'WHAT'S A NICE girl like you doing in a place like this?' It's a line Sheridan Prasso must have heard in dozens of girlie bars, strip joints and hip-hop clubs in Asia. And she may well have replied: 'I'm working.' Because Prasso was researching her book, The Asian Mystique: Dragon Ladies, Geisha Girls & Our Fantasies of the Exotic Orient.
No, it's not a guide for sex tourists seeking Asian flesh. Quite the contrary. 'In the bars of Bangkok and elsewhere in Asia, western men who may find traditional notions of masculinity diminished by modern cultural expectations can find restitution,' Prasso writes. 'They can experience feelings of dominance, wealth, power, and masculinity - at least temporarily. Here, any man can experience feeling attractive again - even loved.'
Depending on your point of view, the balding and paunchy white men escorted by nubile Asian women seen throughout Asia are either winners or losers. In support of her book's underlying notion - the idea that an Asian mystique (that is, an exoticised view of Asia) prevents westerners from clearly understanding Asia and Asians - Prasso talked to scores of Asian women, from political leaders to investment bankers, students and homemakers. The interviews most pertinent to her investigations were those with women who had the most contact with Caucasian males: mail-order brides, bar girls and prostitutes at one end of the spectrum and Cathay Pacific flight attendants at the other end.
Her field work in fleshpots from Pattaya to Manila notwithstanding, Prasso describes herself as 'the shy writerly type'. Now living in New York, the petite, blonde author spent 15 years as a journalist in Asia, chiefly with Agence France-Presse in Phnom Penh and Business Week in Hong Kong. From the time she left her job with Associated Press in Chicago in 1990 to come to the east, Prasso says she began developing her Asian mystique theory and collecting information for the book she knew she wanted to write.
'Growing up in America, I had no idea what Asia and Asians were really like because the reality is so distorted by the media and culture,' she says. 'But once I got here I saw how much we get wrong and that the reality of Asia has little to do with our fantasies.'
Prasso remembers the moment when her own illusions about a 'mystical Orient' were shattered. 'Shortly after moving into a Mid-Levels apartment, I would regularly hear a man shouting in a sing-songy voice outside my building. Because I'd heard that the Cantonese believed gods were everywhere, I'd somehow decided this man was chanting to appease the gods that inhabited the mountain just behind my building. I indulged this fantasy until a Chinese-speaking friend told me his 'chant' was a call for scrap metal.'
After that, Prasso says she was unable to look at anything in Asia 'with the same eyes'. Again and again, she found that 'the impressions I had brought from America didn't match what I saw. The true Asia, I found, was largely misrepresented by the fantasy-fuelled images I'd absorbed from western culture.'
