Doing Thailand : the anthropologist as a young dog in Bangkok in the 1960s 9789744800992, 9744800992

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Doing Thailand The Anthropologist as a Y oung Dog

in Bangkok in the 1960s Niels Mulder

tthMc I atm

(Dr.) Niels Mulder is an independent anthropologist who, for the past forty years, has been trying to come to grips with the cultures of Java, the Philippines, and Thailand. His findings and conclusions about Thai culture and society have been recorded in 'Inside Thai Society-Interpretations o f Everyday Life; Inside Southeast Asia-Religion. Everyday Life. Change; Thai Images-The Culture o f the Public World, and Southeast Asian ImagesTowards Civil Society?' He can be reached through

Doing Thailand

Doing Thailand The Anthropologist as a Young Dog in Bangkok in the 1960s Niels Mulder

White Lotus Press

© 2008 by Niels Mulder. All rights reserved. White Lotus Co., Ltd G.P.O. Box 1141 Bangkok 10501 Thailand Tel. Fax E-mail Website

(66) 0-38239-883-4 (66) 0-38239-885 [email protected] http://thailine.com/lotus

Printed in Thailand Designed and typeset by COMSET Limited Partnership ISBN

978-974-480-099-2

pbk.

White Lotus Co., Ltd., Bangkok

Contents

Preface.........................................................................................................................ix 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

June 1965................................................................................................................. 1 July-August............................................................................................................ 7 Late A ugust...........................................................................................................15 Thailand in the Mid-1960s.................................................................................. 21 September............................................................................................................. 27 October..................................................................................................................35 November-Early December................................................................................43 December-January............................................................................................... 51 February-End of M ay..........................................................................................61 June 1966.............................................................................................................. 69 1966-68.................................................................................................................73 1969-Early September 1971.............................................................................. 77 Late September 1972............................................................................................85 1972-October 1973............................................................................................. 93

Epilogue

101

List of Illustrations

Plates 1. Portrait 1965 2. Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University 3. Close-up; here I study Thai 4. Buddha (Sukhothai). Do His Teachings explain Thailand? (Photo Fon Zwart) 5. Buddha (peasant style) (Photo Fon Zwart) 6. Angel paying respect to The Teachings (Photo Fon Zwart) 7. Making merit by dressing the Buddha (Photo Fon Zwart) 8. Garlands, mostly for ritual purposes (Photo Fon Zwart) 9. Markets are colorful (Photo Fon Zwart) 10. New Year at Thai Yonoke (Sugarcane-with-Long-Hair, me, Malai) 11. Malai with my brother, ‘Beer is no liquor.’ 12. Receiving a certificate from the His Majesty King 13. Straight from the frame of The Gypsy Girl 14. Surassi’s home in Thonburi, near Krungthon Bridge 15. Road in front of Surassi’s house 16. Uthai and fellow-monk 17. On the way to Wat Thongnopphakhun a. Passing a beggar woman b. Risking life and limb c. Ferry d. Landing Thonburi side e. and on through these lanes 18. New Road 19. Sampeng after rain

VII

List of Illustrations

20. Reg 21. Quay next to Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank 22. Hotel where Reg takes her patrons 23. Hovel where Reg and four other women stay (left side) 24. Food everywhere a. In the passage to Reg’s hovel b. Hawker 25. Slum on Phayathai Road, opposite Chula’s campus a. On the way to Reg’s child, first ‘bridge’ b. Second ‘bridge’ c. Second ‘bridge’ ends d. Last leg 26. Near the Monument of Democracy (background) 27. Aphided (Superpower) 28. With the policeman’s wife 29. The policeman on his rickety verandah 30. Slum scene, Makassan 31. Pen-pushing at the UN ECAFE 32. The flow of words at a UN conference 33. Malai and Lek at the shrine of the Mother-Ruler 34. At the shrine of the Mother-Ruler

Preface

On my return in July 1966,1 had a bee in my bonnet that didn’t stop humming as I told story upon story in which this, that and the other became “Thai.” According to my wife, they had little to do with Thailand and everything with an obsession that distorted my views of others and myself. At best, it was what I thought Thailand to be, no better than the image in a distorting mirror. In retrospect, I think she was right. W hat do we know when we have been in a place? What can we be certain of other than our experiences? In September, I came to see Andr6 Kobben, my teacher of ethnology, on the question of what we know when we have been “there.” I came at the right moment; as an editor of Anthropologists in the Field, he had lost some of his usual selfconfidence. In that collection, a variety of researchers reflect on what they had experienced and learned, on whom they were, and what they came to think. Yes, they had been “there,” and now told their story. This is my story. It is set in Bangkok and may tell something about how it was, or even is, out “there.” It is about what I saw, or thought to see, about what I experienced and how I reacted. Perhaps it is nothing but a curious piece of biog­ raphy, a group of weird adventures. Even these days, some forty years later, I am not sure about what I know or don’t know. Through writing, I try to sort it out and understand what was up. In anthropology, we take it that we participate and observe. There can be no doubt that I participated in events. There is no doubt either that I have seen things. Still, after fifteen years among the people I have written so much about, I am at a loss as to what participant observation is all about. For instance, I have a well-known colleague who undressed and body-painted as a Zulu, took up the famed spear, then joined the ritual dances of his warrior tribe who had—apart from clashes in Jo’burg—no wars to fight. He, however, is convinced that his big white body jumping

ix

Preface

around in threatening circles was an entry into the culture and mind of the people he studied. To him, this was real participant observation. I am not so certain. Naturally, observation is a must, and so are interviews, meetings, and attending rituals and everyday events. The thing the observer needs to be conscious of—and often is not—is that he observes from a certain position and that the lenses of his personality, culture, and intellectual background distort his view. Even if he paints his body and wields a spear, he sees and understands things in a peculiar way. He is “there,” but does he participate? Let us look at it from the other side. The stranger in their midst is inevitably an object of wonder. Even if he is not being considered as an intruder, he remains somebody “special,” somebody who does not really belong, who evokes curiosity or ridicule. Being a foreigner is being seen: a towering blond presence among black-haired people. He is always conspicuous—no matter how good at the language and culture. And people let it be known that he or she is that way. They react to it and it affects their communication. The researcher is and remains a stranger—a professional one to boot. At university, the idea of participant observation was taken for granted. It was like Malinowski had done: being there, on the island. Not until the 1960s could we read about the experience of loneliness and pain, anger and bewilderment. I think that most of us who repeatedly spend long periods “in the field” are somewhat weird. Why expose oneself, not so much to an unknown culture, as to oneself? What is so wonderful about one’s own company if you could relax with people of your own tribe? What is great about an away game without supporters? There is no end to standing out. You are the stranger. In some places, they will yell at you, “Hey, you!” “Hi, Joe,” “Whitey,” “Mister,” “Miz,” “Hi man, wanna fight?” You always have to explain yourself, where you come from, why you are there. You’ll always be the butt of jokes: you are an illegal immigrant, a CIA or KGB man. People will express their wonderment at your speaking their language, at the fact that you can read, at your knowledge of history. All the time, they’ll make you feel that you are apart, unusual, not one of them. If that is what is meant by participation, it is fine by me; it is the outsider being there. Even so, most of the time I liked “being there,” which may say as much about myself as it does about my choice of fields and the people I sought information from. All along, I have been working in the cities and towns of Southeast Asia. I like the anonymity urban environments afford. Of course, you are visible, but there is also certain cosmopolitanism about life in a town. It is a place where unknown people flow past each other, where strangers are expected, where pathways cross.

x

Preface

It was no coincidence that I landed in Thailand. At the time I went to university, many Dutchmen had come back from the East Indies, and four of my teachers taught about their experiences in the former colony. Non-Western sociology and tropical economy concentrated on Indonesian society in transition and its development. Physical anthropology focused on Borneo. Language and civilization emphasized Islam and Java. By the time some of us wanted to taste life on those enchanted islands along the Equator, Dutch intransigence had so soured relations with Djakarta (as it then was) that their tribe was being expelled from the country. As a conse­ quence, Professor Wertheim advised his students to concentrate on India. From 1957 on, Indonesia was forbidden territory—an inaccessibility that lent the country an enticing lure. I didn’t care whether the place was called Indonesia or the Dutch East Indies. To me, those were the tropics, and one fine day I would make it there. In preparation, I sat with Professor C. C. Berg’s class in Malay. His few students did not learn much of the language, but more, however, of the wonders of the Orient and of Java in particular. As a born narrator, there was no end to his stories about his personal experiences and his interpretation of old-Javanese sources; the significance of the Indian heritage for Javanese culture and the later development of Islam; the position of the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) in its struggle for power and the secrets of Javanese symbolism. His professorial head was brimming with cultural learning, and when the fine day had not yet arrived when I finished my studies in 1964, Berg told me, “You go to Thailand, another place strongly influenced by Indian culture nobody here knows anything about.” It took a year before I had arranged a Thai-UNESCO scholarship that was, through Berg’s good offices, supplemented with a grant from the Ministry in The Hague. During that time, I got into contact with two Thai students, Nanthana Chuttiwong, who studied art history and Chavalit Soemprungsuk, better known as “Pete Thai,” at the Academy of Visual Arts. Next to this, I read everything Amsterdam’s libraries held on the subject of Thailand. It did not give me much of a feel for the place, which had less to do with the relative paucity of literature than with the weird assumptions that saturated the scholarly works. In the 1930s, the American anthropologist Ruth Benedict had pioneered the so-called culture-and-personality approach. Culture—say, a people’s mental milieu—was supposed to have a pervasive influence on individual personalities that in turn stimulated people’s sticking to their culture. This reasoning was watertight: People were the prisoners of their milieu; the milieu was the prisoner of the people. Because of this, you could identify and label characteristic styles of life: some groups were Apollonian—fussy and hard to please, others were Dionysian—given to fun.

Preface

In the literature, the Thai were said to look for the sunny side of things and to appreciate pleasure—every undertaking must be sanuk, otherwise it was not worthwhile. But they were not called Dionysian. The label was “Buddhist,” and Buddhism, in the fashion of the day, was thought to be the treasure-house of values and ideas that, in their turn, could explain human behavior, attitudes toward work, and the prospects for economic development. Whether this was correct or made-up, whether fact or fancy, was not important really because Buddhism explained almost everything under the Thai sun. As a result, a political scientist defended the thesis that Buddhism was a natural barrier against violent Marxism. A public administration expert maintained that its ethics stimulated passivity, rejection of the world, and even timelessness. Consequently, Buddhism had a negative influence on bureaucratic practice. Not only civil servants, but farmers too were said to be burdened by beliefs that made them passive and fatalistic, incapable of competing or developing. Their inclination of relying on themselves only led to cultivating mental equanimity and avoiding attachments and commitments. According to these scholars, being Thai equated with being Buddhist. Such Buddhists believe in karma (rebirth), and that one’s experience of the present is the outcome of one’s actions in earlier existences. A beggar must have done something base; an aristocrat must have accumulated priceless merit; and to be born a bitch hints at having been a prostitute in a previous life. The only way of improving one’s future was making merit in the present, worshipping, burning candles, listening to sermons and rites, and leading a moral life for which one must assume personal responsibility. Nobody could help. All men and women had to come to their own rescue. With these assumptions, there was little cause for wonder that the Thai were described as inwardly directed loners, individualistic to the marrow. According to certain anthropologists, this had to do with a carefree childhood in which moth­ ers generously breast-fed their offspring and were not fussy about toilet training. Children were left to their own devices. They did as they pleased, went their own ways, and continued doing so in later life. John Embree was the first to give an account of this amazing behavior. During his fieldwork in Japan, he had been impressed by the diligence, regularity, and discipline of the villagers. Later, in Thailand, he didn’t find a trace of these qualities. When Thais were walking together, they didn’t swing their arms in rhythm. When you picked up a girl in a bar, it might turn out that she was not mercenary about it. He invented a label for this: Thai society was a “loosely structured” social system.

Preface

Being loosely structured fitted wonderfully well with being Buddhist. The latter believed in karma, and thus in personal responsibility for their own actions. Such people must be individualists, with each of them following their own courses. As a result, Thai life must be highly erratic, and so the pundits concluded that all social interaction was set within a framework of cosmic unpredictability; that Thai society always traveled on the brink of social chaos, and that any attempt on the part of the observer to impose more regularity on the system (sic) could only lead him or her astray.

1

June 1965

In June 1965,1 was on my way to the enigmatic Land of Smiles. If everything I had read were true, I was going to a place where life stood in stark contrast to the Protestant drive that is said to animate my countrymen. Even so, when I arrived at Don Muang airport, two young men punctually met me. One introduced himself as Mr. Narong of the Ministry of Education, my sponsor; he proposed to take me to a hotel near his office where I was expected the next day to settle the details of my stay. The other was Surassi, whom I had met as a student with Professor Ernest Boesch in Saarbriicken when my wife went there as a researcher in a psychologyoriented project that would take her to Thailand later in the year. Surassi invited me home, and that’s where I spent my first days. In the evening, Surassi took me on a tour of the city. In an easterly direction, the last big thing was the traffic circle at Pratu Nam (The Sluice) next to which boats took off for Bangkapi. Two hundred yards beyond was a huge night market, followed by the vast Makassan slum, bordered on two sides by railroads. On the other side of the tracks were rice-fields and scattered buildings. South of the waterway to Bangkapi the city expanded along Sukhumvit Road with its many side lanes, but beyond Soi Ekamai, and certainly on reaching Phrakhanong, rice was still grown to the north and east. Our first stop was the Makassan market where they offered such a confusing variety of delicacies that I gladly left the ordering to my host. When we came back to the Pratu Nam roundabout, we turned south to the Silom area, from where we went on to Sampeng, Bangkok’s huge Chinatown. I vividly remember that excursion, first of all because we survived it. Surassi demonstrated himself to be a first-rate road devil, not so much bent on showing the City of Angels as on demonstrating how fast he could do it among other drivers similarly motivated. Obviously, the traffic was loosely structured. We saw some angels, too, albeit of the low-flying

1

Doing Thailand

type that lined several streets in Sampeng, foreshadowing my fascination with that part of town. The next day I paid my respects at the Ministry of Education, where I met the director-general who would be my sponsor for as long as I studied on a ThaiUNESCO scholarship. He was a very friendly man who couldn’t stop smiling and whose face didn’t offer an inkling of what he thought or intended. He wasn’t bald, and yet he was expressionless as a billiard ball. Of course, while reading up on Thailand I had come across the idea that showing your intentions or emotions is not done, yet I didn’t feel comfortable in the presence of that smiling moon. 1 felt better in the company of Narong, who was tasked with practical matters. Together we visited the Faculty of Letters at Chulalongkorn University where I would be taught Thai. The professor in charge told me to return in a week when he would have arranged my studies accordingly. I would be lodged at the student hostel on Phayathai Road, nearly opposite the university campus. There they also told us that I would be welcome back in a week’s time. The scholarship money came without delay, and as from day three, I rode a Honda moped. At Chula I hoped to meet colleagues as soon as possible. In new, far less spectacular buildings than the Faculty of Letters, the socio-political sciences were struggling to establish themselves as serious subjects. Among the Thai faculty, nobody had yet earned a doctorate, and the best they did was to repeat the amazing wisdom I had studied in Amsterdam. They seemed to agree with the patent Buddhist qualities of Thai life that they eagerly elaborated. One by one, they were very nice people who liked to talk without asserting much and who avoided discussion. In an attic opposite the main building, a Canadian Jesuit, Dr. Jacques Amyot, S. J., was establishing the study of anthropology. There the venerable father welcomed me to his small club that, apart from himself, consisted of Suthep and Patya, age mates who had recently finished their master’s degrees in London. Amyot and Suthep were particularly interested in my ideas about the leadership potential of Buddhist monks in modernizing the Thai countryside. Originally Professor Boesch had suggested this topic. During his long period of work in Thailand he had been impressed by the idea that populace not only honored monks but that they also listened to them, that they had considerable influence on the minds of ordinary people. This concurred with the opinion of other observers who held that “No project can succeed without the temple’s blessing.” However this may be, no empirical research had to date been done to assess the monks’ capacity for leadership and their effectiveness in introducing development and change. The

2

June 1965

only thing we had were piles and piles of assertions about Buddhism and the results of being Buddhist. Amyot was an eminently practical man. Of course, there was nothing against suppositions, but he warned against taking unsubstantiated assertions about “loose structure,” Buddhism and development, monks and leadership, or Thai individual­ ism for gospel truths. He seriously doubted the value of the Cornell project that for the past fifteen years had flooded the world with such “insights.” He was more sympathetic with the tentative findings of my research of the literature that suggested that the influence of the Buddhist clergy should not be taken for granted. Because I combined social science with an interest in religion, Suthep introduced me to the ever-controversial Sulak who was then publishing the remarkable Social Science Review (Sangkhomsart Parithat). A man of strong but always interesting ideas and convictions, he insisted that his country be called Siam—a point I then had difficulty in appreciating, also because of the eternal confusion arising from the many names of my own, such as The Netherlands, Holland, or the Low Countries where, weirdest of all, the Dutch hail from. Since the Thai spontaneously referred to their place as the Country of the Thai, I thought that the former royal name had best be forgotten. Sulak also held strong views on Buddhism. In contrast to the American scholars who, through the top-floor windows of their ivory tower looked down on a Buddhist country where religious preoccupations pervaded all interaction, Sulak held Bud­ dhism to be a program for society. To him, too, to be Thai was to be Buddhist. The problem was that the Thai were mistaken Buddhists, with most merit-making mere superstitious and thus a useless practice. If the Thai—or rather, the Siamese—would be real Buddhists, the country’s problems would evaporate. Through realizing their true identity, on-going, senseless, and imitative Westernization would grind to a halt. For a long time the idea that “the Thais are mistaken Buddhists” would stick in my mind. Perhaps it agreed with my Calvinist background that wastes little sympathy for unorthodox beliefs and practices. This is how it has been written; this is what it means. Deep down, Theravada Buddhism is as uncompromising as Calvin; for their salvation, people can only rely on themselves. Because of this overemphasis on orthodox interpretations, the first generation of researchers had lost touch with the practical religion, and in that way they ended up with a loosely structured hotchpotch. For me, Sulak’s thinking resulted in the mental separation of Buddhism and animism, of orthodoxy and superstition. There was no problem in coming across

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D oing Thailand

manifestations of popular religion: people were honoring statues, praying in front of shrines, offering flowers and candles, while having intricate relationships with the spirit world. Yet, what all this revealed about their religiosity, about the prevailing religious mentality, remained safely beyond my ken as long as I took an ideal for reality. In that way I had landed in a dilemma for which I was ill prepared. This first-time error would not be the last. Being “in the field” invites making such mistakes that, in retrospect, prove to be a fruitful method—as long as the research extends over a considerable time. The wrong analytical knife produces weird crosssections, so to speak. One gets to see a picture that is both unexpected and nonsensical, and that keeps you on your toes. The least it does is to reveal what things are not; the best, that it feeds curiosity and imagination. It alerts, and, given time, it animates perspectives, allows for keeping in sync with process and change, and strengthens the conviction that there are no final interpretations of anything social. Anyway, to keep me on track—and to help in my endeavors—Sulak introduced me to a bright young monk, Phra Maha Uthai. As a novice he had already finished the entire Pali curriculum, which entitled him to be addressed both as venerable and great. He resided at Wat Thongnopphakhun, a temple famed for its intellectuals, on the other side of the river. I would visit him five times a week to learn Buddhism and, more importantly, Thai. If the Ministry had been instrumental in introducing me to the university, and Sulak in finding a monk teacher, I had to initiate any further introductions myself. High among my priorities were the lowly angels spotted on my first night in town. Soon after I moved into the student hostel I was hooked on Chinatown’s vulgar life, which reminded me of Amsterdam’s underbelly. There, late at night, it felt like home. Most of the girls there were Thai, their customers Chinese. Because of their profession, they were easily approachable, and soon I knew a few of them better than a short bedding allowed for. Noi was a young widow dressed in the phanung, a kind of a wrap-around skirt still common among lower-class women. Most of her colleagues had already replaced it with pants, miniskirts, and tight-fitting dresses. She liked cheap watering-holes better than going up hotel stairs, and after servicing her early patrons, she tried to double her money by playing cards. This was a risky business, not only because her accomplices in gambling pursued the same goal, but also because of the police preying on streetwalkers and gamblers. Arrested on one charge or the other meant losing the money one carried; being held until the next morning, meant losing a whole night’s earning opportunities.

4

June 1965

Not a gambler myself, Noi guided me to other vital entries to urban life. She was a hearty drinker, and since, after investing in a moped, I had to be careful with my scholarship money, it was most welcome to be introduced to a wide variety of cheap appetizers and the pleasure of the “Golden Deer”—a cheap “whitsekey” that had as little to do with Scotland as the rice from which it is distilled. Generously mixed with soda water and ice, it made a tolerable long drink. Noi liked to sit and chatter away into the wee hours of the morning before I would sneak her in into the hostel. She would discreetly take her leave when we were through. Since this was not a daily routine—Sampeng being vast and offering many diversions—she sometimes grew emotional when she suspected that she was not the only contender for my affections. This was most useful! Ever since meeting that shining moon at the Ministry, I was consciously trying to read faces in a milieu where people apparently cultivated an eternal smile. Especially higher up, as at the university, people smiled straight-facedly while not conceding anything at all—and thus the meetings with Noi, who had a Chinese father, offered a fine opportunity for evaluating emotions and studying the slight muscle movements that thicker, Mongoloid skin tends to hide. For a few weeks, I was close enough to seeing her as my companion. Mean­ while, my bridge partner Eugene, who was being roped in by a gold-digger girl from Burma, proposed that we spend a weekend at the relaxed and then pleasant coastal resort of Pattaya. Despite of the ostentation of his girlfriend, I thought Noi would afford pleasant company. Discomfited on first meeting her, Eugene commented, “She is really very plain.” Still, I did not think that Noi’s being from the rabble should be an impediment to enjoying a few days on the beach. That Friday, however, Noi did not show up. Keenly discriminating, she knew who and where she was. My neighbors at the hostel were Johnny and Wang, from Hong Kong and Taiwan. They were among the first students at the Southeast Asian Institute of Technology only recently established on a corner of Chula’s campus. They taught me the secrets of instructing the cook at the Chinese eating-places we went to for dinner. They taught other things, too. Immediately below our balconies, there was a small pond. Once or twice a week, a fellow in a white T-shirt and black shorts—making him Chinese—came to swim about while gathering heaps of weeds that were thriving in the lukewarm water. These he loaded on his bicycle’s large luggage-rack, and then disappeared. Overlooking that scene, I asked them whether they knew what that fellow was doing:

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Doing Thailand

“He is gathering weeds.” “That’s what I see. But why?” “To feed his dogs.” “Dogs eating vegetables?” “Of course! What do people in Holland feed their dogs?” “Offal, innards, something meaty.” “But that’s for people! Dogs feed on vegetables. Moreover, they’ll be very delicious that way.”

With Johnny and Wang I could speak English, a language I could use at the university, too. Beyond its fences, it was utterly useless. If you heard it at all, it was street urchins yelling “Hey, you,” most often followed by the mandatory “One baht!” I thus had to gather, as quickly as I could, expressions and words to help me on through urban life. In the morning, I had formal lessons; in the afternoon, I was with Uthai, who only knew a smattering of English words. Our dealings were in Thai, in the ordinary language and in the idiom used to talk with monks. In Sampeng, I unwittingly picked up a vast Bangkok-Chinese vocabulary, and conversations with the angelic girls yielded a firm dose of uncouth words that taught how to scold, swear, abuse, and refer to anything sexual. To me, everything I heard was Thai, and expanded the range of my possibilities. In this way, I readily appropriated all sorts of expressions people uttered when being amazed, frightened, disappointed, or angry. Naturally, I wanted to know the meaning of things I was picking up—that’s what teachers are for. But when asking at Chula—a high-class and thus smug ivory tower whose real nature I still ignored—to explain frequently heard popular exclamations, they frowned and feigned surprise. “Really, I do not know. Never heard it before. You must have picked up some Chinese.” This certainly was a possibility, and only later would I be aware of the Teochew origins of much urban slang, but was it true? When I would check with Uthai, he and his fellow holy men would burst out laughing. “You’ve been to the brothel, isn’t it?” “You were with women.” “That’s very vulgar indeed.” Then, however, they would explain text and context of all sexual allusions and swear words with which popular Thai is seeded, very much as Dutch is. Because of our mutual openness, I soon became Uthai’s window on the seedier side of urban life. He thoroughly enjoyed it because, having been ordained a novice on finishing elementary school, he was confined to and sheltered by his holy orders all the way into adulthood. Now, aged 22, he was practically without experience and naturally curious about the adventures of ordinary young men, of which I could serve him a generous helping.

