Jim Algie

by Bizarre Thailand Tales of Crime, Sex,and Black Magic

  Upon returning to Bangkok, I took malicious pleasure in taunting her about all the similarities between the two countries in terms of phallic symbols, temples and traditional dance. She retorted, “That’s because they stole everything from Thailand.”

  “Actually, no. They say that a Siamese king loved Khmer dance so much that he kidnapped a bunch of the apsara dancers and brought them back to his royal court so they could teach his teachers how to perform. The royal barges came from the Khmer too, and I read that even a lot of Thai dishes like sweet green curry were invented by the Khmer, but the Thais added a lot of chilli and other spices to them.”

  Like most Thais, she did not believe any of those claims.

  When we finally made our first pilgrimage to Angkor in early 2004, we couldn’t have picked a worse time. It was almost a year after a group of Khmer men had torched the Thai embassy in Phnom Penh, destroying and looting many other Thai businesses, after a Cambodian daily made false allegations claiming a Thai actress said that Angkor Wat belongs to Thailand.

  On the first anniversary of the carnage, high-ranking politicians and both prime ministers convened for photos taken in front of Angkor Wat, to prove that all the simmering grievances and recriminations

  had once again been put on the backburner. But the photo-op propaganda did not dispel any of the angst in the atmosphere. Like the prelude to an electrical storm, the air was charged with tension. In the booth where we had to buy our three-day passes, the swarthy Khmer guy behind the desk saw Anchana’s passport and looked up at her. “So, you are from Thailand.” It was not a statement. It was an accusation.

  “Yes, I know Cambodians hate Thais.”

  “No, Thais hate Cambodians.” With that, he dropped her passport on the table and shooed us out the door like a couple of human flies.

  That was not the only problem to contend with. In the temples of Angkor the lingams had been castrated and pillaged long ago, although some of their bases—resembling the female genitalia and representing shakti, or the life-bearing power of the womb and the divine feminine—were still visible. After two days of trudging through tons of temples in brain-sizzling heat, following months of reading and researching, we had seen only one intact lingam at the cliff-top temple of 11th-century Khmer vintage, Wat Khao Phnom Ruang, in northeastern Thailand. I was sick of the whole subject and equally sick of the age-old ‘dick contest’ between the warring men of Thailand and Cambodia that was causing us friction wherever we went, forcing Anchana, in a fit of karmic retribution, to pretend she was Khmer.

  No one I had spoken to, in either country, could confirm or deny that phallic charms possessed any fiscal or physical potency. My growing doubts about their efficacy was comically summarised by Eric Weiner in his brilliant travel book The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World, when he wrote about the prevalence of such fetishes in Bhutan. “As the owner of a penis myself, I can tell you that no body part is less qualified to ward off evil than the penis. Most of the time it seems to welcome every form of evil, vice and temptation.”

  The testicular temples of Angkor encompass some of the most macho and muscular architecture on earth. So it was strange to see that two of the most prevalent motifs there are female: the heavenly apsara dancers and the guardian angels known as devatas. Until then, I had never seen anyone grope a statue before, but this Khmer guy was rubbing the breasts of an apsara dancer on a bas-relief. So many times had her breasts been rubbed—in what was another ancient fertility rite—that the stone was worn smooth and shiny.

  Our attempt to balance out the yin and the yang, Shiva and Shakti, sent us off on another tangent—examining Angkor’s feminine mystique and fertility rites. The Temple of Women, however, was not actually built by women. As immaculately preserved as it is, the name is derived from the use of pink sandstone in its finely hewn details and lintels. After a dinner show starring a dozen apsara dancers, we tried interviewing them. Onstage, these ‘celestial nymphs and muses’, garbed in golden finery and wearing pagoda-like crowns on their heads, were visions of languorous grace and sensual beauty. Backstage, they were a group of giggling teenage girls wearing jeans and T-shirts. All the questions I asked them through the interpreter were immediately answered by their middle-aged male teacher, who forbade them to say anything.

