Travelers' Tales Thailand: True Stories (Travelers' Tales Guides) Read online

  In the water there are fish, in the fields there is rice. Whoever wants to trade in ele- phants, so trades.…Whoever wants to trade in silver and gold, so trades. The faces of the citizens are happy.

  —Words inscribed on a stone in the ruins of the former Thai capital of Sukhothai

  “Every nationality is different. The French keep to themselves. They eat together and swim together, and they aren’t interested in meeting the others. The Americans and the Australians are the opposite. They like our food and like to meet other nationalities. The Germans and the Swiss are lazy. They smoke too much ganja.”

  Earlier when I had arrived Naret had brought out a large tin box from his bungalow, which also served as the village kitchen and laundry. He had opened the box and proudly displayed his plentiful supply of “Thai sticks,” potent marijuana tied to six-inch bamboo slivers. When I declined his offer, he said he didn’t smoke it either and never had, but that it was all part of the “bungalow business.”

  “I ask these tourists where else they have been in this part of the world. India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Bali, but always on the beaches. Chao Samui never go to the beach except to catch fish.”

  Naret smiles as he talks. He seems to find it all very humorous. Was there anything that really bothered him about the foreigners who brought him a life of ease?

  “Not really. But some of us Samui don’t like it when they swim without their clothes. For them it means freedom, but it is offensive to us and to Thai people. My brother says it means they have no respect for us.”

  Naret’s brother is in the bungalow business, too, on another beach on the large island. In fact, different members of Naret’s extended family own nine different bungalow villages among the twenty or so on this end of the island. The tourists don’t know this so they go from one to the other, thinking one village may be cheaper than the next.

  “We change rates depending on how many travelers are on the island. Sure we bargain—but they aren’t very good at it.” He grins.

  When I first walked into this village on Big Buddha Beach, Naret had appeared before me with a smile and “Sawatdi khrap,” the traditional Thai greeting. He then grasped my arm and we went for a stroll down the beach, as if we had been old and dear friends. He took me to his bungalow where his wife, or his “girl friend” as he called her, was cooking an orange-colored fish curry over a charcoal fire pot. He poured me a glass of rice whiskey and asked me where I was from. His hut was identical to the others, except it had a more lived-in look. On the raised wooden floor were straw mats. Brightly colored phakhamaas hung from lines strung across the room. There was a calendar printed in Chinese and Thai on one wall. A low table beneath the calendar held a ledger in which I assumed he kept business records. He lived simply yet he was probably a wealthy man on Ko Samui.

  “I was born on Samui and I will die here. The people of Samui work together.” Gesturing to the west toward the mainland, he says, “I don’t see why others can’t do the same.”

  Joe Cummings is the author of Lonely Planet’s Thailand - a travel survival kit, Moon’s Baja Handbook, and co-author of Lonely Planet’s Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia - a travel survival kit. He has spent much of the last fifteen years in Thailand and was an extra in the movie, The Deer Hunter. He is profiled in Part Three in “Farang Correspondent,” by Michael McRae.

  Remember that if a shopkeeper accepts your price, you are obliged to buy the item. Try to make the seller mention prices, so that you are in a position to accept or reject offers.

  —Elizabeth Devine and Nancy L. Braganti, The Travelers’ Guide to Asian Customs and Manners

  ALAN RABINOWITZ

  Echo of the Forest

  City sounds jog memories of unexpected encounters.

  IT WAS NOW MIDNIGHT, AND THE STREET NOISES OF BANGKOK outside my hotel room were just reaching a crescendo. As my mind drifted back to the Huai Kha Khaeng [Wildlife Sanctuary], I thought how different these sights and sounds were from those of the forest. There I had been lulled to sleep by the monotonous rhythm of geckos called too-kay in Thai because of the strange throaty sound they make to each other, and I had awakened to the howling of male gibbons. Fresh tiger and leopard tracks lined the riverbanks and trails, the various shapes and sizes telling a different story about each animal. I remembered the huge clumps of fresh elephant droppings and the afternoons when I’d been shaken from my reverie by the high-pitched, almost mournful trumpeting of an elephant herd nearby.