6

2

July-August

Sampeng is where the Chinese live. Its main thoroughfare, New Road, is a stinking hole—always full of traffic, always full of people, always full of smoke and dust, even after it rained. Sampeng is full of life, day and night. It holds many movie theaters and tea-houses; watering-holes, and eateries, short-time venues, and hundreds of prostitutes. It is city life at its best. On a square bordering the main road is a night market, pulsating with people and stalls, food and cheap drinks. Mingling with the crowd, you can readily identify some sixty streetwalkers, most more than mature. The younger ones tend to be heavy with child. Among this talent, an old bird senses business and approaches me with a young woman in her wake. She looks lovely, very girlish, with an orange bow in her unkempt hair; her smile mixes bashfulness with mischief. She takes me through the maze of back alleys between New Road and Yaowarat to a shabby place specializing in quickies where the boys enjoy peeping and where elderly women offer the services of heavily made-up girl children. Yet, I like it, or rather, her. When I deliver her at the older woman—whom she refers to as tyay, for the time being understood as tyek (“Chink”)—she rapidly fades away into the moving crowd. It lends the attraction of elusiveness. The next day, she asks for a ride. We go to Thonburi. On that opposite bank, the air is fresh. There are lots of trees; it doesn’t stink. She doesn’t say a word but obviously enjoys the speed, the cool air, and the broad back she presses herself against. We drive around, half an hour perhaps, before she reminds me that she must “seek money,” walk the street. I set her loose again among the throngs along stinking, fuming New Road. From then on, I often take Reg to the point where I cross in daytime for my lessons with Uthai. It is a fine place to sit and smoke; it is airy and cool. The fer­ ryman in his small boat waits for late customers whom he takes across for a baht.

7

Doing Thailand

Some are night-birds like myself, occasionally there’s a fisherman, and if we are early, some late market women on their way home. Sometimes, the man ferries seamen to their ships whose black hulks stand out against the mighty flow of the Chao Phraya. It is a lovely movement, that ferryman at the aft of his boat paddling to the light of a candle and the reflections of city and sky. At that spot, to the rear of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, one is free from the gaze of people. When I ask something, she gives the shortest of answers, only gradually revealing herself as a great story-teller with a boundless imagination, making me ever more curious about her life, her views, and her story. She comes from Khorat, she says. Her relatives live there, somewhere in the province. Her father is a customs officer at Sadao on the Malaysian border. Her uncle is in the police. She was frightened to death when she spotted him crossing her beat, probably in quest of a girl. Her best friend is Dengtoy, a woman who dubs movies. With her she goes parachute jumping. Yes, she arrived in Bangkok recently, from Khorat. “Then, did you start plying your trade here?” “No, a few years ago, in a bar, in Had Yai. One New Year’s eve, I worked in a brothel in Muang Chon. Gee, I’ve never been so tired in my life. The young men were simply queuing to start the year that way. We did not dress up any longer; took pills to keep going; they just came in as the other left. So tired, but great money.”

Money, the quest for it, seeking it—her endless topic. Normally when we meet she has some in a small purse she hides on her chest. She likes to show it, the proof of success, of her worth, of her independence. Two, three patrons at 20 baht each between dusk and midnight—no big deal. No, tyay (Chinese for elder sister) is not her pimp. She is in the trade herself. They are living together. Isn’t it strange I am still attending school? What do you do there? Science of society. . . . She likes the word, savoring it, “so-si-o-lo-lo-gy.” In her way of talking, she likes lengthening words by adding a syllable, often throwing me off balance because of her pronunciation. To me, she is Reg, not Lek. For a long time I understood her way of saying “gift” as “a thing you dream of,” which sounded good enough until uttered in the presence of my high-class teachers. She likes to indulge in vulgar language—that Uthai would dutifully explain—but when I repeat after her, she will scold, “You’re cheeky!” She says she wants to sell things, be a market woman:

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July-A ugust

"But you are selling.” “What?” “Your body.” “Cheeky monkey!”

When she is down on her luck or low in spirits, she tends to nostalgia: “I long to being pure, to being a child. I should go home.” “W e ll,g o .. . . ” “I’ve no money.” “Save some.” “Ah, if only I were back home.” “If you’re serious, I’ll help you.”

After several such exchanges, she decides to be serious, and I have to make good on my promise. I advance bus fare to Khorat and the extras needed on the way, some 100 baht, and send her off to the shack where she stays with four or five of her colleagues. When, in the afternoon of the next day, I go there to see whether she has left, she sits amongst the other women who greet me exuberantly: “Money! Gimme money! G im m e .. . . ” “Reg can’t go home like this. Buy her a pair of shoes first.” “You want to take me? You may—one hundred.” “Why not? She has nice t i t s .. . . ”

Reg does not join the chorus, but doesn’t seem embarrassed either. She’s gained; she could throw a blow-out. The only way to go is to slink off. Cash is overwhelmingly important in the life of the desperate. When it streams in, it means loud laughter, momentary relief, an unexpected victory, a feeling of greatness. There is no plan for spending it. It is a windfall and a binge. It is not to be saved or invested. The idea of a future, if it exists at all, is vague. One hundred baht! One hundred! You look at it, turn it round, kiss it, you shout, you laugh, then spend it, squander it, lend it generously to a miser. You forget your debts, your obligations, or even to buy the shoes you need. When there’s a little money, you’re pennywise. One hundred is a bonanza and calls for a feast.

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Doing Thailand

As a pro, you prove your worth through the money you make. You prove yourself through generosity, through spending arrogantly, with no other purpose than an act of self-validation. The best you can do is to spend some in the temple to ensure your luck or buy a lottery ticket. Reg tells stories about earning fantastic sums—that’s her prestige. Where her money went is irrelevant, the question of an outsider who sees problems that aren’t there. A week after being defeated by my own money, I am drawn to the little square off New Road again. Reg has spotted me before I see her. She hastens to climb onto the buddy seat, and without a word we are off to the spot at the river. She’s happy I’m back; she’s suspicious, too: “You’ve been spending a lot on women. You’ve been playing around.” I am obviously “in,” part of a world she is possessive about. To feed her, I tell about the newly discovered brothel right opposite the Chula campus. She knows it. In the past, she worked there. Its keeper, who she refers to as “older sister,” rents the premises from the police. “Then it must be a safe place, free of harassment.” “That’s right, but it is short on patrons. O f course, many students come, but they just sit there talking and joking, and have little to spend on the women.” “Did you often work in brothels?”

Her answers are vague. She talks about three years ago. She has been telling so many stories. It seems as if her life is an endless trek through cheap knocking-shops, bars, hotels, markets, streets.. . . If there’s an ounce of truth in all this, she must have entertained ten thousand customers. Does my questioning lead anywhere? I think that I have merely descended into the quicksand of her history where all delving for facts leads to confusion. I should be more discriminating, conscious I am watching Reg, a loose woman. That is her way of being, a cunt without emotion where men deposit their sperm, with or without a load of gonococci or spirochetes. It takes five minutes, but they pay to do it—money another has to work for a whole day. Is it work? It is more like scrounging. Reg looks for money, finds it. She is of the street, of endless chitchatting, of playing cat-and-mouse with the police, of catching money at the hotel where she goes in and out. Her world is a gaming table where, divorced from a hard day’s work, money moves like luck. “You know, Reg is just my nickname. My real name is Wasana.” Back at the hostel, I check. “Wasana” means good fortune.

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July-A ugust

Between the river and the bank stretches an extensive backyard that, at night, is guarded by an Indian watchman and a couple of ferocious dogs. Late one evening, they were particularly noisy. Their continual barking draws me to remark, “Stupid dogs.” - “Why do you say that? Dogs aren’t stupid. They have very good eyes. They see things we people can’t see. That’s why they are barking.” At this I laugh heartily. I think I understand what she implies but can’t take it seriously. Amsterdam is still near, Thailand a long voyage ahead. Gazing up a tree, I point upwards, “There, there’s one.” This time no there’s no “cheeky monkey” but a smack in the face. “Shut up.” For Reg, the outing is over. I realize that spirits are not talked of—let alone joked about—at night. Next afternoon, I go to see her. I find her firmly asleep on the floor, pressed against Tyay, with children crowding in front of the television set, the only furniture of the two-room shack. The least I can do is to apologize for my rude behavior and take her to the market before the sun sets, in hopes of hearing more about the spirit world. I’ve hit the nail on the head. She’s willing to talk about her experiences! Of all the stories she has told me, I like her meeting with the slyest spirit of the South best. It happened at the time she worked in that bar in Had Yai: “There, we, five or six of us, sat at a table toward the far end, near the stairs. When a man came in, he would pick one of us to sit with him drinking, and, if he wanted, we took him to one of the rooms on the second floor. The uncanny thing, however, were the visits of the bar owner’s son who had been killed the year before. When he came in, he sat on the other side of the table. He never drank; ghosts do not drink. You recognize them by their drifting eyes. Even so, we were frightened, especially when he signaled one of us to serve him upstairs. In the room, he gestured for me to undress, which he also started doing. Weird, isn’t it? Then he did what men come for and went to take a shower. Imagine, a spirit bathing!” “Did he pay?” “Well, yes. He left me with some red notes. Spirit money. It doesn’t buy you a thing.”

Our first trip out of town took us to Pak Nam. At our river site, Reg had been talking with gusto about the festival of the Pagoda In The Water. Full of anticipation, she suggested going there with one of the other women: “Let’s go there on Friday or Saturday night.” Toward dusk, we had checked in at a shabby place. From there, we went to a landing from where dangerously crowded ferries plied the Chao Phraya’s impressive

11

Doing Thailand

estuary. Like most people, Reg wanted to go to the temple first, to make merit, to ensure her luck, before she spent her sparse money frivolously. The pagoda grounds were brisk with business. Vendors were selling bunches composed of a joss stick, a candle, a piece of gold-leaf, and a few flowers to offer at the temple. Monks were keeping watchful eyes on long tables set with rows and rows of miniature begging-bowls. Nuns were changing baht into quarters, dimes, and nickels. Food stalls tempted the masses with soups and stir-fried delicacies. Obviously, it was an auspicious occasion highlighted by speakers that broadcast manfra-chanting and sermons over the heads of the devout. Reg bought a bunch and went through the motions of offering it at a statue, paying honor first, then lighting the candle and joss stick, putting the flower on the pedestal, and sticking the gold-leaf onto the statue. After praying for luck and prostrating herself, she went to a nun where she settled for nickels. After all, drop­ ping twenty coins into twenty bowls must amount to more merit than parting with one baht all at once. She was obviously content with herself, and demonstrated a hearty appetite at the food-stalls before we crossed over again to the wonders of the fun fair on the opposite bank. There, amidst a cacophony of noise, sound, music, voices and yelling, one found small Ferris wheels and rings so crowded with sputtering karts that as one stopped, all had to come to a halt. There were fire-eaters and fire-spitters, acrobats and contortionists, snake charmers and hawkers, stunt men and pickpockets, buttock and bosom squeezers, yobs and amulet-selling nuns, con-men and dancers, lottery vendors and knife-throwers, piercers and self-mutilators, fakirs and glass-eaters,and above all, crowds and crowds of people, eating, laughing, stumbling, falling, pushing, shoving, shuffling, turning, sweating, panting, squeezing. And there was Reg, losing herself, roaming with beaming eyes through a fantasy land of noise and loudness, of spectacle and spontaneity, of instant satisfactions and wonders where carnival had taken over the ordinariness of life. It was a whirlpool of sensations, of two-headed calves, of hydrocephalic children, man-eating crocodiles, fetuses in bottles, hideous deformities, floating heads, ladies with beards or fat as whale blubber. Whatever the attractions, whether ghost house or monkey acrobatics, they were being advertised by displays of rhythmically but awkwardly moving, sparsely clad twelve to fifteen-year-old girls. Even the female riders at the tight, rickety “Wall of Death” came out in brassiere to attract the crowd. Men and lanky youths, but even a few women, were having fun throwing balls at a target that, once hit, caused pubescent girls instantly to drop into a basin of water. Then, as their job demanded, they had to scurry up again to perch on their small metal seats for the next dousing. Other gids

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July-A ugust

had to dance for their keep. In glittery outfits, they were on stage, jumping up and down in front of hopping men who had bought tickets to dance with them. The latter were not supposed to touch the girls; they were moving with them on wild rock or stylish round dances, on foxtrots or waltzes. The girls’ faces were smiling, or was it the layers of make-up that conveyed that impression? Moving and moving, from early evening until late into the night, fun or no fun, they had better smile as long as the countryside produced an inexhaustible supply of poverty-stricken female talent. We wouldn’t be in Thailand if all this was not seeded with places and vendors selling noodles, rice cakes, sweetmeats, pastries, cut-up fruits, fresh and bottled drinks, crispy cookies, side-dishes for “with the rice,” fish-stomach soup, dumplings, spring rolls, innards, fishcakes, roasted meat, sausages and skewers of shishkebab, all of it so varied it would take weeks to sample. At a far, murky end of the grounds were three or four canvas tents, advertised by a drummer or single trumpeters producing a high-pitched wail reminiscent of a female’s mating-call that attracted droves of teenage boys. When the curtains opened, two or three girls could briefly be seen standing on an inner stage, but in contrast to their sparsely clad colleagues elsewhere, they were dressed in phanung and blouse; they looked like ordinary peasant girls. Reg sensed that it was not her kind of place, and urged me to see for myself, a request I happily consented to. On paying one baht, I found myself among ten to twelve young men in front of a stage on which three girls were lined up. As the curtain closed, they pulled up their skirts to well above the crotch that the spectators tried to touch. The whole session lasted no more than a minute. In reporting back to Reg, I added that these girls must earn a lot for their keeper, netting 5 baht or so every two or three minutes, perhaps as much as a hundred an hour. This didn’t interest her. “Were they shaven?” she asked. “What?” She points to her groin. I hadn’t noted. Back in Bangkok, Reg insists I drop her off at a place near the hostel. There, she is unusually persistent in asking for money; “To buy milk.”

“Milk?” “For my child.” “Do you have a child?” “Yes, and I must pay the people who care for it. Eight baht a day.”

Grown wiser, I propose to give her some money if she produces the child.

13

3

Late August

It is a pleasure to know some people, expats like myself, where I’m welcome to pass an evening telling my stories. There are so many things happening to me, so many impressions to manage, so many balls thrown into my court that I need to tell about them. Yet, experiences are hard to communicate, and the ventures I expose myself to most often don’t connect to the imaginations of nice, middle-class listeners. Many of them are simply amazed in getting news about things happening right in their backyards. To them, it is like revelations from another planet. Others are irritated that I’ve taken up with life in the city’s underbelly. Often they simply don’t want to know. Besides, my forays into uncharted territory sometimes bring me into contact with unspeakable conditions, with a wretchedness that hurts. What remains is writing letters, sorting out things in imaginary conversations that center on myself. What appears as a story about Reg, the streetwalker, is a soliloquy in which I try to find my feet. This is not to say that people should not react to it! Perhaps their views from half-way round the world help me come to grips with my bewildering world, with myself. Anyway, at dusk that day, Reg takes me to a place some 200 yards down from the hostel where a crack in the fence separating Phayathai Road from a piece of marshland provides access to an unruly slum. To go there, one has to negotiate planks—demolition debris—for which they use the word “bridge.” On one side the narrow alley is fenced off with barbed wire; on the other is a row of decrepit wooden houses. Expertly, on her flip-flops, Reg maneuvers across the “bridges,” but to my shoes the planks are as slippery as ice. To make things worse, it is getting dark. Tlirning right, she leads onto another, more easily negotiated pathway. The shanties grow smaller and smaller, until the path abruptly ends. To the right is a single plank, half under water. Avoiding the mud is impossible. Going left and right, we pass a few

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Doing Thailand

random shacks until we arrive at a rectangular shed, about thirty feet long. Stooping, she takes off her slippers, enters the corridor in the middle, and beckons me on. On both sides, coop-like dens are separated from each other by flimsy cardboard walls. Reg disappears into the first; I seat myself at the entrance. There is little to be seen but a mosquito net, lit by the flame of an oil-wick, that fills the whole of the bed-sit. It is too low to stand up in. When the net opens, I see an aged man, an old woman, and a small child, one of its feet tied with a rope to a pole. In the pen next door, is the sound of a radio. The screams of other children and the movement of a score of people penetrate. When Reg touches the tot, it starts to cry. She pulls the bawling boy on to her lap. It doesn’t stop. It reaches for the old man. “You don’t love your mother!” The old woman asks for money. She shows an empty feeding bottle. She says the child is very expensive. I give them some cigarettes, am nauseated, want to g o .. . . Entering the darkness outside, I slip on the mud, make water, then find a plank, any plank will do. I move into a dead end, back up, on to another plank-----A little hand grasps mine—Reg. She leads me back to the crack where we entered. I give her some money. “See you soon.” I trudge home, feeling very tired. Stumbling up the stairs, I hesitate at the door. Opening it, I step into a palace. My room is high, airy, light, clean, quiet, almost serene. The bed in a corner—a nice bed, only a fraction of the room’s size. I feel miserable because of my privilege. I have just been confronted, at less than a hundred yards in a straight line, with a situation so wretched as to be unimaginable—and I had better imagine it. Is this seeing? Is this participating? It is learning the hard way; it is an onslaught on my emotions, on my integrity, on myself. Two weeks have passed, two weeks of confronting the slums. Am I that much of a tenderfoot? Yes. No. I had entered Karachi’s refugee districts, seen Casablanca’s bidonvilles, lived in the slum at Ikebukuro, but these did not enter my experience, my being. They were curiosities. This time, I have been hit. I feel shame and powerlessness. Suddenly I am a stranger in my palace at a stone’s throw from an aged man, an old woman thin as a rake, and a tot with a large head and a foot tied to a pole. Three people in a cage not bigger than twice my mattress, under a net, just above the water, among the rats. “You don’t love your mother,” she had said. My God, what is there for that child to love? On meeting again, I become a Dutch uncle. I try to convince Reg that she can­ not leave the child in that shed. That it is unhealthy. That there is no air, no light, no happiness, not even another kid to play with. From the way she stares at me, I understand I am rambling. The child is not just a burden, not just 8 baht a day. She

16

Late August

is a mother taking care of her baby. By paying the old couple, she proves her worth. What is that talk about happiness, chances in life, children’s homes? Even so, the child, ironically named Aphided (Superpower), after a boxing champion, has cast a spell; he haunts me. 1 am no longer free but dominated by events. Thank goodness, not all the time. On delivering her to her beat, I had promised to be back the next evening, but for once, at my writing-desk, I am making good progress. Let it be, tonight I am working. Yet, I promised. Later than usual, I arrive on New Road. Reg is on the other side of the street, with Tyay and a guy. She hurries to my side, smiling helplessly, “Will you wait?” She has a customer, she’s about to be on her back, she’s near money. I am dazed. “See you tomorrow.” What do I expect, associating with prostitutes? But emotion and fantasy have taken over from rational observation. I’m becoming my own measure, a prisoner of myself. I must reach into that elusive chiaroscuro world, put my hand on things that are bound to escape from my grasp. Every time I drop her off at her beat on that stinking, fuming hole, it is as if I am confronted with the Addams family in the scene where Morticia descends into a sewer pit; “Thank you for seeing me home.. . . ” The lid closes, and I’ll never know what life is on the other side because I live in a house with a door. Prying into the lives of others seems to confront me most with myself, with my confines and limitations, with a horizon that fences me in. I am poking my nose into others’ affairs, but noses are bad tools for prizing open manhole covers. What am I but a Peeping Tom, glimpsing aspects of other lives for my own sake, and incapable of understanding what I see in the context of their lives? In daytime, they teach me Thai, but sometimes my instructors show that they are not satisfied with my progress. I am slow in mastering tones and certain vowels, yet I do my best, and in the evenings I try out whatever I learned when we sit at our riverside. Much of what I say must be gibberish to Reg or at least a strange language. When I ask my many questions, she invariably asks: “Why? Why do you want to know?” I explain that I’m interested in her experiences, in her story, “It’s interesting,” I say. She savors the word, “in-te-res-ti-ting.” Obviously, it does not belong to the vocabulary of the street, her street. When I talk about her “work,” she gives me an odd look. She likes the word. Reg “works.” Reg has a profession. But these are my words that do not connect with the way she sees it. In her view, she has no trade. She is a whore—the word she uses is base—that’s screwing and being screwed; it is catching money, not working. On the street, it is pleasantly sauntering about, chatting with the others, occasionally

17

D oing Thailand

interrupted by a customer she always refers to as khon, the anonymous classifier for people, something like “a unit of human being.” These conversations not only show me the limits of my linguistic ability but also that we speak different languages, inhabit different worlds. My teachers are critical not simply of my asking them to explain oft-heard expres­ sions, such as “Fucking elephant!” or “My cunt drops!”—which they refuse to do anyway—but are not satisfied because my language in general tends to be too plain, too egalitarian. I have difficulty adding “khrap,” the suffix that makes any expression polite or deferential, to my sentences. I object to elevating all and sundry, but at Chula it seems necessary, while in Sampeng, if I unwittingly use a sumptuous word or overly polite saying, I get laughed at. Polite society refers to pros as sophenee (“beautiful women”), while Sampeng’s down-to-earth streetwalkers refer to themselves as karee, hookers, or, more neutrally, “women looking for money/food.” I find it difficult to express the whole social map in language. Besides, if you stick to the conventions, you simultaneously place yourself on that map. It goes against the grain with me; I feel hampered, impeded. Of course, at the university I am a student of sorts, but I am primarily an easy-going free spirit refusing to be pigeon-holed. It even appears in my clothing as one of my high-class women teachers chided me for drip-drying my shirts. I should iron them, or rather, have them ironed. Well, as long as I am doing my own washing, saving an odd baht, I think she’ll have to cope with it. On my side I also have some annoyances. It lasted weeks before I had the necessary tapes to exercise in the language lab, and for the first two months they refused to introduce me to the Thai alphabet. All that time I had to rely on phonetic transcription, while Thai script, though complex, is not really difficult, and most of the time usefully indicates pronunciation and tone. Over the past few weeks, I have been taking on that hurdle, which enables me to decipher names and direc­ tions—thus allowing me to take Reg to places out of town—and to read elementary school primers in which anything in the world is classified as “good” or “not good,” as polite or rude. My first free reading exercise was rather unsettling. I traveled behind a smoke-belching bus, trying to read the ad at its rear, “0A /0, New!!!" To read or not to read, Reg doesn’t give a hoot. In order to find out where she hails from—her stories are confusing—I showed her a map. That was great. She pointed precisely to the spot where her mother lives. Only then—oaf that I am—I realized that she is a hundred percent illiterate. So it seems to go all the time. Am I learning something about Thailand, or am I learning about myself first of all?

18

Late August

What I collect is no better than the old buttons and coins dropped into my box. I hardly know where they come from. Because my Thai is improving, Reg wants to talk, wants me to understand, and insists on explaining things. She has fully replaced Noi as my tutor. She has devilish fun in teaching me the street language but can also be very serious. On those occasions she allows me glimpses into her world. It appears as a small, self-contained universe in which she is perfectly at home. She may be naive, but she is not stupid and has a rich imagination. That makes her world both confined and vast, and she is at ease in both dimensions. I try to explain that she can prevent disease and pregnancy with little “rubber bags.” She couldn’t care less. Rubbers are expensive, and men don’t want to use them. Reg has no disease. Reg is as fit as a fiddle. “What if you are pregnant again?” Those are my ideas, not hers. Why raise problems that aren’t there? The only problem is money. “Do you know what is really dangerous? You don’t. You need me to tell you. That’s when you sleep with a woman who is having her period. A few days ago, I had the ‘red light,’ but it didn’t stop me from looking for money. When the man who took me to the hotel—he wanted me for the whole night—discovered that I was bleeding, he got very angry and refused to pay. Not being paid after serving him a first time, that hurts, but he was right: it is very dangerous, a bleeding woman.’’ “And the clap?” “I’m fine.”

