The Amok Runners

by Colin Cotterill

  ‘Because he’s hot.’

  ‘I know that, but what I mean is; historically, what justification is there for his presence? Him getting wounded in ancient Greece or Vietnam I can understand ... but what are his firm white buttocks doing here in Thailand in the sixteenth century getting tortured by the Burmese?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You’re such a racist.’

  ‘It ain’t racist, brother. He couldn’t have been here.’

  ‘Yes, he could. And do you know how I know he could?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  The joint was bite-sized now. Sissy pulled his famous roach clip from his handbag and nipped the remains.

  ‘Because … and it’s really important you take notes on this one … because if there weren’t any white guys here it’d erase some five hundred million dollars in box office revenue in mainland USA alone. Nobody wants to see a bunch of ethnics massacring each other without American help. If he wasn’t here there’d be no marketable reason for making the movie. By shipping in Dan – ooh look at my teeth everyone – Jensen and having him master eight words of Thai with which to turn the depleted Siamese army into a fit, hungry fighting force, they’ve upped the budget a zillion times. So, if America says it was here in 1560 …’

  ‘But there wasn’t even an America in 1560.’

  ‘What’s a hundred years give or take to your average cinema-goer?’

  ‘Oh, man,’ I said. ‘It’s my history.’

  ‘And, if you ask me, it needs serious editing. Who cares? We’re talking fiction here. You’ll be telling me next The King and I got it wrong.’

  ‘Don’t get me started on that.’

  ‘It’s backdrop. Get over it. Either that or withdraw in protest. Handcuff yourself to the Three Kings monument downtown and go on a fast and tell the world the Americans are doing a re-write on our heritage.’

  ‘Then I wouldn’t get to be in a movie.’

  ‘That’s the spirit exactly. We have to get those priorities straight. You’re almost a star. Forty-six dollars a day plus meals; can’t sniff at that.’

  This was going to be my first extra role but I wasn’t doing it for the money. I’d been given the go ahead from the editor to do a series of reports from the front line. But once I signaled my intention it turned into a family affair. Our brother, Arny had signed up, and, to my dismay, Mair insisted on coming along too. Cinematic bonding, she called it. It was just as well they were recruiting ‘Assorted Asians’ for the early scenes. We were more assorted than most. Only Grandad Ja, grumpy as ever, was staying home to run the family shop. Sissy and I remained philosophical about it all. How many families had a Hollywood home movie to show their great grand children?

  ‘You’re right,’ I said.

  Chiang Rai ganja taught you to observe. You’d notice things. That’s why I liked it. The lights of the municipal grid had replaced the lights of heaven. Headlights and taillights danced a slow polonaise along Huay Gaew Road. Advertising hoardings dazzled brazenly beside the super highway. The city spread before us like a buffet of shiny rhinestones.

  In fact, Thailand itself was more bluster than salience those days. There had been times when military coups landed on the country like raindrops. The population had become so inured to the seasonal sprinkles that Thais had long since stopped complaining. The common people took their ideological soakings without protest and left the rabble rousing to the students. A succession of military tsars helped themselves to the spoils of government and everyone applauded their chutzpa.

  But in recent times there were longer gaps between the dark clouds and there had even been periods of dubious democracy. Then, three years earlier, a sun-god rose in the north and spread light and free gifts across the land. He dawned with such brilliance that all of the little political parties gelled into one under his banner. And he warmed the earth with his big smiling Chinese face. And he set, not on the cities, but on the villages for that was his vote base. He introduced cheap medical schemes and rural development projects and protection from the drug mafias for the poor and they bowed before him.

  And all the while he dug his hand into the same coffers of power from which the famous coup generals before him had feathered their nests. His once obscene wealth became scandalous and soon he owned not only the position of Prime Minister but the country itself. And a great envy descended upon the land and the sleeping military was awoken and the sun-king was banished to a distant kingdom where he bought condominiums and football clubs and got blisters on his fingers from counting his ill-gotten off-shore funds. So it was we sat there beneath the cloud of yet another military administration.

