Casual Meeting in ThailandBooks - Behind The Smile by Owen Jones

Lek was born the eldest child of four in a typical rice farming family. She did not expect to do anything any different from the other girls in her class in the northern rice belt of Thailand. Typically that would be: work in the fields for a few years; have a few babies; give them to mum to take care of and back to work until her kids had their own children and she could stop working to take care of them.

One day a catastrophe occurred out of the blue - her father died young and with huge debts that the family knew nothing about. Lek was twenty and she was the only one who could prevent foreclosure. The only way she knew was to go to work in her cousin's bar in Pattaya. She went as a waitress-cum-cashier, but when she realised that she was pregnant by her worthless, estranged husband, things had to change.

She had the baby, gave it to her mum and went back to work. However, now she needed real money to provide a better life for her child and to make up for spending its whole youth 500 miles away. She drifted into the tourist sex industry.

The book relates some of her 'adventures', her dreams and nightmares and her 'modus operandi'. It tries to show, from Lek's point of view, what it really is like to be a Thai bar girl - the hopes and frustrations, the hopes and the let-downs, the hopes and the lies and deceit that are part of her every day life.

Thailand is often referred to as the Land of Smiles and the author of this book agrees that it is, having spent nearly a decade there.