Reg knows the ins and outs. Her world is well-ordered. Things outside of it are totally irrelevant. That’s other people’s business—none of hers. Maybe it’s the same with me. I merely think that I am studying other people’s lives. In doing so I hurt my nose and bump my head. I know that this is going to happen again. Without hurting yourself, without violating your own little universe, you are not going to penetrate somebody else’s. Perhaps the only thing that really happens is that you are confronted with your own narrow-mindedness. What the Other revealed is not much more than your own prejudices. It teaches me that you can never understand the Other as long as you place him or her within the confines of your own horizon. You’ll have to learn to understand them in their own right; you have to see their perspectives. I doubt whether I’m good at this, but when I try Reg’s life offers a very different picture. The problems I see are everyday fare to her. Her life is clearly arranged and predictable. She is unhampered by future or choice. She doesn’t need to intervene. She goes with the

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Doing Thailand

flow, her flow. That flow has no program—it has no other purpose than doing what you would be doing anyway. Chances are that the only thing I am doing is constructing a case of extreme contrast. My life is one of obsessive progression. I spent eight to nine years at the university in order to arrive somewhere from where to move on. I doubt everything. It is my profession. Raising problems is my hobby; the future is a necessity; inter­ vention is a must; curiosity drives me on. Perhaps this explains why Reg and I like each other’s company. Opposites attract, don’t they? In her case, not life itself but survival is important: she must find the money in order not to kick the bucket. It is as basic as that. All the problems I raise, the suggestions I propose, are no more “interesting” than the bourgeois morality that inspires the nice, “good” people of Chula. Those opinions do not touch her. People like Reg live from day to day and from hand to mouth. They know that many things are not as they should be, but they have to accept them. The police chase the women and take their money; the boss cheats his workers; the civil servant is a petty tyrant. You can’t do a thing about it. Those on the other side have their own rules; they are a different kind. You try to stay clear of them. If you can’t, you possess your soul in patience. I don’t mind if you rate these remarks for what they are—idle talk. Still they are important for me to note. I must unmask myself before I can even hope to get some grip on what is happening to me and on what I hope to understand. Compared to the people I’m in contact with I have been bom into the lap of luxury with a silver spoon in my mouth. How can I ever pretend to know what drives them? I shall never experience how they live because I have money in the bank, I have choices in life, and I am on my way to a future. I am much more of a petit bourgeois than I like to admit. My days are programmed. Five days a week Chula, language. In the afternoons, Uthai. That is more language, and lots of explanations, not only of Buddhism but of my experiences. Before going home, I pass through Sampeng. Normally I reach there before the late afternoon rains. Some women have already come; with them I drink iced coffee before going home to work. I added up my hours. I wanted to survey my use of time. So many hours of this, of that, of sleep, of sitting with Reg at the river. I came up with twenty-two hours. I had forgotten to consider travel tim e. The city is vast, and although you can speed nicely along the broad new roads, such as Silom, Ratchadamri and Sukhumvit, the older thoroughfares slow you down. Anyway, I must spend some two hours in the traffic every day.

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4

Thailand in the Mid-1960s

In 1965, Bangkok was no longer the fabled “Venice of the East.” It was a place rapidly entering the world, eager to join modernity and progress. The canals once dissecting it in all directions had been filled in, becoming roads. Cars and motorized tricycles had taken over from boats. Life was speeding up; trees were being cut down; wooden structures were giving way to concrete and steel, to banks, offices, apartment houses and, most conspicuously, large hotels. In the process, flooding was aggravated. The city of 2.5 million had begun expanding beyond its ecology’s limits, and while real high-rises did not yet exist, the victory of concrete and fuming gridlock was in the air. Still, the skyline, except for Sampeng, was dominated by temple spires and tall trees, and Dutchmen possibly felt a vague pride that the six-storied Philips Building ranked among the city’s tallest. In that edifice The Asia Society, run by Bill Klausner, had its office, and since he had observed the behavior of monks in the Northeast, I sometimes visited him to seek information on my chosen subject. He was not the only American in town. To the east, in neighboring Indochina, the war in Vietnam was heating up with the “red tide” threatening to spill over into Thailand. The Royal Thai Army thus needed strengthening. To conduct their war, the Americans were converting the country into a huge military base. The United States Operations Mission (USOM) was entering villages to build facili­ ties and stimulate development. The Peace Corps was upgrading knowledge and lifestyles. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was funding anti-Communist activities. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was supporting the war effort by gathering data on mentalities and lifeways. Thailand was clearly an American ally, and subject to lots of “aid” to be channeled into develop­ ment—“counter-insurgency”—programs, military training, and related hardware. Roads and a new rail-track were built to open up the Northeast. They led through

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Doing Thailand

empty territory: they were meant to channel military supplies rather than farm equipment and produce. Swallowing the rhetoric, I saw the problem as one of national integration. After all, Thailand was a big country, comprising certain well-defined regions each with its peculiarities and distinct idioms, harboring a varied population: Malay Muslims in the deep South, tribal people in the hills and mountains of the North, millions of Chinese immigrants and their descendants, and the Laotian-speaking inhabitants of the poor, neglected Northeast. Did these people feel they belonged together? Did they feel like a nation? Throughout the twentieth century, the governments in Bangkok attempted to make the capital the nation’s unquestioned center. From there, nationalism and mod­ ern versions of Thai civilization were propagated. From there swarmed the army of civil servants who descended on the provinces. From there, a national school system expanded. From there, community development and counter-insurgency strategies originated. In the early 1960s, with Vietnam “under threat,” these programs were invigorated. The King resurfaced as the nation’s moral center, towering high above the sordid squabbles of military politicians. Religion was to be developed as a national institution. Schools were being built in ever more remote villages. By the mid-1960s, the expansion of the school system had been so impressive as to leave only a third of the population illiterate. Most people under thirty were considered able to read and write and to understand Bangkok Thai. They had been exposed to the national curriculum and its propaganda, to at least four years of flag-raising and anthem-singing ceremonies. They knew the King to be the sacred heirloom of the Thai people, and Buddhism their moral guardian. Politically, how­ ever, these people did not necessarily feel great affection for the center. Their voices and interests obviously didn’t matter there. If they thought about their government at all, they felt neglected. In their contacts with prestige-crazed “servants of the King,” they did not really meet with a civil bureaucracy but with haughty district officers and teachers who felt far superior to the peasant masses—then still 85% of the population—whom they were lording it over. These problems were thought to be particularly acute in Isaan, the Northeast. The Laotian-speaking population there—a third of the national total—had little reason to be charmed by Bangkok ways. Theirs was a poor region, hidden in the rain shadow of mountain ranges that separated their territory from Thailand proper. Sometimes they fled drought or the slack season to do menial work in Bangkok. There they were patronizingly treated as country bumpkins eating sticky rice and pungent side dishes—with their fingers!

22

Thailand in the Mid-1960s

Apart from sharing the King, nominal Buddhism, and the burdens of Bangkokimposed administration, there was little enthusiasm for national identification to be expected from Northeastern peasants long accustomed to solving, or at least coping with, their own problems. Their loyalty would have to be won, and communist propaganda was quite successful in doing just that. Exposed to infiltration from Vietnam and Laos, a Mao-inspired guerrilla force was building up, threatening the safety of village headmen, teachers, and police personnel. In countering these developments, joint Thai-American mobile development units were organized. They traveled to the villages to dig wells, improve hygiene, advise on agriculture, build airstrips, and propagate “the Nation.” Headmen were invited to Bangkok, from where specially trained monks were sent to promote “politically correct” interpretations of Buddhism. Besides, roads were being built criss-crossing the countryside in all directions. Despite these efforts, the insurgency kept building up. The period of heavy US involvement in Vietnam has, for Thailand, been called the American Era. The Thai military power-holders were hobnobbing with and cultivated by Big Brother from overseas. Military funding, ordnance, and personnel poured into the country. (At the time, at least 30,000 US military were in Thailand.) All this became very obvious, not only in the far-off countryside, but also in the capital where rapid modernization was taking place. Bangkok was awash with money, not only because of the war, but also because of the city’s strategic location at the very heart of Southeast Asia. It had been peripheral to the main shipping routes of the past, but air traffic had now put it squarely at the center. The city was going to become a meeting-place between Japan and the West, between Europe and Australia. It was attracting global business and congresses, international exchanges and UN agencies. Tourism, then mainly from America, was picking up. The course of the future was baring itself. These developments were accompanied by inherent problems that were becoming visible at the time. The capital was being transformed into a permanent construction site where squatters competed with investors for space. Investment went into real estate rather than into industry,with foreigners paying rents to the tune of three times the monthly salary of a full professor at Chula. Bangkok-serving hydro-electric plants began to divert water needed for irrigation. The service sector was expanding rapidly, but ran into the chronic problem of an unskilled labor force and an inadequate education system. As a result, Thai secretaries fluent in English could earn up to twice the salary of foreign graduates in the employ of the state, while ambitious businesses were hiring Western managers—at royal wages—from

23

Doing Thailand

all over the world. In brief, the place where I got my first taste of being a professional stranger was a backward country hurrying into the future. Intellectually things were rapidly developing, too, with more and more scholars questioning the model propagated by the Cornell group. It seemed as if the latter were imprisoned in schemes of their own concoction. Of course, if you are keen on seeing Buddhism at work, you will find Buddhist values in every nook and cranny. It will pervade Thai life, inspire individualism and “loose structure.” Somebody doesn’t show up for an appointment? Loose structure! An accident on the road? Wild driving? Extreme individualism! Yet, I survived 16,000 miles on a motorbike in often wild but not so loosely-structured traffic. If it would have been as unstructured as the Buddhist individualism school would have it, I would have been as dead as the dogs lying by the roadside. Those dogs didn’t know the rules, but I did. Don’t ask me to formulate them, but there was and is method in the madness. Explain-alls like Buddhism probably explained little but agreed with the popularly assumed relationship between religion and development. These, in turn, were congruent with the then-fashionable structural-functionalist paradigm. This presumes that the composing elements of a society naturally belong together and are in balance. As a result, and however improbable the conclusions, as long as they fitted the loose-structure and idealized Buddhism frameworks, researchers were unfazed by facts. Apart from such fashionable functionalism, the Cornell group concurred with John F. Embree’s impressions, which focused their attention on individual behavior that, in the culture-and-personality frame of mind, was thought to reveal the Thai way of life. Consequently, a matching idea of Buddhism was constructed in which “individualism” became the touchstone. It was elevated to dogma: the Thai are individualists. The weird thing is that this led to an offhand characterization of the social structure as “loose.” The tenacity of the Cornell model may also have had much to do with the choice of research site. Bang Chan, located at the edge of the Bangkok conurbation, allowed researchers to operate comfortably from a hotel in town. In that way, they maintained a colossal distance between themselves and the plodding peasants; they remained strangers to each other, incomprehensible and elusive. Moreover, being as close to the city as the nosy anthropologists, the peasants concerned—who, like peasants anywhere, set their sights on self-sufficiency—had long been exposed to the market and thus naturally cared for themselves and their families first. They were as individualistic as anyone living in a money-dominated, semi-urban

24

Thailand in the Mid-1960s

environment. In other words, there was nothing particularly Thai or Buddhist about their situation. I had the good luck of arriving at a time when the tide was turning: as of 1965, the heyday of loose-structuralism had passed. Scholars outside the Cornell orbit had begun to question, or frankly ignored, their ideas. This is apparent from Boesch’s reflections on the stifling effects of the sacrosanct hierarchical relationships on personal drive and aspiration. Evers commented on frozen structures, too, and had begun debunking the myth of high social mobility. At the same time, I joined their chorus, cautioning that one should not talk about how things are structured, whether loosely or tightly, on the basis of pure impressionism and in blatant disregard of observable facts. Next to these European voices, other outsiders to the Cornell circle had things to say. In his review of the literature, commissioned by UNESCO, Jacques Amyot was, to say the least, not really taken by loose structuralism. Klausner’s and Ingersoll’s observations of village life also hinted at regularity rather than anything “loose,” while Moerman concluded his study with the memorable sentence, “In the course of explicating the concept’s (loose structure’s) meaning in Ban Ping, I have become less convinced of its value for depicting Thai society” (167). This was just a beginning. We still needed to know almost everything about the practice of Thai Buddhism, the mentality or mentalities informing it, the position of the monkhood as a national institution and its concrete influence on people’s lives. The relevant studies would take us up to the end of the 1970s when the debate about loose structure finally died down. For the time being, however, loose structure needed to be taken seriously. Where did it originate? What made it so persuasive? Why were observers, time and again, struck by observations that made them conclude that there was something “loose” about life in Thailand? Perhaps there is something elusive about the Thai. They are eminently capable of maintaining their distance from strangers. They do not easily admit them into their lives, seemingly keeping to themselves while holding outsiders at arm’s length. They shield themselves from foreigners and make these feel foreign indeed. Besides, those foreigners having come to study them also kept their distance. They and their informants inhabited very different worlds and must have found each other equally odd. In my early days of fieldwork, I did not see myself as a student of culture. I was a sociologist interested in social systems, structure, manifest and latent functions, institutional arrangements, recurrences and regularities. As a result, the idea of loose

25

Doing T hailand

structure did not sit well with me, and the reduction of social structure to a kind of a dependent variable of culture and personality struck as preposterous, as bad sociology. Perhaps the scholars of the 1950s wanted to impose a Wamerian social stratification a la America, a regular pyramid of classes, layered from upper-upper down to the lowly rabble. In the mid-1960s, Thai society could not be forced into such a model. Society was still organized in estates that each had their roles to play. At the apex was the monarch; there was an estate of aristocrats, including nobility and bureaucracy; they were the rulers. There was the army, aspiring to rule. There was organized religion, the clergy, some 350,000 in all. There was the peasantry. With economic change, the middle classes were only just appearing. Trade and exchange were in the hands of China-born or second-generation business people who kept to themselves and who were seen as a foreign element in the Thai polity. In the mid-1960s, Riggs still labeled them “pariah entrepreneurs,” tolerated outsiders who had to compromise with Thai bureaucratic superiors who were not only thought to dominate affairs but who were also organized, like the monks, the army, and the schools, in strictly hierarchical fashion. In that order of things, persons identified with honor and rank rather than with themselves as “individualists.” Perhaps the military-bureaucratic oligarchy—not particularly tolerant of dissidents—had not yet succeeded in incor­ porating the “individualistic” peasants into their world view.

26

Plates

1. Portrait 1965

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**• ••

2. Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

3. Close-up; here I study Thai

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4 . B u d d h a ( S u k h o th a i). Do His Teachings explain Thailand? (Photo Fon Zwart)

5. Buddha (peasant style) (Photo Fon Zwart)

6 . Angel paying resp ect to The Teachings (Photo Fon Zwart)

7. M aking merit by dressing the Buddha ( Photo Fon Zwart)

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11. Malai with my brother. 'Beer is no liquor.’

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12. Receiving a certificate from the His Majesty King

13. Straight from the fram e o f The Gypsy Girl

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14. Surassi’s home in Thonburi. near Krungthon Bridge

15. Road in front of Surassi's house

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16. Uthai and fellovv-monk 17.. On the way to Wat Thongnopphakhun

17a. Passing a beggar woman

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I7b.

Risking life and limb

17c. Ferry

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19.

Sampeng after rain

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21. Quay next to Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank

5

September

Too often, my life here is bewildering. I am pushed by events and emotions. Perhaps I should stick to the ivory tower of the university; stick to monks and community development; focus on learning “correct” Thai. It’s simply not my way. I am fas­ cinated by places where I shouldn’t be, places my fellows do not go. Being there, I stand out—sometimes as a target. I am obviously out of place, a curiosity, a guest. I try to blend in, but I am an intruder, as everybody knows. This habit also makes me a stranger at the ivory tower where my interest in the “low life” is distrusted; it troubles them. Troubled or not, a stranger also holds his attractions. In that way I am welcome to chat with a youngish woman lecturer in French. Her attire is like that of most women on the faculty. They dress up in lightweight, super-modest summer clothes full of frills and pleats that exaggerate fragility and femininity. It stands in stark contrast with the black-and-white uniforms of the unadorned women students. Even as I dislike those frilly dresses, they do agree with that French-speaking lady who spent some time in Paris. There she has been shocked by the ways of the students. Whether it was meant as a criticism of Western freedoms or of my libertine reputation, she didn’t say when she tried to convince me of the importance of la pudeur, of being honorable and chaste, which, to me, is somehow reflected in those dresses. I must say, I was impressed by her earnestness that struck me as unworldly. I shiver when I imagine such a woman as my partner. Compared to the ladies on the faculty, those of Sampeng appear as the dark side of the moon or a nether world of debauchery and sin, or, should we say, of poverty and struggle? It is as if the ivory tower stands next to a cesspit of vice. Unwittingly, they rub it in, especially on Wednesdays. Then my teacher makes me read an ethics text written for high-school students. It is on discipline and appearance, on self-restraint and pleasing manners. I was struck by one of the metaphors: Young

27

Doing Thailand

people are compared to foals that freely run around, jump, frolic, and leap. I would say they are playful, but they did not use that word. The message is clear, the young should be restrained, domesticated, made docile, and obedient. They should not run freely, jump, frolic, or leap. Nice, that is, “good” people control themselves. So much is sure. I am not that nice. I frolic, and they know it. Of course, they tolerate me. Why not? I am an outsider, foreign and ignorant. The language expresses it clearly: I am a farang, a white person hailing from the fringes of the Eurasian continent. They say the word derives from “Frank,” from the Frankish Knighthood that set out to conquer the Near East at the time of the Crusades. From there the word spread into Asia; it seems to be traceable in many languages. As far as I am concerned, I experience the word as discriminatory. It classes a great many people together—and stereotypes them accordingly. To be white is the explain-all that sets you apart; you are not one of them and never will be. You are a Fremdkoerper in the most literal sense of the word, a “foreign body” And this lends us, the Thai and me, a mutual elusiveness that at the same time is attractive and loathsome. It is attractive in that it stimulates curiosity, the will to understand each other. I find it loathsome in providing a wall of prejudices to hide behind and to treat each other as exclusive categories. Whatever my feelings, I am not going to change the world. I am classed as farang, and it’s easy to see why. One hears the word all the time. They refer to you not as “he” or “she” but as farang. If that happens on the other side of the fence where little brats yell “F a la n g .fa la n g whether or not followed by “One baht!,” I can understand their excitement, but on campus I do not like it. It’s rude. I doubt, however, whether there are rules in the ethics primer dealing with this problem. Associating with Reg leads me into alleys I would never have otherwise traveled. In fighting the shock of the first confrontation with that tot with its foot bound to a pole—the utter wretchedness of it—I started to mull over alternatives. There must be children’s homes, orphanages, or what have you. I went to the office concerned with social work. It was not an encouraging experience. It is a rather smallish place staffed with lady graduates dressed like the lecturers from Chula. You could hardly imagine them going out into the slums, until I met Miss Arun who made a purposive impression. She explained that in a city full of misery—the Aphideds must number in tens of thousands—there is little they can do, but she encouraged me to take Reg to the office. It all depended on her. In the evening at the river I told her. The child could possibly land in better circumstances. Reg was impassive but agreed to come along.

28

September

It was quite an interview that I couldn’t well follow, but the case sparked some interest. Miss Arun told us she would check on Aphided’s situation, then see whether she could do something about it, again emphasizing that she could only act with Reg’s consent. Then in English she said: “There is something strange about that woman.” What can I do really? I am meddling with other peoples’ lives, interfering in circumstances I am unable to alter. Probably it is merely protesting the feeling of powerlessness and insignificance that struck me during the first confrontation. I am fantasizing escapes, cooking up alternative scenarios because I follow impulses rather than reason. But then, reason makes me an outsider—which is both unacceptable and a fact. That was, for me, the message of my meeting with the remarkable Dr. Phian. Dr. Phian, a physician who dedicates her life to fallen women, was the first per­ son I met not taken aback by my interest and involvement. She wants to rehabilitate such women, to rescue their self-respect, to “cure” them, to give them hope. In a way, she knows the scene, and can produce statistics on age, circumstances, marital status, etcetera. Fifty percent of these women are young, between 16 and 20, and 55% are divorcees (loosely structured early marriage?). Forty percent are illiterate. She is strongly against the anti-prostitution law. That law has nothing to do with the protection of women. A fallen woman, whatever the reasons for her fate, is scum, a lowly being, a stain on society. The police hunt them as if they were animals. They may raid them in the brothels as if they were doll’s houses. To them, it means money. Clearing sidewalks means pilfering the money the women carry, only to throw them out onto the street again. You cannot possibly stuff the precincts and jails with poor, wayward women. There is an even more invidious side to this. Making streetwalking hazardous concentrates the trade in manageable brothels, all of which pay protection money to the servants of the law. It is a racket, in which Reg operates at the lowest rung. Dr. Phian is a mine of information, and a demonstration that both of us are outsiders, looking at the scene from a distance. We try to pinpoint phenomena, subject them to ideas, classifying and drawing lines through the anthill of ordinary life. Imagine them there, using our map. Surely they would get lost. No matter how often we meet active prostitutes, we remain worlds apart. And isn’t that the same for the others we meet, loosely-structured peasants, Buddhist slum-dwellers, individualistic tarts and other floozies? Even so, Dr. Phian is still interested in my observations and experiences. She encourages me to develop a picture of Reg, to tell the story of her life, which merely leads me into a maze of contradictory

29

Doing Thailand

episodes. Reg loves story-telling—and do not doubt her word! - “I am a grown-up woman, a mother. When I tell something, it is true. My parents never asked the same question twice.” It takes me quite some time to see her point. I tell her she is ill. I want her boy to be somewhere else. I take her to Miss Arun. I am a busybody. I try to impose my ideas. I worry about the dirt in her body. I speculate about her passing it on to her patrons. But who am I? She is an adult; she is a mother; she is not ill; to her, antibiotics are like aspirin, like “Snake Brand.” Two or three capsules will do the trick. Her life is complete. She knows her way. It is my life that is deficient. I do not know my way. I know that there is more to know. I doubt. I read. I write. I go to libraries. I study. I am curious, always traveling on to the ever-receding horizon. Reg and I are worlds apart. Sometimes she rubs it in when she explains things by saying, “I am a whore,” using the nastiest word in the language. Her “I am a whore” means that I am an outsider to her world, that I do not belong to it, that I am no better than any other square. Reg shows herself to be a whore without a trace of inhibition. She has crossed the line that divides good from bad, the righteous from the hoi-polloi, the squares from the scum. Being on her side of the line, she is untouched by official ideas o f respectability. She has totally adapted herself to her profession. She allows herself all behavior a “nice” woman would dread. When she sits, her mini-skirts will edge up higher still; she’s unaware of it. When she is on the buddy seat, she squeezes herself against my back. When we walk, she wants to hold my hand. Her conversa­ tion is devoid of polite words. Wherever she appears, people will recognize her for what she is—and she cannot care less. Personally, I like that freedom. Sometimes, however, it is irritating to show myself in her company as when passing a group of young men who are not shy of proclaiming their comments. Lek doesn’t even seem to notice. She is truly immune to society’s opinion. And society knows that a girl in the company of a white man is a whore; a “nice” girl cannot allow herself such freedom. I have some good news about Superpower. I must admit that it soothes my conscience now that I accept things for what they are without troubling myself. I was too close for comfort; this is better. Without telling me, Reg had spirited her boy away from the old couple in that shed near the hostel. I heard it from Miss Arun when I went to see her to enquire whether action had been taken. She had indeed been to the place, but the child was gone and without the mother’s cooperation they couldn’t do a thing.

