Certainly the bar-girl is now a very familiar figure in the English language paperbacks for sale at Phuket and Bangkok airports, and Burdett, an English former lawyer who now lives in the Far East, has returned to the theme in his new book. When, asked our hostess, is someone going to write about Thailand without having a bar-girl in the story? She was referring, of course, to Thailand as seen through western eyes. The issue of "the bar-girl in Thai literature" cropped up at a dinner party in Bangkok earlier this year. That's what's got them so hung up." Nong's theme and, one feels, the author's, is that prostitution is less exploitative than a sweat-shop and that Thai bar-girls are free spirits who make their own choices and have a different, less repressed attitude to sex than the uptight, joyless, hypocritical west. In the sex trade we see a true redistribution of global wealth from west to east. Bangkok 8 contains a number of defences of the bar-girl life, concluding with this from Nong: "Western women can't handle it that their men get a better time over here. Bar-girls, brothels and sex are very much a part of both that first book and the new one, Bangkok Tattoo, not least because Sonchai's own mother, Nong, was a bar-girl and our hero is the result of a brief union with one of her American clients.
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