Transsexual show a hit with mainland tourists
(AP)
Updated: 2006-02-27 09:06

Chinese mainland tourists love to chow down at Hong Kong's shark fin restaurants. They also load up on designer goods at the city's boutiques. Now they have a new must-do stop: gawking at Thai transsexuals prancing around in bikinis and low-cut gowns.

Busloads of holiday-goers from mainland have been filling up the theater for the bawdy new cabaret. It's a spectacle for the visitors, who rarely get to see such a show at home.

As the curtain rises, dancer Thanut Waiweerayuth struts onto the stage in a red and gold ball gown and a towering beehive-like headdress. The performer bellows out a song by one of Hong Kong's biggest pop stars, the late Anita Mui.

With his meticulously made-up face, shiny mane and curved bosom, it is almost impossible to tell that the 23-year-old Thai is a man in drag. That is as long as he keeps his mouth shut, which is why the song is lip-synched.

Thanut is one of about 30 Thai transsexual and transvestite dancers performing in the show.

Many of them are veteran cabaret performers or winners of transvestite beauty pageants in Thailand, a predominantly Buddhist country where homosexuals, transvestites and transsexuals are widely tolerated.

Chinese culture is less accommodating, calling such people ''yan yiu'' -- ``human freaks.''

Unlike Thanut, who began taking female hormones at 15, many of the performers have undergone either breast implants or full sex-change operations.

During the show, the dancers lip-synch Western pop songs like Madonna's ''Like A Virgin'' as well as Cantonese and Mandarin numbers. They also perform a variety of dances, including Thai and Chinese ribbon dance.

But the highlight seems to be the performers' feminine beauty. They don an array of glamorous costumes, from figure-hugging sequined gowns to traditional Thai and Chinese dresses to bikinis, unabashedly flaunting cleavage and long legs.

Male tourists gawk when a coquettish dancer in a golden bra with pearls barely covering her breasts walks up to the audience and shakes hands with them.

Apichar Sirichantakul, the Thai organizer of Golden Dome Cabaret Show International, says he brought the show to Hong Kong because he wants to expand his business and the Thai market has become saturated with transsexual entertainment.

Calling himself the ''daddy of the lady boys,'' he says that if the Hong Kong test goes well, he plans to explore taking the show to Chinese mainland cities.

More than 80 percent of the audiences have been Chinese tourists, with smaller numbers from Japan, South Korea and Southeast Asia, says Apichar.

The theater, which began last April, holds up to 700 people for each 45-minute performance. Tourists pay $21 each to tour operators, and the three shows a day are usually sold out.

Yuan Fang, a tourist from the eastern province of Zhejiang, said the cabaret is pleasing to the eyes but too shallow for her taste.

''It's exciting. But I'm more interested to learn what the transsexuals actually think,'' said Yuan, who together with a friend paid an extra $15 to take photographs with the dancers after the show.

The performers often aggressively scramble for customers -- some even acquiesce to being groped -- to earn the extra cash and become grumpy when they fail to find any.

Many spectators said they were impressed by the transsexuals' physical allure.

''I think they are more beautiful than real women,'' said a tourist from the northwestern Chinese province of Xinjiang who would only give her surname, Li.

Asked whether the dancers were too skimpily dressed, Li said: ``It doesn't really matter because they are men anyway.''

Zhou Yung, a bank executive from the eastern province of Zhejiang, slipped his hands inside a dancer's silver bra as she posed with him. He later told his wife, Tong Jingna, who also saw the show: ``They are kind of hard and don't feel like a woman's breasts. They feel like a man's body.''

Another mainland tourist, Zhou Qi, said she sympathized with the plight of the transsexuals for having to earn a living with their bodies.

''I pity them. I don't think they have much choice,'' Zhou said.