Guan Yin, the Taoist Goddess of Mercy, is also widely worshipped in Thailand. Illustrations of her, robed in white and standing on the nose of a dragon, are common currency for those who bank on the spirit world. Women pray at shrines devoted to Guan Yin in Thailand, leaving pearl necklaces in the hope she will make them pregnant. Stories of Guan Yin’s powers of fertility are legendary. One Chinese fable states that the goddess fertilised rice paddies with her breast milk. But in other legends and statues she is a male Buddhist saint named Avalokitsvara (a Sanskrit word), who appears in different forms in Tibet, Burma and Indonesia.
Like Kali and Guan Yin, Nak is a figure shrouded in dualism. By turns loving and maternal, sinister and sexy, Nak’s complex nature has made her attractive to a host of different filmmakers. In 2005, The Ghost of Mae Nak, the first movie version written and directed by a foreigner—Mark Duffield from England—was released to mixed reviews. According to Tom Waller, the producer of the film, they modernised the tale but remained faithful to its spirit. “The young couples’ love awakens the spirit of Mother Nak, and it’s told through the grandmother’s eyes, so we can do some flashbacks to explain the legend. But mostly the film is set in contemporary Bangkok. We shot it at some creepy locations around Sukhumvit Soi 77 like the canal and the old market. Some of the Thai crew got a bit freaked out and would joke that Mae Nak was just around the corner.”
Another strand of the story that continues to fascinate is the many different accounts of what happened to Nak’s spirit. Was it ever laid to rest? Theories are rife, but evidence is scant. Tom, however, sides with folklorists who believe that after the monk took a bone out of the dead woman’s forehead to contain her spirit, he wore it around his neck like an amulet.
“We’ve dramatised all this in the film, but nobody knows what happened to this ‘bone broach’ after the monk died. It just disappeared,” Tom said. “We’re hoping someone who sees the film will be able to tell us what happened to it.”
Since then, there have not been any more films or TV series about Nak. Given the new breed of Asian horror with spectres crawling out of TV sets, using mobile phones, infesting penthouses and wreaking havoc in a phantasmagoria of special effects, the story of a rural woman from a 19th century farming community doesn’t have a ghost of a chance at the box office these days.
That, however, has not stopped all the supplicants from coming to her shrine. Some are mystical mercenaries asking for wealth and looking for winning lottery numbers in the etchings on the trees outside the shrine, but many pray to her for love or seek to cure their maladies of the heart. As Gay said about locals consulting monks and fortune-tellers as psychiatrists, Nak is also something of a relationship counsellor. Before her shrine, the lovelorn can vent their bleeding hearts without losing ‘face’ in front of anyone.
In his non-fiction book Heart Talk, Christopher Moore reckons that Thais have more expressions about this muscle than any other culture. The outpouring of songs, films, soap operas and TV shows devoted to the ins and outs of love is a never-ending flood. In that genre of romantic tragedies, the tale of a woman who died in childbirth while her husband was on the battlefield and came back from the dead along with their child to take care of him, comes from a real and much more haunting place than any of these other make-believe stories about rampaging ghouls.
As every widower and lonely heart knows, all love sagas become ghost stories in the end.
Funeral Rites: The Thai Way of Death
The wooden coffin had been placed inside a metal sarcophagus and covered with iridescent paper to seal in the stench of putrefaction. Bouquets of plastic flowers crowned and surrounded the coffin. On the left-hand side was a photograph of the deceased woman on a gilded stand strung with blinking fairy lights. After three days of mourning rites, the body would be burnt so her ghost would not loiter on this plane of existence.
As soon as a mourner entered the big wooden sala near the temple, in this village of 100 people close to the Cambodian border, they lit a stick of incense and knelt down in front of the altar, praying for Noobin to have a safe journey to heaven and a good rebirth. The nine monks who came to chant each morning and evening offered the same blessings.
