Thailand Confidential

by Jerry Hopkins

  For a long time it was thought that it was from India that Thailand got its phallic worship, but archeologists have since discovered similar images painted on pots dating from about 1000 BC, long before Indian influence had any real impact on Southeast Asia. Again as a symbol of fertility.

  Unknown to most of its guests, on the grounds of the Nai Lert Park Hotel (formerly the Bangkok Hilton) there is a small shrine dedicated to phallic offerings, at the north end of the property beside the Saen Saep Canal behind the parking structure. Here, about a hundred phlad kikh crafted from various materials are displayed, ranging up to three meters in length and arranged around a spirit house built by millionaire businessman Nai Lert to honor Jao Mae Thapthim, a female deity thought to reside in the old banyan tree nearby. It’s believed that a woman who made an offering soon got pregnant, thus the shrine is mainly visited by childless women who offer incense, flowers, food and cigarettes.

  Of course, pregnancy is not what the girls at the Hog’s Breath want. (May all the animist gods forbid!) There, if you’re pregnant, you’re out of work.

  Nor do they want the protection from evil and snake bites that the amulet was thought to bring small boys who, once upon a time, carried the amulets in their pockets before setting off for school, or worn on a waist string under their clothing, off-center from the real penis in the belief they would attract and absorb any injury directed toward the generative organs.

  Early styles of phlad kikh bear inscribed invocations, entreaties and praises to Shiva; later ones combine these with appeals and prayers to Buddha; modern ones bear uniformly Buddhist inscriptions written in an ancient script that cannot be read by contemporary Thais. Amulets carved from wood, bone and horn once were made by monks who specialized in their manufacture and the respect given an amulet was connected to the charisma and reputation of its creator.

  Today, the greatest number are mass produced for the tourist trade, in wood, bronze, pewter and plastic. Some depict Hanuman, the Monkey God of the Hindus, crouched upon an erect penis, his tail arched over his back. Tigers are given human shafts double the length of the animal. Demons that look like something from a horror movie from Hollywood threaten to commit fellatio with pointy teeth. On others, women straddle an out-sized penis, wearing a smile and a polka-dotted bikini.

  Amulet markets in Bangkok and elsewhere still offer the real thing, but at most street stalls the charms are now as laughable as they are divorced from authenticity, and the titillation factor has led to most being hugely overpriced.

  For the bar girls and for most Thais today, the phlad kikh is used to summon good luck and, in places of business, a rich and generous customer. Today all over Thailand, they may be seen in places of commerce, next to the cash register in a mom and pop store or nestled in a pile of knockoff designer gear at a street vendor’s stall, in the still unswerving belief that its presence will be good for business, or at the very least cannot hurt. I once saw one the size of a grown man’s thigh mounted between the front seats of a Bangkok taxi.

  “How’s business?” I asked. He said it was terrible.

  A Cool Heart in a Hot Climate

  I was walking along Sukhumvit Road to my bank when a motorcycle gave me a bump as it passed. I was on the sidewalk when this happened and I wasn’t pleased, and inasmuch as it was the second time in a week that a motorcyclist had run into me on what Thais call a “footpath,” I decided to take action. Motor-cylists had been using the sidewalks as if they were another lane in the road for a while and I figured it was time to do something about it.

  I ran behind the bike, catching up in about half a block when the driver parked next to the bank. I reached him just as he placed his helmet on one of his handle grips. He saw me and looked somewhat chagrined.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said.

  “Not good enough!” I yelled, and I grabbed his helmet and threw it into the street just as a bus passed, running over it. Then, realizing what a stupid mistake I’d made, I turned about and ran, anxious to get away before he beat the hell out of me or pulled a gun and shot me dead. If that had happened—and, happily, it didn’t—a dozen witnesses would’ve told police, “This farang came out of nowhere and attacked him...”

  I can’t remember, and wouldn’t want to tell you if I could, how many times I’ve lost my temper since moving to Thailand. But let me recall, as an exercise in humility, one other incident. This occurred when my computer was giving me fits and I took it to a repair shop, where the owner called the Apple distributor and before I knew it I was yelling at someone at the other end of the phone line, and he hung up on me. I told (not asked) the shop owner to call the man back, which he politely did. The man told the shop owner that he didn’t want to talk to me, I was jai rawn, I had a hot heart.

  I grabbed the phone and said, “What do you mean you won’t talk to me? I need help.”

  There was a silence at the other end of the line.

  After a moment, I apologized. “Look, I’m really sorry,” I said. “And I do need your help.” There was another long pause and he told me to bring the computer to him. When I did, he said it would take a couple of weeks to fix my computer and in the meantime, he said, he’d give me an old one, which he then spent nearly an hour programming for my use. It doesn’t need saying that I felt well and appropriately demoted in the karmic food chain.

  Sadly, this is a typical farang way of reacting to the many frustrations encountered on a daily basis and as is true nearly everywhere, it seldom gets you anywhere. Certainly, it makes no friends, least of all in the Land of Smiles, where an open display of emotion is considered extremely poor form.