30

September

According to Reg, things are in the best of orders. If I am that interested in her baby, she will take me to where he is. In the labyrinth of alleys between Yaowarat and New Road, rather near the place she took me the first time, she guides me into a five or six storey concrete structure she refers to as “hotel.” Inside, we move through a tangle of stairs and corridors, across foot-high cement beams with doors opening to rooms left and right and along stinking latrines. Several flights up, we come to a windowless room, filled with a big bed on which I see a half-naked man, a half-naked woman, and, unmistakably because of his oversized head, Reg’s boy. A small fan puts on a courageous struggle to stir the sticky air. I recognize the woman as one of Reg’s colleagues with whom I have chatted over coffee at the little square on the side of New Road. The child begins to cry. The solution is milk. Not ordinary milk, but diluted Dutch condensed milk. That’s quality! Gee, ten months old, teething, almost walk­ ing, yet bottle-fed. The child keeps crying and refuses to drink. The woman’s man is better at calming him down than his mother. When he has stopped, the white man is to hold him, upon which it howls again. Then Reg takes him, hitting him playfully on the behind. He howls louder still. I, too, feel less good. A few days later, Reg has more to show. Behind the shack where she lives, in the same compound, the policeman’s wife has been found wiHing to take care of the kid, at the same rate of 8 baht a day. That place, at least, is airy. The boy was sitting in an old washbasin, surrounded by a few women on the rickety veranda in front of the policeman’s hovel. The women were folding and gluing old newspapers and notebooks into the sort of bags people carry their snacks in. Anyway, they also take some time to “mother” or “aunt” Aphided—pulling at his birdie, feeding him, petting___ He seems to thrive. It is much better now. Enough about Reg. That she makes me feel a stranger is not so strange, but this week I had an experience that made me feel thoroughly out of place. On campus we had a visiting group of singers, a choir from an American university on its world tour. They put on a performance in the great audience hall where I sneaked in after my lesson. Suddenly, and most unexpectedly, I was bathing in the delight of great European choral music. For a few days this confrontation with my roots in the stuffy heat of this city had the better of me. It was upsetting; being here is uprooting oneself without letting go. Wouldn’t it be better if I just stuck to the things I came to do, confining myself to the ivory tower of outsiders who know where they are? For them, the concert was probably not disconcerting. It rather confirmed their identity, reassuring them that

31

Doing Thailand

they still are who they are. They are not obsessed with the Other, with an elusive environment. Campus and academe are safe places. I do not like that safety; it is so smug. The only thing I’m sure of is that I am reconstituting myself, that I am losing and gaining at the same time. As long as I understand as little as I do, it is a disturbing experience. Yet, writing about it helps. It makes me see the way I travel. It clarifies changing perspectives. When you have just arrived, everything is new, strange. The only measure available is your own, plus, of course, the loosely structured observations of those who wrote about this place before. My first confrontations were baffling. Taken unawares, I met w ith ignorance, ill-health, neglect and illiteracy, poverty and prostitution, slums and a baby bound with its foot to a pole. None of these were parts of my world. There, I take health seriously; I cannot imagine being without letters, without texts. I have a reasonable income; the lottery has no meaning for me; I am always moving on to a future. So, what happened was that I measured by my own standard and wanted to change the world accordingly. It is good to recognize my own confusion. To acknowledge that it is I who am blind and in need of a seeing-eye dog. Reg doesn’t need one: she knows where and what and who she is. Her world is regular, and sometimes she tries to explain it. By getting glimpses of the perspectives of the people I meet, my own view of things changes all the time. This shows how personal it is, how hard to objectify. It shows how easy it is for fantasy and emotion to take over. It makes me distrust the idea o f empathy that was sometimes discussed at university. Andr6 Koebben, my anthropol­ ogy professor, stressed hard data, to be obtained through systematic observation. Empathy was imagining things, but when I take the tack of Dr. Phian’s statistics, I feel I’m even further from what I want to know. I cannot disentangle this, not now, not yet. I am in the midst of it; it affects me, and the only thing I know for sure is that tomorrow I’ll see different things and hold a different opinion. I operate in a world full of contradictions where the same observations are both confirmed and denied. Is it different at home, in Amsterdam? Probably not. A lso there life must be full of hitches. The point is that they are part of life as I know it, that I am not reflecting on. In Amsterdam, I go with the flow, or at least with my little flow that keeps me from bumping my head or from prying into manholes. In that way, life is smooth and orderly—until you start asking questions. Here it is different. Here I hurt myself and raise problems. I create contradic­ tions. I was especially shaken by my experiences with the medical establishment. When I took Reg, who had been complaining for some ten days about pains in h er underbelly, to the university clinic, they gave her a shot and sent her away with a

32

September

prescription. At the pharmacy, she decided to invest five baht in five capsules of the prescribed cure, to which the pharmacist made no objections. I was staggered. You can’t tamper with prescriptions, can you? It got me excited. I took her back to the clinic: “What has come over you? You are sending a penniless, illiterate little woman home with a scrap of paper to fight her disease?” “But aren’t you paying for her?” “Am I to solve your public health problems?”

We got a stamp, FREE, and the tetracycline, the full cure. Even so, I am still suspended in a web of inconsistencies in which—this much I take in—I act like Don Quixote.

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Plates

22. Hotel where Reg takes her patrons

23. Hovel where Reg and four other women stay (left side)

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24. Food everywhere

24a. In the passage to Reg’s hovel

2 4 b . Hawker

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25. Slum on Phayathai Road, opposite Chula's campus

25a. On the way to Reg’s child, first ‘bridge’

25b. Second ‘bridge’

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26. Near the M onument o f Democracy (background)

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31. Pen-pushing at the UN ECAFE

32. The flow of words at a UN conference

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6

October Between Saraburi and the Town of the Royal Border-stone, or Khorat, the capital of and gateway to the Northeast, the Americans had just finished building the Friendship Highway. As a result, we traveled along a very smooth road. On small, but rather fast motorbikes, this can turn anthropology into a hazardous sport. We almost never made it when a water-buffalo decided to cross the road right on our approach. Coming to a rough stop on swerving onto the verge, we survived with a few bruises and scratches. That evening, after checking in, there appeared to be more serious damage: underpants stained with pus. I was leaking. I was dirty, very dirty, felt panic, had to do something about it, immediately, had to find a doctor. Before thinking about eating, I set out to find a clinic or a hospital. Yet, at eight in the evening, nobody was convinced of the urgency, Reg least of all. To her, the first thing to be seen to was food. As 1 calmed down, it made sense to be practical about it. That night I wouldn’t need a rubber. We had landed at a room on the second floor of a ramshackle, wooden hotel, and slept early. Around eleven, I woke up because of music and loud voices downstairs. It was as if ten people were throwing a party. This was not what was hoped for and so, after being wide awake for some time, I decided to see for myself what was on and whether I could plead for consideration. It was my first taste of what the American military calls “R&R,” rest and recreation. In an open, big room at the rear were tw o big, practically naked harbingers of Western civilization, obviously in their cups, who were, among bottles and a ghetto blaster, enjoying themselves with four or five girls. They were drinking, screwing and yelling, in which they were eagerly joined by their ladies-for-the-night. The enthusiasm with which ThaiAmerican “friendship” was being celebrated would certainly prove immune to any spoilsport. Nor was my desire for sleeping a good enough reason to risk aggravating the day’s damage.

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Doing Thailand

Around midnight, music and voices calmed down. It was but the ominous lull before real pandemonium. While they were busy, one of the girls had taken her chance to sneak out with the sound machine and was trying to run off with it. Unfortunately, it was noted too soon, with two now fully naked bulky white bodies in hot pursuit. Meanwhile, Reg slept on. The map promised a trail right to the south. At the point where the dirt road gave way to a jeep-able track, a Thai-American surveying crew was mapping the profile of a road. Twenty miles on, the trail ran into dry forest. People were few and far between. When there were any, they did not seem to consider the path to be a road from Khorat to an identifiable place on the other side of the watershed. One man commented that the passage was tough going. My Thai not being that good, I enquired whether it was still far too “tough.” The trail was passable, however. The sandy and laterite soils on the rain-shadow side of the mountain range cutting off the Northeast from the rest of the country were paradise compared to the mud we had confronted on the forest trail to the Erawan Falls two weeks earlier. The man had been right, however. When we came to a river on the other side, we had arrived at “tough.” At the place where we reached its bank, the swiftly flowing water was about four to five feet deep, and the only bridge across it consisted of two parallel coconut-palm trunks. We were eighty miles on our way, and thus well beyond the point of no return. Wading beneath the trunks, I tried to figure out how to shove the bike across. One wrong step would be total loss. Then, out of the blue, four or five men, heading north, appeared. On seeing our predicament, they were quick to extend help. Lifting the bike above their heads, they carried it onto the other bank, then hurried to reach home before nightfall. Soon, we were on a dirt road again, then, down from a bulldozer camp, on the rough profile of what, when I traveled the same trajectory half a year later, was to become a broad highway. The Americans were opening the Northeast in a hurry in order to ferry their ordnance and troops. It was dusk when we reached Kabinburi. In a smallish house, an old woman—brush-cut, bristly white hair, and only dressed in a phanung that left her shriveled breasts bare—exploited two small rooms to comfort weary travelers. It was a godsend. The next day, I dutifully tried to reach my teacher in time by racing the bike over the very rough laterite roads connecting Kabin through Chachoengsao to Minburi. From there, going on to Laksi, one enters urban concrete and construction. Two miles from Muang Min, the road skirts the famous village of Bang Chan that,

36

October

according to Cornell’s research team, exemplified Thai society as a whole. On turning south at Laksi and racing through Bang Khaen, I realized that it was I who was somewhat loose that Monday. My teacher was not so much amazed at as disturbed by my showing up late. He accepted my apology and said my lateness didn’t matter. If I was not there at the appointed time, he was free to do his own thing. He probably thought of it as good-riddance. He was the junior of my teachers, a young man of dark complexion who, because of his lack of seniority, had been assigned to preparing the tapes I needed at the language lab. He didn’t precisely like it, neither did he appreciate that, early on, I had complained about being unable to make headway at the lab as he was procrastinating in his duties. We had an uneasy relationship that relaxed only toward the end of my stay, when he explained that my pressuring him for those tapes had almost resulted in his refusal to have anything at all to do with me. In Thailand, forcing people does not lead to results. It leads to avoidance, disappointment, and loosely-structured behavior! Anyway, I had business more urgent than language lessons. If I am struck with “women’s disease,” it means that Reg is suffering from “men’s illness” and that we need to seek out a cure. That shouldn’t have been difficult. According to Health Progress in Thailand -1962, the government takes the fight against VD very seri­ ously. The report states that mobile clinics patrol the countryside and that, in the capital, the fight is organized round the clock in two day-and-night clinics. I try to find out at the university hospital. I am directed to an outpatients’ ward where Reg and I have to wait for a doctor. After explaining our case, he tells me we are at the wrong address. Then the pill turns to Reg who sits waiting among the others. He tells her that she is ill, that she is not going to walk the street, that if she does he’ll call the police. She remains impassive at this berating, yet outside she scolds me for a “cheeky monkey.” Even so, she meekly comes along with me to the next address. Twenty minutes later we are at the closed door of an official VD clinic. It will be open at eight in the morning. The next day, Reg is called into the women’s ward. I see the doc at the men’s. After a brief meeting with a kindly consultant—’’You shouldn’t involve yourself with a low-class prostitute. Look for another girlfriend”—they take blood and a smear. The next day, they’ll know more. When I’m back—Reg was adamant about not coming along—I am told I have the clap. They inject me with a dose of penicillin, then send me off with a prescription for thirty-two capsules of tetracycline, to be taken two at the time every six hours.

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Doing T hailand

It is more complicated to know Reg’s case. After a long wait, I am admitted to the lady physician she saw two days ago. It is not immediately clear about whom we are talking, but when we have determined who Reg is, the lady tells me she has more than a simple gonorrhea. According to the blood test, she is in the second stage of syphilis. “Yes, chances are that her boy is syphilitic, too.” She wants to see her again. Reg is unimpressed, and doesn’t want to be impressed. She is not ill. Doesn’t she, like all the women on her street, take a regular swig of “Snake Brand?” That potion is reputed to take care of all dirt that can be deposited into a woman. So, what’s the use of going to a clinic? “Reg knows how to take care of herself.” She puts her trust in Chinese chemists, in herbs, in quacks, in soothsayers, in miracle cures, in monks, and especially in potions and pills that are cheap and recommended by her colleagues. She distrusts those haughty, authoritarian people in government offices and clinics, in police uniform or otherwise: “Yes, but the doctor tells me that you have a very nasty, killing disease.” “Hush. Don’t talk that way. I’m fine.”

It takes a long time to change her mind, and only if I come along will she visit the clinic over the six-week period of pitting penicillin against secondary syphilis. Because I was living next door to her child, we agreed that, on set days, she would present herself at the hostel to be taken to the clinic on Sathom Road. The first time, her arrival was mediated through the watchman, which I found cumbersome. “Just come upstairs and knock at my door.” This easy-goingness resulted in the unkempt figure of a phanung-clad little woman on threadbare flip-flops entering the hostel in broad daylight—a sight that must have strained the hall steward. Within two weeks he was at my door. Worse than that, he entered at his own discretion: “You are breaking the most fundamental of rules!” “What are you talking about?” “The universal ru le .. . . ” “Heh?” “You receive w om en.. . . Out you go!” (Obviously indulging in his righteousness and position of authority, my attempts at explaining only made him mount higher horses still.) “You’re out, and soon. If not, I’ll inform the university, the Ministry, your embassy, U N E SC O .. . . ”

38

October

My blissful innocence is to pursue me that day. I obviously needed to consult with Reg on finding a place to stay, but on my way to the shack in the slum along a black-watered, narrow canal between Town Hall and Democracy Monument, I run right into the arms of a policeman after a minor traffic violation. He wants to see my license, but when I produce the unwieldy international certificate, he can’t make head or tail of it. Hesitant about what to do, he decides to play it safe: “You’ll have to come with me to the precinct.” That’s going to take time and a long palaver, and since he’s unsure of himself with his catch of a tall white man he can be won over. He finds it interesting, enjoys the exchange, then decides to stretch a point and be generous. Even so, I am affected. Bumping into authorities twice in a row makes me jumpy of all of them, in or not in a uniform. With my guard still up, I arrive at the shack where, at that hour of the afternoon, Reg will normally be sleeping on the wooden floor. Tyay is there, together with two other women, but Reg has already left. To go where? It’s too early and too hot to find her at her beat. Between four and five, at the usual hour of coming back from my lesson with Uthai, I am on New Road. Reg is nowhere to be seen. In her stead, I recognize Black Fatty, a voluminous woman whose epithet “black” differentiates her from others so endowed. It’s unclear what makes her blacker than her colleagues; “fatty” is obvious enough, however. She makes the impression of being a kind-hearted soul never without a small paper bag with fried cassava chips or other assorted delica­ cies that she always generously shares. While offering a little banana leaf-wrapped sweetmeat, she wants to know whether I am looking for Reg: “Of course, but she doesn’t seem to be around.” “She must be. I’ve just seen her.” “Perhaps she is receiving.. . . ” Retreating a few feet, Black Fatty stops at a rather spectacular, well-dressed young woman, an obvious floozy. Fatty points to her, but what I see is a strange, gaudy face crowned with highly pinned-up hair and partly covered with a fringe. When the face opens out, first in a smile, then in raucous laughter, I see it’s Reg, but she is not my Reg. Confused, I forget what I came for, left disoriented in a strange city. All the same, there is some urgency to get my bearings. Disconcerted by her metamorphosis into a full-fledged pro, I am reassured by her old flip-flops and dusty feet. Whatever her new hair-do, mini-skirt, and blouse, she didn’t even think of investing 2 baht 50 satang in a new pair of slippers. And when we talk, her coarse

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Doing Thailand

language and manners stand in familiar contrast to her new looks. Over iced coffee, she thinks it a minor matter to solve my, or rather, our housing problem. That night I’m back early. The day’s confusion is still with me. I’ve hardly come to a halt when she has already jumped onto the buddy seat, “Go, go!” She’s agitated. When I stop to buy cigarettes, “No, n o -g o ! Police.” Especially during weekends, “Police, police.” Sometimes they are really everywhere. They go as far as arresting women in the act at hotels. Sometimes they hunt for whores all over the city. A whole army of them seems set on eradicating streetwalking once and forever. They are stationed at short-time venues, chase after women, and fill the Black Maria, or the Land Shark as it’s known here. If the women are out of luck, it may be their first station on the road to the dreaded rehabilitation center at Pak Kret. I take her to our new spot on the river. The old place, at the landing behind the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, was suddenly fenced off. The new location is very quiet. Nobody ever comes there; there are no police in sight and no ferry to land. It is at an eddy in the river that the farmers, who pass in a steady stream, have to negotiate on their nightly trips. Laden with their fruit and vegetables, their small boats skim along the bank before swirling into the canal and on to the market. The eddy is also a place where occasional fishermen try their luck by casting their nets from their precariously small boats, but apart from the splashes and the rapidly flowing water, the spectacle of shadows on the gleaming stream is silent. Reg normally relaxes at that spot. Then her voice is calm and melodious, dif­ ferent from Sampeng where she sounds coarse and tart-like. Tonight, however, she remains nervous, and sounds like she does on her street. She does not want to talk, really, so I leave her in peace, trying to set her at ease: “Nobody is coming after you here.” Many cigarettes later, I take her back, but the police are very visibly present. We drive on to have a coke somewhere, far from the street girls. While drinking, an old off-duty cop enters to have a drink himself. Immediately, she wants to go. “Why? That fellow is not after you.” “Go, go!” I try to mollify her with some flowers, but her mind is with the boys in tan. At the end of a confusing day, I drop her off at her shack. The next afternoon she is very purposive in guiding us to the vast Makassan slum at the far end of Petchaburi Road. Leaving the motorcycle at the adjacent market, we enter on a long “bridge” that soon degenerates as the houses grow smaller and terrain more marshy. About there, she leads us to a shed reminiscent of Aphided’s original shelter, which Reg proposes we rent. No way. A woman suggests a placc

40

October

somewhat further on and is good enough to take us there. Soon, the planking improves, and the “bridge” stands solidly above mud and water. On both sides, it is flanked by reasonable two-storey structures, virtually all with a shop, eating-place or kitchen in the front room. It is the shopping mall in the heart of the back-street area. At its busiest point, we turn to the right, entering a five-foot-wide alley, also lined with two-storey houses. Some thirty yards down, we arrive at a vacant, wooden dwelling that looks promising. Upstairs consists of a screened room where we can sleep, and a small outdoor area where the laundry can be dried. The bigger room downstairs contains a rough wooden table and two chairs. Next to it is a narrow strip with a single, earthen charcoal stove, a large jar connected to a hose, and a stone plate with a hole to bathe and squat. Stuck between the planking, the previous occupant has left a worn toothbrush that Reg immediately appropriates. To her, this is luxury. The other boons are electricity and the fact that the hose extends to a public tap some fifteen yards away. The only investment needed would be a mattress.

41

7

November-Early December

In November, we move in at Makassan. It is the beginning of the dry season, and the boards of the “bridge” are well above water. In the evening, I can take the moped into the house. It stands on stilts, a few feet above the mud. Garbage you simply drop between the wider cracks in the flooring; it will soon be disposed of by a thriving horde of rats. Inside the house, scores of cockroaches prey on all edible dirt. These, in turn, are kept in check by spiders the size of a man’s hand. The first few days they gave me the creeps, but they are totally unresponsive to insect spray. After a few days, I was wiser, and respected the house’s pecking order. These creatures are not vermin but useful scavengers living in a profitable natural balance among themselves and with us. Upstairs, on the outer side of the screened area where we sleep, the previous occupant has left hanging a calendar sheet featuring an old monk. Reg adopts it as her house altar. She invests in a jasmine garland that she respectfully offers, hanging it on the same tack as the sheet. Then she prays for a very tangible business result for the night to come. A practical woman, she has two reasons for pampering her monk. If business is slack—because of the diligence of Bangkok’s Finest, or of pay-day being a day or two off, or because of physical discomfort—she seeks his blessing through proper propitiation. Alternatively, she expresses her gratitude for taking in five or six customers as she plans to do when, on our way home, she picks up a garland. As she pays, 1 accept the paper bag and take a sniff of the delicious smell of jasmine. She doesn’t buy a new one, but is upset: “You’re stupid! You know nothing.” It dawns on me that I have despoiled her offer, that offering it now will be worthless, or worse, an insult. That night we keep the smell to ourselves, at the head of the mattress. With so many things in place—a table at which I can work, a monk she can worship—there are only a few amenities we need to buy: something to sleep on, a sheet, towels, a washbasin. Buying these things is spectacular, at least, with Reg.

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Doing Thailand

She can bargain with the best, not so much at the level of a mattress—an investment of 175 baht—but by pinching pennies off set prices. She is willing to fight for every satang, and usually wins, as when she gets away with two 1-baht transistor batteries for 1.75, as much to the shopkeeper’s consternation as to mine. Reg’s fun is in buying things, in bargaining; she is not given to preparing food. It is not necessary either. In the slum, the “mall” is around the comer, and keen competition keeps prices of meals and snacks at rock-bottom level. A little further on, at about the place where Reg proposed we rent first, a woman makes delicious soup of cow’s entrails, and the nearby market is seeded with food stalls. The problem, therefore, is more in the choosing than the cooking. This changes when Reg comes home with a beetle the size and color of a cock­ roach. She is elated about her catch: “Mind you, in the market they sell at 2 baht each!” Charcoal is mobilized, the stove lit, the beetle grilled. Sizzling in its own fat, the creature slowly lifts its full plethora of legs and feelers. It tastes somewhat bitter, somewhat like fattish, rancid hedge leaves. To Reg, it is a feast. For two weeks to follow, her enthusiasm for weird snacks knows no bounds. Time and again she comes home with cockles, bowels, packages of fermented raw pork in moldy banana leaves, unripe pieces of fruit to be taken with spiced salt, a premature bird within a cooked, fertilized egg, papaya salad, a bowl of fish-stomach soup, or what have you. In a Thai market you can find more than you can sample in a year. Then, suddenly, the novelty has gone, and she’s back to sleeping and talking or listening to “the news,” a kind of a stand-up comedy show of much talking, some events, some songs, and many jokes. The program is far too fast for me to follow, but amuses Reg greatly. Between five and six, we eat something in the market or along the road, before I take her to her beat. On dropping her off at her sidewalk, I return to study, to read and to write. There is so much material I must process that I need those evenings, as much as Reg needs them to meet her friends, chitchat, and look for money. Basically, her day has just begun, because after some washing and sweeping, she has little else to do but sleep in the coolest corner downstairs on the wooden floor. A little past midnight, I’ll show up to pick her up for a late bowl of rice porridge before we head home. Sometimes she keeps me waiting, which, I must confess, always tickles me. In the business of selling quickies, it never takes too long, yet it stimulates my resolve to repossess her. Our schedule’s predictability has meanwhile resulted in my nickname: The White Pimp. In a way, they are right. I take a great interest in her earnings. I want to know how many customers she had, how much money she made. That money is also high

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N ovem ber-E arly D ecem ber

on her mind. She likes to show it as proof of her worth. Not so when she scores only one or two patrons, but when she gets eighty or a hundred she makes a show of it. She’ll say that it was very quiet, that there were no men, that it was a bad evening—then produce the dough, laugh at it, kiss it, ‘One hundred!” Very seldom has she anything to say about the men she shares her body with. She does not see them, has no interest in seeing them. They are like a passing parade of anonymous uniforms. Sometimes, though, there is something remarkable, like an oversized dick she comments on as painful. Or the Chinese guy who made off with her necklace. Or that number seven—wasn’t it a good night?—who despoiled her of the money the previous six had brought in. On rare occasions, a white foreigner finds his way to her graces, and that is worth a story: “Early tonight, I had a farang—a strange fellow! Those farang, I cannot understand them; they think that anything goes.” The fellow had been introduced by an Indian money-lender well familiar with the going rate: “Two lays, 50 baht.” “At the hotel, he insisted that I undress fully, that I do not use a sarong ; he refused to use a loincloth. Reg doesn’t like that, but he’s the one paying. Then he wanted to kiss my belly and breasts. Hsssh. It is ticklish, unpleasant. A Thai or a Chinese would never do that. Then, when he was at it, he kissed my neck. For the second round, he even proposed that Reg be on top. O f course, I didn’t do that. That is very dangerous. He was a dirty fool, that farang ___

Normally, Reg knows how to dodge the police. These days, though, they also field plain-clothes men: “They know our faces, they know all of us. When they pick you up, it is useless to say that they are mistaken. They know that Reg is a whore. When they take us to the station, they take our money, but it doesn’t bring them anything. It is better to give them 20 baht, then they’ll leave you in peace. Sometimes you pay them off with a quickie. The man at the hotel knows them too: they do not need to pay for the room.”

These fellows have found a most interesting way of pimping indeed. Does it really matter how much she earns, whether she scores two, four, or eight men? Whatever the money, it is always gone. Sometimes a cop takes his pick, another day she lends it away, or she pays for drinks for a circle of colleagues. It rarely goes

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Doing Thailand

to the woman caring for Aphided. Her debt there doesn’t diminish. This makes m e think of playing the part of apprentice pimp. Reg, when you have money in your purse, give it to me. I’ll keep it for you. As long a s you have money, it disappears. You cannot refuse when they ask for a loan. You h a d better give these worn-out women 5 baht, just like that, then they can eat, but do n o t ‘lend’ ‘cause you’ll never see the money again. Stop standing these tarts their drinks. It doesn’t bring you a thing. When you have no money when you meet a cop, offer him a free ride. As long as you carry your money, they’ll know you have it, and they’ll ju m p you. You are too good; you dare not refuse.

