by Jim Algie
The guards pulled him to his feet. Inhale…exhale. Down another corridor, cool cement under his feet, the hospital smell of urine and cleaning fluid, out through another metal door, the sun slitting his eyes. Inhale… exhale. Grass, bushes and flowers.
A yellow butterfly zigzagged across the prison yard. Nobody stopped. He said to the guards, “I didn’t ask for a meal or a cigarette, but See Ouey and his old friend Tik Lin used to like chasing butterflies across the fields when they were boys. Just a few seconds, please.”
The wandering monk had told him a riddle or parable, “Am I a man who dreamed he was a butterfly? Or a butterfly who dreamed he was a man?”
Nobody decided that he was a butterfly who had only dreamed he was a man. As the butterfly zigzagged across the prison yard, he willed the rest of his consciousness to it. When it flew up and over the wall, clearing the brambles of barbed wire, Nobody smiled.
Short steps, the leg irons rattling. Inhale… exhale. Inhale… exhale. Another room cool and dark. A big gun bolted to the floor and pointed at a white curtain, behind it a wooden cross in front of sandbags stained with blood. Inhale…exhale. The guards made him sit down on a beam jutting out of the cross. They unlocked the handcuffs. In his hands they placed a single unopened lotus blossom, a yellow candle and three sticks of incense, like he was going to pray at a temple, which was exactly what he wanted to do. To bind his wrists together, the guard used the same sacred white thread that monks use for ritual blessings. Inhale...exhale. Sweat tickled his spine. They raised his hands over his head and roped them to the cross. Around his face they tied a blindfold tight enough to make a vein leap in his forehead.
Nobody stared into the darkness, where the flame of a candle grew into a lotus blossom of light. The face of the reclining Buddha, eyes closed, smiling serenely, looked back at him from the center of the flame. Nobody smiled at the Buddha: smiling at the sad, stupid futility of it all, and smiling because it was far too late for it to do him any good, but Nobody had finally solved the puzzle of life, the riddle of nirvana.
It was a bayonet in a soldier’s stomach.
A half-eaten Buddha image in a pool of blood and feces.
A coconut tossed at sea.
A smiling woman with a sun-freckled face.
A train of ants carrying a cockroach antenna.
A newborn buffalo that smelled like the dawn.
It was everything.
And it was nothing at all.
Exhale….
III. Nobody’s Monster
TRUE TO HIS LAST words to the monk, See Ouey’s rebirth began when the prison’s doctor and psychiatrist held a press conference to announce their findings one week after the execution.
“During the autopsy we found no abnormalities in his brain and from the interviews I conducted with him in the prison it is my professional opinion he was not insane. During the time he carried out the attacks he may have been temporarily insane, but that’s something we’ll never know for sure. At times he did speak in a delusional manner that made me wonder if he was extremely religious or simply a nihilist.
“For the first few months in jail he was mostly cooperative. Even though we had a Chinese interpreter on hand, See Ouey did not speak a lot. I got the impression he had always been a very quiet and shy man. He did express quite a bit of remorse about his heinous deeds, but he always insisted that his crimes were nothing compared to those committed by the Communist Party of China and the Japanese Imperial Army. After he took up Buddhist studies, he refused to speak to us for the last few months of his incarceration.
“In closing, it is my professional duty to add that many doubts linger as to whether he actually committed all the murders he has been accused of.”1
The doctor’s comments sent See Ouey’s spirit hurtling around the world on teletype wires that inspired editorials and hundreds of hate mails. “See Ouey wasn’t a man. He was a monster.” “The doctor is even crazier than the cannibal.”
The hostility only made See Ouey’s spirit stronger. His legend grew as it passed from eyes to mouths, from mouths to ears. Thai parents warned their children, “Don’t stay out late at night or the ghost of See Ouey will come and eat you.”
It was the children who began seeing him first, skulking in the shadows as he followed them home, or standing beside a street-light, his head tipped backwards, his jaws opening like a trap door to swallow the insects as they plunged earthwards.
