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How the girls live
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Photo is my friend Oi on our trip to Samui in 2005
One of the most frequent comments on my blog site is that people would like to know how bar girls and other single young Thai girls live.
This comment from from a reader was enlightening:
I’ve also been curious to see how the TGs/bar girls live. I’ve been to BKK last year in August (only second time this far) and I spent some time with a freelancer that I met in Gulliver’s. After a couple of days I asked her to show me her apartment. This girl was around 28yo, was speaking english better than the average bargirl - she was in fact studying at Uni (She showed me her ID & Uni ID). I quite enjoyed talking/spending my time with her.
She very reluctantly agreed to take me to her flat and in handsight it was quite a bad decision for me to go there. I felt quite depressed for the rest of my stay in BKK.
She was living somewhere close to the PraKanon (?) BTS station. The building she was living had 4-5 “apartments” - all the girls living there except one were freelancers. The building entrance was a masive steel door directly from behind the street vendors. She had to talk to the street vendor in order to let me in (aparently that old lady was also some sort of owner/building manager) Inside the building were some very very narrow and quite dangerous to climb on stairs. There was a common bathroom area (..with no door and I had to wait for the non-freelancer girl to finish her shower…) I couldn’t spot any kitchen area.
The “apartment” had something like 7 or maximum 8 square meters. All concrete, no windows, and the painting was terrible - old and peeling from the walls. There was no bathroom or kitchen inside (couldn’t fit in 8sqm anyway). It was looking more like a prison cell. She had a very small table with a brand new (!) TV on it and she happily told me that somehow the owner will install TV cable soon (aparently some Uni courses are also broadcasted on TV). She showed me her laptop and her Uni uniformes (white blouse & black skirt from a very small wardrobe). On the floor it was some sort of rug that was serving as bed. And there was a fan on the ceiling. That’s all. I felt sick. I wasn’t expecting luxury, but I was expecting some decent living conditions. I was born and I grew up in Eastern Europe, so I know what tough live means, but I rarely have seen this sort of poverty. I really felt very very very sorry for these girls.
First of all, I want to stress that, just like you and me, there can be wide differences in how bar girls live.
Here’s a comment from another reader in reply to the one quoted above:
This girl you speak of has SIGNIFICANTLY improved her standard of living by becoming a BKK freelancer. Make no mistake.
Maybe if you look at it from the perspective of where/how/when you were born and REALIZE how lucky you were, you might feel a bit better. OR, as an alternative visit her parents home some time soon, na? That ought to give you some extra perspective.
One thing worth spending a little space on is the issue of how these girls lived when they were growing up. Here are a few photos to give you an idea what ‘home’ was like:
Entire families live in these homes. No electricity or running water as a general rule. Often cooking is done over an open fire. You may notice the child in the photo on the right. I’m sorry I don’t have any interior shots. I got these photos just stopping at the side of the road when I was on holiday in 2006.
Back to bar girls in Bangkok.
The worst form of living I have personally seen was a room that was 4 cement walls and a dirt floor — but that wasn’t Bangkok, it was in Cha’am. She was a tiny little girl who was about 147 cm high and maybe 36 kilos.
In Bangkok the worst accomodation I’ve seen with my own eyes is the 3rd floor above a Soi Cowboy go-go bar. I was out one day with a girl who worked at Dundee, one of the small gogo bars on the soi. It was early or mid-afternoon and she said she wanted to go by work, so I followed her. She went to the stairs in the back of the bar and she called me to follow her.
We went to the second floor where a lady was running a business. She styled the girls’ hair in the afternoons. A shampoo and haircut was a couple of hundred baht. Song made an appointment to get her hair done later, then took me to the third floor.
This was the ‘dormitory’ for the girls who worked in the bar. It was a large open room with a wooden floor and open windows. There was no air conditioning, though they had two fans, both of which were turned on. It was hot.
