The Last Opium Den Read Online Free

outside the Red Lips Bar on Peking Road. It is like standing in church light, filtered softly through dark stained glass: a comforting, a respite, a connection with old ways, old values, and sleaze gone by.
     
    In a music shop, I buy a couple of CDs by one of the most revered of Hong Kong’s elder entertainers, the singer of Cantonese opera who was known as Sun Ma Sze Tsang, among other stage names, and whose real name was Tang Wing Cheung. He was born in Guangdong Province in 1916, and he died in Hong Kong in 1997, a few months before the return to Chinese rule. Half a century ago and more, licenses to smoke opium were issued to certain inveterate smokers of means and standing. I do not buy the CDs because I like Cantonese opera or the singer known as Sun Ma Sze Tsang. I buy them because he is said to have been the last of the licensed opium smokers. With his death, at the age of 81, on April 21, 1997, the legal smoking of opium, long unique unto him, came to its end.
     
    I turn to yet another native acquaintance, a gentleman of a different sort, with whom I am able to penetrate the inner circles of the triads of the Sham Shui Po district, an area so dark that its reputation as a black market serves as a veneer of relative respectability.
     
    There are several meetings with different men, different groups of men. Again and again, the hushed word for opium, ya-p’iàn.
     
    In the end, there is nothing that the night stalkers and gangs of Sham Shui Po cannot get for me. Perhaps a kilo of pure No. 4 heroin? A ton of pure No. 4 heroin? A truckload of pills? Artillery or explosives? American hundred-dollar bills complete with watermark, safety thread, and intaglio as fine as that of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing? Or perhaps I should like to buy—we’re talking outright ownership here—a few women, children, whatever. No problem.
     
    But no one can bring me to an opium den. Why? Because there is no such thing.
     
    I lean inside the hotel elevator. My tired eyes settle on a stylish framed placard advertising the Club Shanghai on the mezzanine level: SCANDAL AND DECADENCE—1930S STYLE. Downstairs, at breakfast, I read in the Hong Kong Standard of the government’s attempts “to woo a Disney theme park to Hong Kong.”
     
    I walk into a joint on Patpong Road in Bangkok, sit down on a banquette near the bar, and within a minute there is one naked scrawny girl to my left, another to my right, a third crouched between my legs beneath the little table set before me. The brace that flanks me have squirmed and curled their way under my arms, drawn each of my hands to a breast; the one under the table strokes my crotch and thighs with her fingers and head. On the raised stage in the center of the room, five more girls perform simultaneously, one at each corner, one in the middle: two squat to lift Coke bottles with their pudenda, two undulate with spread legs against stage poles, one lies with a leg raised high, masturbating and wagging her tongue. With one hand, I squeeze a nearby nipple between thumb and forefinger. She whose nipple it is responds instantaneously with a swooning moan so overdone that when I laugh she just as instantaneously bursts into laughter herself. The three of them will continue to work me either until I agree to take one or two or all of them upstairs, or anywhere I please—150 baht, the equivalent of about four American dollars, to the house; another few hundred baht per girl, negotiated separately with them, for the night—or until I slap them away in anger like flies. This is why most Westerners come to Bangkok.
     
    “They like Americans,” says an expatriate friend who has long been involved with one of the loveliest of the countless girls who work the joints of Patpong Road and the Nana district. “The British are cheap, the Japanese want to put out cigarettes on them, and the Germans are, well, German.”
     
    Most of the girls are Isaan, he tells me, from the northeast of Thailand,