A Conversation With A Chinese Prostitute

 

Still dirty, Liza said. Why not use toilet paper so that our hands don’t touch the shit, and then eat using chopsticks? That is cleaner, said Liza.

NO HOLDS BARRED

Raja Petra Kamarudin

I remember during my school days I made a trip to Penang and stayed with some Malay friends of mine who were sharing a house with a Chinese prostitute named Liza. Liza took the master bedroom while my friends took the two (smaller) back rooms.

This had nothing to do with sex but was merely a cost-sharing arrangement so that they could split the rental and other expenses. Liza was the main tenant while my Malay friends, members of a band, were the sub-tenant.

Liza operated at the Carmen Inn nightclub and the bar in the Merlin Hotel, Penang, where the American GIs hung out on R&R from Vietnam in the 1960s. In fact, my friends were playing in the Carmen Inn on a six-months contract.

Anyway, one of my friends joked with Liza and said there were too many of us in the back rooms (I think it was about ten of us) so could one or two of us sleep with her in the master bedroom whenever she did not bring any clients home (her business was normally done in the Merlin)?

Liza replied, sure, but we will need to pay to sleep with her.

My friend replied we just wanted to sleep on her bed or in her room and there will be no sex involved.

Liza responded by saying she will never sleep with Malays anyway since we are dirty.

Dirty? Yes, said Liza, we eat with our hands, and we also wash our bums with our hands. Yeak!

But we use our right hand to eat and our left hand to wash our bum, my friend replied.

Still dirty, Liza said. Why not use toilet paper so that our hands don’t touch the shit, and then eat using chopsticks? That is cleaner, said Liza.

That is why she goes only for American GIs and not Malay band boys, she explained. Then Liza glanced in my direction and Marina gave me a dirty look. End of story.