It does not take much convincing. Reg, too, is tired of all those friends with noth­ ing but holes in their pockets. The only one actively opposing the new stratagem is Black Fatty. Her perennial craving for food makes for a lifestyle that is always short on cash. Apart from chewing sweetmeats or other delicacies, she has little else in life than her three husbands, one driving a taxi, the other two just pimping. One of them, who keeps another women too, is quite violent, even hitting her on the street when her purse is flat. That man needs lots of money, and Black Fatty is very afraid, and so, in turn, she needs it. “Reg, it is bloody senseless to pay for others’ pimps.” Black Fatty disagrees, and Reg is warm-hearted. Black Fatty even threatens her: “What are you keeping that foreigner for?” She goes further still, promising interest, 10 baht a day for every hundred borrowed. Isn’t that a nice investment? Once still, Black Fatty gets it her way, but she’s indebted everywhere, also at the coffee shop on the little square: “The boss there has much better means of getting his money back than you, Reg.” On Sundays, Reg dresses up and is all smiles. Before going out, she’ll visit the policeman’s wife. She will pay for the milk. Most of the time, the rickety veranda is full of people, after all, Reg is coming with money, and perhaps somebody will be better because of it; if it is not for coins, there will be cigarettes or iced coffee. Among the people, we find a lame duck feeding on leaves, and Reg’s child crawling about. Reg will pick it up and fondle it fervidly. The child will be startled and cry. It will try to be at the side of the woman who cares for it. Reg doesn’t let go that easily. The child pisses on her skirt. When it calms down at the side of the woman, the great moment arrives: “Look Ded, what I brought you!’ The child knows the ritual and extends a hand. Reg fills it with a baht. That should make the child happy. The least it does is draw attention. Everybody is interested in that baht; normally

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N ovem ber-Early D ecem ber

it will disappear in Tyay’s pocket. Then we arrive at the real stuff: “Ded, hold it” as she waves 10 and 20 baht notes, counting them out theatrically: “Look, Ded, MONEY.” Ded doesn’t see the point for the game lasts too long. Neither does he see the point o f the pair of tiny shoes she has bought him. Shoes among the poor who go barefoot, shoes in the mud of the yard, shoes, the symbol of “nice” people. When the money has been handed over and cigarettes distributed, Reg and I will be off on our way to the Sunday Market in front of the palace. She will not mention the child for the rest of the day. The market at the Royal Field is a spectacular happening. They sell all sorts of bush meat, such as snakes and roes, mouse-deer and edible birds, monitor lizards, field rats, and anything that can be trapped or shot. The most colorful section, rather near the exotic meats, is the birds that, in contrast to the just mentioned animals, are, together with pet monkeys, the live specimens of what can be yielded in forest and field. These do not exhaust Mother Nature’s bounty! In Thai logic, or so it seems to me, everything that moves can be eaten, is “useful,” as they say. Soon Reg can show me heaps of the flying insect she was proud of catching. They must be a delicacy; they indeed sell at 2 baht each. They are called mengda, the word I know for pimp. To understand that logic, we need to know that the king crab is also referred to as mengda, the male being much smaller than the female and going for a free ride on her back. There is much more to see than the bewildering and inexhaustible variety of condiments—of which mengda is one—and foods. Everything that is popular and cheap is available, from toys to textiles, ready-made clothing to shoes, hand-bags to kites, fruit of all sorts and in all measures, neatly arranged in regular, eye-pleasing patterns. There is aesthetics in a Thai market place. Halfway around, I like to cross the road to watch the vendors along the fence of Wat Mahathat, the Temple of the Great Relic. They specialize in amulets; are familiar with their stories, with their miraculous powers, with the monks who made them. Since all people seem to own them and rely on their protection, the demand for such talismans is steady, even growing, as the exposure to danger does not diminish. Yet, procuring an amulet in the market—one is not buying, that would be an insult—is obviously a specialist affair in view of the ubiquitous magnifying glasses “buyers” and sellers wield. To “rent” an amulet is an art. Passing the Grand Palace, one comes opposite the small sanctuary of the Town Pillar where the protective spirit of the city is honored and supplicated. In order to give more power to one’s requests, it is always good to make extra merit. This can

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D oing Thailand

be acquired easily by releasing a couple of pitiable little birds from the tiny cages in which vendors offer them. Reg is not interested, although the same logic applies to her when she offers a candle at the temple when investing in a lottery ticket. After spending a long time on our feet, we sit down for refreshments at one of the hundreds of eateries interspersed between the merchandise. A man, sitting nearby, is curious and asks about me, addressing her as “Mouse.” At this, she is irritated. She objects to being addressed as if she were a little girl, which I need to explain. She, Reg, is a professional woman, feeds a child—she is a mother! Reg glorifies in my ability to speak Thai; her farang is special, which puts her in the mood of engaging the man and his questions. After all, in my company she is special, too. Shortly after moving in at Makassan, Reg buys me my first loincloth; a week later, she brings me Chinese-style house-pants. Even though she has never asked my name, I experience these affectionate gestures with some apprehension. Is she stating a claim? Beginning to be involved? That she sees me as more than just a convenient partner becomes clearer still during the first week of December. In that month, the weather is really dry with strong southerly winds carrying some freshness into the city. It allows boys to fly kites and play dogfights with each other in which they try to cut the glass-strings of their opponents. In town there are few places to play other than at roadsides or on bridges. In the early evening of the King’s Birthday, I take Reg to her beat—where, because of the occasion, she expects to make a killing. On crossing a bridge, a kite string enlarges my mouth by half an inch at least. It’s like being caught in a web. After freeing myself, Reg pushes a kerchief at my face while I try to make it to the university hospital. Because of the holiday, staff at the ward is skeletal. It takes considerable time before a doctor can see me. That evening, he is a very busy man, and so he thinks that two or three stitches will stem the damage. When the doctor is already with the next patient, the attending nurse has the commonsense of putting in three more. Even so, that evening I do not look good, and Reg is worried. I try to reassure her, “Just a little accident. At home, I’ll do my work as usual. You go ahead—make your fortune. Tonight, men will readily part with their money.” Even so, an hour and a half after leaving her on the street, she is back home. And thus, I can’t work. When she is around, she wants to talk, to listen to the news show, to tell stories, or sing songs that she shapes through broad gestures. She uses them to make fun and to send messages, “Do you love me?”, “Will you wait for me?”, “Have you been playing around?”, “Do you miss me?”, or to comment indirectly: “That will not see the light of day,” “Your appetite is excessive,” “It really doesn’t matter.”

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N ovem ber-E arly D ecem ber

For me, being at home means to work or to sleep; for Reg, work is outside. When she is here, she wants to play with the radio, to review her prospects for the New Year, to repeat her stories. Thankfully, sometimes, she sleeps, but often she comes to sit at the one and only table, taking scissors and cutting paper at random until it is all scraps. Sometimes she will fold the paper first before attacking it. The result is the same; shreds, heaps of shreds. It unnerves me: “Reg, please, do something.” But the fun of bringing food has gone, and so the best she does is telling a new story: "When I married, I was fat. I’ve been fat until I gave birth. Mother always said that Reg was a good-for-nothing, only fit to eat and sleep. But Aphided will learn!” “Reg, you are great, but please, do something.” I hit on an idea. I take a notebook and write a line of Is, 1 1 1 ........“Reg, take this pencil. You see these? It is the number 1. Now please, trace them.” “Reg is a whore,” she answers. It means she needs no apology for having no ambitions, for being passive, for roaming the streets, for protesting against being taken to a clinic: “Reg, please. If you sit here, you do something. Start tracing 1.” My vehemence impresses. The notebook is in front of her. She holds a pencil in her hand. She looks at the page, then up at me, somewhat terrified. She looks again at the white page with those little standing lines. She pokes the pencil into her ears, her nose, her ear again, into her mouth, drops it, picks it up, approaches the page with it, then withdraws her hand as if in fright. While I pretend I am busy, she keeps shifting her glances between my stem face and the intimidating page. After what seems an eternity, Reg tries to make a mark on the paper, to imitate the number 1. She tries again, and again. The page fills with little twists and coils and scrawls. Bizarre forms, scribbles. It dawns on me that Reg doesn’t know how to hold a pencil, that I must teach her how to hold it first. Steering her hand, we produce a page full of little, somewhat straight, somewhat crooked marks. Then I fill a whole page with Is, encouraging her to trace them. She goes at it. After filling half a page, Reg looks up, “I can do it!” In my mind it resounds as: “Look here, I, Reg, the whore, I can do it. It is not just you other people. I, Reg, can write 1!” How do we do it, how do we grow up with signs and symbols? From early on, crayon and chalk, pencils and paint are part of a toddler’s world. Coloring pictures belong to it. Soon we express ourselves on paper and paving-stones. All this is new to Reg. When she is back at her beat, I buy pastels and begin preparing a coloring book, drawing pages with Is and 2s, simple pictures of dolls, houses, cars, boats, clocks with hands telling time. For once I am eagerly abiding her presence.

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Before going to my lesson the next day, I try to explain what I hope her to do, but it is not immediately clear. The dolls and houses, cars and clocks are not readily recognized. Reg can listen to and talk with the radio, but simple pictures are not so simple. After guiding her first moves, I am off in expectation that I’ll find her soundly asleep on the floor later. When I return, Reg is busy coloring, scratching, and scraping at the pictures. It results in a wild spectacle that, somehow, makes sense to her. She has fun, too, and for a few days she scrambles and scribbles. Then, before ever making a purposive mark, the novelty disappears, in the same way as she stopped bringing tit-bits from the market. When I insist, she dismisses the whole thing with: “Writing is not for my sort of people.” She knows it. She is not of my world.

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8

December-January

One would think that as one’s mastery of language improves, understanding will grow. I am not so sure. Language is words, and more words are more diversity, an increase of complexity. The more I understand of Reg’s conversation, the more I am confused by her stories. And stories she wants to tell, for she takes pride in my “understanding Thai.” One thing is clear, however. Superpower, her little boy, is much more important to her than I thought. First, I thought the kid to be a mere burden, 8 baht a day to be spent on an industrial accident, but the way she sometimes muses about him makes him much more than that. It makes her a mother, it morally validates her. She’ll make sacrifices because of her child, and she is absolutely sure that he, the son of an illiterate, will go on to university. He will love her. As if to illustrate this, she told me about the bond between mother and son by way of a story. As with the story of the sly ghost, she situates it in the South, in the Moonlight Bar where she suggests, sometimes, that she embarked on her trade. Near the border, it must be a sex worker’s paradise with all those Malaysians streaming in to while away money and time with Thai women. When she is at it, she narrows her eyes to slits while counting money by the thousands. There, in that setting, one of her colleagues points out a man to her fifteen-year-old son, “That one there is your father.” The boy confronts the man, exploding in rage: “You . . . . You My mother . . . ” and stabs him, stabs him, stabs h im ___ Grisly as it may be, she obviously enjoys telling this tale of unwavering love for the mother, whatever her station in life or her occupation. Are these true stories? Perhaps. What they reveal, certainly, is her perspective on things—which may be the important point. She’s also positive about having been married:

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“I married when I was fourteen.” “That’s early.” “No, Reg had her first steady when she was twelve.” “Did you sleep with him?” She pulls an indignant face, “O f course not. The first time was with my husband. He had to wait until I was fourteen. He paid my keep for two years because he wanted me. Liang toy that’s what they call it, to maintain the child you hope to marry.”

She stresses her story with broad gestures, feeling great in explaining something, and she’ll make sure I understand. She’s elated on such occasions. Look, the student with all his books—a thousand things he doesn’t know. And see me, Reg, who never went to school. Reg knows many things: “Although he was much older, or maybe because of it, my father thought my future husband a good match. We went to visit his family in Chonburi. They were Chinese-Thai. He earned well, some 1,200 baht a month. He was with the state transport company. Naturally, during the time he paid for me, he was not allowed to touch me. Besides, I had my little boyfriend. Later, when we were m arried, we settled down in Nakhom Ratchasima.”

Then, for once, she is the one asking questions: “When you got married, the first night, how often did you come?” “Well, we had a long day of feasting and partying. I think we were just tired.” “Ridiculous! How many times?” “I think we slept like logs.” “You’re telling me nonsense. The first night! That’s important. My man came five times. Five times!” “That’s quite a record. And, did you like it?” “I? Reg? He came five times.” “But you?” “He came five times.” “Do you ever enjoy it?” “O f course, after three months, I liked it because I loved my man.” “But do you come?”

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“Stupid question. I have a child. O f course.” “How is it with your patrons?” “You’re cheeky. Nothing.” “Nothing?” “O f course. I do not love those men. But my own man, I loved him very much. Imagine, the first night, five times!” “Did you have children?” “No; a miscarriage when I was sixteen.” “Then, after six years, the two of you divorced.” “No. We were married officially. That is difficult to undo.” “So, you are still married?” “O f course, but I left him when he brought in another wife. All along, he had minor wives, but taking one in was just too much.”

Living in this house in the slum is the best thing that could have happened to me. To be expelled from the hostel was a stroke of luck. I had given it some thought; it was vaguely on my mind. One day I should live among the people, get a feel of life in an ordinary neighborhood. The hostel was a tower, not exactly an ivory one, but it stood apart from the ordinary. It was a secluded environment. Now I have neighbors, partake in gossip, am part of the gossip, learn the language. The fellow opposite is a policeman, a traffic cop whose beat is at Ratchadewi Circle. There we wave at each other when I happen to pass. He is also responsible for the nearby tap where we connect the hoses to fill the jars. In the evening I sit, scantily dressed in sarong, at the table, and work quite seriously. There are so many documents and books I need to read. The language must be developed. I have to make systematic notes about the things I hear and see. Then there are these letters to you with which to tell the stories I experience, the little discoveries, the progress of my understanding. Writing about these is fun and an attempt at some integration—a way of making sense and exercising some self-observation. In brief, I am busy. When you drive down Sukhumvit to the Phrakhanong area, you only need to turn into Soi 71 to reach the countryside soon. It’s great to get out of the city so near to where one lives. It becomes an adventure with Reg. Walking criss-cross through the flat fields, she seems to know every plant and bush; she’s constantly picking leaves and berries that she puts into her mouth and that she invites me to eat. I cannot

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imagine doing such a thing at home, but here almost half of what grows and blooms seems to be edible or effective as medicine, and much of it enhances the flavor of Thai cooking, which is outstanding by any measure. Whether in the fields or on slippery “bridges,” Reg is sure of her footing. She cannot read a letter, but she knows her way among herbs against all diseases; she has a massage against every ache; she knows the taboos of her trade and how to placate the secretive forces that rule her fate. She is certain about invisible creatures; they are part and parcel of everyday life. When she was a child and couldn’t sleep, she would see the snake-ghost enter the house by the roof. It would wriggle about on the ceiling; she wouldn’t dare to move in awe. When she told her mother, she shrugged, because she couldn’t see it. But Reg knew. No, it never did anything to her; the snake-ghost wasn’t dangerous, but Reg was frightened. Her uncle, her dad’s brother, could also see spirits. More than that, he knew and talked with them, and thus he was a bad person. The evening he died, his ghost took possession of the cat and kept roaming about for weeks. Reg was terrified, as she was later, when she worked in that whorehouse in Chonburi. There, in one week, three of the girls died—and their spirits kept haunting the place. Spirits of such women are very dangerous; they must be driven out by a spirit doctor. Only then can the place become peaceful again. As December progresses, her stories start dominating the house. Spooks and spirits are giving way to money. She talks about nothing else. The end of the year is approaching—we are on our way to the bonanza. She reminisces about that brothel on Siphaya where, over New Year, she earned 600 baht. When I comment on that as good money, she denies it: “We were more women than rooms; we had to wait to take turns; I could have made more. Besides, we had to share our money equally with the boss.” “So, you got 300 only?” “No. 600—600 for me, and 600 for him.” As if to rag me—I find these stories stunning and tickling—she comes again with that Chinese New Year in that knocking-shop in Chonburi: “Isn’t that where the parents of your husband live?” “Yes; it was mother who introduced me there; she knows the mama-san.” Then the story of how she earned 1,760 baht, her share, over three days of celebration; how the women kept themselves going with pep pills; how they were too tired to dress up. Men were simply queuing to start the New Year on their favorite act. Again she is going to hit it. This time, she’ll be on the street; she is not going to share with anybody. She thinks that she is going to make some 600, which to me,

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at 20 baht a customer, and at the rate of three an hour, seems a formidable target. But Reg has her ways of achieving it. Every day now she is offering garlands to her monk. She goes to the temple to make merit. She consults a priest who predicts good fortune. She comes home with a new amulet and facial powder, expensive but blessed. At the seamstress’s, she orders a new dress. In the market, she invests in a padded bra. I buy her a pair of shoes.. . . The days running up to New Year are very quiet. People save their money. It leaves her cold. The day after tomorrow, tomorrow, will bring the jackpot. “What are you going to buy me?” The day has arrived. At four, Reg is on the street, in a new dress, with a new hair-do, but come six o’clock, she has not seen a single patron yet. “Let’s go to the market.” “How come? You were to make money.” “No people yet.” At the market, I buy her the handbag she has set her eyes on. Back near her street, we eat, then to split up: I to observe the merry-making, Reg to be an object of it. Nine, ten-o’clockish, I am at the heart of things, the celebrations at the Royal Field. There, amidst the crowd of exuberant, howling young men, most in their cups, I become a target. They accost me, squeeze my behind, make a grab at my crotch. I hit back at one or two of them, but realize that defending myself opens me up to greater risks. The place is swamped with youths, and I am a lone attrac­ tion. Today, under the steady drone of Buddhist mantras and auspicious blessings broadcast all over the Field, everything goes. I had better go. Like the women, who already left. I return to Sampeng to see how Reg is faring. Right then, her life is being made miserable by a group of drunks she is happy to escape from by jumping onto the buddy seat. At the quiet end of the street, she has a mere 70 baht to show. It is not because of lack of patrons, really. At the hotel, they are simply queuing—dead drunk, all of them—and so are the girls, most of them well-dressed for the occasion, all of them powdered white. A pigsty of repulsive, disorderly young men, all waiting for a turn in the rooms that are desperately short this night. The girls do not like it, yet they want the money, and so does Reg. She is in a new, silken sarong and a white blouse suggesting mature tits. Earlier in the day, I teased her with that new acquisition that promises more than she has to offer. It seems to work, though: “All of them squeezed it. Reg didn’t need to take it off.” To protect her scanty earnings, I collect the 70 baht. On New Road, among the crowd, I get in my own way. What the hell am I doing here? Why am I not drinking champagne with my kind? What am I in this fuming hole for, among loud, drunken braggarts and cheap whores? A young man accosts me. He speaks English and wants to chat. I hesitate, do not feel like it, but

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give in. I only consort with myself, imprisoning myself with me, killing myself with emotions and compulsions. “I am Sombat. I am a teacher. Have a swig.” He holds out a flask. Get over yourself, be free, relax. I take the bottle, take a swig. “Nice girls here, isn’t it?” His head hints at the women on the other side, “Did you start the New Year already?” He is tipsy but polite. He asks the routine questions, where I come from, where I go to, what I do in the City of Angels. For once, it is good to answer, to get out of myself: “I am going to play with a woman.” Sombat crosses the street; disappears with one of the girls into the maze between New Road and Yaowarat. Some ten minutes later he comes out again to walk on with a slight sway. Perhaps he is on his way to watch a film; the whole night the movie halls are in business. Towards dawn, people will bring offerings to the temple to set the omens right. Back at Reg’s it appears that she has made 20 baht only—a single trick in an hour and a half. Where is the bonanza she was anticipating? “Tomorrow, New Year’s Day will bring the bread.” Perhaps. Hopefully, tomorrow’s customers will be less engulfed in liquor. Maybe tonight Reg will still have the pleasure of being picked up by a group of inebriated friends, like the girl who just went upstairs with a bunch of seven or eight. Back at New Road, I pester myself again. Dear little friend, you are one of those to be played with, to receive these pigs and let them do their thing. What do you think, feel, experience? Reg doesn’t think, doesn’t feel. How could she operate if she would bring my compulsions to her mind? Then, suddenly, relief, a miracle. Looking up in this ugliest street in this ugliest part of town, I see that the overhead wiring is the perch of thousands and thousands of swallows, tiny flying gentlemen in tails. Free little birds roosting above a sewer of humanity. The deception of the New Year cannot be accidental, and thus Reg wants to consult her priest again. “He told me that my luck is running out. At this moment, things are not that bad, but after a month or so, if I stay on in Bangkok, my mother or another relative will die. I must roam, go from place to place to find money. Reg will be a whore, everywhere, but should not stay long in any place. If Reg does, it will bring bad luck. He knows everything, that priest. He knows my trade. He even knows that you see me. He tells me that no good can come from associating with a foreigner, with somebody from another language and tribe. Reg will have to wander on.”

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“ I would like to see that priest o f yours.” “Why? Just tell me your birthday, that’s enough for him, to tell your future.” “Well, let me join you on your next visit. That’s more fun.”

Would that fellow have anything sensible to say apart from advising that she become a wandering whore? If I still want to do something, I should hurry. Our time is running out. When I come to see him, I meet a sympathetic, elderly man, seated among the offerings of a group of devotees come to consult him. When he notes me, he waves me on. The suddenness of it, and the curious crowd upset me. I stammer. My Thai is chaotic. Unable to explain, I excuse myself. In the compound outside, I recover my poise. When the last visitor has left, I enter again: “You know, it’s about Reg. She says that you know everything about her. You know that she’s a pro, that she has a child nearby, practically around the corner from here. I would prefer to see that child at her mother’s, in Khorat. She says that she’ll take it there when she has the money, but whatever she has, it always disappears. Perhaps she listens to your advice.. . . ”

The story doesn’t ring a bell. Even if it did, what can the priest do about it? Aren’t I trying to saddle the old man with problems of my own imagination? Isn’t it my problems that I call “Reg?” Yet, I am in a hurry. The next afternoon, I come again, this time with Reg who has dressed up for the occasion. She also carries an empty bottle. When we arrive, the old man is sleeping on the floor. He gets up quickly; adjusts his robes. It is the time of the day that visitors will come. The monk enquires after my birth date. What day of the week? What year? I’ve no idea. The priest tries to convert Anno Domini into Buddhist era, the solar into the lunar calendar, Christian years into the Chinese zodiac. “You are born on a Saturday, Year of the Pig. Your constellation is auspicious. This will be a lucky month.” With Reg, he is faster. Her future is bright. I am not wild about the mumbo-jumbo, but what do I expect? Reg is satis­ fied. On the floor, she makes three bows, gets up and goes to get her fill of the monk’s holy water. As far as she is concerned, we are through. Then the old man remembers something and gestures that I should stay put. Meanwhile we are not the only ones to consult him. When Reg has rejoined the circle, he starts talking, sometimes addressing Reg, sometimes all of them. He explains her situation, who she is, that she walks the street. To this, everybody puts in a word. Reg participates,

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too, answering questions, and so we finish with a pleasantly relaxed discussion group. Among all the suggestions, it is increasingly unclear to me what we are talking about. Are we looking for a solution? Then there first of all must be a problem. These people are just talking about their ideas, to which Reg is impassive. They are mere strangers, from the other side of life. A man opines that she should learn a trade. Somebody suggests that she could enter into her employ. Reg puts on a what-isall-this-about face. She cannot be impressed with good-will, sympathy, meddling. Caging Reg in the employ of a patron? The priest explains that she is illiterate, that she has a child, that the white man hopes to see that child at her parents, that the money he gives to that purpose disappears just like that, “Isn’t that so?” Reg nods in agreement. Her priest knows everything, doesn’t he? The discussion degenerates into endless chit-chat. We leave. “You’ll give me 500 baht, isn’t it? The priest said so. When do I get it? W hat is that glum face of yours? When are you giving that money?” (I hear myself mumbling something like, ‘if I really help you with it’. That is precisely the point Reg will never see.) “You are going back on your promise, isn’t it? Yours, it is just empty talk. If you want to help me, you gimme money. Yes, yes. I’ll go home. For two days, and then I’ll go on a spree. Five hundred! When do you give it?”

She feels it, she knows it: the time is approaching that her rival will arrive. She feels it, she knows it: then she’ll receive the ransom to redeem the mortgage of emotions I forced on her; then I’ll be no more than another among her endless line of customers. Even so, she is more possessive of me by the day. She claims me, keeps referring to me as “my husband.” It is as if the vague threat eggs her on. Jokingly, smilingly, she wields the kitchen knife and talks about the ducks. It’s a well-known reference that regularly features in the news: “Angry Wife Severs Penis, Feeds it to Duck.” Every time you read it, you’ll sleep on your belly for a few nights. Then you’ve been reminded that smiling female grace may just hide a tiger. Spotting the predator, I feel ill at ease. After taking her to work, I clear my stuff, and transfer to the house I have rented in anticipation. My wife is arriving in ten days. Four days later, in the middle of the night, I am irresistibly drawn to Sampeng, to Reg. She is on her street: she must be. The windfall I had left her—500 baht—has

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been cleared out. She’s been gambling, boozing, lending, hitting The Golden Deer: “Reg was very, very drunk.” “Let me take you home.” “You may, as long as you pay.”

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9

February-End of May

The insult inaugurating the New Year shattered the spell. I had indeed descended a few rungs into the manhole; there was no secret, no magic. The shady underworld of prostitution, of sex for the sake of sex and of money for the sake of money, was not exciting but disgusting. As far as I was concerned the cover could be replaced. Was there anything I could do about Reg? Seen from her side, there was no need for me. At the same time that I had to travel on, she had reached her final destina­ tion. She knew it, said it: “Reg is a whore.” This justified her being lazy, carefree, indolent, slipshod. It justified her refusal to see doctors, to take their medicine, to consider herself stricken with “men’s disease.” In her life was no place for numbers or watches or coloring pictures or rehabilitation. There was no need for do-gooders, Miss Arun or Dr. Phian. She didn’t need to invest, to save, to face the future. Her life was complete. She was of the street; she had found her freedom on the sidewalk and in her boundless fantasizing. Was I looking for excuses, trying to wash my hands of it? Something like, “Niels has done what he could. The case is hopeless.” Had I taken advantage of her, deceived her trust—or was I merely an outsider anyway, a fellow from the other side of the divide who had passed by as if on a visit? Must I reproach myself for being a traitor, for trifling with her emotions? Was I irresponsible? The weird thing was that I raised these questions in relation to Reg, a professional, and that I didn’t anticipate them regarding my wife. Her coming would redeem me, u s .. . . Eight months ago, we had left each other in the expectation that, through Boesch’s research project, she would join me in Thailand soon. As time passed, it appeared that the project was doomed. As of October her letters came exclusively from Amsterdam. She would try to exert pressure in The Hague, would try to convince the people at the Ministry of Education that it was unfair to break up a fledgling marriage. She had a right to be with her husband.

