Anger spread all over Krungthep through mimeographed flyers handed out to passersby, and by impassioned voices on unsanctioned radio broadcasts and street corners, where crowds—not just university students but also bus drivers and street peddlers—stood to listen until they, too, became part of the beast.
When the animal grew even larger, the masses inside it swelling into tens of thousands, it spread up and down the length of the capital’s grandest avenues. When it needed to sleep, cardboard and scraps served as mats. When it needed to eat and drink, money was pooled to haul in pickup truckloads of water canisters and sacks of rice. Meals were cooked in open-air kitchens, supplemented with whatever the street hawkers were selling.
At a multigroup committee meeting, one of the demonstration organizers brought up reports that the toilet situation was getting dire. If they didn’t want to lose the support of surrounding residents and merchants, a solution needed to be found.
They looked at one another, hoping someone would know what to do. Who had any idea how to build toilets?
A hand went up, a young man. They asked him who he was and what he had in mind. The young man spoke in a low voice, and the crowd yelled at him to speak louder.
He was—he said, at slightly higher volume—a second-year engineering student, part of the agricultural university’s faction. Back home in Prachuap, he had helped his father set up toilets on fishing boats, and he was also the boy who had to clean them. If he had more time, he could likely design a better setup, but the most expedient solution that came to his mind would require only some hacksaws and metal pipe, or if that wasn’t available, thick hollow bamboo would do. And buckets. Many, many buckets.
Get this patriot what he needs, the committee commanded their underlings. The students around him patted his back and exhorted him not to fail them. He wouldn’t, he promised. The animal would continue to grow. The fates of their generation and generations to come would hinge on its decisive victory, and he would tend to his part.
Over the next day, he built a row of makeshift toilets that emptied into an already filthy canal. Open-air for the men, and for the women a separate row shielded by donated curtains. The committee asked him to supervise the cleaning shifts, and he agreed to the thankless assignment. Volunteers would often disappear when their turn came. The ones left were able to convince a nearby mechanic shop to let them borrow a long hose. When the inevitable clogging problems occurred, he was the one to wrap his nose under perfumed cloth and open the affected joints.
It was worth it, the engineering student said to himself. The animal he was part of was about to save the country. On the radio, the police proclaimed that no force would be used against the animal. The animal would be victorious if it didn’t back away. It would grow larger and stronger. It would spread through the streets of Krungthep, and with every step that it lurched forward, all the world would hear it coming.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Marching with the crowd toward the rallying point at Democracy Monument, the engineering student registered the sublimity of the scenery and circumstances around him. Just over a year back, straight out of secondary school, he couldn’t have foreseen himself as one of the nameless many—now more than three hundred thousand, one newspaper estimated—chanting at the top of his lungs, raising his fists to join the others.
It was October 1973. Any other year, the students would have been worrying about examinations and, if they’d scored well enough to genuflect for their diploma, about whatever was to be the rest of their lives. For the engineering student, October should have meant looking forward to the start of the term break; he had planned to board a train at Hua Lamphong and ride southward to his home village, staring out the window at the passing scenery of salt farms and crop fields crisscrossed by hastily dug red-dirt roads and the distant peaks of the mountain ranges that bordered Burma. It was the reverse of the view outside his train window when he’d left his hometown for Krungthep, having promised his parents that he would bring back pride and honor for his family.
Before his arrival at the university, he’d had no idea there was such a thing as protests. In his home province of Prachuap, if anyone had a grievance with the governance, they might approach the village headman, who might, depending on the breadth of the complaints or whether he had won or lost at high-low the previous night, gather other elders to his house. Generous quantities of home-distilled rum would be passed around, and by the next morning few would remember their grief or the promises made to them.
His family back home knew little about his involvement with the protest groups. In letters to his mother, he mentioned only the things he wished their village had—uninterrupted electricity and multistory department stores selling all kinds of merchandise, even though he couldn’t afford most of it. And the things he wished Krungthep could have of Prachuap—the cool, breathable air wafting from the sea and the long bands of stars whitening the night sky. He told his mother he was eating well and never skipped meals. He talked of his new friends and all the good, supportive professors he’d come to know.
The truth was that he didn’t have very many friends even in his own department, preferring to spend the hours outside of class listening to his records while finishing up his problem sets. He was polite to a fault, his manners betraying a palpable shyness that arose from not wanting to inconvenience others, from not being from the capital and not being conditioned to speak in proper, unaccented Krungthep dialect or to dress other than in the requisite university dress of white shirts and dark pants. He found comfort in the empty back rows of lecture halls and on the outdoor benches that were too sunny for the capital-born. There and in his room he could concentrate on his studies, at the least, and advance himself.
