My Internship in Thailand

This happened a lifetime ago now. I was a freshman in college and had the luck to get an internship for a large company – which was not something they usually offered anyone of my class.

The internship was in Chang Mai, Thailand, a place that I had never been or even heard of at the time, but jobs were tight in the USA then and the country of Thailand seemed very stable politically and it was very cheap to live there. This was important as I was basically footing the bill for my own education.

I won't get into an in depth description of what Chang Mai was like then. It has changed so much that a travelogue of my time there would be useless and probably not that interesting anyway. Suffice to say it was hotter than hell and close enough to Laos that the recently lost war in Vietnam made us feel just a little bit unwelcome as Americans. (Refugee camps were all over the place – a major source of cheap labor that the company I worked for took advantage of.)

Also, it was in the north part of the country far from Bangkok and the coasts that were tourist destinations for Germans and Australians, and not very easy to get to. There was a little airport there, but most travel was from Bangkok by bus which was a hot miserable ride I did exactly once as I felt like I would die of dehydration on the long and dusty trip.

I didn't speak the language and no one outside of the workers at my office seemed to speak English. I was there to work and that was pretty much all I did for early part of the summer there.

I worked with a few Americans, a lot of English and Germans and a few Thais in a nasty, crammed little office building. They were almost either grizzled operations people with no patience for "snot nosed little interns" or senior managers and treated me like dirt. Even the Thais who managed the work force didn't have any patience with me.

I lived about 3 blocks away from the office in a small hotel with all the charm of a mental hospital. I worked 5 days a week and half day Saturday and spent the balance of my weekends doing errands and laundry.

So yeah, I was pretty miserable, overworked and lonely. I was counting the hours until I could return to the states by the end of the first week there. It was a lot of hours though – months worth of them.

It was a Sunday when my life changed for the better in a way that I am still not proud of but that is as much a part of who I am as where I went to school or who my parents were. I was walking through the commercial district of Chang Mai just before dark and happened across what could only be called a brothel.

Prostitution was legal in Thailand. (Still is I am led to understand.) The brothel was in a building sandwiched in between a carpet shop and a place that sold what looked like paper or something. I could tell what the place was based on the number of provocatively dressed women that were seated in the front window.

Perhaps 10 in all. They were small and pretty. Typical of women in the area and of indeterminate age. (No, they were not children.)

I was intrigued but intimidated. Again, I spoke no Thai and this was a time when there were very few westerners in the part of the country. I had only a very basic understanding of Thai money and no real way to bargain. It was a paid internship so I had some cash, but the very idea of trying to go in to make a transaction was enough to make me a window shopper only.

I stood in front of the window and the group of girls came alive, waving, batting their eyes and generally trying to get my attention. As I sat in stunned awe of the chance at sex that was before me, their pantomime got more direct. Tongues darted in and out of the side of their cheeks while they held an imaginary cock in their hands. Legs were spread and bouncing of bottoms was flaunted.

I loved what I was seeing but had no way to buy it. I was about to turn away when I heard one of the women shout.

"Hey Joe, you not from around here? Want fun?"

It was the first English language words I had heard a woman speak since I had been in-country. I found that as much as I wanted sex, the idea that I could perhaps talk to a woman was enough for me to turn back around.

I looked in the window again to see if I could spot the source of the words and a small woman much like all the others waved and said hello. She was maybe 5' feet tall, very thin and had the dark brown skin that was common here in the jungle forest areas.

She smiled, waved and pointed to the door and then waved and pointed again when I hesitated. Afraid that she might lose interest or that I might otherwise lose her completely, I overcame my fear and entered the door to the dark waiting room within.

Inside there was only a small man who obviously ran the place, an old woman who seemed to be doing the cleaning and keeping up with things, and a single old man who looked like he was waiting for a service. All eyes were on me.

I smiled and nodded and realized immediately not a thing I said would make sense to the man. (Thai and English do not share common words and this area of the country did not ever see westerners.) I thought to pull some money from my pocket but thought better of it, not knowing anything about how to move forward.

My little window angel turned the corner speaking in her native language a mile a minute. The man was not pleased to see her and tried to wave her back to the window and a commotion ensued. I lost my will and started toward the door but she told me to be still and she'd work it out.

More rapid fire speaking and arguing and finally a silence. She fired me a price in the local currency (Baht) that amounted to about $10 US at the time. It would have probably been many times more than a Thai man might pay. I smiled, put my hand in my pocket and pulled out the small brightly colored bills.

Once paid, my Angel pulled my by the hand to a small room in the back. No doors – just a thick carpet like drapery across the doorway and a single bed that looked too small for a conventional westerner to lie upon. There was also a small chair and towel rack – places to hang ones clothes I surmised. I wasn't quite sure how to proceed.

