In reference to this image, the Australian photographer—who went on to win the World Press Photo Award and many others—told me, “An old woman was crossing the highway outside Bangkok when she was cut in half by a car, which was abandoned by the side of the road after the driver fled the scene. Her hand was left on the bonnet. It was unbelievably depressing.”
His experiences with them had driven home the fact—and the fear—that road accidents are the leading cause of death in Thailand: an average of two people die on the roads every hour. It has one of the highest rates of traffic fatalities in the world. More tourists and expats die or are injured in road accidents than by any other means.
“It was crazy, driving at 160 kilometres an hour on a Friday night, trying to beat other body-snatchers to the cadaver. Thais won’t get out of the way for an ambulance, but they will for Poh Teck Tung, so we’d often get to the accident before the police. One night I was in the back of the van with three dead bodies rolling up against me every time it turned. We’d picked up one of them from a hospital and he’d already been dead for a few days. The stench was terrible,” he said.
Near a footbridge on a busy road out in some industrial suburb of Bangkok, we pull over behind a fleet of Poh Teck Tung rescue vehicles. Staff members are running towards the bridge, jogging up the stairs. A policemen stringing yellow crime-scene tape across the top of the stairs lets us pass. Then we see the body: young, male, Thai, on his back. The glare of orange streets lights lends the scene a hellish tint.
Whether he was shot in the forehead or hit with something heavy like a crescent wrench, nobody’s sure. For once, there’s none of that Thai cheeriness. The mood is sombre, voices drowned out by the drone and din of traffic. Speculation runs rife that it might be a drug-related killing, or possibly a mugging—common on footbridges—gone violently wrong. The dead man, in his faded T-shirt and rubber flip-flops, may have lost his life... for a few hundred baht?
A few members of Poh Teck Tung kneel down beside the corpse, pointing at the fatal wound, while a crime photographer from the police propaganda magazine, 191 (the emergency line in Thailand), takes some blood money snaps. A few of the cops standing by look lost in troubled thoughts. Who’s going to have to tell his family?
11:02 pm. Ram Intra Road.
A dozen volunteers from the foundation, half of them female, are sitting around beside a mini-mart and petrol station, near one of the most accident-prone roads in Bangkok. Anchana is relating some of her experiences as a nurse’s assistant in a Bangkok Emergency Room, which encourages them to relate the grisly details of their work.
One volunteer shows off a prominent tattoo of the foundation’s emblem on his forearm. Another man, Kitti Cheounarom, says he’s been volunteering for ten years now while waiting on a lengthy list for a position among the 200 paid workers.
One night, he says, they received a call from a guy who’d been taking a piss in someone’s backyard and smelled the stench of decomposition. Members of Poh Teck Tung dug up the backyard and found some bones. A minute later, an elderly woman opened the back door and yelled at them, “What the hell are you doing? I buried my dog out there a few weeks ago!”
Kitti and the crew double over with laughter. In a high-pressure job like this, black humour is the best safety valve.
2:58am. Poh Teck Tung Hospital on Bamrung Muang Road.
We’ve been waiting here for hours now. The videographer is asleep in the front seat, Anchana has gone home, and a French photojournalist and I are sitting on the curb beside the pick-up truck, chatting about Thailand’s other main group of volunteer rescue workers, the Ruamkatanyu Foundation. Their main office is on the corner of Surawong and Rama IV Road, right beside Wat Hua Lamphong.
I tell Remy how Anchana and I donated a few hundred baht to the lady at the counter and received two pieces of paper to write our names on. In another room were stacks of empty coffins. Following the other donors, we glued the pink slips to one of them. Connected to the office is a Chinese-style shrine. Here, we lit sticks of incense for deities such as the Tiger God, then burnt the other pieces of paper with our names on them to make merit for the dead. Within the span of ten minutes, there were about 15 people performing the same ritual.
