Susan is renowned for her work in Bang Kwang Central Prison: a squalid, maximum-security jail on the outskirts of Bangkok, which, when she first started going there, only had a medical budget of around 80,000 baht per year for some 7,000 inmates. Because of all the AIDS and tuberculosis cases, the budget was completely spent only a few months into the year. So if you were admitted into the rundown prison hospital, full of vermin and bloodstains, you’d have to bring your own pillow (assuming you had one) and be lucky to get an IV drip and a single aspirin. Working with a group of Singaporean dentists, Susan saw that the prison’s rundown hospital was outfitted with proper mattresses. And in conjunction with the Causarina Prison in Perth, Australia, where inmates fix around 20,000 pairs of broken glasses each year and distribute them to Third World countries, Susan helped dozens of elderly convicts—the majority of whom had never been to an optometrist before—to sharpen their vision.
On one occasion, Jim Pollard was an eyewitness. “For these old men who couldn’t see and got their first pair of glasses late in life, seeing the expression on their faces was incredible. It really improved the quality of their lives.”
Watching Susan in action at the prison while he was out there doing different stories, Jim was struck by the fact that “she speaks the language fluently and understands Thai culture and that they like fun. A lot of her work concentrates on the prisoners who are neglected there, but she does a great job of lifting their spirits. I’m sure she has her mood swings, but she’s just a very positive person. Susan has done some terrific stuff. I take my hat off to her. But we need a lot more crossover from the well-to-do world to the less fortunate countries.”
In Bang Kwang, Susan struck up an acquaintanceship with an American inmate named Garth Hattan, who was serving a lengthy sentence for drug trafficking. “It took a long time to convince him that I wasn’t out to do a good deed at his expense and then, he opened up and said, ‘I’m very vulnerable now, don’t hurt me.’ It just came out of my mouth—‘I’m gonna love you in ways that you’ve never been loved before.’ I blew myself away with the depth of conviction, because I wasn’t really in love with him, but I made a commitment to myself and to his mother to see him home.”
Impressed by the eloquence of his letters, Susan told him that he was going to become a writer and that his experiences behind bars would touch the lives of countless others. Garth laughed at her. “But I told him, I’m starting to have feelings for you that I’ve never had for anybody, and he went ballistic. ‘How can you say that? You don’t even know me.’ And I’d never sworn around him before, so I said, ‘Go and fuck up and have fun then.’ So I went away thinking that he didn’t feel the same about me, but when I came back a week later he confessed that the feelings were mutual.”
Once again, Susan’s intuition was bang on, because he eventually began contributing a monthly column to Farang Untamed Travel magazine called ‘Letter from the Inside’. In his first column, Garth wrote about what it’s like being locked up in a cell intended for four people that actually held twenty. “Aside from the sweltering heat, you’d be deploring the lack of sufficient ventilation and be desperate to just get out for a breath of fresh air, and you’d discover that your physical proximity to the guy you’re meant to be sleeping next to defies every law of your heterosexual ethos.” Even though he had to write out the columns in long hand, his sweaty hand smudging the ink, Garth was our most punctual and reliable contributor. Susan smuggled the columns out. The prison officials didn’t care, because they realised that his writings were cautionary tales for travellers about mixing high times with lowlifes. “There’s no glamour here, just a sweaty inanimate existence riddled with the futile dreams of what could’ve been, mingled with the aching regret of having let so many good people down—especially yourself,” he wrote in another column. “Enjoy your travels, and never put yourself in a position that would jeopardise your freedom to do so.”
For the first three years of their relationship, Garth and Susan didn’t have a ‘contact visit’ because Garth thought he wouldn’t be able to control his longings, or act like himself in what amounts to a ‘monkey cage’, with some 60 prisoners and their kin sitting around at tables. Most of the Asian inmates, overwhelmed by the emotional reunions, do not hug or kiss or do much more than stare at their food. Eventually Garth agreed to a ‘contact visit’ and they’d sit in the corner, hugging, kissing and making love, using her long skirt as a veil. During one hands-on visit—the prison guards would tease her mercilessly on those days—Garth asked her to marry him. She said yes and he gave her a ring that once belonged to his grandfather. The stone was missing, so he asked her to replace it. She refused. The missing stone was symbolic of their relationship. Not until after he was out of jail would she find a replacement.
