Owen Jones
The Behind The Smile Series is the story of Lek, a bar girl in Pattaya, Thailand. Lek was born the eldest child of four in a typical rice farming family in the northern rice belt of Thailand. A catastrophe occurred out of the blue one day - her father died young with huge debts that the family knew nothing about. Lek was just twenty years of age, and the only one who could prevent the foreclosure of the family farm, and allow her younger sister and two brothers to continue their education. However, the only way she knew how was to go to work in her cousin’s bar in Pattaya.Can a Pattaya bar girl ever go back to being a regular girlfriend or wife?’Behind The Smile’ is a look into one part of Thailand, a country known around the world as ’The Land of Smiles’.1] Daddy’s Hobby: Lek went to the bar ’Daddy’s Hobby’, in Pattaya, as a waitress-cum-cashier, until she realised that she was pregnant by her estranged husband, and everything changed. After having the baby, a girl, whom she left with her mother on the farm, she needed real money to provide a better life for her child and drifted into the tourist sex industry.The adventures, dreams and sometimes nightmares, this is Lek’s point of view of what it’s really like to be a Thai bar girl... the exhilarating hopes that cover up the frustrations, let-downs, lies and deceit of daily life, give way to the dream of a normal life when she meets a new man, yet again.When this new man returns for a real life relationship, Lek finds it’s not so easy going through the good and bad of couplehood. Will they stay together, and for how long? Will she ever be able to trust a man enough again either? Or will she go back to the bar girl life?
