Ping Pong

Ping Pong (table tennis) is a relevantly popular sport all over the world, not so much in a professional sense but in a recreational sense.

Dotted around the streets of Bangkok are many entrepreneurs shouting the words ping pong show. I would like to say that I followed one of these gentlemen out of naivety, but the truth is I knew what to expect.
I’d heard about the shows through friends and thought that they sounded like cabaret rather than a sleaze fest. So we got in the man’s tuk tuk and looked at the set list for the show.

• Smoking
• Razor blades
• Writing a letter
• Pop a balloon
• Ping pong
• Put out fire
• etc……

We were convinced, so we let him take us on his whimsical journey. After driving for about 20 minutes we pulled in to this dingy alley way and I already thought this is not what I expected. Stopping outside a boarded up club we were confronted by 6 huge men sitting outside. We walked passed them trying to not to make eye contacted and entered to a bar decorated in murky white paint and damp stains. We paid our 150 bath and went through the door at the back of the room, at our peril.

We walked in to a dark room full of rows of empty chairs. There was a stage and 2 Thai ladies dancing on it. At the back of the room were about 10 Thai ladies scantily dressed getting ready to perform. We were the only “clients” in the room apart from a couple sat in front of the stage. We sat in the middle of the room because it is where we felt the safest. As soon as we sat down I was given a balloon and told to hold it in the air. The lady who gave it to me then ran on to the stage, bent over, put a straw in-between her legs and shot a pea at the balloon popping it to smithereens. Other tricks were pulled through out the show like projecting ping pong balls from the ladies nether regions, throwing and catching a weird piece of metal from the ladies nether regions, smoking from the ladies nether regions and pulling a long piece of ribbon from the ladies nether regions. There was not one entertaining or impressive trick performed by these ladies, the fact that we were the only people sat watching created a macabre atmosphere. The only entertainment was taken sadistically from the piercing silence that occurred after each trick was done.

We left quite soon after we entered, we didn’t want to be part of this…

The after thought was much darker, the facts that 4 of us paid 150 baht each. We were the only people in that room apart from another couple. This equals 900 (18 pounds) bath which must have been split between the owners of the club, the people on the street that drew us in, the bar workers, the men on the door, the DJ, the rent for the building, paying off the police for not shutting it down (because porn and the sex trade is illegal in Thailand). I couldn’t imagine the girls in the show getting any money at all.

All around a very depressing experience….

Words: Alan