141 pages

English

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Bizarre Thailand , livre ebook

MarshallCavendishM - Jim Algie

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

141 pages

English

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Bizarre Thailand takes readers off the well-rutted road of tourist hotspots into the darkest and sexiest hinterlands. Welcome to a twilight zone where travellers become soldiers and cowboys, a black magician courts politicians and film stars, sacred tortoises mate on the streets of a small town, and Fertility Goddesses are wooed with massive phalluses. In this strange land, nothing is what it seems: a prison becomes a tourist attraction, a 20-storey robot is a building, a man becomes a beauty queen, a Buddhist temple turns into hell on earth, a loving wife is immortalized as the most famous and ferocious of all phantoms, and a serial killer's corpse is reincarnated as a museum exhibit. Bizarre Thailand takes an irreverent look at how the profound, profane and frankly quite odd intertwine with the rhythms and flows of everyday Thai life, paying homage to the quintessential culture of one of Southeast Asia's most captivating destinations.

Sujets

Tailandia

True crime

Thailand

Thaïlande

Informations

Publié par	MarshallCavendishM
Date de parution	01 octobre 2010
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9789814351867
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0520€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Bizarre Thailand TALES of CRIME, SEX and BLACK MAGIC

by JIM ALGIE

Cover design by OpalWorks Pte Ltd All photographs provided by Jim Algie © 2011 Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited Published by Marshall Cavendish Editions An imprint of Marshall Cavendish International 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Request for permission should be addressed to the Publisher, Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Private Limited, 1 New Industrial Road, Singapore 536196. Tel: (65) 6213 9300, Fax: (65) 6285 4871. E-mail:te@sg.marshallcavendish.com The publisher makes no representation or warranties with respect to the contents of this book, and specifically disclaims any implied warranties or merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose, and shall in no events be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damage, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Other Marshall Cavendish Offices Marshall Cavendish International. PO Box 65829, London EC1P 1NY, UK • Marshall Cavendish Corporation. 99 White Plains Road, Tarrytown NY 10591-9001, USA • Marshall Cavendish International (Thailand) Co Ltd. 253 Asoke, 12th Flr, Sukhumvit 21 Road, Klongtoey Nua, Wattana, Bangkok 10110, Thailand • Marshall Cavendish (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Times Subang, Lot 46, Subang Hi-Tech Industrial Park, Batu Tiga, 40000 Shah Alam, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia. Marshall Cavendish is a trademark of Times Publishing Limited eISBN: 978-981-4351-867

To my mom, Patricia, and my brother, Richard, for putting up with me for so long.

Contents INTRODUCTION: INTO THE THAI TWILIGHT ZONE CRIME SCENES Behind the Bars of the Bangkok Hiltons Pattaya: The Vegas of Vice? Museum of the Macabre: See Uey the Chinese Cannibal A Night in the Lives of Corpse Collectors MISADVENTURE TRAVELS From Ayuthaya to Bangkok: A Bizarre Expat Odyssey Weekend Warriors: Military Tourism in Thailand Double Lives: Searching for the Siamese Twins Country ‘n’ Eastern: Home on the Dude Ranch THE SEX FILES The Black Sex Magician of the Body Politic Empowering Sex Workers A Cross-Section of the Third Gender Erecting a Tribute to A Fertility Goddess STRANGE CELEBRITIES The Artist Of Bizarre Architecture The Angel And She-Devil Of Bang Kwang Central Prison The Scorpion Queen and Centipede King Thailand’s First Lady Of Forensics CREATURE FEATURES Going Ape in Simian City In the Glass Ring with Siamese Fighting Fish The Water Buffalo’s Tombstone Reptilian Ménage à Trois: THE SUPERNATURAL Modern Primitives and Ancient Shamans Oral Hexes and Shock Airwaves Nang Nak: The Ghost of Thailand’s Past Funeral Rites: The Thai Way of Death Directory of the Bizarre About the Author

INTRODUCTION: INTO THE THAI TWILIGHT ZONE Where else in the world could a womanising black magician become a political advisor and chat-show celebrity, or the abbot of a Buddhist temple t ry to construct a pagoda out of water buffalo skulls? Where else would a town be overrun with sac red tortoises that mate in the streets, or the preserved corpse of a serial-slaying cannibal be on permanent exhibition in the most macabre of museums?

Where else but in bizarre Thailand? A Twilight Zone where nothing is what it seems.