Aside from the chanting, it was not a solemn occasion. More like an Irish wake, actually. Groups of family members and friends sat on the floor eating and chatting. Some of the men drank beer; others knocked back shots of rice liquor that tasted like pickled razor blades. Behind the scenes, the women cooked and served food.
At night, men knelt behind the curtain that separated the big room (with the coffin and Buddha images) from the kitchen, to put wagers on a simplified version of roulette, using a cardboard grid on the floor. Beside them, an older relative taught a gaggle of kids how to play the same game with one-baht coins he provided—and won back from them. Noopat, the dead woman’s younger sister, told me that gambling is common at rural funerals; it helps to distract people from their grief and the fear of a possible haunting.
At some memorial services in the countryside, poor families auction off the gambling rights to local mobsters, who agree to pay for the funeral ceremony. A good send-off, which gives ‘face’ to the deceased’s family, requires an investment of at least 20,000–30,000 baht. For many rural families, that’s a crippling debt.
I’d never met the deceased, but she was the older sister of a friend’s wife. Cameron Cooper (Noopat’s husband, and the other co-founder of Farang Untamed Travel magazine) and I were the only two farang there. Stories of the dead woman’s life leaked through the Thai-English language filter: she was a hard-worker who arose every morning at 4am to hitch a ride into the frontier town of Aranyaprathet to sell vegetables in the market. Afterward, she returned home to make fried bananas or sticky rice in bamboo tubes to sell in the village. When her mother died young, she weaned her baby sister, Noopat, and her own infant son at the same time, each child suckling a different breast. Noobin moved to the northeastern province of Loei where she and her husband tended cornfields, but came back to the village to nurse her father when he was dying. Years later, her own misdiagnosed case of angina, which could have been treated with the right medicine and enough money, led to a massive stroke that left her body and mind mostly intact, but her vocal cords could only transmit whimpers in place of words. Sometimes she’d get angry and cry when people couldn’t understand her. Eventually, the untreated case of angina made her heart swell up to five times its normal size. Doctors gave her a year at most to live, but with incredible tenacity she hung on for three years. Liver failure turned her skin a yellowish-green tint and finally claimed her life. At the end, she suffered such fits of agony that death came as a tender mercy.
Sitting on the floor drinking and listening to all these stories, I kept stealing glances over at her husband of some 30 years. He’d been staring at the coffin and his wife’s portrait for hours, sitting on a dais by the Buddha images, where the monks had chanted earlier. The husband, whose face had taken on the same scorched and barren look of the province’s soil, must have been overwhelmed by the same memories everyone else was recollecting, except he had thousands more to sift through and sort out. We thought about walking over and offering him a drink and condolences, but bereavement is the most private of duties, and condolences are clichés that console no one.
***
In this village of Baan Pla Kaeng (named after a kind of fish found locally), ‘Uncle Lom’, as he’s affectionately known, takes care of all the funeral rites, ordinations and the upkeep of the one-monk temple. Now in his 70s, he first moved here from Korat province in the late 1960s, when the government was offering free land to settlers to put up a human shield between Thailand and Cambodia, where the civil war was threatening to bleed over the border.
Uncle Lom grinned. “I was greedy for some land.”
In those days, he recalled, all the roads were made of dirt. There were no cars or bicycles, and people got around by ox-carts. Most of the locals were so impoverished and unedu
cated that they did not know how to hold a proper Buddhist funeral. So when someone stepped on a land-mine or was blown apart by a mortar shell, their corpses were left to carrion birds and scavenging beasts.
In the 1970s and ‘80s, Noopat recalled how mortar shells exploded around the village every day. Families would flee into the jungle or hide in their own little bunkers. Tanks rumbled down the roads; bombers flew low overhead; tracer bullets pierced the night skies. Defeated but not disarmed, starving soldiers from the Khmer Rouge would come across the border looking for food and valuables, stealing into people’s homes to slit their throats and rob them.
Old fears die hard. Even in Bangkok two decades later, come nightfall, Noopat still has an obsessive compulsion to check that the front door of her house is locked every few hours.
