Numa Numa Lightbulb Moments

The second best thing about traveling* is getting to talk to people from different cultures that have a completely different take on life. You never know what random chance encounter will completely change the way you look at things. I’ve had a few of those kind of lightbulb moments while traveling, but two of the more memorable ones happened on the same night, within just a few minutes of one another.

I was at a club in Patong Beach, which is one of the nightlife hotspots on the island of Phuket off the southern coast of Thailand. My brother and I had been on the island for a few days relaxing and just generally mucking about enjoying the weather, the food and the wonderful company of tuk tuk drivers.

The club was nice, clean and lacked the sleaze of many of its peers. We’d been the previous two nights and as a result had gotten to know some of the waitresses and staff a little. It was a pretty relaxing place and a nice spot to unwind. You know how stressful and taxing loafing about on the beach all day can be.

As it got later though, the place would start to pick up and by midnight or so it was packed, loud and full of dancers cycling on and off the main circular stage. Five or so go go dancers at a time keeping the crowd moving danced about in various forms of club wear. My brother and I had a small bar table in the back corner and as we’d spent the majority of the night in a heated discussion about something to do with EverQuest, which is what super cool people talk about when in clubs, but I’d tipped pretty well the past few nights so there was always someone around us bringing more drinks or just saying hello.

Soi Bengla in Patong Beach - Thailand - Phuket

Open air bar on Soi Bengla - Thailand - Phuket

Every now and then a dancer coming off her rotation on the platform would stop by the table for a minute, hear our nerd talk, and move on... except for one. Not too far into the night, and I’m still not sure where she came from, but one particularly striking girl appeared seemingly out of nowhere and basically attached herself to me.

Geeky single dude sitting in the back who has been tipping well the past few nights – I probably could have been wearing a giant sign that said ATM around my neck and had roughly the same effect. As shocking as this may be to some folks out there, beautiful women throwing themselves at me doesn’t exactly happen every day (more like only 2 or 3 times a week, really) so I did what I usually do when put in a somewhat uncomfortable position where I’m unsure how to react, I started talking a lot.

She had a thick accent and her English wasn’t perfect (yet infinitely better than my Thai, so she still wins) but it was good enough for us to be able to have a fairly normal conversation. After a short while of talking, I was asked if I wanted to barfine her. I didn’t know what that meant, so she and one of the waitresses explained it to me. If I paid the club 600 baht (about $17.00) she could leave the rest of her shift that night and hang out with me. In a nutshell, I’d be buying her rights for the evening from the bar. As for what happened after we left the club, that was implied clearly enough to go unsaid.

I politely declined the offer. I didn’t want her to be offended, but that’s really not what I was there for. She shrugged and said “OK”. So every so often she’d need to run off to the stage to do her rotation but afterwards she’d come back to the table. Over the course of the night, we got the chance to talk quite a bit and I learned an awful lot of things about her way of life that made me feel a bit guilty for intruding upon it.

Back when we’d first arrived in the country, my brother and I stayed a few days in Bangkok. At night, we’d been working our way through the various hotspots and a few of the not-so-hot-spots. Being that it was our first time in Thailand we were a little taken aback by the blatant sex trade operating pretty much out in the open in the city. It seems like everywhere you looked on Sukhumvit road in Bangkok there was some old white dude with a pretty young Thai girl on his arm.

At first we didn’t really notice what was going on though. You walk by people, you see them, but you don’t really process who they are or where they might be going – unless they had a Pizza Hut uniform on – my brother became embarrassingly excited whenever we’d run across one of his foreign delivery boy counterparts. It wasn’t until it got dark outside our first night in the country that we were beaten over the head with it. We walked into a bar off some side road near Asok Station and were greeted with a stage full of girls shuffling around uneasily in various states of undress. Some danced enthusiastically and some looked barely awake. The place oozed sleaze, and we left pretty quickly. But it wasn’t like that in Phuket, everyone seemed happy, everyone seemed like they were having fun. Beneath the smiles and laughs though, it really wasn’t all that different. Lightbulb number one – exploitation is often hidden by a good time.