  My most vivid memories didn’t stem from anything I had seen or heard in the forest, but from what I had felt. This forest possessed what I can only describe as an “oldness.” Inside this sanctuary the modern world had yet to fully intrude. The pure essence of this place was still somehow undisturbed.

  Two scenes in particular played back in my mind. I remembered sitting on the steps of a thatched hut in the forest watching a golden-backed woodpecker search for its morning meal. Peering around a corner of the hut to follow the bird’s flight, I found myself instead facing the calm countenance of a thin, medium-sized man. I’d had no idea he’d been standing there. His head was completely bald and he was wearing nothing but an orange cloth around his body. I had just met my first forest monk.

  We stared at each other for several seconds, then he pointed to the bird, which had landed nearby, and said something in Thai. Seeing I couldn’t understand him, he smiled and beckoned me to follow him down the path from which he’d come. I wanted to go with him but to my surprise I turned away instead, and walked quickly back toward camp.

  Two days later, I was following leopard tracks along an old elephant trail when I smelled a strange, sweet odor. Glancing around until my eyes adjusted to the shadows, I suddenly noticed there were people standing quietly among the trees watching me. They were Hmong tribesmen whose villages were near the Burma border, at least a two-day hike from where we were standing. There were five of them—three boys and two old men—and a water buffalo, making their way to purchase or trade supplies in the nearest village outside the sanctuary. As I moved among them, the boys looked at me curiously, while the glassy-eyed old men looked toward the ground. The strong, sweet smell that had first caught my attention permeated their clothes. It was the smell of opium.

  Alan Rabinowitz is a research zoologist who contributed five other stories to this book from Chasing the Dragon’s Tail: The Struggle to Save Thailand’s Wild Cats.

  The Hmong, called Meo by the Thais, are a fiercely independent people who fled Chinese persecution over the last century for the relative peace of northern Thailand. Today the second-largest tribal group in Thailand, Hmong have become the country’s leading opium producers by establishing their villages on mountaintops since higher elevations are considered best for opium cultivation. Thai Hmong are subdivided into White and Blue, color distinctions which refer to costume rather than linguistic or cultural differences.

  Despite their isolation, Hmongs are not shy or rare; you will see them in Chiang Mai’s night market selling exquisite needlework and chunky silver jewelry.

  —Carl Parkes, Thailand Handbook

  WILLIAM WARREN

  Who Was Anna Leonowens?

  Western theatre and movie-goers have believed the story of Anna and the King of Siam to be based on fact, but the English governess was more than creative with reality.

  THE APPEARANCE OF THE KING AND I—FIRST AS A BROADWAY musical comedy in 1950, then as a movie seen by millions all over the world—stirred considerable emotion in the kingdom where the story allegedly took place. Angry editorials appeared in Thailand’s newspapers, the movie was banned, and prominent novelist and political leader, M. R. Kukrit Pramoj, on hearing that other figures from the Thai past might be subjected to similar treatment, advised his readers that “the best we can do now is to shut our eyes tightly and pray ‘God save our ancient Kings.’”

  The outrage is not difficult to understand. The ruler portrayed was supposed to be King Mongkut, one of the most revered monarchs in modern Thai
history, and even a cursory knowledge of the real man was more than enough to shatter the image of a comic character dancing a spirited polka through the hallowed halls of the Grand Palace. Just as painful to Thai minds was the fact that countless innocent Westerners apparently believed they were viewing a true story, not only regarding the King but also the importance of Anna Leonowens, whom he hired to teach some of his wives and children. Even so shrewd an observer as the noted Middle Eastern traveler Dame Freya Stark praised Anna’s alleged achievements, writing that “few people can have wielded a stronger influence in that corner of Asia.”