On the third afternoon, monks from a bigger village nearby came to spirit away Noobin’s soul to heaven. As they solemnly intoned their baritone blessings in Pali, all of the mourners knelt before the dais, palms pressed together at chest level in a wai. A sacred white thread that the monks held was later used to wrap the deceased’s coffin, which the pallbearers shouldered and carried towards the crematorium outside. Just in front of the plywood coffin, holding the white thread was Noobin’s son, the one she had once weaned at the same time as her baby sister. He had ordained as a monk for this purpose, which is known as buad naa fai (‘ordaining in front of the fire’). One of Noobin’s daughters held her mother’s photograph against her chest as the funeral procession circled the crematorium three times in a clockwise direction. Noobin’s husband walked beside his daughter. In one hand he had a coconut, in the other a machete.
Each mourner picked up a little brown flower with a tiny candle and stick of incense tied to it. We walked up the steps of the crematorium to pay our final respects and left the flowers in a metal tray on top of the coffin. Unsure what to do next, Cameron and I lingered around the top of the stairs, when suddenly the husband lifted the lid of the coffin—what?—so we could see the dead woman, clad in a dress and with her eyes closed, her cheeks sunken and shadowed. From her bony hands, tied into a wai with white thread, bloomed a bouquet of white and purple orchids. As the putrid smell of decaying flesh trapped inside the coffin rushed out, I veered back.
But the sight and the smell were the least of our horrors, because the men cracked open the coconut with the machete and gave it to the newly ordained monk to anoint his mother’s face and cover her body with the milk in an Indian purification ritual. The teenager then passed the coconut to his sister, who repeated the rite, and then—the real shocker—she passed it to me. Refusing would have been tantamount to disrespecting the dead, but it was difficult to look at the dead woman’s face as I poured the milk onto it.
As we walked down the steps of the crematorium, they placed the coffin inside the brick oven. As is the custom at a Thai funeral, each of the guests received a small gift. Once, at a more upscale funeral in Bangkok, I got a leather key-holder. This time, I received a red plastic menthol inhaler. Under the circumstances, it was a very welcome gift.
The following morning, the relatives congregated to pick up Noobin’s ashen remains, which had been collected on a sheet of corrugated tin inside the oven. The family members picked out the biggest bone fragments, washed them in a bucket of perfumed water, and placed them in a small vessel to inter in a concrete pagoda on the temple grounds. Using a hoe, another relative formed the remaining ashes into an outline of a human body. This is done to ensure that the deceased is reborn with all their limbs intact. Then her shaven-headed son, having disrobed as a monk and now wearing street clothes, upended the tin sheet into a hole in the ground and covered the remains with dirt.
The son-turned-monk anoints his mother’s body with coconut milk at a rural funeral near the border with Cambodia.
For a vegetable vendor and farmer who’d scraped a living from the land for most of her life, it was a fitting grave.
***
Before the funeral in Isaan, the only time I’d ever made merit for the dead was after the bloated body of my friend and colleague, Teerapong Kansatawee, was fished out of Bangkok’s Chao Phraya River in 1999. He was only 33.
An elfin guy with neatly trimmed hair, Teerapong had the biggest eyes I’ve ever seen. Perhaps that’s why his parents nicknamed him Gop, or ‘Frog’. Over his shoulder, he always carried a homespun bag of cotton embroidered with Isaan or hilltribe motifs. The bag was laden with novels, heavyweight tomes on history, politics and economics, as well as cassettes of Thai folk music. He wore ordinary jeans (never torn, always clean) and button-down shirts. He had none of the derogatory qualities I sometimes associate with Thai men—the juvenile, non-sense of humour and the lust for lechery. Which made him an alien in his own country and an outcast at Hyper, the Thai alternative magazine where we both contributed freelance stories.
