Nut is a hostess outside a bar on Bangkok’s Soi Cowboy, where she makes 7,000 baht (roughly $200 USD) per week. Dancers there make 10,000 baht per week. Nut left her previous club on Sukhumvit Soi 4, where she made 1,500 baht as a hostess. She’s 32 years old, and has been in the business since the age of 24. She’s made (and lost) a small fortune. 

“When I was 25, I was stupid,” she says. “I once had one million baht ($32,000) USD in the bank, but lost 800,000 ($25,000) of it gambling in one hand of cards.” How did Nut amass a bank account of a million baht by the age of 25? Most of it was paid by her sponsor of the time, a western man in his mid 50s she met at the bar in which she worked. “He bought me a house, a Mercedes, and my boobs, and he gave me $30,000 baht a month for four years” (that’s $48,000 USD, in cash). 

Nut’s story is not atypical for many of the thousands of young women who work in Thailand’s bar industry. Nut’s father is an Isaan farmer who still lives in the house Nut’s sponsor bought her. The objective of Nut and her colleagues is to meet a nice western man that will support them and their families. But many like Nut, unaccustomed to the sudden lavish spending of sponsors, drink and gamble most of it away. The concept of planning for a time they’ll no longer be young and beautiful doesn’t occur to them. If they don’t eventually land a relationship with a man who “take care,” many will end up working the streets as freelancers, returning to home upcountry when they are older women. 

Nut has plans that this will not happen to her. “Now, I’m smart. I went to the beach with a new sponsor who paid me 4,000 baht a day for 20 days ($2,500 USD). I’m going to move in with him next month. He’ll pay me less when I’, but he’s sending me to hairdressing school until I graduate. When I do, he’ll buy me my own shop, and we’ll live in the apartment upstairs.”  

Nut’s an example of a Bangkok bar girl that blew through an exorbitant amount of money, but learned enough from it that, at the age of 32, she realizes she may have only one more shot at making her financial future comfortable. “I lost my old sponsor because I got drunk and went with another man, and he saw it. Then he left. Then I was drinking too much and lost all my money. Now I don’t drink any more. My sponsor now is a good man, but he’s too old, 55 years old. It doesn’t matter. He has a good heart and is taking care of me. I don’t drink, and I not go with another man.”