One of the ladies in the office gave us a brochure about the foundation, witten in both Thai and English. Among the old photos of train wrecks and visitors from the royal family is a brief history of the foundation. During World War II, a teenager named Somkieat Somsakulrungruang was aghast at the sight of all the dead bodies and the walking wounded he saw around the Tha Tien Pier, close to the Grand Palace and the Temple of the Emerald Buddha. Allied bombers had shelled the area again and again. Somkieat, whose leg was severely lacerated by a bomb fragment, helped to collect the corpses.
Those physical and psychological wounds may have scarred him for life, but they also opened him up to the suffering of others. Years later, when he was running a small shop in the Bangkok slum of Khlong Toey, Somkieat allowed his poor customers to pay on credit. One of these labourers told him he could not afford the 80 baht to buy a coffin for his cousin. Somkieat agreed to pay for the coffin and to sponsor a religious ceremony for the deceased. With the help of his wife, Rattana, and Dr. Roj Chotirungruang, Somkieat formed the Ruamkatanyu Foundation in 1970, to not only pick up the dead and tend to the dying, but also train fire-fighters and rescue divers.
Across the country, they now have 3,000 staff and volunteers, as well as 40 rescue vehicles. True to Somkieat’s original mission, they still provide free coffins and cremation services. The needy and the grieving can contact the branch office at Wat Hualamphong, which is open 24 hours a day throughout the week.
All of a sudden, a voice crackles over the radio and the videographer, who’s been sleeping in the front seat, bolts upright, revs the ignition, and beckons for me and the photographer to jump in. Within ten minutes, we’re entering the military barracks near the Samsen Railway Station.
Hundreds of soldiers and their families live in these concrete cinder blocks. There are no balconies, only long open-air hallways. Up on the fifth floor, standing on a ledge, is a soldier dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. A policeman standing about five metres to his left—we can only see his head and cap—is trying to talk him down. Surrounding us are a dozen ambulances from different hospitals and other charity foundations and at least 40 or 50 staff, volunteers and curious bystanders. Everyone’s getting cramps in their necks and taking shallow breaths as we stand around like a pack of hyenas waiting for him to jump.
In the local press, it’s no secret that battle-lines have been drawn up between rival foundations and they’ve even carved up parts of the city like street gangs. But if they’re charity groups, why are they scrapping over cadavers?
“That’s a really hazy, sketchy topic,” Philip Blenkinsop told me. “The nice way to put it is that people know how many bodies the foundations bring in, so to make more merit they’ll donate more money to them. But I’ve also heard that some foundations have deals with hospitals to bring accident victims in and that even if there’s a hospital nearby they’ll take them to one five kilometres away.”
In this regard, they are certainly no worse than the doctors at some Thai hospitals who refuse to treat badly injured patients if they do not have the cash or credit cards to pay for the treatment.
Defending the much-maligned ‘body snatchers’ (as they’re occasionally called), Philip said that he has seen members of Poh Teck Tung save lives. “They also took really good care of me out there.”
As we watch the policeman talking to the soldier on the ledge, I hear a few bystanders asking what his room number is so in the case that he dies, they can use the digits to choose lottery tickets. It’s the same superstitious deal with the license plates of accident victims.
Not until I taste the coppery flavour of my own blood do I realise that I’ve been gnawing on my bottom lip for the last few minutes and my neck is aching from staring up at the ledge. For some muc
h-needed comic relief, a male medic from one of the other charity foundations begins chatting me up. I ask him, “Who’s the soldier up there? Do you know what’s happened to him?”
“He’s just a psycho. Do you want to go for a cocktail after?”
There’s something about the way he said ‘cocktail’ that made it sound like the most frightful of double-entendres.
Just then, with a whoosh of air-brakes, a fire truck pulls in. Excellent, finally some action. The firemen inflate a huge yellow bag and place it directly under the soldier. Our muscle tension slackens. Interest wavers. People look away, talk, light cigarettes. Soon the policeman coaxes the soldier off the ledge. He’s handcuffed, brought downstairs and put into a police truck. I’m not sure why he’s getting arrested. Perhaps it has something to with the Buddhist belief about suicide being worse than murder.
In a way, everyone looks relieved.
In another perverse way, we’re all disappointed.
