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

And the King was there sitting on a chair with all his family and his Royal court behind him, looking at how the farangs made best use of these implements. Dr. Bradley and his wife went through the dinner using each instrument correctly, and each plate, each cup, everything, wine glasses, and so on. After that, they took leave and went back home. And the King knew how to make use of each implement.

  But the Thais themselves didn’t keep up in grand style after that. They only adopted the spoon and the fork because Thai food is cooked in the kitchen and the cooking operation is not carried to the table. You don’t need the knife to cut anything when it has already been chopped up or is served in small pieces. So they adopted only two. The rest they discarded. And they adopted the soup plate to eat rice with. That’s how the Thai people deal with a foreign culture when it arrives. Dr. Bradley made a note of this to himself.

  He was surprised. He just thought it was so strange. He probably thought, oh well, we must humor him, so he took his wife along in all her fineries to a dinner party at 8 o’clock in the morning and they made an exhibit of themselves.

  The late Kukrit Pramoj was Prime Minister of Thailand, scholar, and author of the epic Thai novel The Four Reigns.

  Among the voices of democratic opposition, Kukrit was prominent as a courageous journalist and parliamentarian. In the early 1960s, when Hollywood made The Ugly American, on the struggle to save democracy in Southeast Asia, Kukrit was asked to play the “Sarkhan” prime minister, opposite Marlon Brando as the United States ambassador. Kukrit later recollected: I was important cast…. Marlon Brando had his own dressing room which was a trailer with everything inside, air conditioning, gin flowing from the tap. I had the same thing, identical and Marlon insisted on that...I’m born a one-movie actor. You see, Hollywood calls a person like me a type actor.You are only called when they need another Oriental prime minister….

  Oddly enough, Kukrit went on to become the real-life prime minister, not of “Sarkhan,” but of Thailand itself. He took on the task early in 1975, when South Vietnam was about to fall to the Communists, and many people in Southeast Asia feared that Thailand as well might fulfill the prophecies of the domino theory. To the great dismay of the timid, Kukrit decided to close American air bases in Thailand, then went to Beijing to establish friendly relations with Communist China. He was the architect of the Thai-Chinese alliance against Vietnam.

  —Richard West, “Royal Family Thais,” New York Review of Books

  NORMAN LEWIS

  Ghosts of Siam

  How the Wild West came to Hat Yai, the ancient shadow play disappeared, and what became of Uncle.

  THAILAND, UNTIL 1953 GENERALLY CALLED SIAM, WENT MODERN just before my first visit there, later in that year. Marshal Pibul Songkhram, the ruling autocrat, ordered the nation to cease to look to the past, and to take the future in a firm embrace. A commission sent to the U.S. to investigate western culture returned with its findings. Its members believed that it was rooted in whisky drinking, dancing in public, and the strip-tease, and urged the introduction of these customs into Siam. It was at first stipulated that the strip-tease should be performed under religious auspices in the precincts of a temple—although this provision soon went by the board.

  Hat Yai, a provincial town in the south within a few miles of the Malaysian frontier, was chosen for an experiment in instant modernization, and I went there to see what was happening. There was a tendency in Siam for the words “modern” and “American” to be used interchangeably, so when the order went out for Hat Yai to be brought up to date, most Thais accepted that it was to be Americanized. Little surprise was aroused when the model chosen for the new Hat Yai was Dodge City of the 1860s revealed by the movies.

  In due course the experts arrived with photographs of the capital of the wild frontier in its heyday, and within weeks the comfortable muddle of Hat Yai was no more. Its shacks reeling on their stilts were pulled down, the ducks and buffaloes chased out of the ditches, and the spirit houses (after proper apologies to the spirits) shoved out of sight. It became illegal to fly kites within the limits of the town, or to stage contests between fighting fish.