  It was at that moment that Khin spluttered out of her nightmare.

  ‘Yes? What? What?’

  ‘Welcome back, Khin,’ I said. ‘How was the trip?’

  ‘I thought, I … I thought I was in purgatory.’

  ‘No, Khin,’ Sissy reminded her. ‘You left purgatory two years ago. You’re in Thailand, now.’

  ‘Thank heavens. What time is it?’

  ‘Coming up to midnight.’

  ‘Yes. My word. We have to run amok at the crack of dawn.’

  Khin rose from the sun bed and unknotted her limbs like a newborn Bambi. She was unnecessarily tall, acne’d and eccentric. Her sensible hair and clothes always hung from her as if they were damp.

  ‘You excited about it, Khin?’ Sissy asked.

  ‘Cock-a-hoop, my friend. Cock-a-hoop.’

  She got to her feet, swayed a little, and headed off to the outside bathroom. I shook my head. Half the stuff she said I didn’t recognize as English. She’d had a British education which tends to make people incomprehensible. I turned to Sissy.

  ‘So, is she excited or what?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Why can’t she just say so? She’s got this whole language of her own. I don’t hear other Brits talking like they’ve got Shakespeare stuck up their rear ends.’

  ‘Ah, but don’t forget, the British Isles changes with the times. It’s open to international influences. Burma’s been stuck in a time warp for the past forty years. Khin probably learned her English from Gilbert and Sullivan.’

  I thought about it.

  ‘They’re old English guys, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  Chapter 2

  “I want you to drain every ounce of their blood, even if it kills them.”

  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

  ‘Siam’ was the title of Hollywood’s latest over-budget goose. It was the week before the heavies arrived from Los Angeles and two thousand other extras would be added to the payroll for the big battle scenes. Meanwhile they had to shoot the segments with assorted Asians acting as village folk. We were under the tutelage of local director, Pongpun Wichaiwong, more intimately known as Boon. He’d brought his own film crew from Bangkok and there were three Thai television actors who, according to Sissy, were famous. I didn’t watch a lot of TV. They’d be the ones who got to scream in close ups. An ex-Navy Seal stalwart had flown in from the states to tutor us all in falling over and throwing ourselves to the ground as if projected by a bomb blast.

  In all, we numbered a hundred; a good size to work with. There were two scenes to be assembled; one, a Burmese patrol being ambushed by half-a-dozen American mercenaries and the other, a platoon running amok after being sprayed by deadly liquid poison from a fleet of paper hot-air balloons. As neither scene involved name actors they’d been entrusted to Director Boon. He had eighteen Thai films under his belt, three of which had won awards at international festivals. For ‘Siam’, his name would appear deep down the credits under ‘in-country direction unit’, but for these two three-minute segments, he would make more than the gross for his last four movies. Some might argue that this prostitution was below a respected cinematographer but Boon was a pragmatist and an artist. He rarely received the budgets he requested from Thai studios so this was a chance to spend rashly and show what he could do.

&nbs
p; Quite apart from being a genius, Boon was also what Sissy would call, ‘a lad’. His regular crew worshipped him and the extras working with him that week quickly joined the ranks of admirers. He’d brought everyone salted cashews from his small plantation in the south. He made play of work. He explained what he was doing and how he hoped to achieve it and he partied with the menials. He was a great general at ease with his troops.

  On the Tuesday, Mair and Arny were off getting bloodied for an upcoming massacre. Sissy, Khin and I found ourselves eating lunch with Boon at the foot of Chiang Mai’s own Grand Canyon. Deep in the southern suburbs across the Samoeng road were the remains of a fantastic project conceived during the building boom. Land owners leased out rights to dig for laterite and gravel. The greater the need, the deeper the open mines were sunk until the earth was pitted with gaping trenches. The deepest of these was some fifty yards down and two hundred yards across. The effect was spectacular. It had everything an ambush could ask for: towering but fragile cliffs, crevasses to hide in, and pretty water turned turquoise by the deep iron and aluminum deposits. The team had been shooting there since six in the morning and the caterers had delighted all but the most unadventurous foreigners by turning up with glutinous rice and fermented fish lahp for lunch. Many of the crew and extras were from the northeast so this was a treat.

