Jim Algie

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

  Fascinated by their legacy, and these sins of omission, Anchana and I went in search of relics from Chang and Eng’s past. Much of the twins’ early life is still a matter of conjecture. Both the musical and the two novels are accurate, however, in documenting their birth in a floating riverside home, 70 kilometres southwest of Bangkok, during the rainy season of 1811. If the old bamboo-and-thatch floating homes have long since been replaced by a Caltex oil refinery and some fish sauce factories, traces of the maritime life Chang and Eng once led (their father was a fisherman) are still high water marks in the country’s smallest province. Head down the roads beside the Mae Khlong River near their birthplace to see fishing trawlers on the water and boatyards along the banks. Workmen—pounding, polishing and patching—cling to ten metre-high scaffolds of bamboo hanging from the sides of trawlers. And the stench of rotten fish will make you squint.

  A few kilometres north, past tiger-prawn farms, salt flats and ornate temples, is Don Hoy Lot, where the river’s mouth kisses the Gulf of Thailand. Here, the banks are crowded with enormous wooden restaurants up on stilts. And the seafood is as famous as the crab-eating macaques that scamper across the mudflats around dusk in search of their staple diet.

  As conjoined children of mixed Siamese-Chinese parentage, Chang and Eng were jeered at and taunted endlessly by their peers. Worse, much worse, was how they came to be blamed by superstitious Siamese for causing a cholera epidemic which killed 30,000 people and left the river clogged with corpses. In the Singaporean production, Chang and Eng: The Musical, a song titled ‘Living Curse’ details their frightful ordeal at the hands of a potential lynch mob.

  But what sustained the twins in their most despairing hours? In the opinion of Ken Low, the musical’s composer from Malaysia, it was the unconditional love of their mother. This motif has played well in Asia: the musical is the longest-running theatrical work in Singaporean history, was well received in Bangkok, and also became the first English-language musical ever staged in China towards the end of the millennium, where the composer told me, “We were treated like rock stars.”

  Today, every Thai person knows who the Siamese twins are. But most would not recognise the names Chang and Eng. In Thai, the twins are known as ‘In Jan’. It’s an auspicious name, meaning ‘Earth Moon’. But it does lead to the common misconception that they were one entity. Not so. The brothers had very different demeanours: Chang was gregarious and playful, whereas Eng tended to be more withdrawn and studious.

  In Thai history books, children learn that the brothers were the favourite performers at King Rama II’s court. Renowned as a patron of the arts and comedy troupes, the monarch often had them perform at the Grand Palace in Bangkok. It has been speculated that his patronage saved them from the wrath of superstitious villagers. Like the twins, King Rama II was also born in Samut Songkhram, where a park featuring a museum of the monarch’s personal effects, a garden with 100 different kinds of plants mentioned in Thai literature, and an open-air stage for annual performances of masked dramas on Thai Artist’s Day, February 24, is named after him in the provincial capital.

  As adolescents, Chang and Eng helped provide for their hard-luck family by raising ducks and selling their eggs. Bigger than chicken eggs, and with a darker yolk, duck eggs are a crucial ingredient in the piquant seafood salad called yum, in rice porridge, and, when mixed with coconut milk and sugar, in many Thai desserts. The brothers would also have known how to make one of the province’s specialties—‘thousand-year-old eggs’. To preserve them, the duck eggs are boiled in salty water and left for a week to soak. They are then wrapped in rice husks and earth and packed away in a box for up to a year. Even today, local fishermen take a good supply of them on long journeys for protein.

  Along one of the province’s many canals, we stayed in an old-fashioned Siamese-style house with a verandah overlooking the water. The roofless shower outside in the garden was overhung by the cannonball-sized fruits of a pomelo tree. This was one of the ‘home-stays’ run by local families in the Amphawa District. Along with appetising local meals, Moo Baan Song Thai also offered boat tours of a floating market, fruit orchards, Wat Amphawan Chetiyaram where King Rama II’s ashes are interred, and a nocturnal outing to watch fireflies.

