"poorer but wiser" apposite.
While far from the first foreigner to be ripped off by Thai sex workers, what made the author’s experiences different was that he chose to write about them while still living in the country, creating a cascade of hostility and death threats.
Perhaps writing The Twilight Soi was a mistake; many thought so.
Doing so won him no friends. He received no sympathy for allowing himself to be deceived while Aek became famous for so successfully cheating and deceiving a foreigner.
On a personal level writing The Twilight Soi helped the author to understand what had happened and begin to move on. It also opened him up to continued and vicious attacks accompanied by grotesque levels of surveillance and invasion of privacy. It also left him locked in the past for far too long; brooding over old injustices instead of enjoying the day; demanding the return of a car, a bike, the hundreds of thousands of baht which had been tricked or directly stolen from him; things which were never ever going to come back.
The chance of anyone doing the right thing in terms of returning stolen goods or compensating him for the lies and false propaganda directed against him, particularly the lie that he was Thailand’s number one drug driver, was zero. Whatever his personal alcohol or substance abuse failings may or may not have been, in Australia he would have been millions of dollars richer as a result of defamation suits. Not in Thailand.
For a while he turned into a bitter, angry man who drank too much. At times of the night he was not a pretty sight and this added to the sympathy for Aek and helped justify his thieving and deception. Every young man needs money. Every old man should be able to take care of himself.
The book also created considerable animosity amongst many in Bangkok’s gay and general entertainment communities who thought it unfair to point out thefts and lies in a personal relationship, despite the fact the very public false claims made against him made his life Bangkok almost impossible.
The posting of the book’s progress onto the internet as a way of recording and protecting himself from the repeated death threats made against him also attracted controversy prior to the government blocking the website – in effect preventing free speech and protecting corrupt networks.
While the author has been criticized for doing so, most of the character’s true names in this story have been maintained. They were only too happy to name and publicly humiliate the author by making up false or exaggerated stories in order to humiliate him and cover their own crimes. The only exception is the Michael character in the story, a pseudonym for the author adopted for stylistic reasons. Consequently Robert in the story is a pseudonym for his friend.
The writing of The Twilight Soi was not a considered decision in any sense and proved difficult on many levels.
These problems included the evolving structure of the story line and the virtual impossibility of hitting the right tone for such a personal and confessional story. It was in total contrast to the news journalism – or reportage – which had occupied much of his professional life. He was used to writing about other people’s crises and could turn the disasters in someone else’s life into news or lyrical prose with a deft touch; but not his own.
The obstructions, official and otherwise, including interference his internet service and the electronic harassment he endured through outrageous over-surveillance also made writing The Twilight Soi exceptionally difficult. The first edition was published prematurely as a result. The decision to push the send button and publish The Twilight Soi in a world where computers have made electronic publication easy, was partly compelled by the hope that as a fait accompli his attackers would realize the book could now be downloaded in Mongolia and there wasn’t much they could do to stop it.
This was a false hope indeed.
It is doubtful any other foreigner would have been stupid or persistent enough to write this book or to risk coming into conflict with such dangerous elements in such a dangerous city as Bangkok.
But writing came naturally to him. It was just what he did, much as a brick layer lays bricks or a carpenter builds houses. While he originally had other projects in mind, the story of The Twilight Soi presented itself and he felt compelled to write it.
The question of whether to proceed to publication was an entirely different question. He was in two minds whether to publish and be damned or to regard personal safety and valour as the better part of judgement.
The Twilight Soi could very easily have become a Maurice - the most famous example of the tradition in English literature of an author, in this case E.M. Forster, publishing a book about their lovers posthumously. The book later became a well known film.
Then again it’s all very well for Oxford dons to discretely publish after their deaths, they can afford it. However having unintentionally burnt through so much money in Thailand the author wasn’t quite sure whether such a luxury was open to him.
Despite the ill feeling that continues at the time of writing to exist between the author and the book’s protagonists he would like to thank both of them for the experiences of Thailand they gave him, some good, some bad, some positively malignant.
That both the young men he became involved with wanted to kill him – “you die for sure” was one of Aek’s constantly repeated phrases, “you know I can kill you’’ was one of Baw’s - was a unique learning experience.
While increasing his understanding of the country and its sex industry, the author’s experiences bore no resemblance to the quiet times he expected to have in Thailand in semi-retirement after 25 years of full time work as a newspaper reporter. He thought he would probably end up writing obscure novels in a picturesque house in the valleys of the country’s beautiful mountain retreats.
Whether these works would succeed or fail mattered little.
There were too many words in the world anyway.
The author's mistakes and wayward behavior during some of the periods covered by The Twilight Soi book, including falling off the sobriety wagon in a fairly extreme manner, dismisses him from role model status. But he hopes that in future years both his blunders and successes prove instructive.
He also hopes that in reading this book other tourists, probably like himself older than they would prefer to be, who wander naively into the ruthless complexities of Thailand’s famous go-go boy industry, will learn from his mistakes and not to be so thoroughly robbed, deceived or stolen from. This book is not labeled a "cautionary tale" for nothing.
The Twilight Soi has not so far and is unlikely to ever attract acclaim within Thailand itself. Indeed both the book and the author have been roundly ridiculed.
Never colonized, the Thais are a proud people with a uniquely complex set of cultural, social and sexual mores made virtually inaccessible to foreigners because of the complexities of one of the world’s few tonal languages.
The Thais do not appreciate criticism from any outside source and do not hold other cultures in high esteem. They do not like being called on the question of their routine cheating of foreigners.
The author had no idea he was starting a battle he could not win and no intention of triggering the chain of events that were to follow. In retrospect he should have realized he had been foolish to have been fooled and gracefully joined the long queue of tourists who had fallen for the lies emanating from a pretty face in this uniquely beautiful but often poverty stricken place. Ultimately the price would have been far less than coping with the events that overtook him.
They