In 1994, I started writing a series of columns and feature stories for local newspapers and magazines that led to contributions to a wealth of international publications such as the National Geographic Traveler and International Herald Tribune, regional papers like the Japan Times and Sydney Morning Herald, as well as guidebooks for major publishers in the United States and London, focusing primarily on the dark and exotic side of Thailand and detours off the well-rutted and over-glutted travel map of hotspots. The inklings of a few other stories came from the pages of Farang Untamed Travel magazine, co-founded by Cameron Cooper, Bobby McBlain and myself in 2001.

There are hundreds of books—and tens of thousands o f stories, websites and blogs—devoted to the ‘palm-fringed beaches’ and ‘majestic mountains’ and ‘delightful gastronomy’ of the kingdom. This is not one of them. Beyond those obvious attributes, the country has many other enchantments and enticements that can be enjoyed without bowing to the tyranny of the politically correct, or snorkelling in a cesspool of vulgarities.

Starting off the collection with a bang is the ‘Crime Scenes’ section. Few people know life and death ‘Behind the Bars of the Bangkok Hiltons’ like the country’s last executioner. Trading in his electric guitar for a machine-gun, former rock musician Chavoret Jaruboon sent 55 men and women to the crematorium during his 18 years on the firing line. Interviews with convicted drug traffickers and prison authorities provide an overview of crime and capital punishment in Thailand.

Only in the sea-straddling resort of Pattaya are yo u likely to hear stories of a middle-aged Scandinavian man running amok in a shopping mall, throwing bottles of acid in the faces of local office ladies, because he had been spurned and sucked dry of his life savings by a bargirl. In ‘Pattaya: The Vegas of Vice?’, retirees on Viagra rub shoulders with Russian gangsters and 10,000 marchers calling for an end to violence against women as they parade down Beach Road, beside scores of streetwalkers in the country’s most bipolar city.

For chills and blood spills, readers can ride shotgun with Bangkok’s rescue workers and corpse collectors. In ‘Museums of the Macabre: See Uey the Chinese Cannibal’, the wretched life and unspeakable crimes of the forensic museum’s mascot— who is also the country’s most infamous serial killer—are autopsied.

‘From Ayuthaya to Bangkok: A Bizarre Expat Odyssey’ looks at an astonishing spectrum of expatriates who have come here over the past five c enturies: pirates and samurai, writers and filmmakers, maverick entrepreneurs and mass murderers. Apart from that famous Thai tolerance of other cultures and nationalities, why do they keep coming here? The answers are as varied, and as eclectic, as the characters themselves. Also detail ed are a few of the defining moments from expatriate history. Many will know about the building of the ‘Death Railway’ constructed by Allied P OWs and Asian slave labourers at the behest of the barbarous Japanese Imperial Army. Few, I suspect, will be familiar with the most moving memo ir of that tragedy, The Railway Man by Eric Lomax, which tracks the strange, five-decade-long relationship that develops between the Scottish POW and a member of the Japanese secret police he longs to maim and murder.

In the middle of 2010, the carnage on the streets o f Bangkok during a series of showdowns between the military and the red-shirted protestors exposed more than a few fault lines running through Thai society and its long-standing love and loathing for the army. Those incidents are flashpoints in ‘Weekend Warriors: Military Tourism in Thailand’, where the presence of so many

troops and bases has created what may very well be a tourist phenomenon unique to Thailand: undergoing military training at real army bases scattered across the country. Despite finding it a challenge to arrange and endure, I did my basic training with the paratroopers from the Royal Thai Airborne in Lop Buri province.

The overblown genre of what I normally deride as ‘B angkok dicklit’ has mostly been neutered from ‘The Sex Files’ section. The only organisation I’ve kept tabs on from that overexposed scene is Empower, one of the few NGOs in the region that pro motes sex work as a viable form of employment for women. That said, they have been lobbying the Thai government for some two decades to get sex workers the same rights enjoyed by other members of the service industry, and they routinely deal with the Thai police in trying to get justice for women victimised by sadistic clients. Over the last 10 years, they have implemented an in credible array of projects—a radio station featuring bargirls as DJs, setting up a miniature go-go bar at an international conference on AIDS and, more recently, setting up the only bar in the count ry (possibly in the world) run by and for sex workers.

