Later that afternoon at the sumptuous, surreal Temple of Dawn, which rises like a colorful Candyland from the drab city streets, I ogle ornate Buddhas, dodge tourist cameras, and contemplate bunkhun. I immediately think of Moon, the supermodel-looking manager at my hotel.
“I am Tiger,” she’d said, as we chatted one evening. “You?”
Dragon, I tell her, and Virgo. She explains that she lives with her mother and nephew, and used to be engaged to a man but then he came out as gay and is now a woman. She models wedding dresses but plans to never marry.
“I have temple. And Mom. Men hurt you. Mom—never.”
I, meanwhile, have no children and see my mother every few months. Lorraine had told me that she sacrificed her sabbatical year so she could nurse her mother back to health; I’m spending mine traveling around the world, and my primary ties, the ones I’m at pains to check e-mail for, the ones I call before heading off to another flight, are my students who’ve come home from prison in New York.
Pan picks me up for the ride home and asks me what I’ll do tonight.
“Me, I will go home to my parents, my family,” she says, before I can answer. “Maybe you think—boring.”
I say nothing. What I feel, though, is envy. Traditional family has not been part of my orbit for decades; for the time being, I’ve cobbled together a beautiful version of “family” from friends, students, and causes. But the allure of the conventional never quite recedes. This trip, saturated in the ache of fragmented families, has brought my own home-life struggles with rootlessness into sharp focus.
“My mom had me very late in her life,” Pan adds. “She is glad I came out, you see, healthy. She is my best friend.”
How lucky you are, I think, turning to peer out the window.
———
The week’s proceedings have a name: “We Shall Find Our Way Home.”
Over breakfast at the hotel, I scan the advice column in the Bangkok Post.
Dear Annie, I read to Lorraine. She’s fretting again. After today’s powwow with the Kamlangji team, we’ll be heading south to Ratchaburi to begin our drama workshop behind bars, and we still don’t have a concrete agenda. We’d spent the weekend apart, Lorraine remaining in Bangkok and I heading up to Chiang Mai before moving over to her hotel.
My brother just got engaged, I continue reading. I’ve just found out that the woman he will marry has been secretly texting the man she once had an affair with. Do I say something, or keep my mouth shut and plaster on a fake smile?
“Now isn’t that the dilemma,” Lorraine muses, halfheartedly.
“Indeed,” I say. “Family loyalty versus gender norms. The woman is meant to smile and stay silent.”
With a jolt, Lorraine sets down her coffee and looks up.
“That’s it! Let’s act it out,” she declares. “Enactments—this will be our role-playing exercise in the prison. This will work. The women will get it.”
We hash out a game plan. Then we make our way to the conference room for a morning of speeches, formalities, and photo ops before heading to the prison. Our visit has morphed into a Kamlangji miniconference, themed around forms of prison therapy and attended by delegates from all over the world. There’s Dr. Brian Steels, a sixty-seven-year-old professor of Aboriginal studies from Western Australia, where he engages in “narrative therapy” with prisoners; Sanyasa, a yoga therapist from India swathed in an orange robe, white turban, and beads, who says little but smiles often, yogically; and theater-therapy guru Kru Chang—his father was the first Thai student to graduate from UCLA and the first Thai to play Hamlet—who looks very much the prototypical “elder sage,” with his harem pants, sandals, long gray hair, and bountiful beard.
“I was once the Johnny Depp of Thailand,” Chang had declared days earlier, when Lorraine and I visited his home base. The drive from urban sprawl into a land of canals and a clearing in the bush delivered us to Moradokmai, his communelike school where forty Buddhist students, most from poor rural homes, learn their entire curriculum through theater. I wondered aloud, is there a relationship between Buddhism and theater?
“There is no relationship. It is one and the same,” came Chang’s cryptic answer, leaving me scratching my head.