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During those months we wrote each other letters. I produced some ninety, writ­ ing on everything that came my way, from loose structure to an evening at Eugene’s and the lovely Peace Corps ladies we played bridge with. Upon my confrontation with that kid bound to a pole, I added a sixty-page serial on “Reg.” The allusions to the charms of our bridge partners triggered her suspicions. After all, she knew me to be a virile young man in a faraway and unfamiliar city. My outpourings on Reg, her circumstances, and the city’s underbelly merely increased her apprehension. In her letters she pointed out that my interest in the most marginal of milieux was of doubtful relevance for learning about Thai life. My observations were no better than notes from the sideline on a society we knew little about by any measure. Why interest oneself in prostitution, poverty, and the seedy side of things as long as one didn’t understand the ordinary course of life? She was not wrong. What she did not know—although she may have sensed it—was that Reg had become the pivot of my emotions, that I was pushed by events, that it all just happened to me, and that Reg was my roadstead in a sea of confusion. I justified “Reg” as socialization, as a manner of opening myself to new experiences and culture. To find one’s footing doesn’t come for free; it is muddling through, proceeding through shocks and shivers. One has to start somewhere, it doesn’t really matter where. In that way, beginning with “Reg” was as good as beginning with a different set of experiences. My wife found this reasoning utterly unconvincing. What she understood was that I was in need of outlets, that I needed to release my emotions and to talk to others to get a grip on myself and the things I was exposed to. She warned me that telling tall stories was no guarantee for finding a sympathetic audience. These expats had other preoccupations than Thai life. Among themselves they agreed that Thai cooking was a pleasure, that the performance of their servants was satisfactory, and that there were many thieves. In their offices they found it hard to connect with or to understand the Thai they had to work with. As Europeans, therefore, they associated with members of their own tribe. They underlined this wisdom by looking down on local life and by denigrating Thai customs. Of course, Buddhism was a very noble philosophy, but it killed all ambition. In order to progress and develop, they needed us. Naturally, the King was an exalted figure, but blind obedience and respect for everybody thought to be a superior put an end to critical thinking. One couldn’t expect any initiative—to get anything off the ground, one must be generous with bribes. My wife was dead right. I had to talk, in English or Dutch, yet to find a sym­ pathetic ear was no easy matter. The only ones willing to listen were Ries and his

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wife, but did they even vaguely understand what was driving me? I didn’t even know myself. I was like flotsam on a stream, moving on, but not knowing where. My wife would be my redeemer, my anchor. She watched me from afar and had reason to worry. Was our marriage still viable? Half a year after its celebration, we had split up when she began working in Saarbriicken. Two months later, in June—fully eight months ago—we had exchanged our last kisses when I left for Bangkok, to start my drift through an elusive land. Suspended in that phantasmagoria, I awaited her arrival. In order to find a suitable house, I sought advice at the embassy. There Mr. Bloemhart—an East-Indian Dutchman who had never set foot in the mother country—advised me to see the Koopman family. They consisted of three very pretty girls who addressed their Thai mother as “Mom” and their blond, railroadof-death survivor father with “Papa.” Their home language was an odd mixture of East Indian Dutch and Thai. The next day they brought me to a fully furnished place in the Yanawa District just fine for my wife and me to settle into. On the side of the lane—too narrow to allow cars—it was fronted by a vast lawn. Next to it was a kitchen and servants’ quarters. At the back stretched a swimming-pool-sized pond surrounded by some twenty coconut-trees. With the house came a housekeeper, Thongkham, some sort of a relation to the owner who lived on the other side of the lane. Because I also found a fine moped—Miss Ravishing of the Peace Corps was leaving—everything was set to welcome my wife. Soon after arriving it became clear that one doesn’t just live in a house. One dwells in one’s fantasy; one lives in plans, expectations, and ideas. In that way I lived in a kind of Bangkok she didn’t fit in. I was obsessed with life’s seamy side. Noi and Reg had been my teachers, and 1 knew precious little about the mainstream. Of course, the first week was fine to look at the lowly scenes and the Sunday market I had written about, but why would somebody freshly arrived from the Netherlands be enthralled by red-light districts and the wonders of Chinatown? When the truth came out and the illusion of our marriage was shattered, she insisted that she meet her rival. It was like chasing a phantom. At Makassan, where I had advanced a month’s rent, the house stood vacant. Behind Democracy Monument, I still found the mattress she had put in pawn to borrow money. Nearby her child remained at the paper-bag-gluing woman, unpaid for. Everyone had their reasons to see her, but nobody knew where she was.

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To track her down, we went on a weird excursion, the same on which Reg had taken me a few months earlier. For some reason or other, she wanted to show me the places she had worked, and say hello to former friends. First, we landed in Muang Chon, at the brothel where she had earned so much over the turn of a Chinese New Year. On to Nakluea, to the dilapidated “hotel” where she had served her patrons. Down, all the way to Chantaburi, where she had tried to earn some money on the veranda of a whorehouse, but where customers found it safer to stay clear of a girl with a white pimp. Where could she be? In Thailand in the 1960s and well into the 1970s, there were cheap brothels everywhere, in the most unlikely streets, in the middle of fields, along the roads. A haystack of places of pleasure into which a tiny woman was as difficult to find as the proverbial needle. She might even have joined her ghostly lover of yore.. . . Was Reg following her monk’s advice? Had she decided to become a roaming whore? For us, whether it was the policeman’s wife, the pawnshop, Superpower, or my wife and I, she could just as well have vanished into the spirit world. She had departed from our lives, and nobody expected to see her again. There remained only one person who could possibly give some shape to Reg, in English. My wife thus went to interview the lady doctor who, at the nearby clinic, had treated her VD. Their conversation hit her right in the heart. How could it possibly be that I had traded her for a retarded, syphilitic woman of the street? Thankfully, there were other things than the trouble of being married or becoming alienated from each other. After all, both of us were in the country to do research and had no choice but to carry on. Where I had observed the freedom of butterflies, she saw regimentation: “This is a society in uniform.” Only then I consciously noted I was the odd man out on campus. There, all students were in dark pants or skirts and well-ironed white shirts or blouses. Marking their status as undergraduates, all men wore neckties—in contrast to similarly dressed trade-school students. Ordinary civil servants were in official dress and looked like policemen minus the cap. On certain days, all schoolchildren and their teachers dressed up as boy and girl scouts. Taxi and tricycle drivers were in dark blue. Could this be called “loose structure” or a country of notable individualists? Not long after her arrival, Ladd Thomas of Northern Illinois University came to town. ARPA had tipped me to meet him at The Majestic, close to Democracy Monument. He was a congenial fellow with much experience in the country and who liked to talk, but he was also interested in what I had to say. Together, we were drinking beer, lots of it, which, at 14 baht a bottle, was a luxury well beyond my

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means. Being with him was a relief from the tedium that was beginning to set in. The drive to write letters, to run about at high speed, to visit everywhere, to tell stories was gone. All of a sudden, Bangkok had lost its fascination. With Ladd, at least, there was beer and endless conversation. It was not just Americans who came to town. At the Bowon Temple, close to The Majestic, Sulak introduced me to Hans-Dieter Evers. “H-D” was a sociologist and thus serious about structure. He had just published two articles in which the myth of high social mobility had been unmasked as not standing up to—pre­ lim inary—research findings. This did not mean that we shied away from great speculation, such as the relation between Buddhism and development or the nexus between practical politics and national ritual. The future my wife and I were facing held little promise. Apart from living in the wreckage of our marriage, it was clear that we were very low on money, and that we couldn’t plan a thing. To pay for her trip, it had been advised that I swap my return ticket, plus some money, for her ticket to Thailand. The Hague would kindly consider eventual compensation and the return trip to the Netherlands. Yet, as in the beginning, they made it abundantly clear that their supplementing my Thai scholarship was a once-only affair limited to a year. In the original grant, it was expressly stated that that money was for me, not for wives or dependents. In order to secure support, it was obvious that something more substantial was needed than vague hints at language study and cultural orientation. Both of us formulated research proposals. Insufficiently guided by either operational or theoretical considerations, they were vague. I looked at the Thai monkhood as a possible agent in effecting socio-economic change and had the temerity of suggesting that the Buddhist ideology—if such a thing exists—would be of less importance than the organization and position of monks. She proposed that modernization is a process promoted by a change in mentality. In reply, we were advised that we come down to earth, that we should not embark on iconoclasm but focus on something feasible and observable. It was obvious that the proposals wouldn’t yield money, at least not in the short term. Berg’s optimism was our last glimmer of hope. As the weather heated up, we gazed at the letterbox at the gate where the redeeming news of a grant, a job offer, of continuity would perhaps be dropped. We played long games of backgammon. We waited. Eight months of running about, of hyperactivity, of challenge and fascination had vanished into thin air. The deadlock was broken when a telegram called her back to the Netherlands—her father had fallen gravely ill. Relieved, she

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started packing up to leave a place that had brought her nothing but deception and despair. Dazed, I kept gazing at the letterbox. I had no idea of what to do with the sudden boon of privacy—apart from sharing my bed with my newest lover, Phon. Beyond that, my energy had eroded. In an effort to gain a second term of Thai scholarship money, I positively reported on the gains in experience, insights, and linguistic skills. I did not relate that for the past four months I had merely been marking time, that I had become the prisoner of a restricted train of thought, and I had lost what it takes to free myself of it. In the same month of May I recounted my story to the Dutch ambassador: Your Excellency, The long series of deceptions, the permanent, growing uncertainty about o ur future in Thailand, the ten months of separation and the difficulties in adapting to each other again, the poor circumstances and the penury of our livelihood—all these are now taking their toll. Upon the hasty departure of my wife, I collapsed. Meanwhile, I am on my feet again, albeit somewhat wobbly. It was predictable. When I arrived in the country, I weighed 85 kilos, of which 68 remain. The last few weeks, I have no pleasure in Thai food, but I cannot afford to buy anything else. As a result, I eat badly. This coincides with stress and reactions of fright. In early April, the creative impulse left me, and all work and chores present themselves as mountains of challenge. Apparently there are lim its to staying-power and endurance. I have come precariously close to them. Social research in a foreign environment requires a strong commitment, and there cannot be any doubt as to my dedication. The year I spent here, I have been very hard-working in an accommodating society, but in a harsh climate and under miserly circumstances. If the pecuniary and emotional situations had been satisfactory, there would not be the slightest threat to continuity. In our case, it seems as if circum stances and authorities conspired to ruin our stay. They have not succeeded in doing so, albeit that I feel disillusioned and deceived. My most immediate need is to take some distance, to rest and relax. I need to have a taste of happiness in the company of my wife. Even if financial circumstances would allow me to choose, I still should opt for retiring to Europe for the time being in order to gather energy and fresh ideas. I need four more weeks to consolidate whatever I have arrived at here, although, in the absence of a ticket or the money to buy it, it is not clear how to take my leave.

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Whatever my muddled perspectives of going to Europe and returning to Thailand may have been—the Thai had renewed my scholarship—the embassy was prompt in reacting. Before I would become their liability, they immediately awarded a one­ way ticket home. It was fine. I was at the end of my tether. Besides, I couldn’t make sense of the news: in one letter, my wife wrote that she was seriously considering ending our marriage—which made me feel ashamed. In another, she revealed her resolve to rejoin me, which, in turn, felt threatening. The best way out was to get out. A European holiday would be the means of redemption.

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10

June 1966

Phon was a streetwalker who operated around The Coronet Hotel, at the corner of the Ratchadamri Road and the narrow Sarasin Lane. She was a lively character, coarse of manners and humor, who had totally adapted herself to her niche. Accord­ ing to her stories, she had made the transition rapidly since she had come to town. Originally, she went there on the instigation of an acquaintance of her mother who assured them that she would earn 500 baht a month. To Phon, this would offer the opportunity of sending money home, of demonstrating her love for the woman who had given birth to her. She had a strange hang-up about her mother. Shortly after she had been bom, her parents split up and settled with new partners. This took the mother to Lampang. Her baby daughter she left behind in the care of her sister, on the rural outskirts of Phan District. Until Phon was twelve, she didn’t know any better than that her aunt was her mother. When she knew who her real mother was, she naturally felt love for that woman, or so she said. Perhaps this was so because her mother was gentle with her, in contrast to the strict regime her aunt had imposed. She kept living at her aunt’s, though, visiting her mother occasionally, which set her on the road to Bangkok. When she arrived, she landed in a lowly menial job, at 70 baht a month. Soon after she was raped, she heard about other work from a friend. She didn’t mind working at a bar, and even liked the dancing. What she didn’t like was sharing her income with the bar owner, nor did she appreciate that her patrons always smelled of liquor and wanted to kiss her. So she set herself up on the street. Men will be men, and if you are a woman you can earn your keep because of it. She could not fathom why men go in for it: “It’s expensive, it’s quick. Take that young fellow, last night. Almost no experience with women. He pays 25 baht for the room, 60 baht for me, and in five minutes it’s all over. Is that worth it?”

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Two weeks before my flight back to Amsterdam, word had reached Phon that her foster mother had died. Having no more substantial work to do, I jumped at the opportunity to take her out of the city, to travel to Phan on my bike. On the way, she taught me natural science Thai style. For as far as we could see, she classified every plant and tree as either “useful” or “not useful.” “Useful” you can eat or provides a cure, you can build with it or make charcoal; the best you can do with the rest is burn it. Among her relatives, she demonstrated the same pragmatism. Her aunt had died because there was no money to buy medicine. That had happened a few weeks ago, hence a long time had passed since the simple ceremonies held to smooth her transition to the afterlife. And so, Phon didn’t feel called upon to make much merit at the temple. There were more interesting things to attend to, such as an evening at the fun fair that had arrived at its grounds. That evening, a movie was to be shown! Shortly after seven, most people from the neighborhood had thus gathered in the temple’s front yard. Many women and a few men had prepared sweets, snacks and other delicacies they were selling to the crowd. The center of the happening was a loudspeaker-equipped van with a little platform in front of it. About a quarter to eight, a man appeared there to make a speech. He was quite witty, and as everybody was eager to be amused, people laughed a lot. The speaker explained that he and his companions had come from faraway places where they had discovered treasures they wanted to share with the honorable ladies and gentlemen. These riches consisted of bottles with medicine preventing pregnancy, headache, constipation, menstrual pains, and sore legs. Other bottles were said to make hair and beard grow, to stimulate sexual activity, at the same time taking care of tired backs, toothaches, and swollen feet. There was medicine for the old, the young, and the middle aged, for women and for men, all of it in bottles offered at prices ranging from 2 to 20 baht. The performance of the salesmen was excellent. They sold many bottles, while the crowd was having fun. Although people became tired after two or two-and-a-half hours of witty sales talk, they stayed on in anticipation of the movie. Finally, by 10.30, a screen was set up, and the show could begin. The film consisted of clips from old newsreels: there were scenes of the London Olympics, boxing matches, unknown heads of state paying visits to unknown capitals, and many other incidents from days long past; the sound track was in various languages, always loud, seldom in Thai. The show lasted less than half an hour; by 11 o’clock, the people had left for home. Just the same, everybody was happy: the abbot had received his rent; the salesmen had sold a carload of colored water; the people had been entertained and provided with cures against all ills.

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Two days later, we traveled on. As had been the case at Khorat, my map indicated a dotted line that suggested a trail to Chiang Mai. Ten miles to the north of Phan, we veered to the west on to the dirt road to Mae Suai. From there, it went straight south, to Wiang Pa Pao, the last place to buy a few bottles of petrol. Beyond it, we were on a trail that, on beginning to climb up to the watershed, led through dense forest. It was heavy going. Because of the early monsoon, we had to negotiate pools of mud and slippery slopes where the wheels kept spinning without making progress. What had looked like two or three hours of forest track took the whole afternoon until, at dusk, we had run out of gas. We abandoned the bike among the trees and reached Doi Saket at nightfall. We tried to find a place to sleep at the temple, where they did not really know what to do with us. Finally, we settled for a stall in the market where Phon found a charcoal stove that she placed underneath the bamboo framework of the table we were to sleep on. For Phon, it was an unpleasant night, but I was so exhausted that I slept soundly, untroubled by cold and mosquitoes. In the morning, I went back into the forest with two bottles of petrol in order to recover the bike. We had come very near to Chiang Mai, which we reached early in the day. I thought that I could present myself as a visiting scholar at the university guesthouse, but the reception there was no better than at the temple the previous night. It made more sense to check in at a traveling salesmen’s hotel downtown where it was Phon’s turn to sleep like a log, and where I felt tickled by the occasional knock on the door of women offering their services. Obviously, they were unaware I had brought along my own provisions, as they say. The only other image remaining of our stay in Chiang Mai is our drinking coffee on a little square immediately to the east of the Banana Leaf Temple where a bitch was being taken in turns by at least three he-dogs: a vivid illustration of the widespread belief that to be reborn as a bitch is the result of an unmeritorious existence. Phon was not impressed. Merit, demerit, it did not affect her. The course her life had taken was not of her choosing. Was it bad, was it good? Yet, she acknowledged her change of fortune in her name: she had left Lampang as Sunanta, now she was returning as Phon. The ride to Lampang was rough, not because of forest and mud, but because the stretch from Lampun onwards was under construction. It was dusty, narrow, and bumpy. It was no fun to share the passage with the mastodon-like lorries that lorded it over the works. When we ran into the Italian engineer directing them, we had good occasion to pause for a chat and a drink. At that point, the worst was behind us. About four, I dropped Phon off at the humble dwelling where her mother lived with her tricycle-driving second husband. As I drove off to Bangkok, both Phon and I knew that one day we would meet again on Ratchadamri’s sidewalks.

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11

1966-68

Coming back to Amsterdam was like being sucked into wholesomeness. Things were in place, recognizable, my presence unproblematic. I didn’t need to be amazed, curious, or alert. If in Bangkok I had been like a young dog snapping at its own tail, Amsterdam seemed linear, calm, suggesting direction as a matter of course. I had things to do. I wanted to rewrite Reg’s story. The insights gained in Thailand must be communicated to the world. Instead of moving around in circles, I was on track. The only snag was that I was married. None of this was her fault. On the contrary, my wife did her best to reach out to me, which was disturbing. She found places to set us up as a family; my reaction was to escape, creating my own environment. I could work at a friend’s, often slept at a girlfriend’s, and visited bars all over town. I participated, but did not see a thing. From our fourth-floor window at Waterlooplein, we looked on the marches against the war in Vietnam. These were preceded by a tolling bell, and a long procession of slogan-chanting demonstrators; “Johnson, m urderer.. . . Johnson, murderer.. . . ” These people were arrested; they had insulted a friendly head of state. The next time they chanted, “Johnson, murmerer-----Johnson, murmerer.. . . ” They went on, week after week. Meanwhile, I prepared a new research proposal. If I couldn’t find Dutch money to take me back to Thailand, why not solicit American funding? In the pubs, I didn’t hesitate to talk about these prospects. Didn’t ARPA’s and my interest in monks and development coincide? It didn’t sit well with the mood prevailing in Amsterdam at the time. They even chided me for my enthusiasm in joining the faculty at Northern Illinois University where Ladd Thomas was developing a Center for Southeast Asian Studies. To them, being in league with the Americans spelled treason.

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In Amsterdam, I wrote critical reviews on the conceptual apparatus pervading the literature on Thailand, and other, more informative pieces on the country “nobody here knew anything about.” It was only after arriving at NIU that I engaged in stocktaking. What was the knowledge I had gained about the place, if any? My effort at bringing together the bits and pieces I thought to have learned resulted in a Special Report of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. In retrospect, it is quite revealing. In its first edition, I am joyfully carping at loose structure, individualism, and Buddhism as explain-it-alls. If there was one thing I had learned, it was to deny or to reverse statements that went unquestioned by most and that set the prevailing mode of understanding. Basically, this method is harmless and fruitful. If most people hold a certain idea, say, “To be a Thai is to be a Buddhist,” then deny it, and look for what they may be instead. In that way one might rapidly discover that “being Thai” is far more important than “being Buddhist” and that Buddhism in Thailand is shaped in a Thai mold. One shouldn’t go by the scriptures or orthodoxy but focus on the practice of everyday life. That holds the key. In that way I found myself with questions galore, and short on answers. In the stream of events—of which I myself had become a part—I had gathered little material to hold on to. I had “Reg” as a case study, but of what really? I had official answers on Community Development and the hoped-for role of monks, but was devoid of real-life observations. I had some empirical ideas on merit-making, but they were far too diverse to cohere. If there was anything “loose” about Thailand, it was, for me, these loose ends dangling. I discovered most regularity in the personal histories of my charming bedfel­ lows. None of these were identical, but they offered certain insights into the plight of low-class women, the enormous importance of prostitution in Thai life, and the matter-of-courseness with which impoverished peasants provided daughters for urban entertainment and other services. Sometimes they are more or less sold to a procurer—always promising a simple or even a glamorous job—who takes them to Bangkok where they are highly rated by older Chinese who strongly believe in the reinvigorating qualities of a virgin. After the girls arrive in a brothel, its keeper contacts his special clients. They pay big money for the pleasure of “initiating” a young girl who, to them, must be as delicious as fresh monkey brains—and almost as expensive. My other observations had to do with merit-making, with the tham boon that some scholars regarded as a national obsession. Again, my findings varied and did not lead to any single or simple conclusion. For Reg, the practice meant making

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little deals with her sources of blessing. She would make a small offering, then pray for a concrete result or, at least, hope for it. That behavior was part of her routine, of her view of life. For Noi, merit had more depth as a long-term investment that would benefit her over time. She went on pilgrimages and was desperate for money when her grandmother died. Because of this, she was earnestly saving money to be spent on merit-making on the occasion of the hundredth-day ceremony. When a similar death occurred among Phon’s relatives, she had an excuse for escaping the drudgery, heat, and harshness of her life in Bangkok. On arriving in Phan, she simply enjoyed spending a few days with her relatives. Merit or no merit, it didn’t mean a thing to her. Surassi’s case was similar. In his boyhood they had shaved his head to become a novice for two weeks as an act of merit-making for his deceased grandfather. As this custom had not incited his enthusiasm for religion, he had kept his distance ever since. Of course, occasionally entering temples or honoring monks is inevitable at cremations and housewarmings. Then religious ritual is part of the proceedings, a necessary element of polite social form. This was clear from the case of Nai Damrong, our landlord at Yanawa. In order to accumulate as much last honors to his father as he could, the body was kept lying in state for six weeks. During that time family, friends, and society could pay their respects, attend the wake, and make merit for the deceased at the same time that monks regularly recited the appropriate mantras. On the last day an impressive crowd gathered to celebrate the final rites at the “Temple of the Boat” before the fire would free the soul, now accompanied with a mighty stock of merit, on its way to the afterlife. This had no doubt been an expensive demonstration of filial piety and, while it will remain an open question whether his father had benefited from the proceedings, there would be no question about the honor and prestige Nai Damrong and his family had gained. When I discussed the subject of merit with Uthai or other monks, things were formally clarified but did not gain much precision. As learned Buddhists, they could describe the three categories of merit-making as giving, respecting the basic code of ethics, and meditation, then disagree among themselves on which worldly behavior was indeed meritorious and which not. To make things more complicated: What to do with the modernist position that community development, welfare activities, and even road-building were religiously meritorious? If a monk were to propagate such endeavors, he was certainly venturing into uncharted territory. When parents surrender their son to become a novice or a monk, they gain merit—so much is certain. To be a monk and to respect the code must yield merit, too. Moreover, their being in the robes offered the public the opportunity to give, not

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only on their early morning rounds but at any ceremony and temple visit. T his was clearly demonstrated by Uthai’s room that resembled a well-stocked grocery store more than a monastic cell of study and meditation. Of course, giving to a beggar is commendable, too, but it is unclear whether it contributes to one’s religious progress. Besides, monks could in their turn bless one’s projects, be it an airplane, a massage parlor, or a housewarming—and so I was straight back at Reg’s way of thinking. In America, they had hired me as a Thai specialist and had no problem with the Special Report in which I had recorded whatever I had learned. Personally, I was less convinced of its value. Of course, teaching students about Thailand who had never been there was no sweat, but we also had Thai students who attended my classes. What did I know about them, about their motivation to make merit, about their customs and ways of thinking? Was it reasonable to state anything but the obvious, such as the size of the country, the number of people living there, the fact that rice was its main staple and an important export, or that the war raging in Vietnam was very near to it? Of all facts, the last was at the time by far the most important. 1968 was the year of the long, hot summer in which vast parts of American inner cities—the ghettos—went up in flames. It was the year that Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King were murdered and that the National Guard shot students at Kent State University. Throughout the country, undergraduates demonstrated against the war—and the prospect of being drafted into it. Thailand, Vietnam, Southeast Asia—it had come very near, at the same time you felt, Thai specialist or not, that you could not comprehend what was going on.