  Trained historians quickly began the task of setting the record straight, going back to Anna’s original works, The English Governess at the Court of Siam (1870) and Romance of the Harem (1873). Both had formed the basis for Margaret Landon’s 1943 best seller Anna and the King of Siam, which in turn became a seldom-seen, non-musical movie (with Irene Dunne as Anna and Rex Harrison as the King) and, eventually, The King and I.

  It proved easy enough to demolish Anna as a trustworthy historian because both her books are filled with glaring errors. Even the title of the most famous is inaccurate for, as King Mongkut’s correspondence makes clear, she was hired not as a governess, which implies a broad range of duties, but merely as a teacher of English. In the text, she makes elementary blunders regarding Thailand’s past, offers an explanation of Buddhism that is either hopelessly confused (she never understood the use of Brahmanic rituals at the Thai court) or shamelessly lifted from other writers, and identifies a picture of Prince Chulalongkorn (her most prominent student) as being that of a princess. Though she claims to have spoken fluent Thai, most of the examples she offers are incomprehensible even with all possible allowances made for clumsy transliterations.

  Before King Chulalongkorn succeeded to the throne, he traveled extensively throughout Southeast Asia and Europe. As a result of his travels, when he became king, he began to modernize Bangkok. One project was to carve a wide avenue from the Grand Palace to the new Dusit Palace, patterned after the Champs Elysées in Paris.The avenue as we see it today is called Rajdamnern, or Royal Progress Avenue.

  —Harold Stephens, “Searching for Joseph Conrad’s Asia,” Sawasdee

  Her worst errors occur in The Romance of the Harem, when, one historian suggests, “her store of pertinent facts was running low.” In this she claims that the King threw wives who displeased him into underground dungeons below the Grand Palace and, most horrific, that he ordered the public torture and burning of the consort and a monk with whom she had fallen in love, a spectacle Anna claims to have witnessed with her own eyes.

  But there were no underground dungeons at the Grand Palace or anywhere else in Bangkok, and there could not have been in that watery soil. Nor was there any public burning, or, if there was, it escaped the attention of every other foreign resident, many of whom also wrote accounts of the same period. Anna simply invented such tales, perhaps to add some spice to what would otherwise have been a rather tepid work, just as she also exaggerated her own influence. As one of Mongkut’s biographers, Alexander Griswold, observes, “Virtue was not unknown in Siam before her arrival, and a cool assessment suggests that she did not loom very large in the life of King Mongkut or his children.”

  Anna, then, stood exposed as hopelessly unreliable, and The King and I as a pleasant fantasy with little historical content beyond the simple fact that King Mongkut did hire an Englishwoman and she did hold classes in the palace. The case seemed closed; there was nothing else to reveal. But there was, and it proved as surprising as Anna’s fictions had been deplorable.

  Who exactly was Anna Leonowens? Even her most determined detractors never really applied much effort to that question, all apparently accepting what she claimed about her pre-Thai life. This, as we shall see, was a mistake; for in the answer lay the key not only to much of what she wrote, but why.

  Anna was born, she said, in Wales, on November 5, 1834, which would have made her 28 when she arrived in Bangkok in 1862. Though not wealthy, her family was distinguished, her father being an army captain named Thomas Maxwell Crawford. When Anna was six, she and a sister were left behind while her parents were posted to India where, shortly afterwards, Captain Crawford died in battle during a Sikh uprising.

  After completing school at the age of fourteen or fifteen, Anna and her sister sailed for India and an unpleasant surprise in the form of a new stepfather to whom Anna took an intense dislike. One reason for this was that he wanted to marry her off to a wealthy merchant twice her age, while she in turn had fallen in love with a dashing young army officer named Thomas Leonowens. To escape the situation, she went on a long tour of the Middle East with a well-known scholar, the Reverend Percy Badger, and his wife, presumably friends of the family.