  ‘This was your idea.’ Sissy didn’t bother to make it a question for Boon. They’d first met when Boon was stage manager at a large transvestite cabaret in Pattaya then again on the TV soap. Like most people who’d met Sissy, he’d kept in touch. It was through him she got her extra work. The director broke off a nugget of sticky rice and dipped it in the fish sauce. He sat opposite us cross-legged on the ground with a broad, gibbon-like grin across his face.

  ‘What makes you think that?’ he asked.

  He was fluent in symbolism and narrative but had little English so our group spoke in Thai. Khin was left behind. She could translate the most ancient Siamese texts and read temple inscriptions unfathomable to the average local but that left her trailing in live conversations by some four hundred years.

  ‘Because you give a shit,’ Sissy replied. ‘I bet the great white bosses ordered sandwiches and you changed the order.’

  ‘All that white bread takes the fight out of a man,’ he said. ‘Sticky rice leaves something burning in the heart.’

  ‘Teacher,’ I addressed the older man respectfully and bowed my head slightly, ‘what are the Americans going to do when they discover your scenes are more beautiful and make theirs look like crap?’

  Boon laughed from his gut. He was fifty with a paunch and he gathered up his long grey hair into a colourful scrunchie. He wore denim so weather-bleached and tight it looked like a layer of dry skin on him. His face was round and pinchable like a baby’s, but with long straggly chin hair.

  ‘Oh,’ he smiled, ‘no problem. They have software over there that can make anything look ordinary.’

  He laughed again, scooped up a wad of rice and fish and fed it into his happy mouth. Even when eating he asked questions. He had an insatiable creative hunger and thirst for knowledge. After only ten minutes with our eclectic group he knew more about us than our own mothers which, in my case, I concede, wasn’t that hard. He had filed away the fact that I was a journalist, single, probably unmarriageable and that Khin was a fanatical researcher.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘we’ll have a real Burmese amid the legions of fake ones. Great.’

  ‘She’s a full-time international student at Chiang Mai University,’ I lied. The fewer people who knew Khin was illegal the better.

  ‘The three of you seem very close.’

  ‘Closer than the three kings,’ I announced proudly.

  At the center of the moat city in the place of honour in front of the old City Hall was the monument to the three kings: Mangrai, Ramkamhaeng, and Ngammeuang. In 1296, King Mangrai, the local regent, invited the kings of Payao and Sukhothai to advise him on a proposed site for the new capital of the Lanna region soon to be called Chiang Mai. It was politicking at its most blatant but it ensured a lifetime union between the three. It was an alliance that had weathered a number of storms before it became a friendship but the three kings came to represent tolerance and common sense over the usual opportunism and butchery of the day.

  ‘I’m Mangrai,’ Sissy confirmed.

  ‘Damn it,’ I said. ‘You always gets to be Mangrai.’

  ‘Tell me it’s a coincidence me and the great warrior were born on October 2nd,’ said Sissy. ‘I’m reincarnated, Boon. You’re sitting before the great-to-the-power-of-something grandson of King Mangrai.’

  ‘Not his queen?’ asked Boon. Sissy ignored the comment.

  ‘Great-granddaddy Mangrai was the man up here, Teacher Boon,’ he said. ‘He capitulated all the lands in the north, up into Burma and China, then through stealth and horrific violence he brought great peace upon the region. All the surrounding kingdoms looked up to him and admired his lack of morals. My sister, Jimm here is the King of Sukhothai because she thinks with her fanny. Her ancestor had an affair with the wife of the King of Phayao and got away with it. Khin’s obviously the King of Phayao cause she’s got no idea what’s going on around her.’

  ‘See, Teacher? We know it all,’ I said, resenting the accusation that I thought with my fanny. ‘If you need to hire us any time as historical advisors I guess we could arrive at a rate to make the three of us happy.’