The Angel introduced her self as Kulap – a name I would find out many years later was common for Thai prostitutes. It means Rose flower – and I guess Rose flowers have some symbolism related to the product (pussy) that she was selling. It was probably not her real name.

I would find she was actually not even Thai. She had been born in Laos and was yet another refugee from the war that had been going on a few hundred miles to the east.

Angel asked me where I was from and why I was there – she had never seen a westerner in this town – and I told her what I could. She really had no understanding of what an intern was nor did she understand that I was a student. She didn't seem to understand where I worked or anything either. Her English was good but had limits as there were just many things she had never been exposed to. Questions she asked led me to believe that she thought I provided either munitions or heroin.

We had been talking for maybe 10 minutes when a voice from the other side of the draped door made an announcement I could identify as a time. (I had become familiar with the Thai word khreung, which was a basic measurement like an hour.)

Kulap blushed and said we had 30 minutes – and began to take off her clothing. As she undressed I realized she might just be too young and I was concerned. (I grew up in a very conservative family and buying a prostitute was already weighing heavily. Buying an under aged one would not be something I could ever live with.)

She smiled and counted on her fingers before saying "10-10-3" but the way she used her fingers made it obvious she was trying to say 23. I shook my head and said not possible and she re-enforced her age to me again, finally counting her fingers and looking at me like I might be stupid for not understanding.

I finally gave up, realizing that I had no concept with these people as they were all so slightly built, but later I came to believe she really was that age or possibly even older.

As were took off our clothes – for now I gave myself some sort of permission to go forward with this – I asked her how she had learned English. She told me that she had worked in a village that was nearby a US airfield. I had no idea what the nature of the airfields where at the time, assuming them to be connected to the Vietnam war.

Kulap realized quite quickly that perhaps the small rickety bed was not going to be a good venue for us to move forward. I imagine I was much heavier than the average Thai and even if the bed could support me, she looked small enough that I was worried she couldn't survive beneath me.

She lay down in such a way that her lower body was as the edge of the bed, spreading her legs to give me access. If I sank to my knees it would work out, but unfortunately I was still feeling guilt at it all. To be blunt, I couldn't get hard.

Kulap, I would find, was not a novice at what she did and slid off the bed immediately. On her knees she actually had to stretch herself a bit to reach me with her mouth, but that she did, alternatively sucking on me and asking me questions like "How long since has it been?" and saying things like "You want me to suck or you want to fuck? We do"

Kulap managed to get me hard and then turned around so that she was bent of on the bed. I stooped to conquer and though I though for a moment I might split her in two, she managed to take me quite easily.

Her ass was small and boy-like. It looked like I should be hurting her, but she did not flinch or otherwise give any signs that she was uncomfortable and in fact was pushing back and giving as good as she got.

I didn't take long. The combination of the tight quarters, tight time to be done, and her tight little body did me in. She giggled like a school girl when she felt herself fill up. There had been no condom – I came in her. She didn't stop moving until I was limp and fell from her naturally. She had skills, I had to admit.

When we were done she squatted over a towel, put her fingers in herself and seemed to spin them around and then dropped a dollop of my cum onto the cloth.

(The no condom thing was an incredibly stupid - and a constant throughout the many more times I would buy her services. I would not be concerned about possible exposure to VD until I got back on the plane to go back to the states. She ended up being clean – I checked twice at the clinic - which was more than I could say about my next girlfriend when I got back stateside.)

She helped me get dressed after as time was running short – and upon hearing yet another announcement on time actually pushed me out of the draped entry and followed me completely naked to the waiting area where she gave me a hug and asked me to come back often.

I promised her I would – and I did – though surprisingly I often had to wait in line for her services.

She told me later that word that she had serviced a westerner brought her business. She explained that whores (her word) that serviced western servicemen from the war were thought to be especially gifted and open to other forms of pleasure.

(She snickered at this in her own cute way – and by the way she then pulled apart her ass cheeks it was obvious to me that she meant that they knew she would take it in the butt.)

I visited her a few more times in the brothel – each was more awkward than the first. The little room, the man who kept the time, and the waiting in line to see her were just horrible, but I liked to talk to her so much. She was really the only person that said anything to me that wasn't related to business, so I kept coming to see her, but I hated the brothel.

Eventually she negotiated an agreement with the man who ran the place so that I could "rent her out" and take her off site. It was a transaction that – like renting a house or a car – required a big security deposit. I think she was grateful to me when that happened. I sensed that she had not been allowed out of the place. I knew the streets better than she did at first.

