Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand

by Jim Algie

  His body melted into dreams rising like smoke from an opium pipe, where his wife tickled his face with her hair. “I love to see my cute little mouse wake up with a smile on his face,” she said.

  When See Ouey opened his eyes, the only thing tickling his face was a creepy-crawly scampering across his forehead. He swatted the insect away. He spat a curse and sat up in the back of the rickshaw. Every night was the same. No sooner had he drifted off to sleep than insects ruined his rest.

  See Ouey sparked a match, the smell of phosphorus wrinkling his nose. As the flame flared, he moved the match across the wooden planks of the rickshaw, crawling with chubby brown cockroaches. He smashed a few of them with one of the rubber sandals he’d cut from a car tire. With every smack, he recalled his mother berating him as a boy, some Buddhist or Taoist saying, “If you kill an insect you’ll be stupid for a week.”

  Smashing them was a futile pursuit anyway; the insects scurried away too quickly. Sweat raining down his chest and forehead, See Ouey breathed a sigh of defeat and put on his sandals.

  He stepped down from the rickshaw. As soon as he tried to stand upright, pain shot up his spine and struck his head like a hammer blow. He groaned and massaged his lower back. Pulling rickshaws for three years in Bangkok, and the two decades he’d spent bending over rice fields on the Chinese island of Hainan, made it impossible for him to stand up straight anymore.

  Little by little, he thought, I’m bending towards the grave. Soon I’ll be crawling around on all fours and all those horrible Thais will be right when they call us Chinese laborers “human animals.”

  The street was dark, the moon cobwebbed with clouds. The only light came from a single streetlamp near the corner of Chinatown’s Yaowarat Road. From the moon’s position in the sky, perched above the dragon silhouetted on the shrine’s rooftop, he figured it must be around 3 a.m.

  Now that he thought about it, See Ouey realized that his mother was right. All the insects he’d killed and eaten had made him this stupid and illiterate. It was the only explanation he could think of for his miserable life and rotten luck. Well, there was that, and the Japanese soldiers and the Thais.

  He walked around the rickshaw massaging his lower back. As those aches dulled, the stabs of hunger sharpened. See Ouey wrapped his arms around his stomach. He rocked back and forth. All he’d eaten that day was a bowl of rice porridge salted with fish sauce, and a couple of half-rotten bananas. The meat and produce stalls in the Old Market wouldn’t be open for another hour or two but, when he counted the coins in his pocket, all he had was barely enough to cover the rent of the rickshaw. Thinking about his favorite Hainanese dish—boiled chicken breasts, dowsed with soy sauce and the red and green chili peppers Thais called “mouse droppings”—deepened his hunger.

  Arms wrapped around his stomach, he paced the street, passing Chinese-style shop-houses with metal grates and a pile of garbage where rats scampered through the debris rattling cans. The stench of rotting pineapples and dog shit burned through his nostrils and tunneled into his brain, unearthing memories he had tried to bury:

  See Quey crawled through the mud on his elbows, the explosion of cannonballs rippling the earth under his stomach…he ran across the battlefield, a Buddhist amulet in his mouth to protect him, the smoke thick enough to obscure the bayonet on the end of his rifle…a cannonball exploded in front of him and he bit down on the clay Buddha image, choking as he swallowed it…the commander in his brigade ordered the soldiers to cut the livers out of the corpses of Japanese soldiers and eat them raw. “We must take on the power of our enemies. It’s the only way we can defeat them.”

  Even dog meat, even the soup made of offal, tasted better than those bloody livers. For days after consuming them he had diarrhea and nausea.

  That was the image he most often associated with the war: a half-eaten Buddha image sitting in a pile of blood, faeces and chunks of undigested liver from a dead soldier.

  But their commander was right. Only two days later they overran the Japanese forces along the coastline of Hainan.

  Power was what he needed now: power. It was the only way he could earn enough money to go home and see his wife again.

  “Hey! I need a ride home.”

  He looked over at the man, dressed in trousers with some kind of Western-style hat. He was fat, so he had to be rich, and the man was sweating beer. Slowly he swayed from side to side like rice stalks in a breeze. He’d probably just been to see one of the prostitutes in Green Lantern Lane, which was Bangkok’s main red-light district in the 1950s.

