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THE TWILIGHT SOI
A Cautionary Tale
Final Revised Edition
William John Stapleton
Copyright 2011 William John Stapleton,
All rights reserved.
Published by A Sense of Place Publishing
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0401-1
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
INTRODUCTION
The Twilight Soi dwells on the dangers of one of the world’s most beautiful and intoxicating cities, Bangkok. It is named after one of Bangkok’s more infamous small streets, or sois as they are known.
Soi Twilight runs off the main thoroughfare of Surawong in the centre of Bangkok’s oldest entertainment district Patpong and is known to gay travelers around the world. It is here where touts from go-go boy bars such as Ocean boys, Bangkok Boys and Classic Boys hustle for the attention of local and international tourists.
This revised edition of The Twilight Soi became necessary because the first edition was published prematurely under extremely stressful circumstances.
The author hoped that the hostilities and high level of surveillance he was enduring would come to an end once the book’s publication was a fait accompli.
Instead it sent events spiraling off in the opposite direction, leading to the burning of his house, the theft of thousands of dollars from his ATM card and the loading up of his laptop with under-age pornography in an attempt at entrapment. The author was forced to flee Thailand and Bangkok, that city he loved so much.
And so the original optimistic ending entertained in the first edition proved incorrect.
Instead the Cambodian government allowed some of the most corrupt elements of Thai society to pursue a foreign citizen on to their territory in order to discredit the author and block the publication of this revised edition.
The Twilight Soi exposes how a lethally charming go-go boy, the by now famous Aek, became a national and cultural icon in Thailand for so successfully cheating a tourist.
Instead of discrediting the author the fact the author’s opponents were stupid enough to pursue him across national borders opened up of a can of worms, including the exposure of the mafia linkages between the owners of the go-go bars of Thailand and the gay bars of Pnom Penh.
The bar manager of the gay bar The Rainbow in Pnom Penh for example rang the author 110 times in a single day attempting to sell him ice in what was an obvious attempt at a setup.
The Thais relentless pursuit of the author made the rewriting of The Twilight Soi, already available world wide and beginning to sell, inevitable. Whatever its current flaws or imperfections, there will be no further revisions or varying editions of this manuscript.
The Twilight Soi began in an angry place - over theft and deception. But applying Western, or in the author’s case Australian, notions of loyalty, honesty, fairness, decency and an abhorrence of deceit do not apply in a country as profoundly different as Thailand. For historical reasons Australians intensely dislike personal treachery or the betrayal of friendship. Standing on these principles in a city like Bangkok marks you as a fool.
Ultimately being angry both at your own foolhardiness and the actions of others embitters and harms yourself, no one else. At first this book tried to end with more understanding and compassion than it began, but the final betrayals and displays of treachery of the Thais were so vicious he gave up any such honorable intentions; and in this revised edition has simply told the story as it happened, with as much understanding as he could piece together.
Many of the problems experienced by foreigners in Thailand come from its extreme cultural differences with the West. It’s name as the “land of hungry ghosts” is well earned. The natives’ propensity for mythologizing and story telling is little understood by Westerners and ridiculed by surrounding nations; in a sense only they themselves understand it.
In Australia a man’s word is his honor. A liar is the lowest form of life.
In Thailand only a foreigner would be so rude as to point out that a story told in the morning bears little or no resemblance to the story told in the afternoon.
Trust no one is advice regularly dished out by Bangkok’s residents, and it is good advice the author should have paid more attention to, rather than trying to make friends amongst the denizens of the city’s nightlife. Applying Western notions of reasonableness and fair play do not work in Bangkok. Milking foreigners of as much money as possible is just considered part of the job description of any tout or go-go boy.
The Twilight Soi is dedicated to the two Thai protagonists who feature most prominently, Aek and Baw, both of whom the author met on Bangkok’s Soi Twilight.
Aek was, when he first met him, was a go-go boy at one of the better known bars, X-Size. One of the last times he saw him, Aek was back in his little white undies parading the catwalk of another bar, this time Bangkok Boys just down the road.
Baw, after a year’s absence hanging around with a drug dealer girl friend with whom he had become utterly obsessed, was once again masterfully working the tourists up and down the Soi Twilight as a tout. He was an expert at both determining what the tourist wanted and their level of stupidity. He was back on familiar terms with the strip’s managers, who handed out tips for each customer brought to their establishment. Baw could pull in thousands of baht a night, but it all went on whisky and girls, just as it had when they first met and had gone on a wild jag across Thailand together.
In a sense the same life circle had happened to the author. He was back making a living as best he could at the only profession he knew, writing.
We all survive as best we can.
After the publication of the first edition of this book both Aek and Baw continued to dismiss him as a stupid foreigner, “a buffalo’’, despite, or even because of the generosity and personal kindness he had shown towards each of them.
Neither Aek or Baw had been on an airplane before meeting the author but far from displaying gratitude, subsequently cheated and stole from him. This kind of behavior continued with many of those the author met until he woke up to the fact he was not amongst friends.
And that he was foolish for having ever believed a single word that came out of the mouths of Thai sex workers - and for failing to understand their sub-culture and their superb acting skills.
Sadly, despite momentary illusions of intimacy, the public derision of the main protagonists and even amongst those he had never met continued until the day he was forced to flee the country.
The author’s experiences over his 15 months in Thailand made the English expression "poorer but wiser" apposite.
While far from the first foreigner to be ripped off by Thai sex workers, what made the author’s experiences different was that he chose to write about them while still living in the country, creating a cascade of hostility and death threats.
Perhaps writing The Twilight Soi was a mistake; many thought so.
Doing so won him no friends. He received no sympathy for allowing himself to be deceived while Aek became famous for so successfully cheating and deceiving a foreigner.
On a personal level writing The Twilight Soi helped the author to understand what had happened and begin to move on. It also opened him up to continued and vicious attacks accompanied by grotesque levels of surveillance