Product Description

Veteran reporter Richard Ehrlich and Dave Walker unfold a tale of love and lust in Bangkok's notorious red-light district. These interviews and correspondence with prostitutes and their patrons draw an intimate and touching portrait amidst the blaring lights and pounding music of Bangkok.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #363177 in Books
• Published on: 2000-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 252 pages

Review
...Thai women seem passive, but are capable of fighting back...wives back home are rarely understanding. -- London's News of the World Sunday Magazine

...a Freudian whirlpool of sexual fantasies and frustration...damaged egos and haunting super-egos...love and cold calculation...cross-cultural mayhem. -- Far Eastern Economic Review

...delivers exactly what the title describes...discloses more about the complex nature of these encounters than 10 academic treatises. -- Lonely Planet Guide to Thailand

...loneliness, despair and delusion...For many men, these dangerous Thai liaisons are no laughing matter. They become obsessed... -- The South China Morning Post

an intimate portrait of Bangkok's red-light district...Does love conquer poverty, cultural barriers and the fear of AIDS? Sometimes... -- Time Magazine

From the Publisher
"HELLO MY BIG BIG HONEY!" is a never-before-told expose of the love lives of Bangkok's bar girls and the foreigners who rent them -- confessed in their own words.

A collection of love letters from all over the world, to ladies of the night working in bars on Bangkok's famous Patpong Road. Plus revealing, in-depth interviews with the women who receive them.

Why are some men obsessed with Thai prostitutes? Can money buy true love? How does romance blossom amid the harsh streets? Do bar girls marry their customers?

"HELLO MY BIG BIG HONEY!" delves beyond the neon, glitz, hype and tragedy of Bangkok's red-lit nights and discovers a world of loneliness, desperation and -- sometimes -- love.

From the Author
Hello My Big Big Honey, Love Letters to Bangkok Bar Girls and their Revealing Interviews, is a work of nonfiction. This TIME reviewed book contains graphic adult language and descriptions of the often romantic relationships that develop between foreign customers and the bar workers in Bangkok's notorious red light bar districts, through real love letters and revealing interviews with the sex workers. Hello My Big Big Honey will give the reader a fresh and unique perspective on Bangkok's "daughter's of the game" and the customers who fall in love with them.

Dave Walker

Customer Reviews

interesting book
I found this book to be an informative book. Takes a single slant at the topic as a whole. A person can learn alot of new things in this book.

Imformation like this is hard to get
how else is one to figure these subtle things out. dig deep and let the cards fall where they may. I felt the book helped me to sort through patterns. good and bad, I wand to move forward quickly and efficantly. I wanted to be able to sort the cultual from the scam. this book helps you do that. I know better where i stand now. and my relationship with my fiance is stronger for it.

Not Great But A Classic
I first visited and fell in love with Thailand when I was 19. It was not till 1994 when I was 30 that I decided to go native. While helping out at my friend's travel agency, I discovered an interesting letter translation service that was offered in almost every other travel agency. When tour guides had no work, they translated "love letters" for Thai women who had foreign boyfriends. All letters told virtually the same story. Mother sick, brother in jail, buffalo died ... these are the bargirls. In the case of students and office workers, course fees, computer went caput, want to set up own business because boss is abusive and exploitative ...

It takes an insider to appreciate the size of this love letter industry. People who say that it's the same everywhere else in the world ain't seen nothing yet. It's quite amazing that authors Dave Walker and Richard Ehrlich dared to make these embarrasing letters public. I nearly tripped over my own toes when I saw this book in the bookstore back then.

Highly controversial but totally honest, this book reproduces the letters that bargirls sent to their foreign boyfriends. It's definitely a project that took more legwork than keyboard hours, but the authors did include interviews with insiders and also a foreward by a Thai sociologist.

The moral of the story? The line between true love and mercenary prostitution is sometimes blurred in the Land of Smiles. Prostitutes don't just charge a fee for service. They create an illusion of romance. It would be good if the suckers could read this book. It would be even better if they could watch a video of a Thai woman weeping in the phone booth telling her Western boyfriend how much she misses him and then smiles to her Thai boyfriend beside her immediately after hanging up. Still, those who think with the wrong "head" are often impervious to reason.

But anyone who has dated traditional Thai women would also have noticed that even good girls will ask for money. The root of the conflict lies in the difference in "money culture". The Westerner thinks that a woman who truly loves him will not ask him for money. The Thai woman thinks that a man who truly loves her will show it with money.

It's not a great book, but at a time when there was no other material on this subject, I thought it was a very good and courageous attempt by the authors.

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