Private Dancer by Stephen Leather Page A

be that the three sisters were somehow morally deficient, selling their bodies to foreigners, dancing naked in a go-go bar, surrounded by all the worst vices, smoking, alcohol, drugs. One might be surprised that they could behave in such a manner without attracting the scorn and derision of the rest of the family.
    And yet, a closer examination would show that the male members of the family were more than happy to take advantage of the situation. The money provided by the girls allows them to live a life of relative luxury. So who is in the morally superior position? The prostitutes or the family members who live off them? I think it would be a fascinating study. It would also be interesting to contrast the Western perspective of morality with that of the Thais. From a Western point of view, the girls would appear to be morally deficient, but so far as the sisters are concerned, by helping their families they are storing up merit which will lead to them gaining status in a future life. Far from doing anything wrong, they see themselves as occupying the moral high ground when compared with the farangs to whom they sell themselves. Once I have the time, I intend to do more research on the subject. PETE There was a definite change in Joy after the Isarn trip. She began telephoning me at the hotel,
    sometimes two or three times a day, and she became more protective whenever I was in Zombie.
    I'd offer to buy her drinks but she'd refuse and tell me to save my money. I still had to pay her bar fine, and I still gave her money whenever we slept together, but she seemed reluctant to take it, as if it were a reminder that we still had a bargirl-customer relationship. The crazy thing was, I was actually faithful to her. I hadn't bar fined anyone else for months and it wasn't because I was frightened of Joy finding out. It was because I didn't want to. Nana Plaza was full of gorgeous,
    available girls, but I honestly wasn't interested in any of them. Joy was the only one I wanted.
    Whenever I went out shopping, I was always looking for things to buy her. A handbag. Shirts. I always wore a Mickey Mouse watch and I found a lady's version that looked similar, and she wore it all the time. “You and me same Mickey and Minnie,” she'd say, and giggle.
    So why didn't I just go the whole hog and ask her to move in with me? Because there were still nagging doubts. Small things, sure, but I never had the feeling that she was being one hundred per cent honest with me. She still wouldn't let me see her room, kept insisting that it was dangerous, even though I'd said that I'd go during the day. And a couple of times she hadn't been in Zombie when I'd popped in. Her friends had said it was her day off. I asked her why she didn't tell me when she had a day off because then we could go out without me having to bar fine her,
    and she said that she never knew in advance when her day off was. That didn't make sense to me.
    I asked her to call me next time she knew she was taking the day off but she never did. And sometimes, when we were with a group of girls, I got the feeling she was talking about me. My Thai was getting better, but most of Joy's friends were from Isarn and they spoke a dialect that I couldn't follow, sort of a cross between Lao and Thai. The girls would laugh and look at me and I'd ask Joy what they were saying and she'd say something innocuous but it never sounded convincing. Like I said, it was just a feeling.
    There was one incident that really worried me, though. She had a red wallet in which she kept her money and her ID card. There were also a couple of photographs of the two of us. I was always proud of the fact that she had the pictures, I guess because it showed that I was special.
    Once, when I picked up the wallet, she went crazy, trying to get it away from me. When I opened it, the photographs weren't there. There was a photograph of a Thai man instead, in his twenties and wearing a baseball cap. I was annoyed and stormed