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

by James O'Reilly

  Bob Halliday, a genial American who has lived in Thailand for decades, calls it a state of mind. “Everything comes and goes in waves here. High-rise buildings, now there’s an example. Suddenly everyone with money wanted one. Tourism is the thing now. But underneath all that, the state of mind does not change at all.” Quite what that state of mind, those reflexes are is impossible to define. Halliday, an expatriate who shuns Patpong, speaks fluent Thai, and appears to be content to live the rest of his life in Thailand, describes it as a natural empathy for friends, a certain delicacy of feeling.

  Around 1912, King Rama VI devised a slogan to sum up what he saw as the essence of Thailand: Nation, Religion, Monarch. The religion is, of course, Buddhism. “Buddhism,” I was told by a Thai writer, “fits Thai ways well. Because we believe that material surroundings are an illusion, and only the internal world is real, to be Thai can be anything we want.” It would explain both the lack of resistance against foreign forms, “Westernization” if you like, and the ease with which they are discarded.

  The Thais have been both clever and lucky in their relations with foreigners. The Thais were lucky that the British and the French, the two major colonial powers, neutralized each other, so that Siam became a kind of buffer zone between Burma, Malaya, and Indochina. They were clever in the same way as the Japanese, the only other Asian nation to escape colonialism: they—that is, the elites—“Westernized” themselves to counter the might of the West; they modernized themselves to avoid having modernity imposed on them by others. The phrase used for this by the British pioneer of Japanese studies, Basil Hall Chamberlain, was “protection by mimicry.”

  The emphasis on monarchy and religion, which seems so atavistic today, was an essential part of this process. The Japanese turned their emperor into what nationalists like to call a “priest-king,” a European-style monarch in military uniform, who was at the same time the center of a religious cult. The Thai monarchy turned itself into something similar. King Chulalongkorn (Rama V), visited Europe in 1897. He toured the slums of London—quite a remarkable thing to do for a visiting monarch—and saw the problems of European modernity, but was impressed by modern science, by the legal systems, and the bureaucratic institutions. Back in Siam, he stated that “there exists no incompatibility between such acquisition [of European science] and the maintenance of our individuality as an independent Asiatic nation.” This enlightened thought, which could not have occurred in a colonized mind, is crucial to the development of modern Thailand. In fact, the king was ahead of the great modernizers of early Meiji Japan, who believed that total Westernization was the only road to modernity.

  During his reign, lasting from 1868 to 1910, a collection of regions ruled by aristocratic families was transformed into a state. Buddhism was reformed and institutionalized as a national religion, taught in schools and monasteries all over the country. The supreme patriarch was a Siamese prince. Buddhist monks taught a new standard Thai, as well as science and mathematics, something their counterparts in Burma absolutely refused to do. The chief ingredient in the attitude of the Burmese Buddhist hierarchy was, as the historian D.G.E. Hall put it, “its opposition to what may be termed modernity.” Thai monks, in contrast, became the first modern teachers. One thing Burma and Thailand had in common, however, was that a generation later Thai government propagandists and young Burmese anti-colonialists were convinced that true patriotism was inseparable from Buddhism. But Buddhism, unlike the state Shinto of prewar Japan, was always a universalist faith, far removed from the Shinto myths of racial purity. This has contributed greatly to the relative openness of Thai society.

  While the Thai elite was educated for government service, Chinese merchants were encouraged to build a modern urban economy, which they still dominate. Chinese businessmen enriched the Thai elite in exchange for status in Thai society, a situation which also still persists. A Sino-Thai journalist in Bangkok told me that “one hundred years ago the Thais knew nothing. The Chinese taught them how to weigh, how to buy, how to sell.” To be sure, my friend, who does not speak any Chinese, is a bit of a Chinese chauvinist. But he was not entirely wrong. When I asked him how Thais and Sino-Thais got on today, he smiled as though the answer was self-evident: “No problem. We mix now because of Westernization. TV, discos, Walkmans—we all move to the same point.” He was not wrong about this either. But when I asked him whether he would mind if his daughter married an ethnic Thai, he did not hesitate: “That I would not allow.”

  Chulalongkorn’s successor, King Vajiravudh (Rama VI), who ruled from 1910 to 1925, was educated at Sandhurst and Oxford, where he read history and law. There is a picture of him, taken in 1914, on the bridge of the royal yacht, splendidly dressed in white ducks, double-breasted blazer, the cap, holding a brass telescope. It was typical of his chosen image—just as typical as the photograph of the present king playing jazz is of his—the priest-king as a modern naval officer. King Vajiravudh was fond of the theater and he wrote plays exhorting his subjects to become modern nationalists, more like Europeans. His hectoring prose could have been written by the moralists of Meiji Japan:Let us unite our state, unite our hearts, into a great whole.

  Thai—do not do harm or destroy Thai,

  But combine your spirit and your strength to preserve the state

  So that all foreign peoples

  Will give us increasing respect.