  On the last afternoon, we went to the Apsara Massage Parlour in Siem Reap, staffed by tough-looking Khmer women from the countryside. Beside the mattress a traveller had written on the wall with a marker pen, “Don’t mess with these women. They will rip you from limb to limb.” Not a bad disclaimer for the heavy kneading and contortionist-like postures of traditional Khmer massage, similar to the invigorating yet agonising bodywork of the Thai school. Only a few minutes into the massage, Anchana said something in Thai to the masseuse who was working on her. The woman repeated it to my masseuse. Then she yelled something in Khmer to the women working in the next room. Within a minute five or six of the masseuses had surrounded us. My first thought was, “Oh no, the Cambodians have formed a lynch mob to kill the lone Thai!” But that wasn’t the case. As she repeated this expression in Thai, the Khmer ladies began smiling and talking excitedly.

  Outside the massage salon, they all wanted their photos taken with her. The masseuses were pictured sitting on her lap, hugging her, kissing her on the cheek, all of them smiling and laughing.

  I finally had to ask what she’d said to them.

  “I quoted this old expression about how Thais and Cambodians are like big brothers and little sisters. We’re all from the same family.”

  On her part, this was a remarkable turnaround. I suppose it was an act of repentance for nursing a grudge, nourished by schoolbooks and teachers, against Cambodians. But with the exception of the man at the ticket booth, and a couple of other minor incidents, she had been impressed by how nice the people were and alarmed by all the poverty and limbless beggars. As an antidote to xenophobia, there’s no cure like travel.

  This joyful reconciliation outside the massage parlour left me thinking that if the women of Thailand and Cambodia got together to work through these bilateral dilemmas (like the ongoing dispute over the Preah Vihear Temple on the border), they would come to an amicable conclusion in no time. But in two countries where the few female politicians are shunted off to posts deemed ‘insignificant’—typically the Health Ministry—and where the phallic symbol still looms large, any such reconciliations will have to remain reveries for the time being.

  The spectre of phallic power raised its ugly dickhead once again on our first trip to the Fertility Shrine behind the Swissotel. En route, the taxi driver moaned about all the Thai women dating foreign men. This was not common but it wasn’t out of the ordinary either: plenty of Thai women catch flack for hooking up with foreign guys. In yet another ‘dick contest’, there has been a recent trend for Thai men to undergo all sorts of penile enhancement treatments, so that they can join the so-called ‘Top Guns Club’. None too pleased with her terse answers, the driver snapped, “Why are you with him? Is it because he has a bigger dick or a bigger wallet?”

  So we got out of the taxi and walked the rest of the way. Since there was nobody around on the weekday afternoon that we visited, I asked her if she’d kneel in front of the spirit house for a couple of photos. I promised not to shoot any close-ups, or mention her real name in the story that I was writing at the time. Anchana frowned. “But I don’t want a baby.”

  “You don’t have to ask for anything. Just pretend like you’re praying, I’ll shoot a few photos and it will be cool.”

  Eventually, she relented. After taking a few shots of her kneeling before the shrine, I asked her if she had put in a request to Tubtim for anything—maybe a new designer handbag?

  “No, Mr. Sarcastic Man. I told her, ‘I don’t want to offend you, but I don’t need a baby now. My boyfriend must do this story and take photos. So please make him unlucky... not me.’” Then she laughed.

  The weirdest th
ing about our visit to the shrine is that it did serve as an aphrodisiac and Anchana also forgot to take her pill that night. That had never happened before. A week passed and her period still had not come. That also hadn’t happened before.

  Like Shiva’s lingam, which represents the unseen forces at work in the universe, there was something going on here that eluded the eye. Or perhaps the shrine exerts more of a psychosexual, rather than occult, influence on its visitors.

  Whatever it was, we spent the next few days in a state of agitation. In the end, she didn’t get pregnant, even though her period was ten days late, and that had never happened before either. So we both suspected that ‘something’ had occurred at the shrine that day. Anchana was convinced our actions had angered the goddess.

  I’ve never been sure of that. Maybe it was only the power of suggestion. Maybe it was a series of coincidences. Maybe it was a surge of erotic electricity that briefly short-circuited the neurons and synapses of our brains.