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12

1969-Early September 1971

However much Thailand had been the reason for my being at NIU, I never doubted that I was on my way to Java. Instead of studying Thai, I sat in with the course in Indonesian, concocted a research proposal, saved money, asked for a leave of absence without pay, and bought a one-way ticket to Bangkok. Toward the end of January 1969 I was on my way. My plan was to buy a small Honda motorcycle to take me as much as possible by land to my destination on Central Java. While I was breaking it in, I renewed my contacts at universities, government offices, and temples; did a few interviews; collected further material on monks and development; discussed with Baas Terwiel the subjects of prayer and Buddhism; waved at the cop at Ratchadewi Circle; and had the time of my life. In the three years I hadn’t been in the city, a new skyline had emerged, punctu­ ated by ten to twelve-storey structures: offices, hotels, apartment blocks, and banks. Most of the city, however, remained very recognizable—the same women lining the same streets, the mouthwatering food and drinks, the Makassan slum where “our” house still stood, the people at Chula, Sampeng, Uthai, the Sunday Market. Yet, work was in progress. To accommodate the immense flow of R&R traffic between Saigon and Bangkok, all sorts of girlie places were proliferating. Hotels needed to be built accordingly. Phetburi Road was boldly extended into the rice-fields to the east of Makassan. Where it reached the two-lane Soi Asoke, a whole modern, concrete shanty town of dubious hotels, massage parlors, honky-tonks, dance halls, and brothels—collectively known as "The Strip”—was mushrooming to cater to the needs of GI Joe. Fortunately, there were other, less loud Americans. At ARPA, I met the gentle Howard Kaufman of Bangkhuad fame. A lovely, well-dressed secretary whom I immediately invited for a Niels-Mulder Saturday-night tour of the town assisted

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him. In getting slightly better acquainted, she admitted that she was afraid of sitting on motorbikes, and when I was by myself again, I grew apprehensive. The city I knew, the places I had taken to, were the vivid scenes of labyrinthine Chinatown, the open-air night markets, the cheap watering-holes of tricycle drivers. I didn’t know a single place to take a nice girl to. She would panic at the bustle of Sampeng; she would abhor the germs at the market; she would detest The Golden Deer. She would expect to be with members of her tribe, with Frank Sinatra, with bourbon and gin-fizz, things I neither appreciated nor knew where to find. After two days of hesitation—she was very attractive—I canceled our weekend date. In September 1970,1 was back. Compared with placid Jogjakarta, Bangkok sped up my life. During the first day alone I made more calls than in a year-and-a-half in Indonesia. The convenience of the phone stood in contrast with the nightmare of the traffic. It had grown so much that roundabouts had given way to traffic lights and level intersections that, in turn, invited the construction of the first flyovers. At the time I was already under contract with the United Nations Commission for Asia and the Far East, which implied that I had the privilege of importing a new car tax-free. After a first taste of the jams, I decided to decline the offer. Riding a small bike again would bestow me the privilege of sleeping an extra half-hour a day. Phon was still on the game at Ratchdamri. Like four years ago, she liked the idea of going upcountry, and so the two of us went on a trip covering the Northeast, and another that took us as far as the lower North and that, for her, again finished in Lampang. The noble object of these excursions was to interview monk-graduates who had been trained to engage in community development. Some six years earlier that idea had been substantiated—with the support of USOM and ARPA—at the Temple of the Great Relic when a course was initiated to train young monks for upcountry welfare activities and, of course, for containing Communism. This program was directed by the young, promising Phra Maha Prayut Payutto who meanwhile had more to show than a course of study. Now there were monk-graduates stationed at various provincial temples, and Maha Prayut was good enough to set me on the trail of his former students. On paper, these ideas about monks and development looked fine. Modem monks would enjoy the challenge of combining secular activities with their religious role. If monks commended certain programs, villagers might accept them as meritorious. In the capital, at the Buddhist universities, this thinking was taken for granted: modernity and tradition could be fused. Thailand was entering the world, and the idea of keeping abreast of the times seemed compelling.

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This thinking was alive and well among the monk-students at Bangkok’s two Buddhist universities but was far divorced from the complacent ways of the national Brotherhood of Monks. It was not so much a case of the Brotherhood’s distrusting the modernists but more that the national organization was ill-prepared for renova­ tion and modernity. This was also the case with the provincial abbots under whom the graduates had to work. These abbots were keen to capitalize on their advanced education to make them teach—upgrade—the novices and monks in their charge. In that way, they went straight back to tradition, to Pali (the holy language), formalized Dhamma (teachings), and memorization. Thai teaching is repeating your master, is rote-learning, is obedience, and whatever their initial enthusiasm, it was soon choked off in an environment far divorced from a changing world. O f course, as young monks they were not expected to be experts in magic, soothsaying, tattooing, amulet-making, healing, or lottery prediction. They were expected, however, to comport themselves in a ritually correct manner so as to serve as the field of merit for the population. Some insisted on some modernity and tried, in their preachings, to relate the teachings to everyday life, often to come to the conclusion that ordinary people preferred old-style recitations. Only at the Buddhist missionary center in Ubon did I find a place brimming with life and experimentation. Most graduates I met complained about feeling hemmed in by the walls of conservatism. They did not get the idea that they were partners in change. The monkhood was not evolving into an organization with pastoral and secular tasks; it was not made to help people accommodate to modem life and change. Perhaps, as some surmised, they would have found their peace with staying in the Brotherhood if their religiosity deepened, if they had been trained in vipassana insight medita­ tion. What they had received at university, however, was intellectual training that prepared them for the world. Most of them, therefore, were looking forward to the day they could leave the Brotherhood of Monks in good conscience. As a by-product of our doubtlessly meritorious trip among many venerable temples, Phon and I also gathered some impressions of the American presence in the Northeast. At the time, the Americans had established several air bases and, slightly south of Udon, a gigantic electronic listening-post about which they joked that if somebody dropped a pencil in “Nam” they could hear it. In the town itself, the military propinquity was acknowledged by hordes of male and female prostitutes, honky-tonk dancing-halls, and beerhouses. Simultaneously, near the Great Ear, a whole village of rickety, cheaply built houses and places of entertainment had shot

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up that, as we traveled through, obviously served as the abode of spectacularly made-up, gold-chain bedecked hired “wives” and others aspiring to that status. In mid-October I was back in the Netherlands. I had left in September 1967, and over those few years things had moved on. The major changes, wrought by the anti­ authoritarian student rebellions of the late 1960s were not immediately apparent. What struck me, coming from poor countries, was that many people were munching while walking the streets as if they had acquired the right to snack continually. Their affluence was evident in pubs, too. In my student days, we afforded ourselves two or three beers an evening, drawing them out endlessly. Now, young people had money to spend, although it took some time for me to grow accustomed to: “You, John, 12.50, please,” “Charles, 9 guilders,” “Pete, 14” at closing time. Anyway, I had money to spend, and a generous serving of lovely company to spend it on, since almost all the girls I knew of yore were divorcees, eager for fun. In April, I traveled, by way of NIU, to Bangkok and the Social Development Division of the Economic Commission. It was located in the RS Hotel, some distance from headquarters in the ceremonious Sala Santitham, the Hall of Peace. Development was still considered to be economic in nature, so our social development office was somewhat symbolically separated from the center of things. The Division brought together a motley crowd of “experts,” such as a Pakistani Parsee, a Nepalese Hindu, a Balinese, an Indian Tamil, a Japanese social worker, a Jewish-Lithuanian American, a Walloon Belgian, a Pakistani Muslim, a Christian Filipina, and poor little me. My job description was to monitor social development planning from Iran to Tahiti. Our diversity made sharing meals a tortuous affair: Chinese food was ruled out because of the Muslim and Jew; beef went against the grain of the Hindus; Japanese food—then still little available—is palatable only to the Japanese; the fresh vegetables that come with many Thai and Vietnamese dishes were distasteful to the people from Japan and the Philippines, while the Thai secretarial and liaison staff shuddered at the Muslim delicacies of mutton and goat. For the rest, we were united nations, communicating with each other in that Indian-style English known as United-Nationese. At the office, I held a controversial monopoly: among all my colleagues, I was the only one able to speak Thai. But, whereas this came as a pleasant surprise to our staff, it was not readily appreciated by the officers. Whenever I cracked a joke on entering the secretarial pool, they never knew who was being laughed at. Not that I was having fun at their expense. I am given to punning, to playing with

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language, but they were not that sure; they resented my familiarity with the country and with the Thai. For me it was constant border-crossing, from Thailand, my local environment, to that strange mirage, the Economic Commission, then back to the market, and up again to the office. Arriving at the UN ECAFE was like being stopped in full flight and dropped into a quagmire of ink, of quill-drivers, and repetitious documents, cliches, stereotypes and self-righteous platitudes. Aghast, I was on the defensive from day one. It was oppressive: there I would be, there I had sold my soul. For two years to come I would be filling paper, writing the hackneyed phrases that make one document substitute for the other—words and words I couldn’t take seriously, that were far divorced from real life but that were the lifeblood of diplomatic and development discourse. In my innocence, I had brought my Javanese research materials with me in the hope of writing a dissertation on my own time. Soon, however, the drudgery of the office spilled over into my private life. The endless stream of verbiage I was exposed to from 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m became an unbearable burden compensated for by the streams of tax-free liquor an international civil servant is entitled to. In the shortest of times my life-sustaining creativity had suffocated in the marsh in which I vegetated. The only call to vitality was sounded by girls, the low-flying angels that criss-crossed Bangkok’s days and nights. Two months into my stay, my footing was based on beer and girls, girls and beer. I knew I could forget my other ambitions. I roamed about the city, but it was like the time when my wife had arrived. Life on the seamy side and all those places one couldn’t take a charming American girl to had lost their attraction. Phon still sought her keep at the same spot, but, since she now had a boyfriend, was interested only in money. The other women who passed through my bed merely underscored my desolation. Without interest, without plan, I was no better than a zombie, a robot on automatic pilot that turns round after hitting an object. That was what transpired when I wounded a Thai colleague to the depths of his aristocratic soul when I expressed, in street language, my doubts about his sincerity. From then on until my contract ended, he shunned me like a pariah. I slapped a taxi-driver’s face after cutting me off to pick up a passenger. With passenger and policeman he gave chase, and while I could hold them off by making rapid turns, they got at me when I swerved into Sarasin Lane to be stopped by flood water. There the constable offered to settle the matter straightaway. He pointed out that I shouldn’t slap faces: “Now, pay the driver 20 baht, and we’ll leave it at that.” Headstrong, 1 refused. Hitting the driver was nothing but righteous retribution. Then we were four in the cab, on the way to Lumphini Station. The officers there did not

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precisely sympathize with my view of justice, even as I tried to convince them that “He almost killed me.” As they let the case simmer, they called for the American MP—who had clearly no business with me. After some time, they proposed I settle at 40 baht; half an hour later, it was 60. When they had advanced to 100,1 told them that I wasn’t carrying that much. So, after my testing their patience, and their testing my resolve, we were back at 20 baht. The passenger, I, and the driver boarded his car again. He was not unfriendly but chided me for my interest in cheap women, then dropped me off at The Coronet where my bike was waiting. The taxi-man was right. When we had our brush, I was on my way to pick a flower around The Coronet Hotel. Meanwhile, however, we have arrived at the wee hours of the morning that leaves me with a barren field on which two daisies remain. One I recognize, Jit, a barrel-shaped Chinese girl who has recently entered the profession and still has fun doing it. It doesn’t really matter how much you give her. The other one is a tallish girl, thin as a rake, whose eyes promise more than her body. I take her. At home, her gangly appearance turns out to be packed with pure sex. When, toward five, I drop her off at The Coronet, I still lust after more. At a bus shelter the eyes of a woman among the early passengers hint at me. Without any ado she takes the buddy seat. When I ask her where she is going, she tells me that she knows a woman for me. I say, “We do not need to make it that complicated.” I take her home. Again, it is pure sex, with the difference that she enjoys trespassing into areas that are taboo in Thailand. She must have served her apprenticeship with the Yanks. At 7.30, she hurries away to her work at a gas company. She shows surprise when I give her some money. In the afternoon, she’ll be back. Later that day, she is back, in the company of a man who strikes me as a nasty character. She introduces him as her brother. When I offer them drinks, he asks for beer that he seasons with a generous dash of whiskey: “If you have any complaints about her, you just give me a call.” Whatever their relationship may be, he is not amiable as far as she is concerned. One hour later and four or five of those cocktails that would fell an ox, he takes his leave. I still avail myself of what she has on offer. Then she sleeps like a log. It dawns on me that a certain GI Joe has recently packed up and that they are looking for a replacement. This doesn’t suit my plans. Later that evening, I want to take my leave, too, not to return to Illinois but on the way to company of my choosing. I have to get rid of this gold-digger. Especially with that pimp or brother behind her, I am apprehensive. Between eight and nine, I wake her up to drop her off in town.

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Late afternoon the following day, she calls. “I miss you.” She persists in talking. Luckily I am free to understand as much or as little Thai as convenient to me. The only point I want to bring home is that we are not made for each other and that she should absolutely refrain from seeing me here again. With a bang she rings off. The next day I am called by somebody who introduces herself as her twin: “You know, my sister, the one who was with you, was greatly affected. In her despair, she tried to take her life. When we brought her to the hospital, they couldn’t do anything any longer. Now she is being kept in the cold storage. In three days she will be cremated. We would appreciate it if you attend the last rites.” To get rid of her, I tell her to call again. She rewards me with a telephone smack.

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Late September 1972

The last week of September, I drift into Thai Yonoke. It is on the little square between the Erawan and the twelve-storey Amarin Hotel. It is famed for its succulent T-bone steak and its bevy of attractive women. Like those who operate around The Coronet, all are freelancers but better dressed and fluent in a type of Yankee-speak against which my Sampeng vocabulary pales. I’ve come to drink a beer. If I want a woman, I’ll pick one up later around the comer on Ratchadamri. The dames here are too exuberant and make me think of that bout of Thai-American friendship in Khorat. Besides, they’ll expect much more for their honey than I am willing to part with. They are used to dollars, to super-baht. Meanwhile, however, a recession is spoiling their trade. There is less resting and recreation going on. Slowly the Yanks are coming to their senses. They begin to realize that Vietnam is a place to stay away from. Besides, from its early days at “The Strip,” the R&R industry expanded far faster than demand. No cause for wonder that women drop by my table. I am not interested. I want to drink beer. The girls here are too expensive, and I don’t want to share in their Yankee-speak. That lingo reflects a mentality these women are hardly aware of. By repeating those rude remarks and insults they denigrate themselves. To GI Joe they are no better than holes in which to dump their money: “If I weren’t here, you would have no grub. Be grateful that you may sell your cunt to me. If we weren’t around, you’d be begging in the street.” Nice company, those guys—undiluted fascists! They think that their dollars allow them anything. I start hating their arrogant, clean mugs. Meanwhile, another daisy has come to sit at my table, obviously in the pursuit of free beer. It allows me to get a better idea of the going rate, and I learn that prices are more depressed than I thought. For 50 baht she is willing to come along for a short time; for 100 more, she’ll stay the whole night. It is less than double what I would

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spend round the corner, but I’m here to have a drink and I abhor her gobbledygook. I want to speak Thai. By offering 30 baht, she turns away: “Cheap Charley.” Two tables further on I spot a woman who looks as if she has just stepped out of the frame of The Gypsy Girl. From time to time she looks at me and I cannot keep my eyes off her. Shrugging, she feigns indifference, yet, a bit later I am again the object of her gaze. She is not in the mood to come over, and barely signals with her eyes that I am welcome at her table. Against my habit, I move over and share a bottle of beer. Immediately she agrees to speak Thai. A little after 11:00,1 offer to take her home at a price that doesn’t make her happy. She looks at the clock. Q uarter past. OK, a short time is money too and as long as she is back before midnight she stands a good chance of earning another 200 or 300. At my apartment, she is in no hurry. I put on a record, get beer from the fridge. We talk. At one o’clock, we are still talking. At two, we are still at it. W hen we finally land on the sheets, we are in for everything but sleep. She is the gypsy girl, totally, a well-rounded, refreshing source of delight unable to quench my thirst. It is midday when we recover our senses. She has to go home to care for her daughter. Still shaky from that night without a dawn, we mount the bike. She lives at New Bridge, a little township near Bang Chan, twelve miles from where I live. She doesn’t want me to take her to her house: “I’ll see you tonight.” For the women of Thai Yonoke, falling in love meant being clumsy. W hat aggravated it for Malai was that it was fully reciprocal. Right away, I was off the street. After 9:00 p. m., I knew where to go. For Lai, these were expensive visits as I came during business hours. Of course, talking and drinking together was fun, but the clock kept ticking without my paying the fee. She needed those hours to seek money, and as long as there were customers she was quite good at it. Even more effective than selling sex was her ability to entertain men with talking and joking in that inimitable barbaric bargirl pidgin. Things were different with the Japanese businessmen staying at The Amarin. Even as most women knew some nihongo, these men did not come for chit-chat. In that sense the sons of the Rising Sun were straightforward. They chose a woman, took her up to their rooms across the street, and twenty minutes later their counter­ part was behind her beer again. At 100 baht a fuck, nobody complained. The nice thing about Thai Yonoke was that it was everybody’s place, also patronized by Thai and local Chinese. Since prices were depressed, the baht could compete with the dollar. Even so, those intent on spending money could have their pick from among a set of spectacular Swedish freelancers at the far end of the bar. I do not know how much these Northern pixies expected, but once they left, you

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never saw them again the same night. Their business was certainly different from that of a screwed-up Sugarcane-with-Long-Hair who complained that last night’s customer, an Austrian who had paid a mere 100 baht, had taken seven turns before releasing her in the morning. Bawdy stories, hard jokes, fighting spirit, frustrated love, abortions, devotion to children, joined by the tear-jerkers that spilled from its jukebox—in Thai Yonoke it all came my way. In not too long my ability to read and write Thai and European languages made me a kind of an in-house secretary to the women who received mail and money from former lovers. While the latter were nostalgic about their Thai adventures, it also happened that I suddenly met with one among those hard-as-nails butterflies who had been seriously touched by her fleeting stranger and hoped for his return or, better still, to join him in Germany. Some of the songs warned against rash love. “Be careful, girl. Don’t fall for it. When you go to Germany, you think that he is waiting for you and will marry you. Mind you, they have brothels there too and foreign pimps expect a lot of bread. Those mengda have golden wings at the same time that we, Thai pimps, are happy with some spending money.” The top hit of this genre, which could move some women to tears, was “The Hired Wife’s Letter.” Sung in an enticing mix of Thai-English and American-Thai, it relates the fate of one of those women Phon and I had seen near the Great Ear. She had grown attached to her John, which did not prevent him from packing up when he had served his time and left for Illinois. In her misery she tries to write him a letter: “Why? Why? How could you dump me just like that?” But how do you do that in English? “I broken hart you musse undersetan, Tyohn tyah, Tyohn tyah, mia secon han khong you yang khoy!' Embittered she realizes that John has picked the flower of her youth, that her life is more mournful than a sad movie. Her way out is taking DDT in the hope of meeting again at The End. The most popular songs were so-called country ballads. Sung in Northeastern style, they enlarged on all aspects of Thai life. The women felt affinity with “The Mistress of the Hotel,” a charming yet self-possessed lady of the night all men are infatuated with but who’ll never give more than what she has been paid for. “The despair of those men, what is it good for? What do you buy for their promises? Deep down, all men are unreliable. As soon as you lose sight of them, they butter up another girl. Yet, are women any better?” In the songs, roles were easily reversed: “If men are tramps anyway, why wouldn’t a woman get her share? The trouble is that you may be saddled with a bulging belly and have no inkling of who the father might be.” These songs oozed with the skepticism and suspicion that colors love life. “You are a victim, you want it, you’re sucked into it, you fall for it, and you’ll be unhappy

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in the end.” Was this Thai? Was it different at home? If there was something dif­ ferent about these songs, it was the absence of our cult of romanticism, of the “And they lived happily ever after.” If there was something Thai about them, it was a shattering sense of realism. Could a song like “Poor People Stink” ever become a hit in Europe? The perspective of these country ballads was always from the bottom up. It was the perspective of the man in the street, of ordinary people, of the rabble under the bridge. “This is the Way Things are,” “The ‘good’ people have money, they can buy us, they can buy our love. Forget about them, don’t fall for it! Their love is pure deceit, and they couldn’t care less. They think that money allows them anything; they are merely cruel and corrupt.” “Poor People Stink” “because the rich keep their money to themselves and refuse to share it. Why? All of us come and go the same way; we’re born and will die. While they hold on to their loot they are not more content than we. When you think of it, all of us stink.” The gap between the rich and poor, the impossibility to approach each other, the distance between the “good” and the ordinary people—it was an inexhaustible subject rubbed in to me by Reg and Noi and Phon and Lai. “We cannot Love Each Other,” “You are a gentleman, my back is turned against the sun; your face is white, mine is scorched; you ride in a car, I sit on the bus; you go to the bank, I am at the pawnshop; you are ‘good,’ and I am base. How could we possibly love each other?” Were those songs not written for us, were Malai and 1 the exception? We had to adapt to each other. I couldn’t just enter Thai Yonoke at will. If she was entertaining a customer, she would feel caught in the act and I would look a fool. When she closed up shop, she would come to my place—and not just to save the 50 baht taxi fare to New Bridge. In that way, I came home. Suddenly things happened in the kitchen, snacks were prepared, we went shopping. From one day to the other I was back at my table, not to work on Java, but highly motivated to study Thai, to improve my reading and writing skills. Even at the office I found peace. I was on the rails, began enjoying being in the city again. With Malai, doing so was no problem at all. If it were anybody’s problem, it was my boss’s. At least twice a week we painted the town red. We would start feasting on Thai-Chinese delicacies at the night market at Bang Rak or in the garden of The Coronet—where Lai got to know Lek—to go on to dance halls with Filipino bands, to bars at Patpong or on Sukhumvit, to top off the evening with some hilarious moments with Amphon, the sharpest little lady of Thai Yonoke. In order to still catch some sleep, I normally called it a day there. Lai would come later; my office started at 7:30.