  It is okay to laugh, but even then it’s best if you hide your laughter behind your hand. Even wailing with grief is acceptable, under very specific circumstances. A smile, of course, is even encouraged. And now that Thailand has joined the league of football nations, when the Thai team—or Manchester United, the country’s favorite, for reasons I don’t comprehend—scores a point, it is definitely alright to cheer and pound on the bar top and fall off the stool slobbering drunk. But an open loss of temper is not acceptable. Ever.

  We’re talking about jai yen, which literally means a “cool heart.” A heart that isn’t hot. Jai yen has been, and continues to be, the hardest lesson for me to learn, and I recognize the possibility, maybe the likelihood, that I may never completely embrace the concept—that, instead, I’ll always be one of those unpredictable, explosive assholes that the Thais reluctantly but graciously put up with.

  Actually, they don’t have to put up with us, and that they do is a sign of their own jai yen .

  This doesn’t mean that Thais don’t lose their temper. They do. Getting mad and shooting someone is an efficient and popular way to handle business and personal conflicts. (You just don’t show your anger and you hire someone else to do the shooting, usually from the back of a motorbike.) Thailand also has a growing incidence of road rage and a high rate of rape, wife-beating and child abuse, so it’s clear that jai rawn is not exclusively a farang experience. Yet when it comes to in-your-face, public shouting matches, there is nothing in the Kingdom to compare to life back home in the West, where epithets, curses and tantrums seem an essential part of every day.

  My friend Chris Moore, who wrote a book exploring the language use of jai or heart, Heart Talk (1992), includes jai yen in a chapter devoted to self-control. “In Thai culture,” he wrote, “considerable virtue is attached to the ability of a person to exercise restraint over feelings of rage, anger or upset. The idea is not to be drawn into an emotional reaction when provoked. There is an attempt to avoid confrontations and the heated exchange.”

  The ideal is to aspire to calmness, concentration and self-control. Thus there are, referring again to Chris’s book, phrases (concepts) such as hak jai (restrain heart), yap yang chang jai (stop heart), khom jai (control heart), sangop jai and rangap jai (calm heart). The goal is to show jai yen, what Chris calls “the Thai equivalent of an English metaphor
, a stiff upper lip.” For example, he says, when a woman is told by a friend that her husband was seen with another woman, the woman doesn’t show any emotion. (What happens later between the woman and her husband is of no concern of ours, though it may defy the concept of jai yen .)

  Farangs not only find this difficult, they may say it’s hypocritical. If you feel something, show it and say it, is the farang way. Excessive politeness, especially when it doesn’t reflect true feeling, is false and is a disservice to all.

  Maybe so, but probably not. Still, the next time a motorcyclist slams into me on a sidewalk, I think I may have a hard time telling him to have a nice day.

  Fun & Games in the Slum

  Father Joe Maier was telling a story about the children in the Bangkok slums where he’s lived and worked for more than thirty years. It was an inspirational story, the sort Catholic priests like to tell. Father Joe runs an organization with thirty-four kindergartens, more than a hundred soccer teams, five shelters for street kids, a medical clinic, Bangkok’s only AIDS hospice and a para-legal team that represents two hundred kids in courts and police stations a month, so he has many such stories. Many are distressing—no surprise there—but this is a story about sanuk, the Thai word for “fun.”

  Near Father Joe’s house was a large open space where ten-wheel trucks parked between long hauls, close to where pigs were butchered for Bangkok’s markets. There was no drainage system and rain and diesel oil and other waste collected in puddles. Yet it was here that the neighborhood children played, because there were no parks or playgrounds, nor any space adjacent to the tired wood shacks knocked up against one another and connected by dodgy pathways just wide enough for two people or one motorcycle to pass.

  Near where we stood, three girls were jumping rope—two holding a “rope” made of rubber bands strung together, the third jumping. “Notice that they’re in the puddles of oil and filth,” said the sixty-year-old American priest, “and that they’ve taken off their shoes. Do you know why? They say they can jump higher without anything on their feet. Which is the object of the game: to jump higher.” The death squeals of the hogs rang through the slum in the night. During the day, it was the laughter of the kids.

  One writer about Thai culture described sanuk as “the fizz in the soft drink of life. Bottled up by the pressures of face and social calculation,” he went on, “it surges to the surface whenever it has a chance.” In other words, remaining faithful to this wise man’s analogy, it is what an optimist does when life gives him a lemon: he makes lemonade. And so it is in the slums of Bangkok where games can serve as an otherwise grim life’s lemonade stand.

  Thailand is remarkable in this. If there were an Olympic event called playfulness, Thailand would win gold, silver and bronze every time. And it’s not just the children. Is it possible for a day to pass without seeing young men hunkered down on a city sidewalk playing a variation of checkers with bottle caps, or kicking a woven rattan ball called a takraw around during a work break that others elsewhere would use to smoke cigarettes? It is as if the Thai sense of play were genetic.

  Father Joe, a kind of, well, father figure to more than four thousand Bangkok school children, believes it is in the playgrounds—and truck parking lots—where much of this creative frittering away of leisure time begins. So where better to look for evidence than on Father Joe’s turf in Klong Toey, one of Asia’s largest and bleakest slums.