At the prison today and tomorrow Lorraine will teach drama therapy and I will assist her, while also promoting behind-bars higher education and the Prison-to-College Pipeline model. Napaporn ushers us into the van, a VIP-style chariot with gold rims and leather seats, for the ride south to the prison. Her energy is palpable. I’d learned that she first got involved in this work after the princess came to her university to interview professors for the launch of Kamlangji. Napaporn had worked with other disadvantaged groups, including Thai ethnic minorities and the differently abled, but from the moment she set foot behind bars and met the women there, it became not a job but an obsession. I know this obsession well, I’d told her.
“I don’t know how long it will last,” she’d said. “Every day I worry: the project will end. Funding dry up. So I just try, impact as many people as possible. Yes?” She went on to tell me of a prison, up near the Myanmar border, where the team is now starting to work.
“It is dark, overcrowded. What do I do, Baz? Where do I begin to make it better? Staff sensitivity training? Yoga? This will help the girls to not be with anxiety, to sleep better. Not easy to sleep in those cells. But the project feels so big, so little a change in so big a problem.”
I responded by telling her about Martin, one of my formerly incarcerated students who came dangerously close to going back inside, right after coming home. He showed up at my office with a black eye from a bar brawl; he was going to forget about school and make money, he’d shrugged. But after nagging, assurances, months of tough love, literally dragging him through registration—he grudgingly started college. Now he’s a star philosophy student, prelaw, a paid intern at a top firm.
“A single life stands alone,” was my response to her sighs.
In the van, headed south, I chat with Brian, seated next to me.
“How did you get involved in prison work?” I ask.
“I went to prison,” he responds.
Brian spent three years behind bars on a charge for which he maintains his innocence. Then he went back inside, dedicating his life to impacting the system that traumatized him. With a background in sociology and criminology, he’s one of a growing number of so-called convict criminologists, scholars whose work is informed by personal experience with the criminal justice system.
“And,” I speak softly now, as Brian and I get lost in an intense discussion about his years inside, “how did your wife take it?”
“She divorced me,” Brian says. “I learned quickly that family is fragile. And family is relative.”
I nod vigorously. “Friends are family you choose,” I proclaim. It’s one of my mantras.
“Yes,” agrees Brian.
The scene outside the window steals my attention, its lush green mountains and rice paddies opening their arms to eternity. Why is the road to hell, around the world, paved with magical vistas? It makes their dramatic disruption by concrete towers and shimmering barbed wire that much more unsettling, a startling marriage of ugliness and beauty.
Ratchaburi Central Prison, home to about nine hundred women, is expecting us. As we enter the buzzing courtyard, tinny music plays on a petite mobile library cart, and a cake and coffee stand is staffed by two prisoners in white aprons. The “Welcome to Ratchaburi” sign is made from color-cardboard cutouts.
In one corner are a dozen women buried in origami weave baskets, baby animals, and a massive portrait of the prison superintendent in full military regalia. Napaporn slings an origami basket on my arm—“Fashion!” laughs an officer—and two prisoners deposit a paper puppy and mouse inside it.
“Quick, quick—they are going to start the yoga now,” Napaporn calls to Lorraine and me. We’re shepherded to a pavilion with a luminous white floor, on which hundreds of women sit pa
tiently. We’re served water and sweet tapioca cakes and handed scented towels while some twenty-five incarcerated women file out, dressed in black tops and leggings; many have elaborately braided their hair and sport vivid pink lipstick.
Singing commences. It sounds like a sorrowful lullaby, chanted by prisoners in high-pitched tones. Chang, next to me, translates.
“The highs and lows of life,” he says. “Keep dream lit at all times. Life is ups and downs but hope remains. Faith. Love. Hope.”
The song stretches on and the women in black begin their yoga poses. It’s a majestic dance, all circular configurations and pyramids and graceful splits and downward dogs. A climactic conclusion has them in a lotus-flower formation, which they hold for a strong two minutes as we offer thunderous applause. The lovely sight, set against its context of barbed wire, makes me cry.
There isn’t time for tears, though. Napaporn shuttles Chang, Lorraine, Brian, Sanyasi, and me to various corners of the prison to get to work.
