Small Surprises, and a Matter of Vanity
By KorskiLet’s say you want a sex change, the real deal. Not just the perfect set of tits—that’s easy enough to get. But the vagina that will fool just about anyone, even a man who’s had his penis inside more vaginas than a plumber who has spent a lifetime fingering and fisting sewer pipes. That artificial vagina is now easy enough to get, and you don’t have to go through nine swinging doors of well-meaning counseling to make sure beyond all reasonable doubt that you know exactly what you’re doing. Getting such an operation is no problem at all in Bangkok, a city where at certain hours of the night you can be surrounded by literally dozens of hustling ladyboys or Thai men dressed and acting just like women, some of whom can only be described as stunningly beautiful. Anyway, to get the vagina that certifiably looks like one, and I guess feels like one (I wouldn’t know from experience), it’ll only take about five days in a hospital. Just enough time to get the penis removed and a good piece of the skin from it folded inside a “hole” and, with the aid of something resembling a dildo stuck inside for a suitable period of time, you’ve got the next best thing to what some men will go to any and all ends to pursue and enjoy.
However one might wish to talk about Thailand, there can be no doubt that in terms of heart bypass surgery, dental work, sex change operations and a couple of dozen other medical procedures, the country’s doctors, very often Western trained, have done a well above average job of targeting Westerners who don’t have insurance, or have inadequate insurance, or are budget conscious, or don’t want to wait six months or a year as they may have to do in a country with socialized medicine.
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I’m having my third cup of coffee and I see a man at a nearby table who is sitting alone and about to have breakfast. I approach him and ask if he minds if I join him. I’d already had breakfast but see an opportunity for a conversation, with, as usual, not a clue where it will go.
What brings you to Bangkok? I ask him.
Eric, the name he gives me, says, I’m here to get an operation.
Dental work? I say, taking a shot in the dark, wanting to open him up. In the years I’ve been going to Bangkok, I’ve met more than a good dozen foreigners who have come to this great Southeast Asian city to get a root canal, some teeth capped, several cavities fixed, or for some a general overhaul of the interior of a mouth that has been largely neglected for a lifetime. It has always been about cost, often a fraction of what one would be charged for the same procedure in the U.S., Europe or Great Britain.
No, he says. I’m here to get this turkey flap under my chin largely removed. He pulls on it to draw it to my attention. At the same time they get rid of this they’re going to cut me below and above my eyes, he adds. Eric’s got a couple of small pouches beneath his eyes, small compared to those I’ve seen on many men much younger. The total bill for the neck and eye cosmetic surgery will be a little over three thousand pounds, less than half of what Eric would have to pay in England. And the doctors at home, he says, might not be as good or experienced at this kind of work.
I look at Eric without trying to stare, and I think: Well, yes, you’ve got some skin to cut off around the neck if you want to look younger, and I can see that some work around the eyes will make a small difference. But for my money, if you want to genuinely look younger you’d be a lot better off putting some brown color in your pretty good head of white hair. And, if you really want to chop off some years, get some serious work done on your awful looking teeth. They’re crooked, several of them are broken, and worst of all their color reminds me of overripe corn.
Eric explains that that he found the Bangkok doctor who would do the work on the Internet, has had three one-on-one consultations with him in the previous couple of days, and will go under the knife for a three hour operation in two days. He doesn’t want a local, which he could have opted for. He wants to be completely out, even if there’s a somewhat greater risk of something going wrong. Eric will only be in Bangkok for six days after the operation, and that, he confesses, is cutting it a little close since he’s been warned that he needs to be quite careful for a good week after the operation to avoid an infection.
I ask him how old he is. I would have put him in the mid to high sixties range. Like most people, I’m not a very good judge of chronological age.
I’m seventy, he says, proudly. And I thought, Now or never is the time to go for it. My father only lived to be seventy-five and who knows when you’ll go.
The changes will be good for about five years, and with a bit of luck, up to ten years, he says. Then I understand you revert to looking about like you did before the operation. With a finger he shows me where they’re do the cutting around his ears and under his chin, and he adds that there’ll be some scars but that they’ll fade with time. This is of little concern to him.
I’d assumed that Eric was in the market for a young Thai wife and wanted to look younger, even though Thai woman are not nearly as concerned about age and age differences between husband and wife as is the case in the West. But never secure in my assumptions, I say, Are you married?
Yes, I am. I’ve been married to a Thai woman for eight years and she’s just great. Two days into my very first trip to Thailand, I met her in the Asia Hotel in Bangkok. We started dating right away. We kept in close contact and before long I was consulting an attorney on how much dowry to pay as part of a traditional Thai wedding. The advice I got was that the more I paid the better it would make the girl and her family look. You’re also supposed to pay according to how much you can afford. I paid 300,000 baht. It was about five to six thousand pounds.
I resisted offering an opinion on paying a dowry, though the fact is I don’t much like the idea of “buying” a wife. Perhaps Eric caught the look on my face, because after telling me what he paid he expressed a sentiment that mirrors my own feelings.
He went on to note that his wife has been quite successful. She works as a nurse in Cornwall where they live. She had gotten her basic training for nursing in Bangkok before they met.
You look like someone who’d want to live here rather than in that wet and cold climate you get all over the British Isles, I said. I’ve seldom met a Brit in Southeast Asia who hasn’t complained about the weather at home and this being a major reason for wanting to permanently live in Thailand.
Exactly right! he said. When I came here nine years ago, that’s what I had in mind. I came to see what I had to do to retire here. But then I met my wife, took her to England, and she hasn’t wanted to leave since. I don’t know if I’ll be able to persuade her to come back here or not. This is certainly where I would like to spend my last years.
Eric had an appointment with his doctor shortly, and I had an itch to get right another assumption about him that I thought had an obvious answer. I said, I take it you’re getting all this done for your wife? He’d mentioned that there was about a thirty-five year age difference between them.
He chuckled. Not at all! She’s thinks I’m absolutely crazy and has no idea why I’m doing this operation. It’s just a big waste of money to her. She accounts for everything we get and spend, and would never do something foolish like this. Good thing I had this money on the side and she didn’t know about it!
Stickman's thoughts:
The thought of going under the knife simply to make yourself look better baffles me, the only exception being if you have some sort of deformity. If I was serious about making myself look better, I would simply change my diet and go on a strict exercise regiment.
The author can be contacted at korski1@cox.net.
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.
