One evening I was sitting at a bar in Pat Pong, probably the most famous red-light district in the world, when an attractive young woman started talking to me, then a few minutes into the conversation admitted she was a man. She/he was stuck in the middle of the transition from male to female. Her sponsor, a Western man, had paid for the course of medication, most of which consisted of estrogen in one form or another, so that she had grown breasts and developed an impressive luster in her long black hair. Her farang lover had lost interest, however, and now she was trying to raise money for the final step which was surgery. It struck me with some force how radical Western consumerism can be in its effect on the Third World, even to the point of changing men into women. My new friend readily admitted that she did not fit the profile of a transsexual. It had not occurred to her to think she was a man trapped in a woman's body. She had decided to have the operation partly because her lover wanted it but mostly because she expected to be much more marketable to Western men as a woman.

At the same time I thought more and more about Buddhism. I had often reflected in a vague way how infantile Western culture can be when faced with some of the more challenging facts of life, especially death. In the West we pay specialists to keep death out of sight, except when a close relative dies. In my monastery one senior monk used to arrange for the local hospital to send him cadavers, to assist in his meditation on the supreme reality of death � and whatever lies behind. That probably sounds morbid to a Western mind (even in Thailand it's not exactly mainstream), but I no longer find it so. On the contrary, I have at least absorbed the Buddhist lesson to the extent of finding our Western habit of distracting our minds from reality to be morbid and dangerous in itself.

Then one fine morning, about a year after my arrival, I found myself writing a story narrated in the first person by a Thai cop who was half western by blood, who was a passionate meditator, whose mother was a whore and who had grown up amongst those very young women and katoeys (transsexuals) with whom I spent my evenings chatting. I didn't need to think about "voice," it was there every morning, nagging, persistent and quite indifferent to all those rules about novel writing I had so conscientiously studied.
    -The Power of Difference (John Burdett, April 2003, Powells.com)