On weekends, most of the magazine crew buzzed around the nucleus of Bangkok nightlife—Silom Soi 4—which resembled a smaller-scale Mardi Gras. Among all the preening and flamboyant drag queens, pill-gobbling expat ravers and whore-mongering gay and straight ‘sex pistols’, under the constant bombardment of blasting dance music, Gop could usually be found outside a bar by himself, sipping a Thai (never foreign) beer while reading a book and listening to local folk music on his Walkman. Occasionally, he’d order a tequila shot and say, “I want to fly high,” before launching into another diatribe with a grin, “Western culture same as AIDS in Thailand. We have no immune.” Then he’d smile, laugh and return to his reading and protest songs. His earnestness and social autism made him the death of the party for most of the gang, who tended to avoid him.
The stories Gop contributed to magazines like Hyper and Thai dailies like Matichon crystallised his interests in rural hardships, injustice and crime. The one I remember the most vividly was about the famous Buddhist temple in Saraburi province named Wat Phra Baht Num Phru, where drug addicts are virtually incarcerated and forced to swallow massive doses of water and herbal medicine every day. On the temple grounds, they vomit up all the toxins in their systems. The monks hold them while they writhe, retch and groan. Echoing that guttural chorus line, Gop entitled his story ‘The Junkie Philharmonic Orchestra’. We had a good laugh over the title in the office. The feature was around 20 pages long. He told Mam, the female editor, that was no way he could cut it down.
Shaking her head with disbelief, she said, “But nobody runs stories this long anymore.”
Gop did not believe in compromising his features and his stubbornness did not endear him to many editors. Still, he didn’t raise his voice or lose his temper. He didn’t wear his CV on his sleeve, or brag about how difficult it was to do the story. In short, he didn’t behave (and never did) like so many of the prima-diva writers and photographers out there.
Wearing his smile like a shield, Gop cheerfully insisted, again—and again—and again—that the story had to run as it was. In the end, he eroded her resistance. When the article, with his original title in English, appeared in Hyper magazine, it ran 16 pages long: the kind of indepth feature that was the byproduct of what is now a bygone era in print media.
The magazine’s editor, Veeraporn ‘Mam’ Nitiprapha, and I talked about his famous article the night she called to tell me that he’d died. Mam thought that Gop had probably jumped off a bridge and drowned. But his family, who came from the south, would never admit that, she said. If a Thai overdosed on drugs, the family would say that he’d suffered a heart attack in order to salvage some ‘face’. Everyone would know what really happened, but nobody had to lose face.
Nevertheless, a few other rumours were making the rounds. Somebody else said he’d been HIV-positive—unlikely, I thought, given his flaccid interest in womanising. Another journalist thought that maybe he’d written a story condemning some corrupt official or gangster, and that their goons had given him a push-start into the river—which seemed more likely.
But I didn’t think that he’d even been writing much
lately. The last few times I’d seen him, he’d been so depressed and drunk that he already looked like a suicide-in-progress. He would rant about how his old job as a full-time reporter only paid 7,000 baht per month and now, as a freelancer, he was lucky to earn half that much. Hyper had closed down. And the only literary magazine in Thailand where he could publish his short stories had also drowned in red ink.
Like a lot of heavy drinkers, he’d become erratic (lashing out at people one minute and getting maudlin the next, so I never felt comfortable around him anymore) and would repeat the same sob stories, “I have no money. Nobody respect me. Thai people only like cartoon. Why you never help me publish stories in English?”
Mam said that when the morgue attendants were looking for identification in his wallet, the only money they found was a single 100 baht note.
That was sad enough, but what really choked me up was when she added, before hanging up, “I just wanted to tell you because you’re the only person from the magazine who ever asked about him or tried to keep in contact with him.”
So I felt obligated to pay my final respects, but his bones had already been kindling for the crematorium. Since he’d died in a violent way, his body had been burnt within three days so the ghost would not linger or try to get back inside the corpse. Excessive displays of bereavement are also frowned upon at Thai funerals because it’s believed these will cause the dead person’s spirit to loiter.
Jim Algie Page 25