Chapter One

My journey to Pattaya-legendary Asian Sodom, notorious refuge of pedophiles and gangsters-had been inspired by a sleepless night at a "hotel" in the town of Trat, just a few hours to the south.

I'd missed the fact that the Trat Inn, which from the street looked just like any other hotel, was actually the town brothel. It didn't take long to get the picture, though. No one else seemed to be checking in with the intention of sleeping.

At about nine in the evening some 50 women and several transsexual men gathered in the corridor. As they awaited the arrival of their customers-who covered the spectrum from underage schoolboys to ancient fishermen-they smoked, smartened themselves up, and fortified themselves with strong drink.

There I met 21-year-old Kai (her name means "chicken"), who seemed permanently on the point of tears. Her eyes darted hither and thither and her fingers eternally fidgeted. She had a bruise on her left cheek. She was from the neighboring town of Chantaburi, known for its rubies, and had grown up in a broken family. There were 10 other children, with a sequence of different mothers and fathers. Kai had a son of her own, she said, whom she had left in an orphanage after the father, a soldier, refused to have anything to do with either of them.

She'd been in the game since her teens, selling her body in hopes of saving money and getting rich. So far it wasn't working very well. Kai was in debt to the proprietor of the brothel after borrowing money for a cassette player. She dreamed of selling herself to wealthy foreign tourists instead of to the