Cross-cultural relationships are already weird enou gh without the presence of love charms, sex potions and phallic amulets. Yet they all play a part in the world’s oldest obsession as it’s practised in Thailand. Stories like ‘Erecting a Tribute to a Fertility Goddess’ look at how the mystical flirts and fornicates with love.

Profiles are travel stories, too. For the country’s architectural giant, Sumet Jumsai, his lifeline weaves through World War II, when the Japanese occu pied Bangkok, to his schooldays in Paris and England, and his designs for groundbreaking buildings that resemble a robot, a ship and a Picasso-like Cubist structure, as well as a number of character-forming encounters with everyone from filmmaker Roman Polanksi to Nelson Mandela.

In any profile, it’s incumbent upon the author to locate the circumstances that have shaped the subjects’ personalities and pushed them in certain directions. The so-called ‘Angel of Bang Kwang Central Prison’ could only have come from the shrink-wrapped suburbs of Australia, as part of a generation that fled to Asia and found refuge in philanthropy.

Other forces also delineate characters and shape reputations. The growing worldwide interest in the work of Thailand’s first lady of forensics, Dr. Porntip Rojanasunan, owes a lot to the ballistic success of TV shows like CSI and the bestselling, bare-bones thrillers of Patricia Cornwall and Kathy Reichs. At first glance, Kathy and Porntip may seem to have little in common except for middle age and gruesome CVs. Dig a little deeper and the two women are case studies in similar pathologies and how they deal with mass fatalities in the most pragmatic of ways.

A dual profile of the ‘Scorpion Queen’ and the ‘Centipede King’—the country’s most infamous freaks since the original Siamese twins became the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’—spotlights the reappearance of the sideshow in popular culture.

In any agrarian society like Thailand, where rice remains the largest export, rural folks develop a kinship with wildlife and their beasts of burden that take on the fraternity of family. Inevitably and invariably, wildlife features tend to focus on the roles these creatures play in ecosystems and food chains. Rarely discussed, but equally important, is the cultural and spiritual significance of these creatures. All across Southeast Asia, the water buffalo has bred songs, festivals, religious rites, beauty contests, and in the case of Thailand, the most unlikely cinema star. As the creature lumbers towards obsolescence, all these mainstays of rural culture are also en route to extinction.

Elsewhere in the ‘Creature Features’ section are stopovers at the world’s first and only monkey hospital, a town overrun with tortoises that are deemed sacred and treated like pets, as well as a trip to a Siamese fighting fish gambling den where gangsters, gamblers and a businessman with degrees in philosophy and computer science wager bets in a millennium-ancient tradition.

Chulalongkorn University is Thailand’s oldest and most venerable institution of higher learning. Consistently ranked in the top 20 of all Asian universities for its research facilities and internatio nal programs, the institution has produced a lot of influential people over the course of a century. In the Faculty of Science, however, freshman students are advised not to use the front stairway in the White Building (the faculty’s oldest structure), because corpses once used for studying medicine were

previously buried there. In the Faculty of Political Science, the main icon which students and staff pray to is the Black Tiger God. Freshmen students should not have their photos taken with the statue of the ‘Serpent King’ (Phaya Nak) from Buddhist lore in the Faculty of Art, for fear they may not graduate. Conversely, graduating students are urged to come to this auspicious place to get their photos taken.

These strange beliefs and superstitions are not secrets whispered among the students and faculty. No, they are all included in an official history book on the university that I edited for them in 2010.

Students of the supernatural can do a minor in this vast and ancient subject with the stories in the last section. During the grisly Vegetarian Festival in Phuket, spirit mediums—allegedly possessed by the nine Emperor Gods of Taoism and other deities—s kewer their faces with hacksaws, chains, swordfish and cymbal stands, in shows of penance and piety. Meanwhile, what must be the world’s only radio show to feature callers reciting tales o f the paranormal also takes listeners out on ghost-hunting expeditions, and they have set up their own pub with a gallery devoted to ghostly images sent in by their fans. The crew’s most terrifying encounter came after a visit to the shrine of Thailand’s most legendary ghost, Nang Nak—a woman who died in childbirth some 150 years ago, yet whose vengeful and loving spirit has haunted more than 20 feature film productions.

On the Buddhist Wheel of the Law, where life, death and rebirth spin in endless cycles, the book comes full circle, from the cradle to the crematorium, with ‘Funeral Rites: The Thai Way of Death’.