  Maybe it was none of the above.

  But since when have love and lust ever inspired anything akin to common sense and rationality?

  STRANGE CELEBRITIES

  The Artist Of Bizarre Architecture

  Anyone who has ever peaked on hallucinogens (or air pollution) in Bangkok has probably thought, when staring at the skyline from on high, “Wow, that robot must be about 20 stories tall! And is that a ship or a hotel? Man, this is some good shit…”

  But these are not hallucinations—they are the surreal byproducts of Sumet Jumsai’s imagination. For this National Artist, the cornerstone of his bizarre architecture is his long-abiding interest in painting, cubism and surrealistic art. Looking at photos of his artworks and buildings, it’s easy to draw parallels between them: the pigments of imagination, the serpentine lines and the techno-geometric forms of The Nation buildings in Bangkok also form the blueprints for his artworks.

  It’s not surprising then, that his first ambition was to be a painter, not an architect.

  “I started drawing and painting from an early age, but my father didn’t want me to be an artist, which meant being a pauper,” said Sumet, sitting on his terrace with a glass of 16-year-old malt whiskey in one hand and a pipe stuffed with cherry tobacco in the other. “There was no market for modern art in those days. So I decided to compromise and study architecture because it was the nearest thing to art. But as I discovered, architecture—real architecture, is art. It’s a very important form of art, and it’s also a form of poetry in concrete and steel, wood and glass.”

  Although he’s been painting for most of his life, he didn’t begin exhibiting his works until his first solo show at the Galerie Atelier Visconti in Paris towards the end of 1999. Judging by the reviews and the lengthy guest list of European aristocrats invited to the vernissage (which also included his old friend, the renegade filmmaker Roman Polanski), Sumet’s debut exhibition Guernica, Typewriter, Racing Cars, and Einstein was a major artistic event.

  So why did he wait this long to have his first solo show?

  “I don’t like the idea of selling my paintings, because they’re part of my flesh and blood, so I don’t want to part with them. But there’s no room to keep them in my house now, and my children think they’re hopelessly conventional and outdated,” he said with a cultured British accent echoing his Cambridge education. Even with a guest list like that, Sumet denied getting a case of the pre-exhibition jitters. “Oh no, I’m too old for that,” he laughed.

  From a young age, Sumet’s view of architecture and the world was shaped and coloured by painters and sculptors.

  “Picasso was my great hero when I was a student, and Le Corbusier [a sculptor, painter and architect]. The two of them went hand in hand for me. They were part of my generation in the early ‘60s, with Vivaldi and modern jazz. And I’m still at it because I come from that generation,” he said.

  On display at his exhibition in Paris (and many exhibitions since) was a series of paintings based on Picasso’s massive magnum opus about the Spanish Civil War: ‘Guernica’, the name of a town in the Basque country that was all but annihilated by the fascist forces of General Franco. Likewise, Picasso’s Cubist period exerted a tremendous influence on Sumet’s design for the two Nation buildings, situated in the southeasterly extremities of Bangkok, alongside the highway to Pattaya.

  “On the west side, quite recognisable, is the anthropomorphic: the chief editor sitting at his computer. But as you come around to the east side, the cut out, the shape of the editor becomes more and more abstract, until you come right round the building and he becomes a completely abstract shape permeated by electronic circuitry, which is an image of communications. So that’s Cubism. When you look at a Cubist painting or sculpture you see other sides at the same time. Like when Picasso painted his girlfriend and she’s divided into different sides,” he said with a laugh.

  A model of these two buildings was exhibited at one of the world’s biggest exhibitions of contemporary art, the Venice Biennale, in 1996. Ten years earlier, his designs were featured in The 50 Leading Architects in the World exhibition in Vienna.

  It was 9pm and we were sitting in the garden of the home he designed on Sukhumvit Road, listening to Ornette Coleman’s be-bop jazz, smoking Cuban cigars and drinking malt whiskey. When he’s sober, Sumet is more of an upper-class Englishman—subdued and composed. When he’s drinking, the Thai side of his character comes out to play and he starts telling a lot more jokes and spinning tales about a spectre he encountered in a Victorian mansion in England.