Soi Cowboy - Thailand - Bangkok

During high season, the girls who worked in bars like that typically made more money in a few good days than the rest of their families could in a month. Without getting into too explicit of detail, a bargirl could expect to make a few thousand baht a night if she got barfined and taken out. In comparison, working a normal full time job in the city could bring in a whopping 16,000 baht (about $460) a month. Without sounding too preachy, it’s a rough situation to be in. If you’re a young girl with a family struggling to make ends meet, which do you choose? Live in poverty or become a bargirl and be able to live a middle class lifestyle? Perhaps more surprising though was how accepted it was. The small town we were staying in’s entire economy was based around those bars and clubs. We were there in the middle of the low-season, when competition was fierce. Hotels boasted of their “Guest friendly” policies and nobody seemed to bat an eye when a pretty young Thai girl would leave a bar on the arm of an old foreign guy. It just seemed to be part of life.Thailand is predominately a Buddhist nation, so perhaps it’s just a kind of culturally ingrained sense of fatalism, accepting and resigning one’s self to what is perceived to be their fate.

Whatever the reason, it certainly wasn’t a lack of strength or will. The entire area we were in had been hammered pretty thoroughly during the tsunamis and the people there had rebuilt and rebounded. They were passionate, emotional and uncommonly open about both, but they were anything but weak.

So why did she do it? She liked dancing and the money was good, she said. Her mannerisms and the way she talked seemed familiar in some way. I could have easily pictured her hanging out on campus at UCSD back home. I wanted to ask more, but thought better of it. At one point there was a bit of a lull in the conversation as the entire building had gotten somewhat quiet. At least as quiet as a club full of music and dancing people really can be. The music that had been playing was mainly an assortment of remixed American and Asian dance and metal songs. But during the lull, a familiar yet unintelligible string of lyrics started to play loudly from the DJ’s booth.

Ma-ia-hii
Ma-ia-hu
Ma-ia-ha
Ma-ia-ha ha

As far as I can tell, its gibberish in any language – but everyone in the club, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Australian, Kiwi, Filipino, Indian, Scandinavian, Middle-Eastern and American knew exactly what it meant.

There’s an old Sega Genesis video game called Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker and in it, you play the King of Pop who is on a mission to save a bunch of children – which was a lot less creepy sounding when it first came out. To defeat enemies you throw magic dust at them or, when there are lots of them you start to dance. They cannot help but join in and eventually the screen is nothing but one giant synchronized routine full not of enemies but of backup dancers and comrades.

To say that the club transformed into Moonwalker wouldn’t be entirely accurate. None of us were nearly that good of dancers and I did not have a cool white hat, but I am now convinced that the secret to world peace somehow involves O-Zone. In what will likely always be one of the more surreal experiences of my life, everyone in the club stopped what they were doing, danced and sang along with everything they had to a song whose lyrics none of us understood.

As much as I’d been learning the past few weeks about the differences between two cultures, literally a world away from one another, I realized that as far apart as we all may have been in some ways, in others we’re not so different at all. Lightbulb number two.

The song ended, people went back to what they had been doing before and the night wound down. My brother and I left the club as it closed at around 4:00am. As we were leaving, we passed by the door to the locker room for the staff. It was propped open and laughter from several girls echoed back into the hallway. One of the waitresses emerged and stopped me with a smile. “She wants to go home with you,” she said half teasing, half serious. My brother shot me a look, as if to say “I wouldn’t tell” which was very brotherly of him, considering I knew full well he felt the same moral unease with the situation that I did. I smiled back, declined, waved goodbye and we left. A few hours later we were on a plane headed to Delhi.

Would I go back? Yeah, I plan to. The morally questionable decisions of some of my fellow travellers aside - southeastern Asia feels so different and foreign in a lot of regards but also very right in others. Everyday life certainly isn’t as comfortable there, but there’s a certain tranquility that I haven’t found anywhere else. I could envision myself spending a lot of time in such a place later in life. For now, I’m still conflicted about whether or not tourism to places like this exploits the local culture and people or if it brings income and wealth to areas that very much need it. The answer probably lies somewhere murky in the middle. Maybe in some small way I can help push it more towards the latter, because when I do return, it will be with the understanding that it is not a playground but a home to a people and a culture that I respect and admire – even if its one I don’t completely understand.

*The first being collectable spoons.

Comments

[Nina]

I love this video and can't stop watching/listening. Ihateyourface.

=)

-n

[Zach]

Very insightful, Nick. I know what you mean though, when we went on the trip I kind of viewed that part as R&R during the day and party at night (which admittedly is pretty much what we did) but it didnt really occur to me that we just stepped into some peoples lives and how it must be through their eyes until after we had left.

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