  Respect from foreign people. There it is again. Siam not only should be modern, but it should look modern, or, rather, if it looked modern, it was modern. Through the king’s encouragement, women began to adopt European dress and hairstyles. He introduced the Gregorian calendar, designed a new national flag, and encouraged team sports and Boy Scouts. The king himself was Chief Scout-General and his youngest schoolboy followers were Tiger’s Whelps.

  Modernity, however, creates its own monsters. The students sent abroad by the modern monarch returned and were no longer satisfied with the rule of the priest-king. In 1932, during the reign of Vajiravudh’s successor, King Prajadhipok, absolute monarchy came to an end, pushed aside in a coup staged by 49 military and naval officers, and 65 civilians, led by 2 modern men, both educated in France, one a soldier, the other a civilian: Plaek Khittasangkha and Pridi Phanomyong.

  Pridi and Plaek (better known as Phibunsongkhram or Phibun) represented two faces of modern Thailand, which are still at odds. Pridi, the son of a Chinese immigrant, was a civilian intellectual attracted to “progressive” politics. He hoped to establish a more democratic system in Thailand. Phibun was a modern military man, inspired by right-wing populist nationalism, like that of King Vajiravudh. The military being a more powerful and efficient modern institution than anything the budding civilian intelligentsia could muster, Phibun’s power grew, while Pridi’s declined. In 1938 Phibun became Prime Minister, with Pridi as his Minister of Finance. He belonged to the same school of thinking as Dr. Ba Maw in Burma and the ultra-nationalists in Japan. He wrote approvingly of Hitler and Mussolini and believed in the Fuhrerprinzip. He changed his country’s name from Siam to Thailand, as though to emphasize that Thailand belonged to the Thai-speaking peoples and not to outsiders like the Chinese.

  This is why many “progressive” nationalists today still insist on using the name Siam. One of the most prominent social critics, Sulak Sivaraksa, believes that the name Thailand “signifies the crisis of traditional Siamese Buddhist values. Removing from the nation the name it had carried all its history is in fact the first step in the psychic dehumanization of its citizens, especially when its original name was replaced by a hybrid, Anglicized word. This new name also implies chauvinism and irredentism.” Phibun’s most powerful intellectual ally was a writer called Luang Wichit, who liked to compare the Chinese in Thailand to the Jews in Germany; both, in his view, were a noxious and polluting presence.

  Like Rama VI, Phibun was eager to impress the world with a progressive, modern Thai image. This meant more Western forms: trousers, gloves, shoes, a national anthem, saluting the fl
ag, and so forth. This was hardly a case of blind adulation for things European. On the contrary, it was a re-creation of Western forms to strengthen Thai nationalism. Western clothes, yes, but made in Thailand.

  The full force of modernity, however, only came in the 1950s and 1960s. As usual, it was mixed with tradition, or pseudo-tradition. In 1958, Field Marshall Sarit Thanarat staged the second coup in two years and formed a “Revolutionary Party.” “The fundamental cause of our political instability in the past,” wrote Sarit’s adviser and later Foreign Minister, Thanat Khoman, “lies in the sudden transplantation of alien institutions onto our soil without proper regard to the circumstances which prevail in our homeland, the nature and characteristics of our own people, in a word the genius of our race, with the result that their functioning has been haphazard and even chaotic. If we look at our national history, we can see very well that this country works better and prospers under an authority, not a tyrannical authority, but a unifying authority, around which all elements of the nation can rally.” (Quoted by David K. Wyett in his Thailand: A Short History.) The unifying authority was the priest-king, reinstated as a real force once again. The monarch lent legitimacy to the new regime, just as the Meiji emperor had done for the Japanese modernizers since 1868.

  It is a common theme in Southeast and East Asia, the use of tradition to bolster modern authoritarianism. Ferdinand Marcos saw himself as a tribal chieftain in the Philippines and Park Chung Hee as a Confucian patriarch in South Korea. And as was the case with the other Asian strongmen, Sarit’s modern authoritarianism was financed by massive American aid, meant, in the buzzword of the time, to “develop” Thailand. The constitution was abolished, martial law declared, the streets cleaned, crime reduced, and critics arrested. The Vietnam War escalated and U.S. bases grew in size. At the same time there was high economic growth, rapidly spreading education (from five university-level institutions with 1,800 students in 1961 to seventeen with over 100,000 in 1972), the beginning of tourism, and a communist insurgency. Sons and daughters of peasants moved to the cities, the middle class grew, students read Marx and listened to the Rolling Stones—in short, Disneyland came to Bangkok. Intellectuals reacted as they usually do under these circumstances: they wrote about spiritual dislocation and moral drift.

  Does civilization kill? Has modernity wiped out traditional values to the extent that nothing but empty forms and pragmatism remain? I turned, once again, to cultural interpretation. One of the most interesting theories, by Dutch anthropologist Niels Mulder, is that traditional values, far from being eroded by anonymous modern amorality, have actually been enhanced. Mulder begins by pointing out that Thai Buddhists are still animists at heart. The world is divided into a private sphere of pure moral goodness, exemplified by a mother’s love for her children, a teacher’s for his pupils, by the Buddha himself, and by the land that provides our food, and a public sphere of amoral powers, called saksit. “Basically, saksit power is amoral, because it does not ask for intentions and protects the good and the wicked alike. It is unprincipled and reacts to mechanical manipulation and the outward show of respect. It is not concerned with right or wrong, or with the development of moral goodness. Contracts with saksit power are guided by their own businesslike logic, and there is no higher moral principle that guides these.”