  Even without booking a tour all we had to do was sit on the verandah and watch a portal into the past open before our eyes. In the early morning, with birds gossiping and fish splashing, monks in saffron robes paddled down the canal, just as they have done for centuries. The Buddhist faithful congregated on rickety piers to put plastic bags of food in the monks’ alms bowls. A short time later, a wizened old woman in a conical hat paddled by to serve us steaming bowls of noodles right on the waterfront. Because the canals and weatherworn buildings of wood have been so well preserved, the Amphawa District won a UNESCO prize for Cultural Conservation. Those enticements, and a ‘floating market’ in the early evening (yet to be watered down by mass-market tourism), have made the capital a favourite escape for weekend parolees from the concrete prison and workaday world of Bangkok.

  After breakfast, I asked Anchana if she’d ever learned about the twins from Thai history books. She said she had, but did not know much about their later lives. I explained how they married sisters in North Carolina, adopted the surname of Bunker, and sired 21 children.

  Anchana looked quizzical. So I told her about Darin Strauss’ novel, Chang and Eng, and a middle chapter entitled ‘The Mysteries of the Bridal Bed’ that details how the twins lost their virginity. After their wedding in 1843, the conjoined brothers agreed that when one of their wives was in bed with them, the other brother would go into a trance and try to be ‘mindless’.

  When he was sleeping with his wife, Sarah, for the first time, Eng thought, “I felt my wife had become a strange part of me, not integrated fully—but not fully only because this new part of me was experiencing its own pleasure. In my hand, her hand, trembling and weak, her fingers hooked around mine—and the only way to describe what I experienced is as a new-sprung void in my chest, sucking out a solitary life’s worth of loneliness and wanting now to be filled with something new.”

  Anchana’s next question was whether their children were normal. To find out, we visited the museum dedicated to them, four kilometres from the centre of Samut Songkhram city. Outside the museum stands a statue of the twins alongside a full-scale replica of their floating home. Even though it was early on a Friday afternoon, this sporadically open and frequently shut museum was closed, necessitating a flurry of increasingly angry phone calls from Anchana to local authorities in order to get them to open it for us. No wonder so many Thais fear the flare-gun tempers of the Southerners. But her persistence paid off; they came down and opened it for us.

  This was the most pitiful museum I have ever seen. Even Hitler’s final bunker must’ve been a cheerier place. Half of the old posters and photos were propped up against concrete pillars and the bare concrete floor was salted and peppered with bird droppings. Whatever its shortcomings—and they are legion—the gallery of fading images provided some touching glimpses into the twins’ personal and professional lives: their wives, their children, their one-time manager P.T. Barnum, and a few of their old circus posters. Most of their kids looked normal and healthy. The portrait of their two lovely daughters—Eng’s Kate, who looked Asian, and Chang’s Nannie, who looked American—was particularly heartrending when I read the caption detailing how both daughters died of tuberculosis at the age of 27. The true sideshow connoisseur will not want to miss the promotional photos for their final, disastrous tour in 1866 after the Civil War had devastated their farm in North Carolina and their slaves were freed. By that stage, the twins were already in their 50s, their star had dimmed, and Chang, once the gregarious wisecracker of the duo, had become a gloomy alcoholic. Eng, a lifelong teetotaler, was repulsed by his brother’s habit, partly because the alcohol had a physical effect on him, too. Doubly defeated, their performances became erratic and they made little money.
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br />   The officials assured us that thanks to a recent visit by some of the twins’ distant relatives, who had promised additional funding, the museum would be undergoing extensive renovations. I hope that’s true. As it stands now, the local prejudice against the twins, and the superstitions surrounding them, have barely changed in almost two centuries.

  ***

  For many visitors to the province, the highlight is an evening ride via long-tail boat to see the nesting grounds of fireflies. Motoring along the dark canals, a fan of light from the boat illuminated long-abandoned houses on stilts and bats swooping across the water. In places the foliage was so thick, it blocked out the sky and moon. This trip into the swampy heart of Siamese darkness was suddenly lit up as the mangrove trees growing out of the muddy banks blinked on and off with thousands of fireflies making quicksilver flashes.

