I worked in a beer bar for four years

My English is good enough now that I can write this myself, and I want to write it myself, because I have read the version foreign men write about women like me and it is always the same story with me in it as weather. Something that happens to them.

I came to Pattaya at twenty-two. Before that I worked in a chicken processing factory outside Nong Khai for 320 baht a day. My mother had a debt to an informal lender at five per cent a month, which is the kind of arithmetic that eats a family. My cousin was already down here. She sent home 25,000 baht in her second month. That is what the decision looks like. It is not a moral question when you are inside it. It is a spreadsheet.

“A woman with three boyfriends is not, in her own mind, cheating on three men. She is a woman with three clients who have each privately decided they are the only one.”

The first thing nobody understands is that the bar is a job with a rota, targets and management. You are on at six. You pay a fine yourself if you are late. You are expected to sell drinks and you take a percentage. Most nights, nothing happens except that you sit with a man for three hours and listen to him talk about his ex-wife, and you say the same eleven encouraging things you say every night, and he buys you four cola drinks at 180 baht and you make 280 baht and go home at two.

The second thing nobody understands is the categories. We had words for it that were not cruel, just practical. There is a customer, who is one night and who you will not remember. There is a regular, who comes back and who you like or do not like but either way you learn his details, because details are the product. And there is a boyfriend, which means something specific: a man who sends money every month whether he is in the country or not.

A woman with three boyfriends is not, in her own mind, cheating on three men. She is a woman with three clients on retainer who have each decided, privately, without asking, that they are the only one. I know how that sounds to a foreigner. I am not defending it. I am telling you the internal logic, because you asked why it keeps happening and the answer is that both sides are running a different contract and neither will read the other one out loud.

I had two boyfriends at the same time for about a year. A German and a man from Perth. I felt bad about the German, who was kind and stupid and used to send me pictures of his dog. I did not feel bad about the Australian, who called me his little girl and once told me my village was dirty. I am telling you both of those so you know I am not asking you to think well of me.

What stopped it for me was my daughter turning six and asking what I do. I could not find a sentence. That is all it was. No moment of light, no monk, no man rescuing me.

I work in a hotel now, in housekeeping supervision, and I earn less than a third of what I earned then. My mother's debt is cleared. I am not going to pretend the bar did not pay for that, because it did.

Two things I would say to foreign men, and I say them without anger.

One: if you have never asked her directly whether there is anyone else, you have not been deceived. You have chosen not to know, and you should be honest with yourself about the difference. Ask. Some of us will tell you the truth. You may be surprised how many.

Two: money inside a Thai family is not the same thing as money inside a European one. When I send 10,000 baht to my mother every month, I am not being drained by a greedy family. I am doing what my brother does, what my sister does, what every employed adult in my village does, because there is no pension and the state will not do it. If your wife sends money home and you think it means you are being farmed, you have misunderstood the country you moved to. It is when you cannot see where it goes, and cannot ask, that something is wrong.

The men who get hurt here are almost never the ones who asked questions early. They are the ones who wanted the fantasy so much they paid extra not to have it interrupted.

We were both in that transaction. Only one of us needed it to survive.