Five years after his execution, the cannibal’s preserved corpse became the main attraction in the Songkran Niyomsane Forensic Museum in Bangkok’s Siriraj Hospital.2
To this day, hundreds of tourists and locals pass through here on a daily basis to gawk at all the autopsy and crime-scene photos, crudely labeled in English with lines like, “Beer bottle slash throat” and “Knife cut vagina.” Lined up on shelves are jars swimming with stillborn fetuses. Some of the infants who died of water on the brain have bloated heads. For the spirits of these kids, the Asian visitors leave offerings of candy and dolls.
In another glass case is a collection of skulls with bullet holes in their temples. The skulls came from unclaimed corpses. Doctors at the hospital used them to study entry and exit wounds to solve the shooting death of King Rama VIII in 1946, a case that has never been resolved.
The museum is air-conditioned to the freezing point of a morgue. As befitting a crypt, visitors speak in funereal whispers.
In one glass case hangs the skeleton of the museum’s founder, who wanted his students to be able to study him after he died. But the number of medical students coming here for lessons in forensics and anatomy are minute compared to the tourists and locals for whom the museum feeds a different kind of hunger, when the gravest taboo becomes the penultimate form of pornography as living eyes probe the naked flesh and preserved organs of the deceased.
Out of the three preserved corpses of murderers propped up behind glass in what look like wooden telephone booths, it’s See Ouey’s who draws the most stares and frowns from visitors. The cadaver is naked, his shriveled genitals on display. The bullet holes in his chest are visible, but the empty eye sockets have been filled in and whitened with paraffin. Ragged stitch marks on the forehead expose how the doctors removed his brain during the autopsy. Some of the teenagers, trying to act tough and look cool in front of their friends, mutter the same curses See Ouey heard in his day like the “Chinks who destroyed the temples.”
As more and more guidebook writers put the museum on maps, See Ouey’s legend feeds on the notoriety. Tourists turn the killer’s corpse into mega-pixels that shoot through cyber-space to reach inboxes all over the world. One blogger dubbed him the “Jack the Ripper of Southeast Asia.”
A woman woke from a nightmare in Madrid, certain See Ouey was lurking in her room with a broken bottle sticking out of his groin.
In Hong Kong, a filmmaker heard stories about him from a friend who visited the museum. At first the director couldn’t believe it. They put a serial killer’s cadaver on public display? This sounds like something out of the Dark Ages.
His friend said, “All sorts of legends have sprung up around this guy. The security guard told me that if you stare at his corpse for more than thirty seconds he’ll visit you in your dreams. Sure enough, later that night when I drifted off to sleep, his brown cadaver walked into my hotel room, wings burst out of his back and he flew around the room like a cockroach.”
“Sounds like The Metamorphosis by Kafka,” the director said, already thinking about makeup and prosthetic wings.
The director searched for information about him on-line, finding several photos from the museum and a black and white image of See Ouey. The killer was an unattractive man with a flat nose and huge nostrils. His hair was cut short like a soldier’s. Several of his front teeth were missing but it was the look on his face that made the director lean closer to the screen. See Ouey’s lips were twisted into a vicious snarl. An image ghosted through the director’s mind of an Asiatic black bear that growle
d at him from behind the bars of a cage in a Shanghai zoo. That was the look on the killer’s face: a cornered animal snarling in self-defense. It was a good juxtaposition. He could use that for the film.
On the Internet there were only a few bytes of information about the killer: the date of his execution in 1958, his career as a soldier in Hainan, his life of poverty as a rickshaw-puller and laborer in Bangkok and different parts of Thailand. Even the exact number of people he killed—possibly five, maybe nine—was open to speculation.
At night, on the balcony of his condo overlooking Victoria Harbour, the director liked to stand by the railing, smoking Cuban cigars and drinking Chablis, while he used the sky as a screen to project all the images in his mind: wounds opening in a man’s back like the mouths of hungry infants lapping up the blood.
He could use that, too, but what was the killer’s real story? He didn’t want to make another lunatic-on-the-loose movie.