Our twenty-five students stand in a semicircle, fidgeting.
“This is a space for drama, which means it is a space to be free!” an animated Lorraine declares. Her confident, commanding classroom self emerges.
“Who enjoys performing?”
All of the women gingerly raise their hands and grin, as if eager to please. Our icebreaker, the mirror exercise, kicks things off. The class pairs up and is instructed to engage in movements. Partners must imitate every move made, without laughing.
Lorraine and I do the exercise along with them, her juddering movements and oddball faces nearly making me crack too broad a smile. The women, meanwhile, begin giggling, jumping, waving, trying to contain laugher. Two corrections officers are mirroring away, too, making googly eyes and goofy faces at their prisoner partners. One has a moon face so endearing, it distracts me.
Warmed up, we’re ready for introductions. Stand in a semicircle, Lorraine commands. Some ladies have their arms slung around their neighbors’ waists; others lean on each other, shoulder to shoulder. Declare your name and an epithet to go with it—an adjective that captures you.
“Lovely Lorraine,” she begins.
“Busy Baz.”
Happy Ploy.
Joyous Plaem.
Playful Joy.
Mother Nan.
Daughter Pim.
Funny Wandee.
The women grow more at ease by the minute, and their giggles slowly taper off.
I take out the newspaper clipping and read it; our translator doesn’t miss a beat. Meet Annie, I tell the class. And brother John. Fiancée Lisa, potential lover Robert, Tom the boss.
A student raises her hand.
“But who is Robert? His job?”
“He has a good job. He is rich.”
Napaporn, standing on the sidelines, signals to me for a quick consultation in the corner. Robert, he should be a drug dealer, she says. A drug dealer who is trying to entice Lisa away from her hardworking fiancé with money and flashy things.
“This way,” Napaporn explains, “it can be a lesson for the women. About not going with bad men. They know about this well—this is their lives.”
“Robert,” I return and tell the class, “is a drug dealer. He has lots of money.” The prisoners’ eyes grow wide. Yoga “ooooohms” from Sanyasi’s class in the pavilion behind us seep in to form our background music.
“But John works many hours,” I go on. “Where does he work?”
“Sells cars!” one woman calls out.
“Good,” I say. “And he works very late, and very hard. And Lisa is often alone and frustrated.”
As a class, we outline what the various scenes will look like.
“We need actors!” Lorraine commands. “Who would like to be Lisa?”
A slim young woman with a long ponytail tied with a red ribbon leaps up, her hand raised. And John? The ladies unanimously point to a thick, short-haired, broad-faced woman who lumbers toward the front of the class, barefoot and blushing.
“We need a stage!”
The women scurry into action, moving chairs around with alacrity. Here’s the office space and the imaginary computers, where John works. These tulips are for the restaurant where Lisa is stood up and then meets Robert.
Scene one: improvise, ladies!
John types away in the office. The boss enters, demanding more work and more hours. John keeps typing, fingers in the air, eyes with deadly focus. Lisa, meanwhile, twirls her ponytail and checks her imaginary cell phone, then pulls out an imaginary mirror and applies lipstick. John is still typing away.
“Cut!” Lorraine calls. Time is up, to be continued tomorrow.
“Awwwwww,” groan the women, in unison, showering us with goodbye waves.
“That went well, didn’t it?” Lorraine says. Napaporn hands me my origami basket.
“I am surprised,” says our translator. She was a teacher before becoming a probation officer. “In my classroom, the women would be so silent—they never wanted to express themselves. Good Thai women, see. But here they are different.”
I’m reminded of a scene in Chang’s school during our visit last week, as we sat in the outdoor amphitheater, devouring plates of lychee and mangosteen. “Theater is more than the truth,” a student named Champion had said. “It makes it possible to tell things you cannot tell otherwise.” The girl next to him chimed in: “Theater gives me the space to tell untold stories.”