  Where the bustling chaos of the East had once been, arose a replica of the main street made famous by so many westerns, complete with swing-door saloons, wall-eyed hotels, and the rickety verandas on which law-abiding citizens had been marshaled by the sheriff to go on a posse, and men of evil intention planned their attack on the mail train or the bank. Hat Yai possessed no horses and the hard men of those days rode into town in Jeeps—nevertheless hitching-posts were provided. For all the masquerade, Hat Yai in the 1950s did bear some slight resemblance to the Dodge City of a century before, and there were gun-fighters in plenty in the vicinity. It was at that time an unofficial rest area for Malaysian communist guerrillas from across the frontier, tolerated simply because the Thais lacked the strength to keep them out. The communist intruders were armed to the teeth, and Thai law enforcement agents—part of whose uniform included Davy Crockett fur caps from which raccoons’ tails dangled—were few in number. Reaching for one’s gun was a matter of frequent occurrence in the main-street saloons. Although it was largely a histrionic gesture and few people were shot, newcomers like myself were proudly taken to be shown the holes in the ceilings.

  The arrival of the movies played their part in Pibul Songkhram’s vision of the new Thailand. In a single year, 1950, hundreds, perhaps thousands of movie-theaters opened up all over south-east Asia, the first film on general release being Arsenic and Old Lace. With this the shadow play that had entertained so many generations of Thais was wiped out overnight. A multitude of mothers throughout the land had worked tirelessly at pressing back their daughters’ fingers from the age of five to enable them to dance with style in dramas such as the Ramayana. From this point on it was all to no purpose, and the customers who befuddled themselves in the saloons with Mekong whisky, drunk hot by the half-pint, were waited upon with sublime grace by girls whose days as performers were at an end. Real-life theater demanded the imaginative effort of suspending belief; cowboy movies did not.

  Investigating the threatened disappearance of the puppet show, a Bangkok newspaper reported that it had only been able to discover a single company surviving somewhere in the north of the country, working in Thai style with life-size puppets manipulated not by strings, but by sticks from below stage. It took 40 years to train a puppeteer to the required pitch of perfection in this art, and it seemed worthwhile to the newspaper to bring this company down to Bangkok to film what was likely to be one of its last performances.

  This was given in the garden of the paper’s editor, Kukrit Pramoj, and attracted a fashionable crowd of upper-crust Thais, plus a few foreign diplomats, many of whom would see a puppet show for the first and last time. So unearthly was the skill of the puppeteers, so naturalistic and convincing the movements of the puppets, that, but for the fact that their vivacity surpassed that of flesh and blood, it would have been tempting to suspect we were watching actors in puppet disguise.

  After the show most of the guests went off to a smart restaurant, filling it with the bright clatter of enthusiasm that would soon fade. Such places provided “continental” food—the mode of the day. In this land offering so many often extraordinary regional delicacies, successful efforts were made to suppress flavor to a point that only a soporific vacuum remained. Kukrit, always a champion of Thai culture, made the astonishing admission that he knew nothing of the cuisine, now only to be savored at night markets and roadside stalls. In a flare-up of nationalist enthusiasm, he announced his determination to put this right. He made inquiries among his friends and a few days later I received an invitation to lunch with him at the house of a relation, a prince who was a grandson of King Chulalongkorn. The prince, said Kukrit, employed a chef trained to cook nothing but European food, and he could not remember whether—if ever—he had tasted a local dish. Entering into the spirit of adventure, he had been able to track down a Thai cook with an enthusiastic
following in the half-world of the markets, who would be hired for this occasion. The meal thus, for him too, offered the promise of novelty and adventure.

  The prince lived on the outskirts of Bangkok in a large villa dating from about 1900. It was strikingly English in appearance, with a garden full of sweet peas, grown by the prince himself, which in this climate produced lax, greyish blooms, singularly devoid of scent. He awaited us at the garden gate. Kukrit leaped down from the car, scrambled towards him and despite Songkhram’s injunction to refrain from salutations of a servile kind, made a token grab at his right ankle. This the prince good-naturedly avoided. “Do get up, Kukrit, dear boy,” he said. Both men had been to school in England, and, as well as their easy, accent-free mastery of the language, there was something that proclaimed this in their faces and manner.