  See Ouey’s prayers to the Black Tiger God at the shrine devoted to him had finally been answered. The god had delivered this man to him at precisely this moment for exactly this purpose. But what should he do now? On the battlefield, he only remembered killing one Japanese soldier, and that was by accident: the Jap had leapt into their trench and fallen on the upright bayonet of See Ouey’s rifle— a machete lashed to the barrel with strands of bamboo. The bayonet pierced the Jap’s stomach. Eyes and mouth agape, See Ouey looked at the soldier sliding down the bayonet towards him, spewing entrails that smelled like a meat market on a hot day. In the cannonade of shells bursting and gunfire cracking, the enemy soldier could not have heard his apology, “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.” The Jap tried to speak. All that came out was a dribble of blood trickling down onto See Ouey’s face. Under the soldier’s weight, the rifle shook in his hand. He could barely hold it upright. The Jap was almost on top of him now, their eyes locked together in mutual surprise. Then the rifle slipped backwards and the dead Jap landed on him face first—

  “Hey! I said I need a ride home.”

  It was that air of impatience and self-importance the rich exuded that bothered him the most, like their time was always more valuable than his, as if See Ouey had been waiting around all night just to lug them home. The rich were like whiny children with teething pains who needed mothers to smear opium on their gums.

  See Ouey wiped the sweat from his forehead. He walked over and asked him, “Where do you want to go?”

  The man said, “Surawong. I’ll give you twenty-five satang.”

  Ashamed of his ragged blue pyjamas, tiny physique and faltering Thai, See Ouey looked down at the dirt road. “Twenty-five satang…too far.”

  “Well, that’s what I usually pay.”

  “Too far twenty-five satang. Very late.” Dealing with drunks was one of the worst parts of the job. Sometimes they vomited in the back of the rickshaw. Then he’d have to clean it up. Sometimes they refused to pay. Often they berated him for not going fast enough.

  “Never mind. I’ll go and find another rickshaw Chink.” The drunk turned and teetered down the road.

  Rickshaw Chink. Rickshaw Chink. Rickshaw Chink. How many times had he been called that in Bangkok? Dozens and dozens. Every time he’d swallowed their insults and his anger. He’d swallowed them, yes, but he’d never digested them. In his stomach a wok steamed and sizzled with rage even stronger than his hunger.

  But the anger was also a tonic. His back no longer ached. His stomach cramps disappeared. The battlefield memories dissolved like cannon smoke. Walking back to his rickshaw, See Ouey grabbed the hollowed-out buffalo horn he used to scoop water from the canals and stole up behind the fat man, stealthy as a tiger: the meat of a man or an animal made no difference to the Black Tiger God who now guided him.

  See Ouey leapt into the air, bringing down the buffalo horn on the back of the man’s neck with all the force he could muster. The horn cracked against bone, sending vibrations running down his arm. The man fell face first onto the dirt road, wriggling as blood gurgled from the wound. The god had taken possession of See Ouey; the buffalo horn was its single fang.

  The man mewled as the god opened up wound after wound in his back. With each stab, he heard insults clashing together in his head like cymbals at a Chinese opera: “Rickshaw Chink! Human animals! The Chinks who destroyed the temples! Pussy blood Chinks! Chink! Chink! Chink!”
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  He could not stab fast enough to pay back every slur.

  The front grate of a shop-house clanging open or shut pierced his inner ears. He looked up and down the street. He couldn’t see anyone. Not yet. But soon enough the vendors would be bringing their food and fruit carts down the street to the market.

  He rolled the dead man over. Without looking at the corpse’s face, he ripped open his shirt, buttons popping. The Black Tiger God opened the man’s stomach with its fang and tore out the liver with its claws. The liver was still warm as he closed his eyes to take the first bite. Blood flooded his mouth. The first gristly bite went down with a grimace. Immediately, his stomach tightened and tried to expel it. Vomit leapt into his mouth. He clamped his hand over it and forced himself to swallow.