There were no beds or furniture — just straw mats for sleeping and portable wardrobes. The ‘portable wardrobes’ were things you’d buy at K-Mart or Carrefour; closets made of cloth stretched over a light aluminum frame; one for each girl. There was a single shared bathroom with a squat toilet, a small handsink, and a shower hose installed above the toilet, with a floor drain.
The sleeping area was open space, and was about 40 square meters (about the same size as my current apartment. It was home to about a dozen girls.)
There was no privacy, it was hot, and all the facilities (such as they were) were shared. There were no cooking facilities at all. By the way, the lack of cooking facilities in Thai condos and rooms isn’t as terrible as it sounds. On nearly every street in Bangkok you can find a variety of good quality prepared food at low prices. Most people I know here do very little cooking. My personal experience is that it’s more expensive to buy fresh food at the grocery and prepare your own than to buy food from the street vendors.
Most bar girls are not interested in cooking.
When I went to the third floor of the go go with Song, the girls were sitting around with one or two Thai guys. The guys were bare-chested and wearing only pants. The girls were in various states of dress — mostly tee-shirt and shorts, though one or two was wearing a bra and but no tee-shirt, and one or two girls were in more traditional Thai wraparound skirts. They had open bottles of whiskey and some street food. A straw mat was unrolled in the middle of the floor and they were playing cards and gambling. They offered me food, whiskey and the opportunity to play cards with them. I declined everything offered.
I sat in the room with them and perspired for about 45 minutes before Song and I left. If the same thing happened today I’d have accepted a glass of whiskey and some food and chatted a bit in Thai, but at the time I was fairly intimidated by the setting. It was oneof the longest and most uncomfortable 40-minute stretches of my life.
The Simple Living blog referenced above offers a lot of detail on the next-worse place I ever visited. My old girlfriend moved to Pattaya, and her room was an airless space of about 25 square meters with paper-thin walls and no window. Here’s a short excerpt from that blog:
The walls of her room are as thin as cardboard…. Unusually, she lives alone. She has no window on her room, and no air conditioning. She has a ceiling fan and a floor fan to circulate air, but basically it makes her room into a convection oven instead of a standard oven. The only option for getting any air into the room is to leave the door open.
The toilet is a traditional Thai ‘squat’ toilet…. You ‘flush’ the toilet by using water from a cistern in the bathroom that is refilled from a small tap. There is no hot water in the room, and no water source except the shower and the tap above the cistern.
There is no bathtub or separate shower… the shower head is mounted on the wall above the toilet with a drain in the floor for the water to run away.
Her bed is a mattress on the floor…. When I arrived, she didn’t have any sort of refrigerator in her room… I felt sorry for her (and myself!) so I took her shopping and bought her a small refrigerator, a rice cooker and an electric wok so she can cook for herself.
She has no washing machine, no TV, no home phone or computer, no countertops, no chairs or tables… just a simple room with a small space to hang her clothes. I guess I don’t have to say that there is no security in the building.
She spent 5 or 6 years living on the third floor of a go go bar on Soi Cowboy. I never saw it, but her descriptions made it sound similar to what I saw when I went to the room above Dundee.
She moved from the go go bar to a decent studio apartment in Sukhumvit. I guess the room she has now in Pattaya is about halfway between go go bar living and the small condo she had in Sukhumvit area.
I find it interesting that the first commenter describes a ‘prison cell’ environment for about 3,000 baht in a building in Phrakanong. My good friend has recently moved into a Phrakanong apartment, and her living is actually quite nice.
The commenter says his girl was paying around 2,500 baht per month for an 8 m2 apartment; my friend is paying about the same price, in the same neighborhood, for an apartment of about 25 m2. My friend’s apartment is rented unfurnished, and I helped her out by loaning her the money for the deposit, selling her all the furniture from my old apartment, and paying for her new bed, all on 18-month interest free credit. Given that she pays me 1,500 baht per month, you could argue that the true cost of her room is 4,000 per month.