  My previous experience of Thai houses had been limited to the claustrophobic homes in which the moneyed classes had taken refuge, shuttered away from the menacing light of day in a gloom deepened by a clutter of dark furniture. The villa came as a surprise, for in the past year an avant-garde French interior designer had flown in to bring about a revolution. He had brought the sun back, filtering it through lattices and the dappled shade of house-plants with great, lustrous leaves, opening the house to light and diffusing an ambiance of spring. This was from the womb of the future. We lunched under a photo-mural of Paris—quand fleurit le printemps—and a device invented by the designer breathed a faint fragrance of narcissi through the conditioned air. The meal was both delicious and enigmatic, based, we were assured, on the choice of the correct basic materials (none of them identified), and colours that were auspicious given the phase of the moon. Kukrit took many notes.

  The entertainment that followed was in some ways more singular, for the prince told us that he had inherited most of his grandfather’s photographic equipment, including his stereoscopic slides, and he proposed that we should view them together—“to give you some idea of how royalty lived in those days.”

  King Chulalongkorn, who reigned from 1868 to 1910, was a man of protean achievement. On the world stage he showed himself more than a match for the French colonial power that entertained barely concealed hopes of gobbling up his kingdom. At home he pursued many hobbies with unquenchable zest; organizing fancy-dress parties, cooking for his friends, but above all immersing himself in his photography. He collected cameras by the hundred, did his own developing, and drew upon an immense family pool of consorts and their children for his portraiture. We inspected photographs, taken at frequent intervals, of his sons lined up, ten at a time in order of height, for the king’s loving record of their advance from childhood to adolescence, all of them, including the six-year-old at the bottom of the line, in a top hat. Toppers had only been put aside in one case when four senior sons had been crammed into the basket of a balloon.

  King Mongkut was a gifted, enlightened ruler who successfully ushered Thailand into the modern world.That he is chiefly remembered as the light-hearted libertine of the film The King and I—based on the fanciful recollections of Anna Leonowens, the English governess hired as tutor to his children—is indeed unfortunate.The sybaritic demagogue portrayed in the film bore little resemblance to the austere, venerated monarch who had spent 27 years in a Bangkok monastery. Significantly, the king’s voluminous state papers contain just one brief reference to Anna— as an appendix to a shopping list!

  —Frank Kusy, Cadogan Guides: Thailand

  The queens and consorts were of even more interest, and here they were seen posed in the standard environment of Victorian studio photography; lounging against plaster Greek columns, taking a pretended swipe with a tennis racquet, or clutching the handlebars of a weird old bicycle. Fancy-dress shots, of which there were many, bore labels in French, the language of culture of the day: L’Amazone (Queen Somdej with a feather in her hair grasping a bow); Une Dame turque de qualité (the Princess of Chiang Mai, with a hookah); La Cavalerie Legère (an unidentified consort in a hussar’s shako); La Jolie Chochère (another consort, in white breeches and a straw hat, carrying a whip). The impression given by this collection was that the Victorian epoch produced a face of its own, and that this could even triumph over barriers of race. Thus Phra Rataya, Princess of Chiang Mai, bore a resemblance to George Sand; Queen Somdej had something about her of La Duse, while a lesser consort, well into middle age, reminded me of one of my old Welsh aunts.

  The prince put away the slides. Like his grandfather, King Chulalongkorn, and his great-grandfather, King Mongkut—an astronomer and inventor who designed a quick-firing cannon based on the Colt revolver—he had a taste for intellectual pleasures. He showed us his Leica camera with its battery of lenses. Candid photography was in vogue at the time. By use of gadgets, such as angle-view finders, it was possible to catch subjects for portraiture off-guard, sometimes in ludicrous postures. There was no camera to equal it for this purpose, said the prince. As for his grandfather’s gear, it took up a lot of space, and he said he would be quite happy to donate it to any museum that felt like giving it house-room.