In a perverse way, the director could relate to the killer’s hunger. He was hungry, too: hungry for respect and success. His last two films had been ignored by viewers and napalmed by critics. One more disaster and he’d be back directing music videos again or spending four hours in the studio trying to light a bottle of shampoo. He needed a hit and the public was always ravenous for more films about serial slayers. But there had to be a bigger picture to See Ouey’s story.
The director began typing up all the horrific tales of death and deprivation his relatives from Hainan had told him about the mass exodus to Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia and America, like the story his grandmother related about how some of the Chinese “snake heads” who charged the immigrants exorbitant sums for their passage, robbed them and threw them to the sharks in the middle of the sea. On her deathbed, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, his grandmother was convinced that the hospital was the cargo hold of a junk. Again and again she pleaded with them in a girl’s hysterical voice: “Don’t let them throw me to the sharks like they did to my brother. Please, not that, not that, anything but that.”
His grandfather had told him another story. “This rich woman disguised herself as a peasant, but the pirates saw all the gold fillings in her teeth. So they ripped out her teeth, one by one, with a pair of pliers, and then they used her mouth, well, let’s just say they had their way with her. As a warning to the rest of us, they hung her body from the mast of the junk. By the time we got to Hong Kong, the crows and seagulls had picked her corpse clean. There was nothing left except a skeleton and a few scraps of clothing. I know I should have a lot more happy memories of my childhood, but whenever I start thinking about the past those are the scenes that come to mind first.”
It was disturbing to think that the cannibal could’ve been onboard the same junk as his grandparents. It was much more disturbing to think that, in some strange way, this man’s story was emblematic of a generation of millions of Chinese who had fled the ravages of war only to find worse squalor and debasement than they’d left behind. It was a testament to the strength and family ties of these immigrants that the vast majority of them did not sink to the same levels of cruelty as the pirates and See Ouey.
Even those stories were not enough to write a film treatment. He had to find See Ouey.
The director flew to Bangkok. He dropped his bags at the hotel and headed straight for the museum. In front of See Ouey’s final resting case he stood, dumbfounded by all the comparisons to notorious murderers. This little shrimp was the “Jack the Ripper of Southeast Asia” and the “Chinese version of Ted Bundy”?
The cannibal’s size bolstered the director’s conviction that See Ouey had been the worst kind of coward, targeting women and children he could easily overpower. Like a tiger, he’d probably snuck up on them from behind, not even giving them a chance to fight back.
Something else about the museum bothered him too. Why were these killers so famous and no one ever spared a thought for their victims and families? He spoke into his Dictaphone: “This is not going to be another one of those films where the victims are dispatched like pigs in a slaughterhouse. I need a sub-plot… something about a victim’s mother and father. The death of their daughter has brought all their marital problems to a head. Maybe she’s a prostitute on Green Lantern Lane. The cops are not interested in the case, so the parents have to track down See Ouey on their own. Unless they can find him, their marriage is finished. Maybe there’s a sibling in the picture who’s going through a nervous breakdown because of the death of their brother or sister.”
The director walked around and around the museum but the only information he could find about See Ouey was a clipping the color of nicotine-stained fingers from a local newspaper taped to the side of the upright casket. The black and white photo was the same one he’d seen on the Internet. No longer was the director so certain that See Ouey looked like a cornered animal snarling in self-defense. He may have been mugging for the camera, playing up to his image, even enjoying his newfound infamy.
Could one man be the predator and the prey, the killer and the victim?
A young woman studying forensics translated the clipping into English for him. It told him nothing he didn’t already know. As a little girl, she said, her parents had warned her not to stay out late or the Chinaman’s ghost would come and eat her.
See Ouey’s monstrous legend was intact, but what had happened to the man himself? He was nowhere to be found. Unless the film-maker could bring his main character to life, the movie would be a commercial and critical fiasco.