  On the way back to our canal-side hideaway, I imagined the two young twins watching the fireflies beam their SOS of loneliness some two centuries before us, as I explained to Anchana the ending to Darin Strauss’ novel. In spite of all the bad blood between them caused by Chang’s alcoholism and Eng’s embitterment, twinned with their mutual poverty, when Eng woke up in the middle of a cold January night to find his brother dead beside him, the final act of his life was one of reconciliation. It was witnessed only by his wife Sarah:

  “He twists away from her—he draws his brother closer to him. Eng takes his twin into his arms: This is the image Sarah keeps of her husband for the rest of her life. Eng dies.”

  Although Strauss has used poetic license to recreate their final hours, it is true that the brothers died within hours of each other. An engraving on the side of the twins’ statue outside the museum in Samut Songkhram shows that even in death they could not escape the morbid voyeurism that turned their lives into a lifelong sideshow: Their corpses were sent to a hospital in Philadelphia for an autopsy and the doctors made a plaster cast from them. But the connecting ligament, which helped to bring them from a floating hovel to the court of King Rama II, from being the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’ to family men and farmers, was never severed.

  The original Siamese twins are buried in a double coffin in North Carolina.

  Country ‘n’ Eastern: Home on the Dude Ranch

  In some of the earliest photos of my brother and I in the family album, we’re dressed up in cowboy outfits and sitting on a rocking horse; in another shot we’re posing in the backyard with our friends, wearing cowboy hats and brandishing cap guns that look like Colt .45s. As children growing up on the Canadian prairies, we wanted to be outlaws like Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy. After school, we played ‘Cowboys and Indians’ and calibrated our fantasies by watching re-runs of old TV shows like Gunsmoke and Bonanza; we learned to swagger and talk tough like Clint Eastwood and John Wayne in the old Westerns (“Vamoose, ya doggone varmints!”), and gave ourselves nicknames like ‘Tex’ and ‘Hoss’. To practise our roping skills, we tried to throw a lasso made out of a belt around the neck of our mom’s Pekingese. But the miniscule yap-dog wasn’t much of a surrogate for a Texas longhorn steer.

  During the summer holidays, our most memorable times were spent riding horses in the mountains of Jasper, and watching cowboys wrestle steers and race chuck-wagons at the world’s most famous rodeo, the Calgary Stampede. But we never got to rob any stagecoaches or fight off a horde of whooping, circling and scalping Apaches. And the only real Indians we ever saw were panhandling winos fleeing lives of deprivation on squalid reservations.

  Little did I realise that my childhood aspirations would not come halfway true for another few decades until I visited the Pensuk Great Western Resort in northeast Thailand.

  A LIVING GHOST TOWN

  The main streets in the resort’s town of High Hill could be the set for an old ‘horse opera’. There’s a sheriff’s office and a jail, a gunsmith and the Deadrock Bull Saloon, a blacksmith and a barber. Between the bank and Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound is a fading sign: ‘Deputy Wanted: Looking For A Few Good Men To Help Out The Law. Must Be Good With A Gun And A Good Horseman’.

  All of the tumbledown buildings, made of wood and bricks, looked authentically weather-beaten. Hidden speakers played a hit parade of 1970s’ country chestnuts like Waylon Jennings’ ‘Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys’ and Charlie Daniels’ ‘The Devil Went Down To Texas’. As photographer Jason Lang and his girlfriend, coupled with Anchana and I, sauntered down the street towards the enormous corral for the first time, Jason said, “It all looks so real you expect some cowboy to run out on the balcony, get shot, and fall down into the street.” Then the Californian yelled, “Yee haw! Yip, yip, yip, yip!”

  Many of the resort’s rooms are actually inside High Hill’s buildings. Behind the horseshoe-studded façade of the blacksmith shop, our room had a plaster mock-up of an antelope’s head on the wall, beside cut-outs of pine trees that framed the TV set. An old rifle was mounted on the bricks above the electric fireplace. Glaring down at us from over the mirror was the bust of an Indian warrior with a feather headdress. Instead of leaving sweets on the pillows, the maid had left us a pair of cowboy-style neckerchiefs.

  The owner of the resort, Yuttana Pensuk, modelled the buildings and signs on a real 19th-century ghost town in Nevada named Calico. When construction began in the mid-1990s, he said, with a cowboy-hat grin, “All the local people thought I was crazy.”