  The steel grate of a shop-house opened with a clang that caromed down the street. The Black Tiger God forced the rest of the liver into his mouth, gnawing on the gristle as he tried to saunter, when he wanted to run, back to the rickshaw. Wiping his mouth clean with his hand, he grabbed the rickshaw and pulled it towards the canal.

  Down by the waterway, flanked by wooden houseboats with corrugated iron roofs, cocks crowed as the sky faded from black to blue. At least the marshy smell of the water drowned out the taste of blood clogging his throat.

  Concrete stairs led down to the canal’s edge. Squatting like a duck on the bottom step, he washed his hands and cleaned the horn. Its tip was dented and bloodied with scalp tissue. Then he scooped up water with the horn, gulping down mouthful after mouthful.

  See Ouey knew he should throw the murder weapon into the canal, but it was the only memento he had left of his homeland. Lately he’d heard the Thais adopt a Chinese expression “to travel with a pot and a mat” for any trip taken on the cheap, because that was all most of the Chinese immigrants had brought with them to Thailand. Hungry and destitute, See Ouey had pawned his cooking pot and sleeping mat two years ago.

  The horn belonged to his first pet, a female water buffalo born in the early morning, so he named her Seow Fung, the “Scent of Dawn.” Thinking of her, he stroked the horn as if it were the animal’s dark hair. As Seow Fung grew bigger, he rode her alongside the rice paddies, past the orchards of dragon fruit, and down by the cliffs that overlooked the South China Sea spangled with sunbeams.

  When Seow Fung was only eight, she was dragged away by the floods of the monsoon season with winds that pulled back palm trees like catapults, launching coconuts into the sea. For days on end he searched for her. Beside a stand of bamboo, he found Seow Fung’s corpse, bloated with water and blackened by the sun. Flies licked the tears from his face as he knelt in the mud beside her.

  Ten years later, when he told that story to his first girlfriend, she said, in the special voice she reserved only for him, a smile on her sun-freckled face, “I know I could find a richer and more handsome husband than you, but I don’t think I could ever meet a man with such a heart as soft as tofu.”

  What would she say now that the Tiger God had forced him to kill a man and eat his liver? Could he ever tell her about the cannibalism that both the Chinese and Japanese soldiers practiced on the battlefield? His stomach clenched. His eyes and throat burned.

  Sadness, he thought, was a kind of hunger that worked in reverse. It made him feel as hollowed out as Seow Fung’s horn, which he had cut off and kept as a memento of her that also served as a good-luck charm.

  See Ouey knew that keeping the murder weapon might be his undoing, but it could also be a talisman that would protect him. In either case, he would not part with the horn.

  Across the canal he saw a couple of women wearing sarongs walk down the steps to bathe in the water. He wiped his eyes and trudged back to the rickshaw. Using some banana leaves he found on the ground, he wrapped up the buffalo horn and went to hide it under the backseat. His hand stopped in mid-air. Running across the floor of the rickshaw were trains of ants cannibalizing and carrying off the antennae, the wings and the legs of all the dead cockroaches.

  Watching the ants cheered him up. He was not alone. He was not strange. Life fed on death. This was nature’s way. The fat man had been one of those cockroaches. He had to die so the Black Tiger God could live.

  BY MIDNIGHT MANY rickshaw-pullers gathered at the entrance to Green Lantern Lane, a noisy strip of bars where men caroused with prostitutes and took them upstairs to small rooms, or to one of the Chinese hotels in the neighborhood. Groups of women in short dresses sat outside the bars on wooden benches. The light from all the green lanterns hanging above them made their skin look like rotten meat.

  See Ouey had never been inside any of the bars. Before he left on the boat for Thailand, his wife made him promise to remain faithful. So far, he had kept that promise. Yet his eyes kept wandering down over the breasts and thighs of the “chickens” as they passed by with their customers. The prostitutes wore the same heavy makeup as the female characters in a Chinese opera. They rarely looked at any of the rickshaw-pullers, who made filthy remarks about them in Mandarin and Hakka slang. “Look at her! She’s got tits the size of pears!” See Ouey laughed along with the men, but he never flung any insults of his own, because it wasn’t fair. Most of the women (some still teenagers) understood the lewd jokes. Not many of their customers did. He didn’t hate the girls. He hated the men, sneering at them every time they walked by, as the envy, the bitterness and the sexual hunger fermented inside him like rice liquor; the longer it brewed the more potent it became.

