyfriend. He makes a brave effort to speak English to me, but I'm content to just sit and watch the crowd. Once again I'm the only farang in the place, which seems to happen to me more and more. There are a couple of girls unattended at the bar who may be available by the hour, but mostly it’s just young Thais in large groups, including one lot having a noisy birthday party. The DJ is churning out hip hop and Thai pop, but surprisingly not at an ear-splitting level. Perhaps this is to avoid too many visits from patrons dressed in brown.

There’s a small raised dancing area behind our sofa with a couple of poles. One of the staff dances lazily around them (fully clothed) until a few random girls in the crowd get drunk enough to climb up and have a go. None of them are in danger of being noticed by a talent scout, but then my friend leaps up there and promptly whips off her dress, revealing a tube top and jean-shorts smaller than the average pair of panties. Some patrons are so impressed they try to tip her, but she shrugs them off. That probably was her job at some point, but she's dancing for fun now. We stay until the bottle is finished at around 5am. It's really only me and the other guy drinking it.

It may surprise you that I don't take her home, but the next day I head over to her "loom", the main reason being my hunger for some good Isaan food. She lives out near the end of the subway. I don't know what it's called but the roadsides are so clogged with vegetables for sale you sometimes have to take an overpass to keep moving. She takes me to a slightly more established restaurant. By that I mean it's in a proper building, but only two feet away from the street and open on three sides. There are a couple of teenage waitresses, but their job doesn’t extend to taking orders. You have to write down what you want on a scrap of paper and hand it to them. I can see why there aren’t a lot of farang customers, but the food is excellent. Not a dud dish in sight. The grilled chicken is not dry as it often can be. It's being cooked right in front of us, on a little barbecue that is in serious danger of toppling into the street.

She has a room to herself, which she rents for 3000 baht a month, furnished. She admits that her only interest in the daytime is watching TV. She doesn’t even like shopping, so she gets away with working only a few days a week at a beauty salon, or so she says. If she's short on cash she knows how to sponge off the occasional generous farang. Not me, unless you count the drinks, but she has a lot of numbers in her phone and I'm sure she's not above a bit of freelancing.

There's no fridge, but she doesn’t have to go far to buy good food. Our whole meal including a large bottle of Singha was 180 baht. Still, I wonder what she is looking forward to in life. Probably not starting a family, as she had a child at 16 who is now eight years old and living with her younger sister, who also has a child. They really have no answer for teenage pregnancy in Isaan. It seems most girls who have a child in their teens wind up with no partner, leaving the kid with their family and working in Bangkok to support the child. All she has left for herself is her friends, a bit of partying and the TV.

What do I find I have in common with this girl? Nothing really, but it's much more fun to hang out with her than be one more farang in a go-go bar. Where did I meet her? When you wander around alone in Khon Kaen, it's surprising how many girls are keen to practice their English.

© Idle Hands. All rights reserved by the author.