It includes free cable TV and a ceiling fan, but no air conditioning, no hot water, and no cooking area.
I mentioned above that most girls aren’t interested in cooking, and I’ve mentioned in other blogs that every time I’ve seen a Thai girl cooking at home they have done their cooking squatting on the floor, preparing the food on a straw mat spread on the floor. They seem very comfortable with this.
Since the water source is on the balcony in these types of rooms, the cooking is usually done on the balcony as well.
Here are some photos of my friend’s room:
Photo 1:
Not much explanation needed here; the photo was shot standing in the doorway to enter the room and you can see her bed with the window above it, and a set of plastic drawers beside. The blue basket is for dirty clothes.
Photo 2:
This picture was taken standing in the doorway leading to the balcony. You can see the open window above the bed, and her view of the 29″ TV, with the small bar refrigerator beside it. She has two good quality plastic & metal chairs stacked in front of the entertainment center. Here are a couple of close ups in the thumbnails below that show you the kind of “kids stuff” that even grown Thai girls like to have in their rooms. You’ll see similar types of toys and plush dolls in the photos of the other apartment at the end of the post. Thai girls often behave like children!
Photo 3:
This is just the front door. You can see my shoes and hers in the lower left corner, and the small fridge just inside the door.
Photo 4:
I took this picture standing with my back to the TV shooting towards the back of the room. You can see her wardrobe filled with clothes, her small shelf unit for dishes, food and cooking utensils, and the back door leading to the balcony.
Photo 5:
This is the small balcony. She has a broom and dustpan stored on the right side of the photo and a large white clothes washing machine. It’s very unusual for a TG to have an electric washer; they usually wash clothes by hand. (At the top of the photo you can see some clothes hanging to dry; her apartment has a built in rod around head-height for this purpose. Next to the washer is a very low blue stool she can use under her bum when she’s in the ’squatting’ position for cooking or cleaning, and then on the left you see a black bucket under a tap. Above the bucket is a yellow bottle of dishwashing liquid, and near the bucket are two small glasses waiting to be washed.
Photo 6:
This is the toilet. It is to the left side of the balcony, and you enter via a door from the balcony, meaning that you need to go outside to reach the toilet or take a shower.
A squat toilet is difficult to use if you’re not used to them. You put your feet on each side, then squat with your bum above the toilet. I can’t actually do it… I simply fall over backwards if I try. Most, if not all, Thai people can. It’s actually probably safe to expand that to include all Asians.
The black rubbish bin acts as a cistern… it is always full of water. The blue handled pan floating in the water is used for ‘flushing’ the toilet at the end. The white hose that runs into the black container has a shower head attached to it and is used for showering in the morning. There is no hot water.
You can see a decent sized basin on the right for washing your hands.
Here are a few shots outside the room:
You can see that the hallway is clean and attractive, and the stairway well lighted and in good repair. The signs pictured say to “please always keep clean” followed by two signs that encorage people not to make too much noise, and not to clutter the hallway outside their doorway with dirty shoes and the like.
I took this photo without changing to the nighttime setting so it’s a bit grainy, but you can see a nice garden area in the front of the building with some trees & plants plus table & benches. A nice touch!
I think you can see that my friend’s apartment, while small, is clean, decent and in good repair. She has taken some care to decorate it with some personal touches, and is very proud of her home.
Let me stress that she is not a bar girl, but has a regular job. Her apartment is located about 12 minutes’ walk or 2 minutes by motorcycle from the Phrakhanong BTS station.
When I asked if I could take the photos she was happy for me to do so, but cautioned that while her room is typical size, most of the girls she knows that have seen her room said it was very nice, and were surprised that she was able to get a room of this quality for 2,800 baht per month (around US$90).