  Was that it? Or was the fresh liver he’d eaten last night finally stirring some kind of power within him? Something was turning and twisting inside his stomach, something waiting to be born. When, he wondered, had he started thinking with his stomach rather than his mind?

  Standing on the perimeter of the group oozing sweat, See Ouey eavesdropped on snippets from half a dozen different conversations… “somebody killed a man in Chinatown last night…” “no suspects, witnesses or arrests yet…” “I hear the police are out in force tonight.”

  None of this had anything to do with him. He hadn’t killed or eaten anyone. It was the Black Tiger God. Still, the events of last night had set him even further apart from the other rickshaw-pullers. They were weak and pathetic. They made jokes about the customers, but they still groveled for business. “Where are you going, sir? I’ll give you a good price.” See Ouey couldn’t be bothered anymore. Three years of groveling had gotten him nowhere. Whatever extra money he brought in from building roads and repairing bicycles he stashed inside the buffalo horn to send to his wife. The Hainanese man who composed the letters See Ouey dictated to her folded the bills inside them. But he hadn’t received any replies from his wife in six months. Had she gotten the money? Had she given up on him and found another man?

  Tik Lin trudged towards him with the same bow-legged, stoop-shouldered gait that marked all the rickshaw-pullers in Bangkok for life. The sweat on his face gleamed under the streetlight. He had a cigarette rolled from a banana leaf hanging out of his mouth just like those white movie stars in the hand-painted posters outside the cinemas.

  Tik Lin was one of the few men from his village who had also survived the Japanese occupation and deserted the army to come to Thailand. At least he had learned how to read and write. He’d become fluent in Thai, too, and liked to joke with his customers that since he was actually a wealthy Thai banker, would they mind pulling him around for a while? Thanks to all his quips, mimicry and funny faces, Tik Lin got a lot of tips. So every night he’d buy a bottle of liquor fermented in herbs and pass it around to all of his friends.

  Tik Lin knocked back a shot. Passing the bottle to See Ouey, he arched his left eyebrow and winked with his right eye. “This is better than a rhino’s horn for making a man’s own horn grow big and strong. Wait till we get back to Hainan. Our wives are going to be sore for a month.” Tik Lin laughed loud enough for the other rickshaw-pullers to look in their direction.

  See Ouey smiled out of politeness and looked away out of shyness.
After knocking back a few more bitter shots, spilling liquor down their chins as they got drunker, See Ouey said, “We haven’t heard from our wives for months now. Do you think it has something to do with these communalists?”

  “Communists.”

  See Ouey took another swig of liquid fire. “Right. Communists. But who are they anyway?”

  Tik Lin snatched the bottle out of his hand. “Can’t you remember anything? We’ve been through this eighty-seven times already.”

  It was embarrassing the way he would flare up like a match head and make these crazy exaggerations. See Ouey pulled his straw hat down to cover his eyes and waited for him to calm down. He took another swig from the bottle.

  When he was drunk, things he never noticed demanded his attention, like the halo of blue rimming the silver streetlight, while questions he never asked demanded answers he could not find. Why were the insects attracted to the light? Was the darkness too lonely for them? Didn’t they know the light would kill them? And how did electricity work anyway?

  If he kept drinking he might find those answers. That was always the lie of liquor. His body got heavier, his tongue grew thicker, but his thoughts circled the streetlight like those insects, touching down briefly before flying off again in a different direction.

  Tik Lin was showing off by counting his money aloud. Trying not to smile, See Ouey interrupted him so he would have to start again. “What were you saying about those…um, communalists?”

  Tik Lin glared at him. The streetlight glanced off his eyes. “Let’s go through it one more time. According to Professor Tik Lin, communism is supposed to be about equality. In our country that means five percent of the population are equally rich and the other ninety-five percent are equally poor. Got it now? Don’t make me repeat it again.”

  See Ouey lifted up the bottle and took another shot. His tongue and throat were numb. “The communists, the Japanese, the Thais, what difference does it make? Life is one losing battle after another, one hardship after another. I’m so sick of it all I don’t even care anymore.”