Hi, Thomas!!! It's really nice to have you back, all in one piece, no teeth marks on your leg or anything, no food borne pathogens in your system!!!
Do you have much experience of Thailand? I know you have traveled widely in Asia. I watched a disturbing Australian movie this weekend, a documentary that won a prize at the Berlin film festival some years back. The filmmaker is Dennis O'Rourke, who went to Bangkok and paid for a prostitute so that he could interview her and record the story of her life in the sex trade there, which as most of us know brings men from all over the world on organized sex tours, including many for pedophiles, since children as young as five are sold by their desperate families.
Anyway, the woman he chose was from the Thai countryside, a 25-year-old named Aoi, who had been married but was deserted by her husband when she was pregnant with his child. He remarried before she had the baby, and she was so sad that she cried herself to sleep for about a year. Her words, translated into English, are really beautiful: "My tears were my friends." I sure know what she means, but that isn't the point of this post, so I will continue. Okay, she had the baby, but her family was poor, her father was dead, and in order to support them she went to Bangkok and became a prostitute, which is a common path for poor girls from the countryside.
The experience made her numb and destroyed what was left of her self esteem. Interspersed with her being interviewed are horrendous scenes of what these prostitutes go through, the men who go there to buy them, and scenes of her returning to the country to play with her small son, and comments by her aunt on the economic realities in Thailand.
The filmmaker promised her a rice farm, which was her dream, in payment for her part in the film. He bought her one, but when he returned there a year later to visit her, discovered it abandoned. He finally tracked her down working in a tawdry and beaten down massage parlor in Bangkok, a woman destroyed. She believed that this was her fate.
A very disturbing movie, excellently made. I can't get it out of my head.
Anyway, Thomas, have you seen any of this first hand? I'm really curious about life in Asia.
Nice to have you here!!
Christine |