  Whether sober or tipsy, he is a namedropper, forever talking about encounters he’s had with everyone from Prince Charles to Nelson Mandela and Roman Polanski—the Polish filmmaker whose pregnant wife was knifed to death by Charles Manson’s ‘Family’ and who could not pick up his Oscar for directing The Pianist in 2003, because he was still wanted on statutory rape charges in the US. Sumet loves to be seen with other celebrities. So there he was, resplendent in a pale yellow suit with no tie, right beside Polanski as he emerged to meet the press and the fans after the Asian premiere of his version of Oliver Twist at the Bangkok World Film Festival in 2005. That night Polanski also received a lifetime achievement award, trading quips with the award presenter Meechai ‘Mr. Condom’ Virajit, who owns the Cabbages and Condoms restaurant on Sukhumvit Soi 11. Alluding to the director’s libidinous reputation, Meechai said, “Roman was handing out condoms in Bangkok’s Chinatown back in the ‘70s,” to which Polanski quipped, after being handed the award, “I thought Meechai would’ve sealed it in a condom.”

  But the architect actually met the filmmaker many years before that when they “were trekking in the Himalayas and I came down with a really bad case of altitude sickness, so Roman had his porters jettison the cases of wine they were carrying for him and helped them to carry me back down to the base camp. He really helped to save my life and we’ve remained friends since then. He used to come to Bangkok quite often for reasons you can probably imagine, but he’s happily married and a family man now.”

  The architect also described an odd yet very friendly encounter he had with Nelson Mandela at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland back in 1999, when Sumet won a Crystal Award for his colossal contributions to the art of architecture over the last four decades. During a banquet, Mandela was seated at the next table. “He kept smiling and waving at me, and I thought he must’ve mistaken me for somebody else. But then he came over, put his arm around me, and said, ‘You’re from Thailand. I was so well received there. Please give my thanks again to the king.’ I thought, ‘Who am I to deliver such a message?’ He’s such a warm and charming man, Nelson Mandela, such a humanist. I later found out he’s charming to absolutely everyone: the doorman, taxi drivers, the chambermaid. He charms them all.”

  It was an encounter tinged with a measure of irony. For back in his Beatnik days at Cambridge University in the early 1960s, the aspiring architect took part in an anti-apartheid march, striding behind the philosophe
r Bertrand Russell. A photo from this period shows Sumet dressed up like an archetypal Beatnik in jeans, a black turtleneck and black wraparound sunglasses.

  After interviewing him on several occasions, I came to the conclusion that Sumet is less of a namedropper than a born raconteur. Two of his biggest charms are that he simply hates to bore his company and that he’d rather talk about his friends than himself. The artist who lurks behind his aristocratic façade is not an egomaniac, though. When I mentioned how I used to live in Barcelona and that the surreal buildings, the park and the church they’re still building—La Sagrada Familia—designed by Antoni Gaudi loom the largest in my memories of living in the city, and that similarly, Sumet’s architecture has come to define the skyline of Bangkok for me, he waved off the compliment. “I really don’t consider myself to be a genius like Gaudi.”

  Out of the hundreds of actors, musicians, supermodels and titans of industry I’ve profiled over the last two decades, Sumet is the only one who has ever called me up to personally thank me for writing a story about him. Not only that, he had his secretary send a thank-you present. The perfect gift for any wordsmith, it was a poster for his Paris exhibition featuring one of his paintings: a Burroughsesque image of a typewriter with a human face.

  But Dr. Sumet Jumsai na Ayudhya is much more than an architect, painter and a gentleman. He has also produced a scholarly book about the archetypal serpent king of Buddhism, titled Naga: Cultural Origins in Siam and the West Pacific (Oxford University Press, Singapore, 1988). In the introduction he writes, “Possibly no other region in the world possesses as many water symbols as East and Southeast Asia culture. Particularly in Siam, whether it is in ritual, literature, dancing, folk art, painting, sculpture, architecture or city planning, a host of aquatic attributes underlies them all. The scope of this work is to attempt to explain them.”