The director closed his eyes. He imagined See Ouey’s spirit wafting across the museum, chill and invisible as the breeze from the air-conditioners, fluttering up the back of his untucked shirt to skitter across his shoulders and whisper in his ear, “Do you see me now? I’m nothing and nobody. A tiny, ugly man who had everything stripped from him: his wife, his farm, his money and all his self-respect and dignity. Everyone treated me like an animal, so that’s what I became.” The killer spoke in the same Hainanese dialect as the director’s grandfather. “When I looked into the flame of that candle for five days straight… when my mind became that flame, I saw that I was going to become an immortal legend and I would never die. That was my greatest hunger.” See Ouey chuckled bitterly. “Not bad for a rickshaw Chink, huh?”
“But why? Why go to those lengths of cannibalism?” the director asked.
“Because I was hungry. Because I had nothing to eat.”
In his mind’s camera eye, the director saw a boy walking a water buffalo beside a cliff top. The camera tracked behind them, slowly panning across a ruffled sea spangled with sunbeams to focus on the boy stroking the beast’s horns. The boy said, “You’re the only one who understands me. You know what I want, Seow Fung? More than anything, I want for both of us to live forever.”
The director opened his eyes. A smile backlit his face. This was great! It was magic. The anti-hero was directing the film for him.
As his eyes zoomed in on the browned and wrinkled cadaver, he saw the movie as a different breed of The Metamorphosis, for the Kafkaesque creature trapped behind glass resembled the exoskeleton of a gigantic cockroach, its wings shorn, antennae clipped: an insect trying to become a man.
That was too mundane for the modern-day mythos of the movie world. Any time he had ever suggested a biopic about this or that celebrity to his producer, he said, “You don’t make the film about the real person. You make it about the legend.”
So how about this? Wings burst open from the creature’s shoulders as antennae shot up from either side of its forehead. Again and again, it cracked its carapace against the glass, trying to escape from its tiny prison.
When the glass shattered, See Ouey flew through the museum in the chaotic fashion of cockroaches, his brown wings beating the air in a blur, his jaws unhinged like a python so he could devour the skeletons, skulls, fetuses and autopsy photos. With each bite he grew bigger and bigger, until he was as large as legend, as huge as myth, as hideous as
racist stereotype: a monster whose wings threw shadows across the moon as he carried off children to use their bones for toothpicks at his secret lair deep in Tiger Leaping Gorge.
Footnotes
1. Bangkok World, July 17, 1958
2. The preserved corpse of See Ouey Sae Ugan remains the centerpiece of the Songkran Niyomsane Forensic Medicine Musuem in Bangkok’s Siriraj Hospital. Visiting hours are from 9am-4pm, Mon-Sat. Admission is 40 baht.
OBITUARY FOR THE KHAOSAN ROAD OUTLAWS AND IMPOSTORS
For Paul Soulodre and Jon McDonald
“I have no money, no resources, no hope.
I am the happiest man alive.”
Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
Few thrills are as harrowing as breaking the law, but only if you get away with it. Getting caught is the worst comedown. Crime, as we saw and practiced it in Bangkok, was another kind of extreme sport. Slaloming around the security at Don Mueang International Airport, dodging the plainclothes cops, and tricking the check-in staff, was all part of the fun, and gave us a bigger adrenaline surge than we ever got from skateboarding or smoking crack.
All the most exciting memories of my childhood were dragged along in the adrenaline’s undertow, like leaves in a flood: shoplifting comic books and candy bars, throwing eggs at the school windows, letting the air out of the teacher’s tires, putting a tack on the chair of the teacher’s pet and watching him sit on it, daring, and then double daring, James Strate to spit on the door of our local church. After he did it, we ran down the block, half-expecting God to strike us down with a thunderbolt. He didn’t and this was a lesson we never received in Sunday school.
Then it was on to stealing booze from our fathers’ liquor cabinets—only a little from each bottle to mix into a vomit-inducing punch for all the boys to pretend we liked—shoplifting and jerking off to porn mags, sneaking into bars while underage, smoking pot, going to rock concerts, leering at strippers, cheating on girlfriends, speeding and drunk driving.