A few of the characters are repeated in different s tories. All are introduced chronologically. Although one running character needs to be briefly introduced here. Anchana, my former partner, who came along on research trips for earlier drafts of about seven or eight of these stories, also played the roles of cultural advisor, translator par excellence and clown princess. Born on a sugarcane farm in the northern province of Kamphaeng Phet, in a house with no electricity, running water or a proper bathroom, Anchana (which means ‘The Winner’ in Thai) put herself through university, majoring in English and tourism, by working as a waitress and a nurse’s assistant in an emergency room in Bangkok, eventually earning a master’s degree in marketing from a university in Australia. Her witticisms and saucy remarks about everything from local men to Cambodian women, her personal encounters with ghosts and favourite country songs about water buffalo add insights, comic relief and a distinctly Thai female slant to a few of these stories. Without her contributions, the stories in which she appears would have been impossible to cover with any degree of depth.

Whenever a writer is approaching such sensationalistic subject matter, they can only go in one of two directions: the senseless shock value and moral indignation of tabloid journalism and TV, or trying to look at the subjects and the subject matter with a bit more balance and empathy. Aside from the occasional headless motorcyclist, I have tried to navigate the latter route.

A lot of the new material has never been published before. Many of the older stories have been revised, rethought, restructured and continuously u pdated over the years, just as many of the people profiled like Dr. Porntip and the ‘Scorpion Queen’ I have met and interviewed a number of times over the past decade.

Filed under Directory of the Bizarre, the listings in the back of the book are intended as pathfinders and other mines of information. Many of the destinations and museums are easy enough to visit. Some tours of duty, such as military trai ning at Thai army bases, can be very difficult to organise and should not be undertaken lightly.

In any event, I will not be held responsible for anyone who goes in search of a ‘love potion’ made by an occultist melting the flesh of a corpse’s chin.

Jim Algie July 2010

CRIME SCENES

Behind the Bars of the Bangkok Hiltons

For Chavoret Jaruboon, the hardest part of being on the execution team at the country’s biggest maximum-security jail was walking into the death-row cell to tell the prisoner that he was about to be executed. “Whatever crimes the person had committed, they were still heroes to their families,” said the former chief executioner of Bang Kwang Central Prison. “The inmates had time to write a letter to their family, and have a last cigarette and a meal, but they usually didn’t feel like eating. They were also given the chance to see a Buddhist monk for a final blessing.”

Blindfolded, and with chains around their ankles, t he condemned man or woman would be escorted by guards into the death chamber. There, their hands were tied together with the sacred white thread that monks use to bless devotees and to ward off evil, so they could clutch three unopened lotus blossoms, three joss-sticks and a small orang e candle, as if they were going to pray at a Buddhist temple. While Chavoret waited behind the gun, the guards would then tie the inmate to a wooden cross with his hands above his head, and put a white screen between him and the machine-gun, which was bolted to the floor and pointed at his back. Finally, a doctor put a target on the screen where the prisoner’s heart was, so the executioner could take aim and fire. That was how the death penalty was carried out after the government outlawed beheading in 1932, and before Thailand switched to lethal injection in late 2003. Chavoret recalled the condemned men and women being led in to the chamber. “I heard it all— crying, begging and cursing. But some of them just walked in without a word. They were ready to die.”

Until being diagnosed with cancer in 2010, these were the kind of tales that the former rock ‘n’ roll musician recounted for rapt audiences at Thai universities and remand centres for juvenile delinquents, which he also included in his 2007 autobiography, The Last Executioner.

Until recently, Chavoret also volunteered as a tour guide at the Corrections Museum once a month. The museum is on the grounds of Romanee Lart Park, not far from the Golden Mount and Khaosan Road in Bangkok. On display are knives and syringes made by former inmates, along with implements of torture once used in Siamese jails. O n the ground floor, there’s a huge rattan ball— like the ones used in takraw, the Asian version of volleyball—with sharp nails protruding from the inside. Curled up inside the ball is a mannequin of a prisoner. To punish the inmates or amuse themselves, the authorities would let an elephant kick the ball around. After it got bored, the tusker would often trample the bloody ball and squash the prisoner. This type of torture (and others like it) was outlawed by King Rama V at the end of the 19th century.

Filled with flowerbeds, shrubs, joggers and school kids, the park was once the site of Bangkok’s most draconian jail, as evidenced by the vacant row of jail cells on the north side and the guard towers that stand like stone sentinels. Built by the French at the end of the 19th century, most of the Maha Chai