After he finished his problem sets, he liked to lie down in the dark and put a new record on the player. The records weren’t even his. He had been asked to safekeep the collection and the turntable that came with it while a fellow dorm resident took a term off to sort out family matters. That neighbor never came back. At first, the engineering student didn’t know what to think of the music. There was enough of it to fill two whole rows on his shelf, mostly of American jazz musicians. He had never listened to anything but loog-toong his whole life, with its folksy, upbeat declarations of love and hardship and the strangely comforting shrillness of the singers’ voices, but this trove of jazz records had cost him nothing, and so he listened to each of them, to erase the silence in his room. The bass line made his fingers move as if he were bouncing an invisible ball. The squeals and fusillades coming out of the speakers sounded like nothing he’d heard before. He soon grew to prefer the air in his room ungently massaged by horns and pianos before he breathed it. He lay on his sleeping mat and felt his matter vibrate and dissolve. It occurred to him that he was not only communing with the songs he was listening to but also that he was making out what might be called songs that had all along been sounding from somewhere inside himself.
One night, as he was listening to a Coleman Hawkins LP, the lights went out in his room. A fuse had likely blown, as often happened in a run-down dormitory seemingly sewn into place by the jumbled wires creeping along ceilings. The darkness forced him outside to sit under a streetlight with a textbook for the next day’s fluid mechanics class. Another young man was already there, crouched on the ground with markers and a rusty art knife. The young man asked the engineering student if he was the one who listened to jazz all the time. The engineering student apologized if his music had been too loud. The young man said not to worry, it helped cover up the all too frequent masturbatorial groans from a nearby room. The young man showed him the layout he had been working on. It was a flyer for an upcoming student group meeting. There would be food and refreshments, the young man said. Come.
So the circumstances that had sparked his involvement with the politics of his peers could be described as accidental, or fateful, or entirely typical for a un
iversity student of that era. For the engineering student, curiosity and hunger both proved to be compelling motivations. He went to the meeting, then became a regular attendee. The noodles served were tasty and free, and he was absorbing new thinking about why things weren’t working in his country. He volunteered to help with routine organizational work, readying venues for future meetings and coordinating with the art students to make sure that sufficient quantities of posters and pamphlets were printed. As often was the case with student groups, turnover was high, interest and participation varying with class schedules and whim, and one could rise in rank simply by showing up. By early 1973, the engineering student had been entrusted to help plan matters of transport and logistics for campus gatherings. At meetings, he wore an armband that gave him authority he found discomfiting. The other students no longer called him by his name, Siripohng, or worse, Ai Pohng, the way someone might yell at their dog. They addressed him as Bigger Brother Pohng, which caused him to bow slightly each time.
The day of the protests, they shouted, Run, Bigger Brother, run! Gunfire had erupted as they marched toward Phan Fah Bridge. He ducked and crawled behind a telephone booth, glass shattering above him. From the shortcuts he took getting to class, he knew his way around the side sois and alleys that veined the old city. He ducked again and ran low toward Bang Lamphu. He heard explosions in one direction and then another. Somewhere close, men and women screamed, but he couldn’t understand their words. The air thickened with an unfamiliar chemical smell. His stinging eyes let out torrents. He ran headfirst into a tree and fell over, bloodying an arm. He was lucky that an old woman shuttering her fabric shop took a look at him and pulled him inside. He felt his way on the tiled floor and followed the slaps of her bare feet upstairs. She washed his face with tofu milk from a steel bathroom bowl and covered his eyes with a wet rag. He spent the night in the woman’s spare room, wearing her late husband’s pajamas and listening to the gunfire and the engine noise of personnel carriers that rumbled through the streets.
When he heard the radio announce that the field marshal had been removed from office and expelled from the country, he wept with happiness.
He would later find out what had befallen his friends—he could certainly call them that now. Most hadn’t been hurt, but more than a few had been torn through by M16 bullets. The fate of others was unknown, but their demise was assumed after they began appearing in the dreams of fellow students, asking for a cigarette or a Coke. Siripohng would also learn that, for his appearance in the lower ranks of the protest’s organizational charts, he had been suspended from the university. He considered it a better fate than that of the more prominent student leaders, who had been forced to flee to the mountains to escape serious charges and the possibility of sudden, involuntary disappearance. His professors assured him that when the pressure died down, he stood a very good chance of being able to continue his studies.
He stayed in Krungthep instead of returning to Prachuap. He told his mother that he was taking time off to make money from an apprenticeship at an engineering firm, to help further his job prospects after graduation. He worked in a print shop, making illegal copies of textbooks for university students, and did weekend shifts as a hotel porter. Each night, after he returned to his rented apartment, he listened to the jazz records, which he now considered his. It wasn’t a bad life, he told a coworker at the print shop. The steadiness of his days gave him comfort, and he could have stayed on that course for a good long while, waiting for the all-clear to renew his studies. Then he met her.
He had been keeping up every now and then with his student group friends. If he wasn’t working, he showed up at meetings, now held off campus at locations known only to those who’d been vetted. He was glad to be back among his fellow students, although there were many new faces he didn’t recognize, and he had to overcome his shyness at each new introduction. Many of the students still called him Bigger Brother, his prestige only having grown for his reprimand by the authorities, although he secretly felt he had not earned the titular respect because he had been safe inside while others stormed police headquarters or carried wounded colleagues out of danger. Yet when he tried to downplay his role, they commended him even more. What humility. We should all look to his example.