  Thailand has a reputation for being open to homosexuality…Although excessively physical displays of affection are frowned upon for both heterosexuals and homosexuals, Western gay couples should get no hassle about being seen together in public.The Thai tolerance extends to cross-dressers and you’ll even find transvestites doing ordinary jobs even in upcountry towns. Possibly because of the overall lack of homophobia in the country, there’s no gay movement to speak of in Thailand—the nearest equivalent to an organized gay political force is the Fraternity for AIDS Cessation in Thailand (FACT), which runs AIDS awareness campaigns, staffs a telephone counseling service and publishes a bilingual monthly newsletter.

  —Paul Gray and Lucy Ridout, The Rough Guide Thailand

  It is good to avoid conflict with outside powers, by polite manners, by hiding one’s true feelings, and so forth, and it is also good to manipulate those powers to your own advantage. It is the basic approach to all foreigners. The huckster and the stickler for etiquette are two faces of the same man. But he can also have a third face, that of the devoted friend, an example of the empathy and delicate feelings that Bob Halliday called “the Thai state of mind.” In Mulder’s words: “The world of modernity is a world of increasingly rapid change filled with self-seeking, impersonal power, and the experience of powerlessness for most. No wonder that the old animist perceptions of power are strongly revitalized, not only in Thailand but worldwide, in the losing battle between the temple and the bank.”

  He applies the same idea to prostitution: “To sell one’s body is an outside phenomenon and so it is to buy and does not imply any feelings of loyalty or even moral respect for oneself. It is a monetary transaction, and money is widely admired and the preeminent embodiment of power…. As long as [the prostitute] cares for her relatives and recognizes the bunkhun [moral goodness] of her parents in terms of gifts and money, she can still present herself as a good person. When she has accumulated enough, or when her fortunes turn, she may resettle in her village of origin, marry, and be accepted.”

  The City is the world of outsiders, the Village the moral home. The trouble is that for more and more people there is no more Village; the City is the only reality they know. Crime and prostitution are but extreme forms of manipulating amoral powers. Impulsive violence is usually a sign of long-suppressed feelings; the behavior of people having to present Face in a pragmatic and increasingly anonymous world. It is often when Face is insulted that sudden violence occurs; a bump of the shoulders in the street, a stranger’s glance at the girlfriend in a nightclub.

  How to moralize the amoral new world? Boy Scouts, racial pride, and military discipline? Marxist dialectics and learning from the Village? The most common answer in Thailand is none of these; instead people point to the personal example of the king and Buddhism. This is where Thai morality and politics continue to connect.

  One of the heroes of the October 14 generation was Sulak Sivaraksa, a genial dandy who goes around in traditional Thai clothes, a cloth bag over his shoulders, and a cane in the hand. His ancestors were Chinese, something he does not hide. He calls himself a Buddhist activist. He is a popular speaker on the international lecture circuit as a leading Southeast Asian intellectual. Sulak was raised as an Anglican and studied classics in Britain.

  To Sulak the resurgence of Siam is a moral issue. The modern world is amoral, because it is capitalist, which fills man with greed. What’s worse, this greedy new world is foreign. Sulak’s very modern response to modernity is profoundly anti-modern. “The present single worst enemy of Buddhism in Siam is of course new technology which comes hand in hand with industrialization and progress….”

  Society “pollutes,” for it makes us crave power and riches. Western powers “took away a lot from our Buddhist way of life. They provided hospitals for us in the Western way, they provided everything Western for us, and so the temple lost all its functions.” The Buddhist precepts are undermined —for example, the precept that you should not kill. “But now you have all the machinery of killing, you have the multinational corporations dealing with killing, and they are linked to banks, and the first precept on killing relates to the second precept on stealing, and so on.”

  “The October 14 generation” refers to the demonstrations in October, 1973, that brought down a military dictatorship and established an elected, constitutional government. This change lasted only three years, until October, 1976, when another coup re-established a right-wing military government.

  —JO’R and LH

  The answer to these modern challenges is to return “to the essence of our Buddhist culture, with its spiritual and moral base, in order to wipe out the danger from modern cultural imperi
alism.” Gandhi’s concept of the “Village Republic should be studied more seriously in order to find alternative models to capitalist development ideology….” Traditional medicine, administered by monks, should be revived. Bangkok must be developed “Buddhistically—against satanic development models which are now prevailing everywhere, by trying to be big, to be rich and powerful…” It is a utopian response resembling Luddite movements in Victorian England. Sulak does not even wish to keep the ruby which “spun a web of greed”; he wants to throw it back into the sea. This seems curiously un-Thai, the response, perhaps, more typical of a lapsed Anglican classics scholar.