  It was on this trip, writes Dame Freya Stark (following Anna’s account) that “her vision of Asia was widened in a manner impossible in an India verging on the Mutiny; and she returned to her family after nearly a year’s absence with a character already strongly formed, both for tolerance and independence.”

  She was independent enough to defy her stepfather and elope at the age of seventeen with her young officer. They were blissfully happy, despite the death of their first two children in infancy; two more, however, a girl and a boy, were born and survived, both in London where the couple resided in the fashionable St. James district for three years. In 1857, Leonowens, by then promoted to major, rejoined his regiment in Singapore, and it was there that Anna received the news that a small fortune left to her by her father had been lost with the collapse of a bank during the Indian Mutiny. A year later, Major Leonowens suffered sunstroke on a tiger hunt and died, leaving her with two small children and no money.

  Friends rallied round to help and she began a small school for officers’ children, bringing in enough money to send her daughter Avis back to England but not much more. A new challenge came with the offer to go to Siam and, with characteristic pluck, off she went, accompanied by her young son Louis.

  A refined gentlewoman, marked by personal loss but brave and determined to bring light to other less fortunate lives: that is the image of Anna drawn by herself, by all the actresses who have portrayed her on stage and screen and even by historians who also accused her of willfully maligning a great man.

  The first person to question the image, almost accidentally, was Dr. W. S. Bristowe, an English scholar whose specialty was spiders but who also wrote on other subjects. A lover of Thailand, he had been visiting the country since 1930, and in the early 1970s decided to write a biography of Louis Leonowens, who founded a company in Bangkok that still bears his name. Not many people read the work that eventually appeared, entitled—perhaps inevitably—Louis and the King of Siam, which is a pity, because Dr. Bristowe’s deft detective work on Anna’s past revealed an extraordinary tale.

  It began when he made a routine check of London records to ascertain the exact date of Louis’ birth. He found nothing, either for Louis or for Anna’s daughter. Nor, when he looked further, could he find a record of anyone named Thomas Leonowens who had served in the army in either India or England. Nor did the army know anything about the man Anna claimed to be her distinguished father. Strangest of all, archives in Wales failed to provide any mention of Anna herself.

  By now, Dr. Bristowe’s curiosity was thoroughly aroused, and he set about tracking down the elusive Anna with all the enthusiasm he normally gave a rare species of spider. Here is what diligent research in the India Office records eventually uncovered:

  Anna was born not in Wales but in India and not in 1834 but in 1831. Her father was Thomas Edwards, a cabinetmaker from Middlessex who enlisted in the Bombay infantry and went to the subcontinent in 1825. There he married Mary Anne Glasscock, the daughter of a gunner in the Bengal Artillery and a local mother who, in all likelihood, was Eurasian.

  Thomas and Mary Anne Edwards had two daughters, Eliza and Anna, and he died three months before the birth of the latter, leaving his
widow penniless after his debts were paid. When Anna was two months old, her mother remarried, this time to a corporal in the Engineers who, not long afterwards, was demoted to private for some unknown misdemeanor.

  Here the record blurs for a time, but somehow—probably through the assistance of a charity—Anna and Eliza were sent to her father’s relations in England, where they presumably received an education. They returned to India in their early teens and entered a home which Dr. Bristowe says “must have appalled them,” for the life of a private soldier at the time was a squalid one of “drunkenness and fornication.”

  Eliza was married off at 15 to a 38-year-old sergeant and something similar was clearly planned for Anna—this is one of the few points where her own version and the truth coincide. Instead, at 14 she went off to the Middle East with the Reverend Badger, who was serving as an assistant chaplain. How she met the clergy-man (later to gain distinction as an Oriental scholar) is uncertain. He was not married, however, obviously liked young girls (Dr. Bristowe discovered he eventually married one of 12), and their tour may not have been character-building in quite the way Dame Freya Stark believed.