He met Nee at one of the meetings. He noticed her immediately, because she had come in from the monsoon rain, and unlike other arriving students, she didn’t seem too excited or unhappy about being drenched. She removed the sheet of newspaper she had wrapped in a protective cone around her head and sat down in a chair in front of him, her white blouse a shade darker where it hung wet from her shoulders. Her hair was cut in a bob just above her neck, and she had long, oarlike hands. When she flipped her notebook, which had the insignia of a more famous university than his, he marveled at her immaculate handwriting.
He ended up working with her on a subcommittee to restock supplies, and he tried his best, at the biweekly meetings, not to prolong his glances in her direction. In the end, he didn’t have to gather his courage to pursue her, this unimagined, noncolor printed woman; it was she who suggested that he take her out.
He took her to an air-conditioned restaurant famous for its grilled chicken and sticky rice, one of his staples. The next time, they went together to see a foreign movie at Chalermthai Theater. It was an American cowboy comedy that made her laugh and laugh, and he tried his best to keep up with her laughter even when he didn’t quite understand the jokes. The strange world that she loved to watch befuddled him. People went around indoors with shoes on, on floors lined with furry cloths. They had times in their year when their streets turned into ice cups but without the Hale’s Blue Boy syrup. She admonished him for not realizing there was such a thing as snow.
She was only a second-year in nursing, but because she was a Krungthep woman he developed a fear that his country boy origins would doom him. He was well aware that he didn’t have an impressive job and wasn’t even an official student anymore and that he lacked the knowingness he often saw in his student friends, who competed over which social theorists to read or which foreign cigarettes to buy. And because he feared he would lose her to someone from a higher social, economic, or interestingness stratum, he grew jealous of her male friends. They often fought, and then they made love with the kind of reconciliatory passion abundant in youth, the first time unplanned in his room and the second time in a hotel room he’d reserved under a different name, out of fear—irrational, he admitted to himself—that someone he knew would see his actual name on the guest ledger and report back to his mother in his home village.
After almost a year and a half had passed, Nee decided he was fit for a meal at her mother’s. She’d insisted that she wasn’t from a wealthy family, but he worried that she was trying to be modest. To his relief, it turned out that her mother owned and ran an ordinary sundries shop in a suburban Krungthep neighborhood. The store sold newspapers and magazines out front and snacks, lozenges, and soft drinks inside. On the first floor, behind the shop, was a combined kitchen and dining room, and upstairs were the bedrooms and the rest of the living areas. In a corner of the dining room, he stood in front of a glass cabinet filled with swimming trophies and medals from Nee’s secondary-school meets. Sit, he was told, and he did, before a small spread of stir-fried watercress and a sour catfish curry and a fluffy golden omelet that hid a mound of sweetened ground pork.
After the dinner, he told her mother that she should have opened a restaurant, which her mother took as flattery but he had said with the utmost earnestness. He found out that his girlfriend—after the meal, he felt more assured calling her that—had a sister living in Japan, where she had opened a Thai restaurant. His girlfriend’s father, who had died of a heart attack five years before, had been a teacher and handsome, the very portrait of moral fortitude, judging from the black-and-white face staring down at him from a wall. Still, he was glad Nee more closely resembled her mother, who had retained an unassuming,
approachable kind of beauty that reminded him of actresses from older Thai movies. He would learn afterward that her mother had instructed her to bring him for more dinners. It made him glad, for reasons beyond the food. He loved the sense of family the dinner granted him. He missed his own family, and this was as close as he’d felt to coming home, without having to lie or feel ashamed about his failures.
Each week, he looked forward to their routine: Friday dinner with her mother, catching a new movie, helping out with the student group’s activities. Sometimes, when tips at his hotel job allowed, they even splurged on steak or macaroni at a Western restaurant. They fought less often. He felt sure that he loved her, but he also wondered whether what he felt was really love or some kind of nameless, pleasurable emotion that had simply formed out of relief from years of not having. Matters of love had grown more complicated than he’d ever imagined. His parents had gone about it the way people had done for generations: after the astrological questions had been satisfied, a parade of dancers and merrymakers had appeared at his maternal grandparents’ house and his grandfather’s permission was requested. When it was received, his father and mother were engaged. If a ceremonial parade like that were to appear on a Krungthep street, they’d get run off by a haphazardly driven bus.
The thought of marrying Nee crossed his mind more than once. He had been unable to believe that she had happened to him, in this life. Before her, he had thought that he would have to return to Prachuap and find a bride among the fishermen’s daughters with whom he might have gone to secondary school and who probably only remembered him as the smart but unbearably quiet boy who had won a provincial scholarship to a university in the capital. He planned on returning to the university; he’d heard that others had had success in their petitions for readmission. It wasn’t that he missed studying engineering. He no longer wanted to feel like he was wasting away in menial jobs that made little use of his mind. He needed again to be able to speak to his parents without shame. He wanted Nee to feel proud to be with a respectable someone.
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