Though her English was limited and there were some concepts of my life that she just didn't have a framework to understand, we did connect on a personal level. She loved things like brightly colored artwork and soft clothes. Any food that wasn't rice was like a revelation to her. Her appreciation of simple things was so complete that it made me see things around me in an entirely new light.

One weekend she took me into the jungle to a camp where they made the small local trees into wood and coal pieces for cooking. They knew her there – I sensed she had lived there – and I got to see big lumbering elephants working to carry the downed trees to camp with their long trunks.

It was a bit scary at first to be so far away from town but she assured me it would be fine. I think once that a man gave her a bad time for being with me, but she never admitted to it. Otherwise everyone was very nice it made me feel like Thailand was something other than an urban slum for the first time.

I learned all about her life and was simply horrified by what I found. All she had known in her early years were refugee camps, poverty and a constantly changing battle lines that kept her family moving from place to place. No real home. No formal education. It was common to go to bed hungry. Complete poverty.

By her early adolescence – (or somewhere around there – she could only explain that it was once here pubic hair started coming in) she had been more or less sold to a bar that served the invading armies of the USA or perhaps UN white helmets – I was never quite sure.

She never expanded on her experience there – I don't think she wanted to tell me what it was like for reasons I could probably guess. Suffice to say that she was not well treated there by either the owners or the patrons.

She had come over the borders into Thailand with the promise of work more than a year before, and it turned out the work was at the brothel. She didn't complain about that. She didn't express that she had been tricked and forced into the world of prostitution or even that prostitution was anything bad, but she did not like the man who ran the place much. She would never explain why.

Anyway, I spent weekends with her for the next month. It cost a lot – more than I could afford really – but I am sure I would have gone crazy in that place without someone to talk to, and sanity was worth paying for.

We had sex, sure. She was incredibly accommodating – and there virtually were no limits to what she would not just put up with but actually suggest. If it could be done by two people – or more to the point could be done to a girl by a man, she made sure it was clear it "was on the menu" and in fact encouraged me to give it a try.

For instance, she slipped into the shower once as I bathed in the morning and knelt and opened her mouth. I moved to put myself in her for oral sex and she shook her head. I was confused but it finally made sense that she was positioning herself to receive a stream of urine.

There was no way I would ever be able to do something like that. I didn't have it in my character to even imagine it. She didn't seem disappointed or relieved – only perplexed. It was as if this was something that western men did, and she didn't get that I didn't.

Things like that happened constantly, and each time I begged off from engaging her in some degrading way she seemed confused and perhaps even disappointed.

As I grew to know her as a human being, it became harder to think of her as a prostitute, and "love making" replaced raw sex during those evenings and mornings when I sought her company in that way. I felt bad for some of the things I had done to her early on, and worked extra hard to make sure she was comfortable and that she knew that I enjoyed spending time with her.

The more I worked to treat her as an equal, the more she got inventive. When we went to bed at the end of the evening, she made a habit of getting down on all fours, ass in the air, instead of simply spreading her legs. She was always waking me with morning rim jobs and incredibly slutty blow jobs, and otherwise always choosing to do the thing that was more extreme than anything that I had in mind.

It was like she was working hard to keep the spice in the relationship, and I played along to the point that I could still respect myself. Some things I really did enjoy – like the way she used her tongue in my ass while she played with my cock and balls. Many things, like the move to take my urine I could not. It made for an increasingly odd dynamic.

Finally, the end of summer was coming, and I had to let her know that I would not be seeing her after the weekend. She took it wrong, having no concept to understand that I had a home to go to and that Chang Mai was not it. I tried to help her understand, showing her a map and things but she just didn't seem to understand that I would be going away, never returning, and could not take her along.

She got very upset then, thinking that I had just grown bored of her and saying that she knew the day was coming and that she should have invited another girl to take over, or perhaps a boy, or both. She pleaded with me to give the brothel another chance and let me know that it would be bad for her if I stopped spending money there.

It made for a very bad week-end, with her doing all she could to renew my desire for her through attempts to lure me into more and more depraved sexual acts. At one point she put her entire small hand into her even smaller ass just to show me what was possible. It was bizarre and un-sexy and quite sad really.

Finally I dropped her off at the brothel early, never to be seen again. She would not take the tip money that I always gave her and appeared insulted with it. She stormed into the brothel door, and made a big point of grabbing a waiting man by the hand and leading him back to the rooms before I could even say my final goodbye and thank her for saving my life that summer.

Two days later I boarded the little rickety plane that would take me first to Bangkok, then to Hong Kong and finally back to my school in the United States. I had some money in my pocket, was wiser in the ways of the world and had experienced so much more than men I knew ever would sexually, but found myself miserable for quite some time after.

I think about Kulap from time to time – especially now that I am older – and wonder where she is, if she is still alive, and even if she even remembers me.