Because of a prisoner-exchange agreement with the United States, Garth was sent back to Los Angeles in late 2002, where he served only a few months before being let out on parole. (Every year served in a Thai jail counts for three in America.)
Late in 2003, the couple was married on a deserted beach in California as a flock of pelicans flew past. The wedding photo shows the two of them in front of a gold and crimson sunset, which ‘turned’ the seawater into volcanic lava. Garth is holding her up in his arms. Both of them are clad in denim pants and jackets, and their smiles are on high beam.
In an email she wrote, “We will eventually be having a larger ceremony with family and friends in 2004, when we can wear something a bit more spectacular than thermal underwear.”
That ceremony never took place. In the middle of 2004, she sent a newsletter from her own NGO to all the people on her mailing list. “I did not wish to break up with Garth. He left me, he had numerous affairs and to this day, participates in recreational activities that are not in accordance with my lifestyle or convictions. I did state, however, that I would go on with or without him and have done so. He had fallen in love with another woman and decided to leave me very soon after I returned to the States.
“It was an extremely trying time for me, I held on, did not move away from him or stop loving him, forgave him and eventually let him go free with my blessings and hopes that he will find true happiness and real love—perhaps one of the most difficult things of my life to do and some of the hardest choices to ever make.
“Then in turn I was left as a foreigner in a strange land with no rights and for the most part, alone without sufficient money to survive. On top of it, my health failed to where I nearly died, due to uterine polyps and the life-threatening anaemia that followed. At one point I was without food or water in the apartment where I lived, and had it not been for the intervention of a friend in Norway, I may have not made it out alive. Ironic to have to face possible death, feeling so alone in a first world country after caring for those in dangerous situations in the third world, ha! Eventually I wound up for a time with nowhere suitable to live, Talya [her daughter] was admitted to a mental ward and diagnosed as bipolar and it was a real slice of personal hell for her as well for a good many months.”
Susan felt devastated and rejected. She also felt blamed by Garth for this break up. “It’s enough to feel bitter about, and many would, but it’s not worth feeling such soul-destroying thoughts and I believe that these forces would do me more harm than the supposed injustices that I have suffered would.”
In a few terse emails I exchanged with Garth, he complained that Susan’s intensity and religious zeal were too much for him. After years in jail, the only work he could find was as a caddy. Garth soon started dealing drugs again. Caught violating the rules of his probation, the former rock drummer was sent back to prison. As of 2010, he is out of jail and on a 12-step programme. In a spirit of reconciliation, he and Susan are now friends on Facebook, but she ignores his more sentimental overtures, saying, “I don’t trust him anymore.”
One has to wonder why so many intelligent women are attracted to such incorrigible criminals and why someone like Charles Manson gets dozens of lov
e letters, and even marriage proposals, every month. Is it because the women like playing to a captive audience? Or that old rock ‘n’ roll cliché about good girls loving bad boys?
Even though she hadn’t reaped what she had sown, Susan returned to live in Thailand, completing and publishing her autobiography, The Angel of Bang Kwang (an honorific bestowed by the press) in 2007. My suggestion to the petite dynamo that her angel wings have been clipped, her halo tarnished, and that she should have called her book The Angel and She-Devil of Bang Kwang made her laugh.
The book opened a new chapter in her life as Susan began a sideline career as a writer. In 2008 she co-authored two books: Ladyboys: the Secret World of Thailand’s Third Gender and Bad Boy. Splitting the writing credits and royalties was Pornchai Sereemongkonpol. What surprised him about working on the book was that “because I’m Thai they wouldn’t open up to me like they did to Susan. She isn’t judgmental and she shared with them a lot of unhappy moments from her own life and that encouraged them to open up. Her charm is disarming, so the interviews were more of a sharing process than a typical Q&A. And she’s a lot of fun to work with.”