Lorraine had spoken of something called role deprivation, the stultifying way in which prison limits human beings, accustomed to playing multiple roles in our complex lives—at once mothers, daughters, professionals, wives, students—to a single hard-and-fast role: prisoner. The power of drama in prison is that it allows participants to perform a kind of resurrection; it’s an opportunity to enact other roles, to have manifold selves again, for a few hours. I did see glimmers of this today as the women luxuriated in their performances, and even as they took leave of their “obedient prisoner” demeanors during the icebreakers.
The delegation files out of the prison, past the ornate shrine and through the security gates. Riding away from a vista bathed in moonlight, I ask Brian about his narrative therapy session, which amounts, from the sound of it, to the sharing of life narratives in an effort to alter them for the better. One woman, he says, sobbed the whole time because she hasn’t seen her children in seven years.
“What do you say to that?” I ask.
“I shared my story,” he says, steadily. “My children rejected me. It pains me. Many nights I sit and drink wine, too much wine, even though it eats at my esophagus. I have stomach cancer, you see.” I grow wide-eyed.
“And my second wife, she has been terminally ill for years. This is the fact of our lives. We are victims of these things, but we can also choose not to be, to reject reading our role in our own narratives as that of victims. Once we do that, we’ve won.”
We pull up at the night’s hotel, where the Kamlangji team awaits our arrival. Rooms are basic but dinner is another sumptuous Thai buffet. Chang the theater guru, changed into jeans and an Abbey Road T-shirt, offers me a serving of chili fish.
“I don’t know what you call this kind of fish in America. It’s white fish. Boneless and childless,” he says.
“How sad,” Lorraine says, raising her spoon.
That night the team arranges an evening outing. We end up in what feels like a Midwestern saloon, complete with a man on guitar singing “How Deep Is Your Love?” To everyone’s delight I drink a frothy pink concoction in a champagne glass—“Don’t get drunk, professor,” the team laughs. I don’t. But I do, with Brian, shut the place down in an attempt to banish the sadness of today from our minds. We sip local rum and chat about prison and family and, sometimes, the prison that traditional family can be. And somewhere in the midst of the bonding and talking and gracious hospitality, I get a taste of that elusive feeling called home.
———
“They say they have been practicing,” Ja
idee announces, as Lorraine and I greet our students the next morning. They’re scurrying to arrange the set and assume their roles.
John diligently types away in his office; the irate boss delivers her role with the authority of a corrections officer. Lisa waits longingly for John at the restaurant, waving her ponytail to and fro. Robert, at the table next to her, makes his move on the lonely lady; soon he is showering her with gifts in the form of an origami basket and yellow felt tulips, while John, despondent, scrolls through suspicious text messages on a flip-flop doubling as a cell phone. The audience, our class, is mesmerized.
“How should the proposal scene happen?” we pause to ask them. “Where?”
“Phuket!” comes the call, in unison.
Two women leap up from their seats to perform the role of palm trees swaying in the sun. Two more imitate the sounds of the waves in the background, and John gets down on one knee before Lisa, who visibly grapples with her answer. Choose the well-meaning, hardworking, yet financially struggling man or the wealthy drug dealer who beckons with all the pleasures of the high life? Divided into four groups, the students perform their version of an ending.
Group one takes center stage. Lisa opts for John, running into his dramatic embrace; the two soon have a child and live happily ever after. Robert, meanwhile, is arrested and led off the stage, bawling, in imaginary cuffs.
Applause!
Group two: Lisa tearfully rejects John’s proposal, but also spurns Robert’s advances. “I choose me!” declares the prisoner, exiting stage left with arms raised in triumph.
Group three: Lisa runs off with Robert, swathes herself in imaginary fur, and, lost in the high life, becomes addicted to yaba. Huddling in a corner of the stage, her end is anything but triumphant.
Finally, group four: Lisa runs off with Robert the drug dealer, after which both are arrested and imprisoned. Lisa, ponytail hanging low, tearfully gazes out her cell window and faintly calls John’s name.
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