One of the crime photographers complains, with the dark humour that is a necessary evil in this line of work, “If he would’ve jumped I could’ve gotten paid 1,000 baht for the photo. I guess I won’t be going out drinking this weekend.” A few of the other photographers laugh as they put away their cameras.
I’m exhausted and exasperated, too. It’s late and I don’t have a suitably gory climax for my story. On the other hand, at least the medic with the cocktail shaker has melted into the night.
4:07am. Driving back to their office with the videographer and Remy.
That first murder scene of the night is still tattooed in my memory. The young man lying there on his back. The wound on his forehead. The cheap flip-flops. The hellfire orange of the street lights above the footbridge.
Who was he? Who murdered him? Will there even be an investigation into his death? Will any relatives claim his body?
The staff and volunteers of Poh Teck Tung live with these agonising questions every night. I tell the videographer that the best thing about most jobs is that you can go home and forget about them. He smiles sadly and says that’s not the case with his work.
“We’ve saved a lot of people but the cases that haunt you are all the dead souls. One night we got called to the scene of a school bus crash a few hours outside Bangkok... absolutely horrific. Body parts were scattered everywhere and these kids were only nine or ten.
“When I was walking around the bus, this little girl who I thought was dead stood up and came staggering towards me. For a few seconds I thought I was actually seeing a ghost. But she only took about six or seven steps before blood began pouring out of her mouth and down the front of her school uniform. Then she fell straight on her face. By the time I checked her pulse, she was already dead.”
Headlights flicker across the videographer’s face. A face rutted and potholed. A face that’s seen too many murders, catastrophes and the drinking binges that provide some short-term amnesia. He looks a decade older than his 50 years. “That accident happened almost a decade ago, but it still gives me nightmares sometimes. It’s still so fresh in my mind that it could have happened tonight.”
MISADVENTURE TRAVELS
From Ayuthaya to Bangkok: A Bizarre Expat Odyssey
When Jerry Hopkins—the man who wrote the book on rock biographies with tomes on Elvis, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix—moved to Bangkok in 1993 in search of a “high-energy city with a damn interesting expat community”, he walked into Nana Plaza—wall-to-wall and floor-to-floor with go-go bars—for a drink on his first night. Then he struck up a conversation with the man at the next table, who turned out to be the Oscar-winning screenwriter who had, in the 1970s, blueprinted the still-exploding genre of ‘disaster movies’ with scripts for The Towering Inferno and The Poseidon Adventure, as well as found acting jobs for his martial arts instructor, a then-obscure actor named Bruce Lee.
“When he told me his name, I said, ‘You’re Stirling Silliphant? No shit?’ He said, ‘That’s not the usual reaction I get, but never mind.’”
Many of the expats Jerry profiled and later included in a book called Bangkok Babylon, he met in bars. They form a cast of colourful and eccentric expat characters—a CIA operative who moonlights as a movie fixer, the world’s foremost expert on the Asian elephant who spent years living in the Thai jungle with them, and a classical pianist who ended up as the most hunted pedophile in the world.
Ever since the days of Ayuthaya, when the Siamese city surrounded by a natural moat of three rivers outshone Paris and London (earning the nickname the ‘Venice of the Far East’), the country has welcomed countless adventurers, merchants, artists, traders, libertines, criminals and financial prospectors. In the National Discovery Museum Institute in Bangkok, multimedia exhibits document the influence of the West and Far East on Siam during its golden heydays of Ayuthaya (1350–1767). The Dutch, British, Indians, French, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese are all depicted in stereotypical fashion, along with their contributions to this grand port city: the Europeans brought firearms, alcohol and luxury goods, the Chinese packed tea leaves and ceramics, while the Indians stitched up the trade in textiles. An exhibit notes, ‘The Siamese state designated an area of settlement within the city for each of the major peoples. Here they could form communities and live according to their own customs.’
That openness and tolerance has rarely changed. Nor has Siam’s welcome mat ever been rolled up except for those periods when it was trampled by invaders like the Burmese and Japanese, or pulled out from under the feet of foreigners by rabble-rousing nationalists, such as after the economic crash of 1997 when Western materialism was denigrated by ads showing neckties as nooses and corkscrews as murder weapons. A favourite Thai joke of the time was, ‘What does IMF [the International Monetary Fund] stand for? I am fucked.’