The biography of a tout, male prostitute, alcoholic, dope fiend and actor in scat-porn videos, Bad Boy is one of the grimmest and most sordid reads to come out of Bangkok’s red-light strips of Patpong and Boys’ Town. Towards the end of the book, the titular character was pummelled to a pulp and left for dead on Patpong 1.
Even his own wife did not recognise him in the hospital. When Susan and Pornchai went to visit him, “She got down to pray with him. Because we were around the nurses and doctors thought that he wasn’t just another bum, so they waived the medical bill of a 100,000 baht and put it on his 30-baht health care card. He had a lot of time to think in the hospital, and now he’s quit drinking, gotten back together with his wife and wants to become a forest ranger.”
From scat-porn actor to forest ranger—not the kind of career moves Susan’s neighbours in the shrink-wrapped suburbs of Melbourne would have ever considered—but once again her benevolent influence, and that of her co-author, has brought a measure of redemption to the life of another lost soul.
Asked how he would describe Susan in a few sentences to someone who had never met her, Pornchai paused. “That’s a difficult question because she’s complicated. If you only knew her from the things she’s done you would think she’s lofty, but she’s not, she’s real.” He paused again. “I respect the fact she believes in Jesus but she’s never brought up the subject of religion unless I mentioned it first. She’s not preachy and has never tried to impose her views on me.”
For the past few years, the Aussie expat has curtailed many of her prison visits, citing the failed marriage and emotional burnout as reasons, in favour of working at a shelter for battered women and giving classes in ‘laughing yoga’ at the Chest Disease Institute in Bangkok. The postures and eruptions of mirth stimulate the respiratory systems of more than a hundred patients per class. To amuse them, she dresses up as a clown and cracks quips in Thai. “I get to dress up as a lunatic for free and help a charitable cause,” she said with another laugh.
Susan has also been working with the Don Muang Home and Emergency Shelter for battered women and girls as young as 12, who have been raped, impregnated and cast out of their family homes, under the aegis of the Association for the Status and Promotion of Women. In a country where domestic violence runs rampant, and not a single complaint of sexual harassment has ever been lodged with the authorities since a law ostensibly protecting women from such was first promulgated in the mid-1990s, the shelter is a sanctuary and safe house for a floating population of anywhere from 150 to 200 women and children.
When she first started working there, many of the girls and women were almost mute from battery, estrangement and a serious shortage of self-esteem. Through scripting and staging dramas about the traumas they have suffered, many of the women have found they do have a voice and means to express their woe and call for justice. “I don’t work with them in the Thai tradition of a teacher dictating to their students. They have an equal say in everything we do, and they also decide what other skills they want to learn, such as public speaking. I’d also like to start a blog with them so they can voice more of their concerns and connect with other women who have similar problems.” Sunday evenings are devoted to the children; some of them are HIV-positive and have opportunistic illnesses such as tuberculosis. “I get covered in snot and vomit and wee. I call it my ‘Sunday night perfume’. Don’t take me out on a Sunday night!” Her eyes twinkled as she laughed. (Susan must have more laughs per day than any person I’ve ever met.)
Having interviewed and bantered with her many times over the years, it doesn’t seem like her personal philosophy has changed very much since I first spoke with her back in 2002, when she spoke of a Jewish rabbi who worked with the terminally ill in America.
“He said that most people can get used to the idea of dying, but what they can’t die with are all the regrets. And I’m one of those people who can’t stand living with regrets, so I really want to live my life as if I could die any day. That’s not a morbid thing. It just means doing your best, and it doesn’t have to be great big things, but just passing those little tests every day—like not losing it with the taxi driver, making the right choices, or giving that extra tip. I think those things prepare you for a good death.”
She laughed again, which seems to be her antidote to all the different strains of misfortune and mortality she’s been infected with over the decades. “I think you die as you live.”