I would suggest that for a working-class girl her living conditions are slightly above the norm. She pays for everything herself, and does not have a sponsor or boyfriend. Her parents supported her last year while she was going to school full time to learn English, but for two or three years before that she worked in 7-11 and shared a room about this same size with her cousin, sleeping together in a double bed. She told me that the room they shared was not anywhere near as nice as the one she has now.
She is very happy with her new apartment. Now that she speaks English, she has been able to improve her salary from 6,500 per month at 7-11 to about 20,000 per month now, so language school was a very good investment for her.
She is taking good care of herself, she sends money to her parents every month, and she is putting 1,000 baht a week into a long term savings account.
Three `years ago I stayed with a freelancer for a few weeks instead of a hotel. We basically played boyfriend-girlfriend for the duration of my 3-week holiday. I bought her some new clothes and she got her hair colored while I was there. She wanted photos of both, so I took out my camera and took nearly a roll of film inside her apartment.
I still have those pictures. While the camera is focused on her in all these photos, you can get a sense of what the apartment was like.
A nice sofa. This was a real leather sofa, and very comfortable. I used to sit down and never want to get up again.
She had a nice, decent sized refrigerator with the ubiquitous plush dolls on top.
And a very large home entertainment area that separated her living room and bedroom. Because the apartment had this for separation instead of a wall, it had a light, airy feel about it. You can see she had a nice TV and large stereo system. If you look closely you’ll see more toys and plush dolls everywhere.
A queen-sized bed and more plush dolls.
You don’t see much of the room here, but you can see that she had built-in wardrobes, large windows for the bedroom, and even more plush dolls.
You can see from the photos that the apartment was roomy — about 55 square meters I think — and it had a small but useful balcony and a nice farang-friendly bathroom.
This girl was a working freelancer, but I stayed in her room for three weeks. She woke up every morning between 7 and 8 a.m. and cleaned the apartment thoroughly, washing dishes, sweeping, making the bed and taking out the rubbish. She cooked lunch and dinner for me every day, and she was a talented and enthusiastic cook. You can probably see enough of her room to tell that she took a lot of pride in herself and the place she lived, and that she lived quite comfortably.
I asked her how much she paid in rent, and it was around 8,400 baht per month (2005).
A farang friend was looking for an apartment recently and I took him to the same building. We saw a room that was similar to this one in size, but in much poorer condition, and the manager quoted us 9,000 per month.
So, it’s not all dreary news for the girls. Some of them live quite nicely.
Most of them live in pretty crap conditions, but when I think back to my university days and the dormitory and small apartments I lived in, I’m not sure I lived any better when I was 20 years old.
The standard for most bar girls is for two girls to share a room of about 25 square meters, sleeping in the same bed together. This may sound terrible, but one thing to understand is that Thai people usually hate living alone. They may not love sharing a bed but it’s not really the torture that it might be for two westerners living in close quarters.
They usually have a decent TV, and often a DVD player. They will usually have an MP3 player, so they may or may not use a stereo. They may have a small ‘boom box’ for playing CDs. They may or may not have a small bar-fridge. They will have a fan, a squat toilet and a small balcony for cooking and washing & drying clothes by hand. There will be little else. This will usually cost each girl between 1,500 and 2,000 per month.
But, as you can see from the photos, my friend is renting a nice room on her own for less than 3,000 per month, and the freelancer in 2005 had a roomy and well appointed 1-bedroom apartment for less than 9,000 per month.
The way they actually live is often dependent on how important the comfort is to them in relation to other things like money for the family, school fees, etc.
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2 responses so far
July 19th, 2008 at 8:49 am
Does anyone know what the girls do, when they get too old for the line of work they are in?
September 11th, 2008 at 6:42 am
The reason most Thai girls have lots of teddy bears and other plush toys is that, as a child, they had nothing. If you visit their home village, you will find that most kids have nothing at all with which to play, just sticks and dirt. So when they get some money as an adult, one of the “luxuries” they buy is a teddy bear.