Even today, the sizable expat community—numbering anywhere from 250,000 to 300,000—has retained a certain autonomy to live as they please. And the maverick entrepreneurs first drawn to the kingdom’s shores some four centuries ago continue to come in search of business and hedonism. Take Kevin Noah Windfield, for example. A finance broker on Wall Street, Kevin was sent to Thailand in the early 1990s by a firm anxious to capitalise on the country’s double-digit fiscal growth that inspired a Newsweek cover story entitled ‘Thailand’s Economic Miracle’. After coming to the country on and off for more than five years, the native of New York and New Jersey became ‘semi-permanently based here’ in 1999, before being confronted with the classic expat conundrum—should I stay or go? Because he did not graduate from an Ivy League school and does not have a bankable surname, Kevin realised he was battering his head against a low career ceiling on Wall Street. “Better to be a big fish in a small pond here than a little fish in a big pond back home,” he reckoned.
If he had stayed in the States, the casino-like odds against him ever owning a small business would have been dicey at best. Nor would he have had the chance to travel through India, Australia, Indonesia and Cambodia, meet two American presidents in Bangkok (George W. Bush greeted him with, “Hey, big guy.”) and have a five-star lunch with the former CEO of General Motors, Rick Wagoner. “I asked him if he could bring affordable Hummers to Thailand. He laughed and offered to sell me the entire company,” said Kevin, still looking a little awestruck by his encounter with the man who was at the wheel when GM crashed and burned in what amounted to the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history.
In starting his own business, the Manhattan Asset Management Co Ltd, Kevin took advantage of the long-standing relationship between America and Siam. In 1833, the two countries signed the Treaty of Commerce and Amity. It was the first treaty the US signed with an Asian power, further opening Siam to Western influences, after the kingdom had previously inked treaties with the Portuguese in 1511, the Spanish in 1598, the Dutch in 1604 and the English in 1826, once the final shots of the first Anglo-Burmese war were fired.
Signed in 1966, the Treaty of Amity and Economic Relations allows Americans the
opportunity to own certain kinds of businesses outright. That treaty was signed in the midst of a burgeoning American military presence as four big military bases were constructed by the Americans in northeast Thailand during the 1960s, when the Westernisation of modern-day Thailand began in earnest. (Until this point, the Thai slang term for ‘trendy’ was based on the English word ‘postcard’, pronounced bosacar, because most of what was known about the outside world came from the mailbox.)
The composer and symphony conductor Somtow Suchartikul (better known in the West as the horror and sci-fi novelist S. P. Somtow) grew up on Sukhumvit Soi 24 in the 1960s when the area was still awash with rice fields. “Our greatest cultural influences then were American. The TV channels at the time showed programs like Leave it to Beaver and The Twilight Zone,” he said. At the time, Thai gangsters like the notorious Daeng Bailey (nicknamed after the soft drink he loved) sported Elvis-emulating coifs and hung around American-looking bars, dancing to rock ‘n’ roll with Thai women in beehive hairdos. (American rock culture of the 1950s is also featured in an exhibit at the National Discovery Museum Institute, nicknamed the Museum of Siam.)
Somtow, who first rose to infamy in the 1970s by combining the strains of Western symphonies with Thai classical music—a local taxi driver once chased him down the street for daring to create such a cacophonous racket—is a mascot for how the nation has always flavored the ingredients of other cultures with distinctively and piquantly Thai spices. A short video in the Museum of Siam illustrates how the street sweets known as foy thong—golden strands made from the yolk of duck eggs and coconut—are of Portuguese descent. So is chilli for that matter. The museum’s exhibition on the quintessence of ‘Thainess’ has a tuk-tuk. Actually, these ‘flatulent’ vehicles are a Japanese invention given a Thai spin; the pad thai noodles were brought to Thailand by Vietnamese vendors in the 1920s; the parliamentary system is British; the royal barges and classical dances came from the Khmer; and the injustice system is hopelessly mired in Third World venality.
Jim Algie Page 6