Susan’s website is: http://onelifesusan.homestead.com/OneLife.html
The Scorpion Queen and Centipede King
I have often wondered: what compels a person to bathe in maggots for two weeks straight? Is it just to get their name and photo in the press? Will it create a ‘viral video’ on the internet that becomes the first rung on the ladder of reality TV stardom? Should it be classified as a form of mental illness? Is it an ‘accomplishment’ anyone would want listed on a CV or tombstone? ‘Here lies John Smith, devoted husband, father and world champion maggot bather.’
But for money and notoriety, people will do the strangest things. Before reality TV, homemade videos on YouTube and the asinine antics of MTV’s Jackass turned the sideshow into a series of digital and primetime showstoppers, the Guinness Book of World Records was the Bible of the bizarre and the A to Z of outlandish behaviour, where maggot bathing is still a hotly contested category and highly prized title.
Thailand has notched up quite a few entries in the book: as the birthplace of the person with the longest hair (a hilltribe man with a seven-metre-long mane who died in 2002); the longest name of any city on earth (the Thai moniker for Bangkok is either 164 or 171 letters, if you want to quibble over semantics); Betong, a town-cum-bordello straddling the Malay border, posted the record for the biggest mailbox; and for a brief time in the late 1990s, the city of Nakhon Pathom hosted the world’s tallest joss-stick. As another obituary for haphazard Thai workmanship and shoddy safety standards, it soon toppled like a redwood, killing several people.
That’s why some doom prophets were predicting catastrophe would do an encore when Kanchana Ketkaew, a sideshow performer already billed as the ‘Scorpion Queen’, set out to demolish the Guinness record by living with 3,000 of the arachnids in a glass room outside the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum in the seaside resort of Pattaya in 2002. Considering that this creepy-crawly is fiercely territorial and the only living creature besides humans which commits suicide (rather than conceding its turf to a rival, the proud scorpion will sting itself to death), it’s no wonder that some of us yellow journalists were already dreaming up tabloid-lurid headlines the likes of ‘Death of a Hundred Pricks’.
Nocturnal by nature, scorpions usually emerge from their moist habitats when darkness descends. During Kanchana’s stint in the glasshouse, the arachnids—due to the noise and light—didn’t come out of hiding from under her
bed, or in a small garden beside it, until 1 or 2am. Then they went on a mad search for food, even crawling around on her bed, so she got little sleep. Around 500 died and Ripley’s replaced them on the fly. But for a while the organisers didn’t notice that several hundred more scorpions had been born. The young are white, and use their pincers to latch onto their mother, so the female can carry the young around on her back.
Although she did suffer nine painful stings, Kanchana prevailed, spending 32 days in the twelve-square-metre glasshouse and entering the Guinness Book of World Records. Afterwards, in the museum’s conference room, her eyes bruised from sleeplessness and her skin faded to a fluorescent shade of pale, the newly crowned and now official ‘Scorpion Queen’ granted me an exclusive audience.
Surely the creatures’ presence, and malodorous waste products, must have darkened her dreams?
“The only nightmare I had was about eating live worms,” Kanchana said. “But on the 21st night I dreamt that I saw a beautiful temple surrounded by a rice field. So I knew something good was going
to happen. The next day, Her Royal Highness Princess Soamsawali came to visit me. She encouraged me to keep going and to break the record for the sake of our country.” As she talked about the princess, her face lit up like an angel crowning a Christmas tree. It must have been the most exciting thing that had ever happened to her.
When asked about the worst part of her ordeal, the petite performer unsheathed her cutting wit. “Having to answer the same questions from journalists over and over again,” she said, softening the stab with a smile.
Kanchana was born into a poor fishing family in Chumporn province, where she also fished for a living. In the mid-1990s, she attended a show at the Snake Farm on Koh Samui where she met the centipede-handler, Bunthewee Sengwong. Blushing and looking at the floor, Kanchana said it was love at first sight. In order to be with her new boyfriend (a former pig farmer from Ratchaburi province), Kanchana had to develop her own act for the Snake Farm’s still-running, twice-daily shows—so she choreographed a unique routine, dancing around in sexy outfits with scorpions crawling across her breasts, before pulling live ones out of her mouth and dangling them by their stingers.
Jim Algie Page 17