  Here you can see a game played in many countries, the contest using a fist, an open hand, and two moving fingers to signify stone, paper, and scissors. Two children throw hand signs at each other simultaneously—a fist representing a rock, a flat hand paper, the first two fingers extended and opening and closing like scissors. If both throw the same sign, they try again until they are different. The rule is: stone breaks scissors, but scissors cut paper, and paper covers stone. It is the child’s way of deciding who goes first, of tossing a coin when there are no coins.

  The form of many games played in Thailand is defined by such economy. When a child’s pockets are empty of cash, he or she doesn’t pitch one baht coins, instead rubber bands are placed on a flat surface and blown with the breath to move them toward a designated line or wall. Thus a game is improvised with something found without cost wherever rubber bands are used to tie off bags of food sold on the street.

  In another game, coconut shells are cut in half with a hole drilled in the middle. A piece of string connects the shells together with knots inside each one. Players stand on the shells holding the string with their toes and hands as they move toward a finish line. If your feet touch the ground, you’re disqualified and the first two to cross the line race again.

  Sticks and stones play a leading role in traditional games. In another race, wooden stakes are driven into the ground an agreed distance apart (usually eight to ten meters) and players form two teams, lining up behind the two stakes. A smaller stick, or baton, is given to each team and when a signal is given, the first player of each team runs around the opposite stake, returning to his team and passing it to the next in line.

  In another, players place a small rock on the back of the hand, toss it into the air, then catch it, then do the same with two, catching each rock separately as they fall. Then three, then four, then five if they can, until the players are unable to catch all of the stones before one hits the ground. Miss one and you are out of the game. This continues until a single player remains.

  Still other games involve no more effort than drawing a line in the dirt. To play one, it must be a sunny day when a circle is drawn on the ground large enough to hold all the players. One child is selected to be the “giant” and he or she chases the others, trying to step on their shadows. When the giant treads on someone’s shadow, that player becomes the new giant and play resumes until everyone decides to play a different game. As is the case in many traditional Thai games, there are no losers and winners. The play is for the sake of play.

  In a second game in the same category, players of one team sit on the floor or ground in pairs, back to back and feet to feet, making a circle. Players from a second team try to jump over the first team’s legs and into the circle, while the sitters kick up their feet to try to touch the jumpers. If one of the jumpers is successful, his team wins and the two teams change places.

  Sadly, such games are not played as widely as once they were, replaced by computer games in the home, video parlors in shopping malls, and other amusements involving expensive equipment. Today, many Thai children race on roller blades, or compete with a machine instead of another child.

  It is in the countryside and among the urban poor where sanuk in play remains affordable.

  The King Swings

  When the original King of Swing, Benny Goodman, jammed with the King of Thailand in 1960 in New York and was asked to assess the monarch’s talent as a saxophone player, he said His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej apparently already had a career worth hanging on to, but added, “If he needed a job, I’d hire him as a member of my band.”

  Similarly, the great jazz vibraphonist Lionel Hampton once said, “He is simply the coolest king in the land.” So it is no surprise that to mark his fiftieth year on the throne, a number of the world’s finest musicians traveled to Thailand to pay tribute by performing His Majesty’s musical compositions. In 1996, Bangkok hosted concerts by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Thelonius Monk Jr. and Benny Carter, saluting what the Guinness Book of Records called “The Longest Reigning Monarch in the World.” In addition, two compact discs were released featuring Hucky Eichelmann, a German-born classical guitarist who emigrated to Thailand in 1979, and the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra.

  It was at age ten when the future monarch started playing the clarinet on an instrument that was purchased—according to his official history—with savings from his allowance, earned while attending school in Switzerland. At that time, his brother, older by only two years, was king, also living in Switzerland and ruling in absentia.

  The youn
g future ruler was formally trained in classical music and on his own played along with gramaphone records imported mainly from the United States. Soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, one of the Dixieland pioneers from New Orleans, and alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges of Duke Ellington’s swing era band were among his favorites.

  His cousin and brother reportedly encouraged him to continue his musical studies and urged him to compose songs in addition to playing them. He wrote his first in 1946, the same year he ascended to the throne, following his brother’s death.

  For many years, the King gathered some musical friends together for Friday night jam sessions in the palace, broadcasting them on the radio. Usually he performed on the saxophone, less frequently on the clarinet, piano or, rarely, guitar.

  In the 1960s in New York, on a cross-country trip to America, he played not only with Goodman and Hampton, but also Louis Armstrong, Gene Krupa and Jack Teagarden, and then went on to California to meet—but not play with—the King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley. Many photos of that meeting, on the set of Presley’s G.I. Blues, are prominently displayed and sold as souvenirs in Bangkok today.

  Later, during the war in Vietnam, when American Bob Hope played for American troops, His Majesty invited the comedian’s bandleader, Les Brown, and vocalist Patti Page, to play with him at his palace home. His music was also included in a Broadway revue in the 1950s and in 1964, following the introduction of a three-movement ballet, he was named to the Institute of Music and Arts of the City of Vienna, the first Asian composer to be so honored.