  As we strolled together across the polished entrance hall towards the door, my attention was suddenly taken by what appeared to be a large, old-fashioned, and over-ornate birdcage suspended in an environment in which nothing was more than a year old. I stopped to examine it, and the prince said, “Uncle lives there.”

  Although slightly surprised, I thought I understood. “You mean the house spirit?”

  “Exactly. In this life he was our head servant. He played an important part in bringing up us children, and was much loved by us all. Uncle was quite ready to sacrifice himself for the good of the family.”

  The prince had no hesitation in explaining how this had come about. When the building of a new royal house was finished, a bargain might be struck with a man of low caste. The deal was that he would agree to surrendering the remaining few years of the present existence in return for acceptance into the royal family in the next. He would be entitled to receive ritual offerings on a par with the ancestors. Almost without exception, such an arrangement was readily agreed to.

  “How did Uncle die?”

  The prince answered enigmatically: “He was interred under the threshold. Being still a child I was excluded from the ceremony, which was largely a religious one. Everyone was happy. Certainly Uncle was.”

  I took the risk. “Would a Western education have any effect at all on such beliefs?” I asked.

  “That is a hard question,” the prince said, “but I am inclined to the opinion that it would be slight. This appears to be more a matter of feeling than conscious belief. Education is an imperfect shield against custom and tradition.” We stood together in the doorway and the cage swayed a little in a gust of warm breeze. “In some ways,” the prince said, “you may judge us still to be a little backward.” His laugh seemed apologetic. “In others I hope you will agree that we move with the times.”

  Norman Lewis has written thirteen novels and nine non-fiction works. His A Dragon Apparent and Golden Earth are considered travel classics, and Naples ’44 is considered by some to be one of the best books written about World War II. He lives with his family in Essex, England.

  Most Thais are fanatic royalists, and you risk offense if you speak of the king without due deference. Centuries of absolute monarchy ended with the revolution of 1932, but the ethos remains strong. Unlike some of his predecessors, who blithely murdered their way to the throne—the traditional mode of execution for those of royal blood was to be placed inside a velvet sack and bludgeoned to death with sandalwood clubs—King Bhumibol seems to deserve the adulation. He is an attractive, high-profile figure, who spends a lot of time helicoptering around the remoter regions of the kingdom, setting up the Royal Projects one encounters everywhere: irrigation projects, hydro-electric schemes, schoolhouses, medical centers, immunization programs, temple restoration, road construction, etc. The hill tribes are devoted to him for championing their cause. Historians say he h
as revived the “open monarchy” ideal of Sukhothai, when the famous King Ram Khamkaeng was said to be accessible to the meanest of his subjects. He is a cosmopolitan man: he was born in America, grew up in Switzerland, and speaks fluent English and French. He is a typical Thai blend of tradition and modernity, and the people love him.

  —Charles Nicholl, Borderlines: A Journey in Thailand and Burma

  ALAN RABINOWITZ

  Elephant Scream

  Acceptance sometimes comes in an odd guise.

  IN ADDITION TO THE MONKS, THE BEGINNING OF THE RAINY season brought other visitors as well: ants, a group of animals that must have evolved solely to torture man. At first there were just the tiny, innocuous varieties. I’d find them stuck between the bristles of my toothbrush, running across the pages of my book as I read, emerging from the switches on my tape player, or floating in their final resting place in my morning coffee or rice. After a while I stopped picking them out of my food and just ate them along with the vegetables. When I finally adjusted to their constant presence, another, more insidious species entered my life.

  Lying half awake in the darkness slapping at myself, I wondered how mosquitoes had gotten inside the net. Then I felt painful little stings and I switched on the flashlight that I kept under my pillow. Large red ants, which until now I’d only seen in little groups around camp, were all over the lower part of my body. They were moving en masse through the window beside my bed. I slapped at them frantically and jumped out from under the net, only to have them retaliate by biting me more ferociously. When I felt them marching across my feet, I swung the flashlight around to see that they were all over the floor and spreading quickly into the other two rooms of the house.