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For that matter, Lai had an excellent remedy to get us up and out of bed, but not at 7:30 when she was sleeping off the night before. Certain Sundays, however, when we had promised ourselves the delight of the freshest shrimps far and wide, we had to be on our way by 10:30 in order to beat the crowd at the harbor restaurant at Mahachai, some twenty miles southwest of the city. In order to work that miracle, Lai would quarter a lime, dip the parts in sea salt, and feed them together with two chili peppers directly into our mouths. No alarm clock can beat it. For a quick little breakfast, Lai fed us a few pieces of deep-fried bean curd to which those chili peppers—“mouse droppings” they call them here—make an excellent match. I can only stop eating those things when my nose runs and my eyes water. On the way to Mahachai I discovered that, in case of an overdose, they have a side-effect: I had great difficulty in focusing, saw things double and vaguely in turns. It could not possibly be the excesses of the night before, but it was dangerous on a fast little motorcycle. By the way, there is an interesting story about those “mouse droppings.” These days you cannot imagine that Thai cooking has ever been without them, and yet there was a time when they didn’t grow here. All spicy or sweet peppers come from South America. That’s why we call them cayenne or chili peppers. You also hear this origin expressed in Thai. Here “Thai pepper” is black pepper, which may hint at the fact that the other is of foreign origin. A similar idea is expressed with the coriander leaves that go with perhaps half of Thai dishes. In Thai, they are called “nun’s herb.” To distinguish it from the originally exotic parsley, the latter is called “farang nun’s herb.” Even if they’re untrue, I still love such stories. On our way to a jungle adventure along the Cambodian border, Lai hopes to say hello to a friend who seeks her money in the vast shanty town of cheap pleasures and hired wives to the east of the huge air base at Uthapao. On our approach—approximately from Pattaya onwards—we regularly see B-52s lifting off on their way to bomb the Vietnamese “back to the stone age.” Bloody hell, who is the barbarian, who the terrorist? So, here they come from, those clean pates, those tight uniforms. They are an insult to everybody alive. I want to pass by. I don’t want to see them. I’ll go berserk when confronted with a Yank. Lai understands my anger. We leave her friend for what she is. This happened in April 1972. It opened my eyes for the crimes being committed in the name of “democracy.” Six years after the marches in Amsterdam, six years after “Johnson.. . . murmerer” I woke up. When later, in Bangkok, I socialized with Germans, I was relaxed. The burden of the Second World War was lifted from my

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shoulders. Now we had to do with a different sort of Ubermenschen from whom one had better keep his distance. This was not that difficult to accomplish. Most of the cowboys stuck to “The Strip” and a few similar places elsewhere. As a result Americans were largely invisible in a motley crowd of a meanwhile eminently international public eager to enjoy themselves in the Emerald City of Vice. Most of its establishments were under Thai management and decidedly creative. Similar to the fun fairs, the up­ market venues offered a pick of weird entertainment, such as a ghost train cum brothel, a transvestite striptease so convincing that it titillated both Lai and me, and lascivious shows that were so debauched that they left us dumbstruck. I had vicious pleasure in shocking haughty visiting dignitaries from India—there was no shortage of them at the Commission—back to their puberty by taking them to a seeming modest place hidden in an office block on Silom. After being seated and served to the lilt of lulling music pandemonium would break out when stark naked girls descended on the tables as if from nowhere, picked cigarettes from the smokers’ mouths, puffed on them between their legs, then tried to put them back from where they had plucked them from. If their victims refused, the girls would approach with their pussies, then drop on their laps while trying to force an erotic kiss. It was “The Strip” come to town. Retribution, pure and simple. Again I was stopped in full flight. The doctor was positive: hepatitis. He asked whether I liked liquor. According to him, somebody who has been imbibing for the better part of his life—even drinking in excess of the tax-free ration allotted to him—couldn’t but suffer from a degenerated liver. It sounded like the death-knell for my happy-go-lucky ways. He didn’t ask further questions. He sent me home with a large bottle of vitamin B and warned that I shouldn't allow myself a single drop of alcohol. Every few days I had to show up at the hospital for a blood check. To stay away from liquor was not difficult: I simply didn’t care for it; I was clearly ill. Taking it easy at home was a bit of luck, too. Suddenly I had time on my hands to prepare a second edition of my Special Report. For want of more timely research, it was still in demand. The people at NIU therefore proposed that I expand it. Finally I could use the material I collected on my trips with Phon, and for the first time in Bangkok I took pleasure in formal writing. Since my blood readings were improving rapidly, I had to keep good pace in doing so. When my brother showed up, I had already been back at the tedium of the office for two weeks or so. He arrived from Bali where he had attended a medical

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congress. To me it meant the unenviable pleasure of introducing him to the city’s famed nightlife on a diet of unpalatable soft drinks. He saved my day! With a physician’s authority he declared: “Beer is not liquor.” Meanwhile, the blood tests kept improving all the time, and even as the hospital doctor kept warning against the devastating effects of Bacchus’s embrace, I felt fine in moderation. Soon the optimism my brother’s visit had inspired evaporated. It occurred when Lek visited my place. I knew her since May when I met her on the sidewalk of Ratchadamri. She was a hefty woman in her late teens, full of fun or, as she had it herself, obstinate and free. When she moved in with an American at the age of fifteen, her Chinese father washed his hands of her. When her man went back to Illinois, she set herself up on the streets where she greatly enjoyed herself. Never ever had she been that free. The heritage of the GI was her desire to learn English well. That’s why she enrolled at an “academy,” which means that she proudly showed herself in a school uniform in daytime. In that girlish attire she sometimes dropped by after class—visits Malai didn’t object to since the two women had taken to each other. All went well until the moment I tried to lift Lek above my ability. At the Seventh Day Adventists’ Hospital another religiously inspired doctor had little difficulty with his diagnosis: acute hernia. His further examination consisted of the question whether I rode a motorcycle. “I’ve been doing so for almost twenty years.” -“Your spine has worn out.” He kept me in traction for four days before he released me with a corset. So I came home, at thirty-seven, with a worn out back and a degenerated liver. Lai called me a rascal and said something like “just deserts,” but it wasn’t funny. Many months later, when I consulted ordinary physicians, it appeared that those missionaries had played God. Because of my love of life, I was a sinner, and so they sentenced me with their diagnoses. My liver was fine. The hepatitis was probably the result of my habit of eating at sidewalk vendors and of not being fastidious about the water I drank. The hernia had nothing to do with a worn out spine. As long as I put on the corset, I could ride my bike. I realized that Americans with a mission—whether at Uthapao or the hospital—are far more dangerous than I thought.

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14

1972-October 1973

It comes naturally to compare things here with my experiences on Java. There, I focused on the mystical scene, on a world of cosmic speculation that would fit well with the mentality at the Economic Commission. My Thai observations, however, are of the street and concern everyday life and the struggle of ordinary people. When Phon classifies the whole of nature into “useful” or “useless,” while another sees it as the manifestation of God’s hand, does that then mean Phon is a pragmatic realist not given to searching and contemplation? My observations are far too haphazard to allow for labeling, and if I still do it, it is no better than my ideas. The only thing I am a little sure of—again, it is no better than my idea—is that I find contact with the Javanese easier. The Thai are mercurial. Every time you are near, that you think you can put your finger on them, they escape. In town you are never invited to their homes, that invitation at Surassi’s being the great exception. They keep you at a distance. I am farang. They are Thai, and are certainly not in the mood to bridge the gap. They know I am interested, that I want to understand and I know more than most of my tribe, which smoothes communication. So, when a few days ago our chief secretary—a spectacular woman—came into my office, I knew what she meant when she hinted at the statue on the desk of a temporary office mate, to whom it is a mere souvenir. We, unenlightened people, however, should not tower over representations of the Buddha. These should be above us. So, why didn’t she place it on the cupboard herself? That would have added insult to injury! As a woman she is not supposed to touch such a holy object, whether statue or monk. She would defile it. So, I paid respect to the statue, put it on top, paid respect again—and both of us were happy. That woman is very serious about being Thai and, in a way, knows how to keep a perfect distance from the foreign staff. To them, at the office, she is Pusnee, a

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corruption of her official name. To the secretaries, she is Phee Nui, “Older Sister Nui.” That is intimate and pleasant. Everybody here has a nickname, a “play name,” as they call i t . Being addressed that way shortens distance: you become part of the family. At the office, however, the staff will never use my Thai name—though they know it—and I am supposed to persist in calling her Mrs. Pusnee. She must earn quite well, some 5,000 baht ($250) I guess—but I still do not see what motivates her. Of course, she is the office’s Number 1, which is great, but it is also lots of work and requires lashings of discipline. She is very competent, and shines like a star. I think she enjoys the stardom. She must spend more than her salary on clothing and make-up, on being spectacular—a luxury she can well afford since she hails from an affluent family, while her husband makes pots of money, too. It is my problem, really. Why spend your time on UN rigmarole if you could be free? The ordinary secretaries earn much less, although, by local standards, very well. At a little over 3,000 baht, their knowledge of English brings them close to the equivalent of a university professor. They are supposed to dress the same way. My secretary is “Bandit,” which sounded a bit odd when he was first introduced. Later I learned that it is the Thai form of “Pundit,” learned or wise. Most of those official names have auspicious meanings, such as good luck, blessing, riches, merit, polite, favorite of the Buddha, and so on. You seldom use them, unless you have a less heavy name, like Malai (garland) or her daughter, Malee (the single jasmine flower you make garlands with). They do not need “play names.” Nicknames are unproblematic. One of the ruling marshals is known as Mr. Pig, and nobody finds it strange. Others are called “Red” or “Biggy” or “Fatty,” or what have you. The most common names are Toy, Lek, Noi, Nit—all of them meaning small or little. Again, nobody is amazed that this six-footer is Nit. Nit is a corruption of Niels, which is an impossible tongue-twister for Thai. Depending on how they hear it, it becomes Nin (black gem) or Nit. If I had been colored, I would have chosen Nin. That, however, is further from the truth than Nit, the name on which Phon decided after my wife’s departure. Meanwhile I’ve got promotion. After half a year of intimacy, Malai changed the spelling of my name. I am still called Nit, but now it is written Nitaya, “the reliable one.” It is a heavy name I should be careful to live up to. Since I learned the language of the street I am better aware that some of our names may be understood in ways one would like to avoid. The other day I met a Swedish girl with the melodious name Randee, which the Thai may hear as “Very Obstinate.” I advised her to make it Arandee, “Good Forest,” which sounds pleasant

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and fairylike. Imagine introducing yourself with the common Dutch name Yet Moy: I guess people here would not dare to repeat it, “Fuck (my) Pussy!” Most foreign names are harmless and just sound weird to Thai ears, and so you have to accept that they will be corrupted, sometimes beyond recognition; the logic of Thai forces them that way. Of course, this is mutual. For instance, we have a little lady at Thai Yonoke with a cute look whose skinny legs stand on striking pumps. Among us, she is thus “Mimi Mouse.” Early on I couldn’t fathom why she’s unhappy with that name. Now I know. She hears it as “Mimi Maw” (Drunken Mimi)—and that for a girl who has never taken anything more potent than a glass of orange juice! The language remains a very interesting and slippery thing. For me, it means straying with tones and vowel length. If you botch them, you may be saying things you do not want to say, that are senseless, chancy, or funny. When they know you, such as Lai’s colleagues or the people at the office, you can sometimes play with it, crack an odd joke. Still, for the Thai themselves it remains weird. Tone and length are inalienable aspects of words. What they like to joke with is inversion, “turning words round,” or shifting initial consonants, such as “Beeping Sleauty.” They also have fun with weird expressions and love to play with coarse words and sexual allusions. In that, they are most recognizable to a Dutchman. Last weekend, language was playing its tricks again. With Malai I went to Pathumthanee in the hope of meeting Uthai. At the main temple there, people would certainly know where we could find him. It was a Sunday, the day TV stations screen kick-boxing, the national sport, without end. At the temple, most monks sat in front of a set, almost as noisy as the crowd watching at the stadium. Did they feel caught out by my unexpected appearance? I doubt it. They were in private, among themselves. Anyway, they knew Uthai’s whereabouts. These days, he is a lieutenant, and he expressed hopes that he would become some sort of an army chaplain soon. It must have been a weird transition to move from his long-cloistered existence to a machine of power and pretense. We didn’t talk about it, and perhaps the difference is not so great. At Wat Thongnoppakhun, it was discipline, order, hierarchy, a uniform, and playing the holy man; the military is not all that different. Uthai was congenial, as always, but also very polite. In his eyes, my stature had grown. He addressed me as acharya, high teacher, which I don’t like. I am not his teacher; he was mine. My promotion was also reflected in his query whether I played with frogs {kob). “Frogs?” I said. “Yes, with those little look'.' Lookl That is a tricky word, everything that is round and small may be look; children, fruits, little animals. “What do you do with these lookl" Uthai replied. “You take a stick

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and hit them full tilt.” I was amazed, but in this country you never know. To my knowledge, you eat frogs—they are quite delicious—but hitting them? Then I got the point: he wanted to know whether I played golf (kohb). On leaving Uthai, we passed through the countryside where a party was going on at a fairly large farm. We were invited. As special guests they were seeing to it that we had more than a good share of tit-bits. When we grew tired of it, I repeatedly asked “Kho la, khrap”—requesting permission to leave—which only resulted in their bringing us two bottles of coke. Will I ever master this language? With Malai, my existence has gained new dimensions. A little excursion is more than an outing. She knows how to tell stories about it and will never pass up the chance of eating well. Often, I joke that she thinks food. She also confronts me with her moods—to which she has a right. After all, she spends much of her time and most of the late nights with me in this flat where she should feel at home. She is a woman of the people, alert, and used to fighting her own battles. She can be very angry, very vengeful, very sad, very serious, very exuberant, and is always—well, alw ays.. . . —in for fun, for dancing, going places. If afterwards she’s in the mood for meeting Amphon, there is no appeal: “Go, go home, sleep. I’ll come later.” In most of my life, when confronted with people, their claims and emotions, I feel hampered, imposed on. I prefer to be with myself. Not so with Lai. It’s weird, but since we know each other she fills my life in a way that stands in stark contrast to the drudgery of the office. Even there, though, funny things may happen. As you know, it is located at an hotel, which means that I have a balcony from which I look out over the balconies of the diagonal wing that still serves as a hotel. The other morning, one storey up and some two rooms down, I see a little lady of the night blinking against the daylight. It’s Amphon. I thus step out to hail her and tell that this here is my office. At that, she points to the bedroom behind her: “And this is mine!” Occupying a hotel room for an office has its advantages. It’s too bad that they substituted the beds with writing-desks, but the bathrooms are in place. A few days ago I thought it a good idea to nurse my hangover. After five minutes in the bathtub, the boss entered the room. Normally he sends Bandit, which allows me some leeway. This time, I heard him grumble because he didn’t find me behind my desk and so I had to think up an excuse: “Sorry, sir. I had a long bout at the lavatory. Yesterday I must have eaten something really bad.” It took considerable effort to mollify his suspicions before he came to the point. Then, when he was on his pet subject, things went smoothly.

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He had come to the conclusion that the massive poverty ravaging our region could no longer be swept under the carpet. The fight against it was the very reason for the existence of the Social Development Division: “If we do not make it public, who will? Those economists only think of money and refuse to consider widespread suffering and its causes. This has to change. We have a message that must be sounded loud and clear at the coming session of the Commission in Tokyo. Now please draft that speech for me.” After almost two years on this job, I am well familiar with such things as “sweeping mass poverty under the carpet” and other hackneyed phrases larding his prose. Even so, the sober earnestness, pathos, and indignation with which he promotes his cause never fail to impress me. The man must be totally unworldly, a prisoner of this marsh of ink. Anyway, since he will certainly not be allowed to speak for more than fifteen minutes, my part of it is manageable: In several of the larger member countries, some 50% of the citizens live below the poverty line in terms of nutritional intake and its monetary equivalent, as compared to their wage earnings. If more indicators of poverty are added, such as shelter and access to education, health and other essential services, etc., then the percentage of people under the poverty line may considerably increase. Studies in this sphere are sadly lacking, and the causes of poverty therefore not clearly determined. But even without these studies, much can be done here and now. Often governmental fiscal policies, pricing systems, and credit availabilities are unconsciously geared to urban requirements at the cost of the rural economy. Financial policies that result in inflation often benefit the urban stockholder of merchandise, at the cost of the farmer who cannot___

One more month to go. By the time I leave I’ll have produced almost 300 pages of verbiage and said nothing substantial. Even so my boss praises certain contributions that he circulates as exemplary in the Division. I hope that my colleagues ignore them—we get on very well together. What they do not understand is that I want to go. If you have a job in Cockaigne and a generous salary to fight poverty to boot, you should not just leave, should you? Besides—and this is what they must to safeguard their self-respect—they believe in this charade. It is not all trouble and strife. A job here may even bring prestige. That was the direct outcome when I was made ECAFE’s liaison officer to organize a ten-day Conference on Social Development, together with the Thammasat University and the Red Cross. The Thai Red Cross is under royal patronage, and so the organizers were invited to a reception where they were to receive a diploma from the august

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hands of His Majesty. Such a thing is no minor affair, and before the program started we had to submit ourselves to a crash course in protocol. At a point two steps in front of the dais we were to bow; then advance two steps; respectfully accept the document from the King’s hands; take two steps backwards; bow again and turn. It went precisely as in my days in military service. Everybody did as instructed, save for me. Upon receiving the royal expression of thanks, I turned around. I realized my mistake; stepped back, went into reverse, and made a bow. Anyway, the most important part of it was the picture they take at the moment the King hands over the diploma. Ask Lai: her Nit with the King in one frame! Because of the congress I came often at Thammasat campus. It brought me into contact with the newly established Thai Khadee Institute, at the top floor of a brand new office tower. They intend to undertake social research, and so I joked about the symbolic value of their location. High above the ordinary hustle and bustle, the least it allows for is a fine view of the city, all the way down to the Chokechai Building on Sukhumvit that, with its thirty-six floors, boasts itself the tallest in town. The end of this fast growth is not in sight, which is also clear from the traffic that worsens every day. That it was a good decision to settle for a bike was confirmed when my Nepalese colleague, on his way home, was held hostage to his status symbol for a full three hours. That little moped agrees with my lifestyle; it agrees with the people I associ­ ate with. At the Commission, it does not fit; as a United-Nations man you are an international civil servant and supposed to display the appropriate paraphernalia. You have to demonstrate your worth, not by writing a significant report, but by showing your status. A fine car, a tailored suit, a necktie, briefcase, unsavory food at expensive hotels, and keeping native society at arm’s length—all establish your importance. And thus, at the office, I keep a jacket and a tie for emergencies. Otherwise I dress as I did when a student at Chula, even though my shirts are ironed these days. It’s clear. I am not a hopeless case; I do make some progress, also with the women I associate with. Malai is of another caliber than my early girlfriends. Of course, when on the game her Yankee speak may leave you baffled, but beyond it she insists on a minimum of decorum and shows little sympathy when I display my mastery of the lingo of the street. Mixing in a few Chinese words is enough to demonstrate one’s urbanity and set oneself apart from greenhorns and the petit bourgeois crowd at the office. One absolutely doesn’t need base language to accomplish that. Lai also corrects my manners. A few weeks ago, in a market, I had bought a snack that I, in the fashion of Dutchmen or of Black Fatty for that matter,

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started to munch while walking. She objected. If you want to eat, you sit down to do so. You take your time and give attention to what you are doing. Even animals do not walk about chewing. Lek, too, had something to teach. These days she is with a taxi driver, Piak, with whom she shares a hovel at the Khlong Toey slum. When they visited here, they proposed that we accompany them to a shrine nearby. They took us to a colossal tree between the yard of the White Bus Company and the canal to Bangkapi. I was amazed to see the trunk of that tree surrounded by replica penises of all description. Two, almost ten feet tall, stood like guardians; a few others were mounted like cannon on their undercarriages. Against the trunk, a huge pile of kitchen pestles, carefully sculpted specimen and small wooden sticks decorated with a red end to mark the cone. In the beginning I thought it had something to do with a fertility cult, such as at Wat Po where women offer garlands and candles to the statue of a lingam. But then, why would Lai and Lek be so serious about worshipping at this tree? To them, pregnancy is no better than an industrial accident. When I got my data straight, I understood that the big tree is the abode of a powerful female spirit, a “ruling mother,” who grants wishes if appropriately propitiated. Some of these rulers demand a bottle of whiskey, a pig’s head, or a dance performance for their favors, but if it happens to be a female, what else but a firm hard-on? The third of May. The great day has arrived. I am free to go, but that’s all. Thailand sticks to me. It is comfortable to be with Malai. I postpone the future by taking her on a holiday first. We’ll visit her dirt poor relatives who live at some distance from the remains of the old Cambodian temple at Phimai. From there we hope to go on to Vientiane on the other side of the Mekong River. According to the news, there is armistice again in Laos. Perhaps we can travel about a little. When we drove on to the north nobody stopped us. There were no roadblocks, no check points. It was dusk that made us stop. Because Lai spoke the language, we had no trouble finding lodgings. We were most welcome—anybody paying with baht is. They treated us as respectfully as they do those who pay with dollars on the other bank. In the morning we got some sort of French bread, together with a glass of very soft-boiled, whisked eggs. As we went on, we started climbing. Gutted military vehicles reminded us of entering a recent war zone. That was confirmed when we drove by a vast army site manned by Thai mercenaries. When I proposed that we drink coffee there, Lai panicked: “Are you off your nut? As the only woman around, I know what will

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happen to me, and you may finish off with a hole in your head.” It was plain: she knew her countrymen. For many hours we traveled along a treacherous, sandy, sinuous route on top of terribly steep, narrow ridges. There was hardly any traffic, here and there some military. Then we made our descent to the royal capital Luang Prabang on the Mekong. No soldier in sight. It was a town of peace and beautiful temples where time stood still. It was the eye of the storm. Back in Bangkok I feel out of place. I long to stay. I have to go. With Lai, staying on is a pleasure, but it is more of the same. When the Commission got the better of me, two years ago, I knew I had to go back to Java if I ever hoped to be creative again. I’ve been vegetating for too long; I even stopped deriding myself for it. If I still aspire to do something positive, I have to go. At the end of August, I return from Jogjakarta. My head mills. Our trip to the South is very different from that to Luang Prabang. I am at it again. Thailand is a pleasure; Malai is sweet; but I am urged on by ideas. I want to rush into the future. My dissertation spins in my head. I need my writing-desk in Amsterdam. Later, I shall come back to put my finger on all those Thai things that still remain elusive. Lai is worried. “I’ll be back. Believe me.” What I do not tell is that Thailand has cast its spell on me.

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Epilogue

Forty years after the events took place, I relived my early days in Thailand. I could do so because of pictures, the remains of my correspondence, notes, formal writings, the sixty pages I wrote about Reg, and still vivid personal recollections. If I would have had to rely on memory alone, the book would have been a slim volume indeed or even a rehash of the academic reports I have written over the years—something I definitely wanted to avoid. The purpose of this book is to reconstruct, as honestly as possible, the develop­ ment of my ideas while “in the field.” What triggered them? How did they change and evolve? After all, doing anthropology is a strange, self-centered occupation whose many pitfalls undermine our gall to tell our students who those among whom we dwelt are, think, and live. The fun of writing this account was to work with unadulterated data and reex­ perience the encounters with persons and situations. I steered clear of the academic obfuscation that invariably occurs when we drag our findings and impressions up to the Olympian heights of the ivory tower. I spelled this out in the story of my meeting with Dr. Phian, and sometimes suspect that the academic approach does little more than substitute its own arcane labyrinth for the direct experience of everyday life. In a sense, I am happy to have left that ivory prison and to be free to revive the moments lost in the dawn of my professional days.

Amsterdam, May 2006

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White Lotus Press Titles Abadie, Mauce, Minorities o f the Sino-Vietnamese Borderland, with Special Reference to Thai Tribes Ball, Desmond, The Boys in Black, The Thahan Phran (Rang­ ers), Thailand’s Para-military Border Guards Baker, Simon, ‘Child Labour’ and Child Prostitution in Thai­ land: Changing Realities Ball, Desmond & David Scott Mathieson, Militia Redux: Or Sor and the Revival o f Paramilitarism in Thailand Bassenne, Marthe, In Laos and Siam Bastian, Adolf, Journey in Burma (1861-1862) Bastian, Adolf, Journey in Cambodia and Cochin-China (1864) Bastian, Adolf, A Journey in Siam (1863) Berlie, Jean A., Islam in China Bematzik, Hugo Adolf, The Spirits o f the Yellow Leaves: The Enigmatic Hunter-Gatherers o f Northern Thailand Boulard, Michel, The Cicadas o f Thailand: General and Particular Characteristics Briggs, Lawrence Palmer, The Ancient Khmer Empire Bums, Axel R. H., Burmese Puppetry Cam6, Louis de, Travels on the Mekong: Cambodia, Laos, and Yunnan Chaz6e, Laurent, The Mrabri in Laos: A World under the Canopy Chew, Anne-May, The Cave-temples ofPo Win Taung, Central Burma, Architecture, Sculpture and Murals Choden, Kunzang, Chilli and Cheese: Food and Society in Bhutan Chu Th£i Son, Patterns o f Textiles and Other Objects o f the td e and Mnong in the Central Highlands o f Vietnam Clutterbuck, Martin, Siamese Cats, Legends and Reality Cohen, Erik, The Chinese Vegetarian Festival in Phuket: Reli­ gion, Ethnicity and Tourism on a Southern Thai Island Coury, W illiam G., Textiles o f Insana, West Timor: Women Weaving and Village Development Cupet, P., Travels in Laos and Among the Tribes o f Southeast Indochina. The Pavie Mission Indochina Papers Vol. 6 Dalton, Edward Thite, Tribal Worlds o f the Eastern Himalaya and Indo-Burma Borderlands Dohring, Karl, Buddhist Stupa (Phra Chedi) Architecture of Thailand Dohring, Karl, Buddhist Temples o f Thailand: An Architectonic Introduction Duggan, Genevieve, Ikats ofSavu: Women Weaving History in Eastern Indonesia Durrer, Hans, Ways o f Perception Ehlers, Otto E., On Horseback through Indochina. Vol. 1-3

D o in g T h a ila n d : T h e A n th ro p o lo g is t as a Y oung D og in B a n g k o k in the 1960s is the often hilarious tale o f an aspiring researcher struggling to find his footing in bew ildering Bangkok. Based on raw data and experiences—that tend to lose their flavor through ivory-tower m anipulation—the narrative offers glim pses on the T hai capital before the advent o f traffic jam s, life at the time o f the w ar in V ietnam , the academ ic fashions o f the day, and the pitfalls of doing ‘field w ork’. At the sam e tim e the book provides insights into things T hai that will be enlarged upon in the follow-up when the young man has grow n to be a professional.’ ‘A devastatingly honest account o f experiences we all share and mostly gloss over.’ - G raham Fordham \ . . and you’re still alive?’ - H ans Ferree

ISBN

t1 7 f l - t1 7 4 - 4 A 0 - 0 in - 2