Nip, Tuck, and Frequent-Flier Miles nytimes.com
Choosie, on that topic, this rather odd article showed up in the Sunday paper. The book you mentioned seems to be about going in the other direction, which I imagine is a more difficult path Anyway, on to the story, where it turns out that maybe they weren't kidding in that old song about one night in Bangkok.
How a developing country with a floundering economy and a significant H.I.V.
problem managed to market itself as a center for medical tourism makes an odd,
roundabout story. It depends in part on the Asian economic crisis of 1997 and in
part on Thailand's thriving cabaret culture. Most of all, perhaps, it depends on the
one plastic surgery procedure that Thai doctors have come closest to perfecting --
namely, the sex change operation. Without the international transsexual grapevine,
which since the late 90's has been spreading the word about the affordable talents of
Thai plastic surgeons, the new campaign to bring hard currency into the country by
touting its medical bargains would never have gained momentum. And so it makes a
strange kind of sense to begin this story with somebody like Michelle Moore --
somebody who, it is fair to say, had never given Thailand a moment's thought before
she flew there and changed her life forever. . . .
These days, there are plenty of people in Thailand -- from government officials
to hotel owners to doctors and nurses -- banking on the country's new status
as an international capital of discount plastic surgery. The sex-change industry is only
the beginning, as they see it, though it certainly made sense to start there and build
on some obvious strengths.
Thailand, as it happens, is a country whose male-to-female transsexuals make up an
unusually accomplished and accepted subculture. There are no legal sanctions
against homosexual or transgendered lifestyles, and kathoeys, or drag queens, are
everywhere. In the late 90's, one of the country's most popular celebrities was a
cross-dressing kick boxer who kissed his opponents and wore lipstick in the ring.
The second-highest-grossing Thai movie ever made, "Iron Ladies," tells the (true)
story of a transsexual volleyball team. Drag-queens and lady-boys are stock
characters on Thai soaps. And the country's many transsexual cabarets employ
performers who are delicately featured marvels of plastic surgery. I visited two
transsexual bars and a cabaret in Bangkok one Sunday night; talking to Iman and
Bam-Bam, two pretty, gum-chewing dancers with lustrous hair and matching mauve
eye shadow, it was easy to forget that they were not genetic girls. It is true that the
breasts they kept flashing genially at me were perfectly spherical and their hips
exiguous, but then that kind of made them look like Victoria's Secret models, who
are genetic girls as far as I know.
Given the amount of reshaping transsexual performers require in order to increase
their value in the tourist-driven entertainment business, it is not surprising that there
are skilled plastic surgeons in Thailand. But in a country where the per capita income
is $2,000, not even showgirls have unlimited money to spend on cosmetic surgery.
And they had even less of it after the Asian economic crisis and the devaluation of
the Thai baht in 1997. . . .
Not much seems to bother Preecha Tiewtranon. He gives off an aura of quiet jollity,
as though he had just heard a good joke or eaten a warm, tasty meal. And his vast
and tolerant bemusement takes in all sorts of phenomena discomfiting to other
people. Just for the heck of it and kind of expecting an oh-don't-be-silly reply, I
asked him whether something I had read in a guidebook was true: namely, that
penile reattachment surgery was performed more often in Thailand than in other
countries and that Thailand was, in fact, the international capital of penile
reattachment.
"Oh, yes," he said. "We have many wives and girlfriends cutting off the husband's
penises here. A few years ago, you had that Bobbitt, and everybody in America
was so excited. And in Thailand, we though what's all the excitement? We have that
all the time. We got very good at the microsurgery for reattaching the penis; it's a
specialty for us." Preecha chuckled heartily. I joined in rather more hesitantly.
Long ago, Preecha said, he had thought "transsexual people were kind of dirty
people and I looked down on them." But then he started seeing a few transsexuals
as patients, people who came in with horribly botched surgery to be repaired, and
he felt sorry for them and thought, If they are going to do this anyway, somebody
good should do it so they don't mutilate themselves. And after a while and to his
surprise, he found that he liked his transsexual patients. Maybe even especially the
foreigners -- those blundering Americans who didn't know the first thing about
Thailand but who trusted him.
In the end, what he liked was that the sex-change patients were grateful, which
ordinary tourists, and people in general, so often weren't. "You know, someone you
do stomach surgery on, maybe it's very hard for them, and you do a good job, but
the patient is just saying, 'Oh pain, pain, pain,"' Preecha said. "The
sexual-reassignment surgery patients are always happy. They don't complain! They
say they are born again here in Thailand, and they are happy." |