  Boon was enjoying the show.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I’d believe a word you two say, but I’ve got some projects coming up soon. I’m interested in your Burmese scholar, here. I bet she has a wealth of knowledge I could tap into.’

  ‘I’m her agent,’ I cut in.

  ‘I do her hair and makeup,’ Sissy added.

  ‘We come as a set,’ I said.

  Khin was now only 371 years behind the conversation. When the translation caught up with her she reacted by telling us she didn’t come cheaply. An exiled Burmese had to make a living where she could, but she insisted on working only one day out of three.

  ‘She’s got something else on?’ Boon asked.

  ‘Khin’s even more distracted than usual these days,’ Sissy told him. ‘She’s on a …’

  ‘I don’t think we need to trouble the director with the details of Khin’s project,’ I interrupted.

  ‘She’s on a treasure hunt,’ said Sissy, ignoring me as usual.

  I switched to English. ‘Shut up, Bro!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a secret.’

  ‘This is Khin, man,’ she said. ‘It’s not gonna take anyone long to notice she ain’t a real normal lady.’

  ‘Exactly. Do you think this man’s going to hire Khin if he knows she’s a nut ball?’

  ‘Treasure?’ Boon asked.

  ‘Nah, I was just kidding,’ said Sissy, switching back to Thai. ‘She comes across a lot of weird shit in her research.’

  ‘Treasure hunts are big in movies now,’ said Boon. ‘I could see a place for a Thai clue chase story. The Da Vinci Code and National Treasure grossed big. If she’s got any ideas …’

  ‘I don’t know …’ I said.

  ‘I could, say, fund her research for a few more months and see if she comes up with something we could write a script from.’

  I looked at Sissy who nodded.

  ‘Well, there are a lot of interesting stories she’s fond of telling us.’

  ‘I’d like to hear some.’

  I translated for Khin being careful to point out we hadn’t given away any secrets.

  ‘You can make something up,’ I told her.

  ‘Then I’m keen as mustard,’ said Khin.

  ‘Good,’ I said and turned to Sissy. ‘That means ‘yes’, right?’

  ‘Sure does.’

  ‘How did you all get together, if you don’t mind my asking?’ Boon said.

  ‘We met in a bookshop,’ Sissy told him. Boon’s face expressed his doubt. ‘
No, serious. Me and Jimm used to hang out in one of the secondhand bookshops near the Thapae Gate. We found Khin in there one day.’

  ‘Under K,’ I added.

  Khin had arrived in Chiang Mai from the University of Rangoon two years earlier. She’d come officially as a scholar and researcher to spend two months at the history department of Chiang Mai University. When her two months were up she’d refused to go back. She’d walked into the dean’s office, sat in her uncomfortable visitor’s chair and claimed academic asylum. She explained that the junta in her own country was suppressing academic freedom and stifling the rights of scholars to accurately document Burmese history.

  It had been a difficult moment for CMU administrators. Khin Thein Aye was a respected historian and the scandal of having her arrested and deported would have lost the university a good deal of face in the international community. Face was practically all they had left so they dealt with the situation in the same way that many problems are solved in Southeast Asia. They pretended to know nothing about it. Officially, Khin had returned to Rangoon after her two-month tenure. They ceased to pay her per diem, removed her name from the list of visiting professors, and ‘poof’ the problem had vanished. They had no idea who this lanky woman stalking the history reading room and poring over palm leaf manuscripts might be.

  Khin had become disconnected and broke simultaneously. It was a chance meeting with Sissy and me at a secondhand bookshop that prevented her from eating the palm leaf manuscripts she was working on. We’d scratched around to find her under-the-table English tutoring and translating work. For one brief period we even had her in uniform as a night watchman at a housing estate. I got her the rented house for next to nothing. On occasions she received small royalties for her articles in foreign publications. As she seemed to spend very little of her income and occupied much of her days agonizing over deadly serious texts, this humble income had kept her alive for two years.

  Her parents had died of preventable diseases they couldn’t afford to have treated. Her only brother had been shot in the student protests of 88, so Khin had nobody to send money to and no homesickness for a country she didn’t like that much.