  At first it was only intended as a weekend dude ranch for him and his friends, but little by little, they added air-conditioned teepees, shooting ranges for rifles and archery, a karaoke room, a swimming pool, a tram that resembles an old steam train and a ‘Cowboys and Indians’ theme show on Saturday nights. Now it’s a 25-horse town with 70 full-time employees and 30 part-timers, and the resort can accommodate up to 300 guests.

  The owner’s obsession with the Wild West began around the same time as mine did, but under much scarier circumstances. His father was a Thai soldier during the Vietnam War, and his kinfolk all lived together on a big military base in the northeastern province of Udon Thani, where he was stationed. Yuttana recalled how, every ten minutes, an American fighter plane would shriek down the runway on its way to drop a payload of bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. In their down time, the American bomber crews watched lots of Westerns.

  And so did Yuttana—who can be seen every weekend at the resort, walking around in a black hat and complete cowboy duds, a holster with a fake six-shooter strapped to his thigh.

  Much of the resort’s appeal to middle-class and well-heeled Thais (who make up about 90 per cent of the visitors) and other Asians (mostly from Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan) comes from Hollywood films and old TV shows. In Thailand, the allure of cowboy folklore and the dozens of Western-themed bars with water buffalo skulls and wagon wheels, also stems from the fact that the kingdom is, like the Wild West, an agrarian society rife with outlaws (read: gangsters and hit men). As the owner’s wife—nicknamed Ping Pong—said, “Thai people don’t have heroes like Americans do, but you see the old films, and wow, cowboys are cool.”

  When she said ‘heroes’ what she was really referring to were ‘heroes’ from rural farming areas, like the cowboys in the American Westerns that were shown in Thai cinemas and on TV after the GIs arrived.

  Whatever heroic tendencies my trusty sidekick—now known as Jason ‘Shooter’ Lang—and I possessed were blown on the first night. Stumbling down the street of High Hill to our rooms, three sheets to the wind, we spotted an enormous insect smashing its carapace into a fluorescent light above the blacksmith shop that was the façade of our room.

  “Dude, that is the biggest bug I’ve ever seen, Tex.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s like the vampire bat of the insect world. Shooter! Duck! It’s coming for our necks.”

  As the insect dive-bombed us, Jason ducked and shrieked while I threw up my arms to ward off an imminent attack: a slapstick scene of Keystone cowboys, causing our girlfriends to have a fit of the giggl
es. Fearlessly, Anchana walked over to the light, reached up and caught the monster in her hands. “Come on, you guys. They don’t bite. We used to play with them on the sugarcane farm.” Grinning, she threw the insect into the air, where it disappeared into a black velvet night encrusted with stars.

  In this spleen of the tropical woods, the womenfolk were making Shooter and Tex look like a couple of greenhorns and yellow-bellied cowards.

  DARK HORSES

  The last time I went trail riding was up in the mountains of Jasper, Alberta. While cutting through the forest, a branch whipped me across the face. I lost my balance and fell off the horse, but my foot was caught in the stirrup. The horse dragged me along for about 50 metres before it stopped. It was a miracle I didn’t break any bones.

  Trail riding is dangerous, warned Yuttana.

  “If the horse knows you don’t have any experience and cannot control him, then he will try to buck you off,” the owner said. “Another thing to be wary of is that horses spook easily.”

  The owner related a cautionary tale of a Thai member of parliament, who was an expert rider, but up in the nearby mountains, he was galloping down a trail when a wild pig appeared in front of them. The horse stopped dead in its tracks, catapulting him into a tree and fatally fracturing his skull.

  For the nervous novice, Pensuk Great Western offers riding lessons. All the basics are covered, from saddling up and reining the beast in, to trotting, cantering and how to fall. “When you’re falling, you have to pull the horse in that direction to break your fall,” said Yuttana.

  But you can’t really experience the cowboy life until you’re galloping down a trail to the percussion of hooves and the tune of the wind sawing through the trees like a fiddle, the forests and streams and sugarcane plantations all dappled with sunlight, cows grazing in pastures and water buffaloes pulling plows in rice paddies—a country mile from the desk-jockey lives most of us live in the city.