Bangkok Days Page 3

  In the Forensics Museum there are countless photographs of crime and accident scenes with terse captions: "Multiple Cuts by Propeller," decapitations from train accidents, "Cut Throat by Beer Bottle," cases of crania punctured by gunshots, yellowed mandibles and bottles filled with damaged brains. On a lighter note, there are the medical gowns worn by the men who investigated the mysterious murder of the young King Rama VIII in 1946.

  Then there are the preserved corpses of serial killers, which are placed in glass cases with metal basins to catch their cadaverine wax. In the middle of the room, there's the shrunken body of the child murderer Si Ouey, sometimes written in English as Zee-Oui: a Chinese immigrant called Li Hui who went on a spree of infanticide in the 1950s, eating the internal organs of the small children he abducted and killed. He is standing, gesticulating, his mouth wide open.

  It is like Madame Tussaud's, except that the waxwork is real. And the Forensics Museum is popular with Chinese tourists. It's as if word of mouth has gotten back to China about this unsavory compatriot of theirs, this shameful splinter of the race. They are also curious about the method of his execution: in Thailand the condemned man is shot with a weapon fixed in place, the bullet directed through a square cut into a length of silk. A flower is placed between his tied hands. A single shot through the heart.

  THE BLUE GOD

  When I thought Dennis was lonely, I asked him if he wanted to come along on my night walks, and he eagerly accepted. He walked with a cane, and that made our walks agreeably slow, but never disjointed. It was an opportunity to discuss past lives, past loves. Dennis, unlike McGinnis, was wary and prickly, a man who scanned your sentences as if he was reading them on a moving ticker tape, like financial data. Perhaps it was a skill he had acquired through interviewing thousands of people for mortgages. He would stop you in mid-sentence and make you repeat the first half slowly until he understood it perfectly. His eyes locked into yours and he always smiled, as if what you had to say was so daft that you might as well hang yourself from your own gibbet. It was irritating, but Dennis also had wonderful one-liners.

  "Life would be perfectly agreeable," he would say, "if it weren't for all the amusements one has to go through."

  We made finds: by the Oriental, through an alley which is partially covered by a Venetian bridge, stands the Catholic cathedral of Bangkok, in an oblong square of French-style trees. There is a white-light sign that says "Catholic Center." I seek out those places that remind me of nocturnal aquaria, where the laws of physics seem to be distorted. A short way down Charung Krung, I found an enclave near the CAT Telecom building—whose tower rises to an unnecessary height—where there was a concentration of shacks and houses, and a temple colored like dried blood. Among these shacks, and from amid a whirl of laundry lines, there rose a beautiful white stupa which seemed to have been completely forgotten by the inhabitants, rising nevertheless into a state of grace.

  Some nights we went late to the Shangri-La Hotel by the river. The salons of this opulently tasteless hotel were restful at night because there was no one there but the night cleaners with their vacuums and dusters. A sea of armchairs and sofas, courtly frescoes and chandeliers. Great staircases and marble lobbies leading nowhere. We sat by the windows and watched the river, and Dennis smoked a pipe. It felt like the Titanic about to sink, or some other ocean liner of times past whose passengers have abandoned it, and I remember thinking that my grandfather, a trombonist with the Halle Orchestra under Toscanini in the thirties, would have loved this place, and would doubtless have stayed here had he ever come to Bangkok. The Chinese vases shone in the bitter lamplight with a sheen of large insects.

  "You're a stiff fella," said Dennis in a friendly way. "I mean, you're a little awkward here, aren't you? Do you know what the maids at the condo call you? Miss Lalant. It's not on purpose. They don't understand the difference between 'Miss' and 'Mister.' And that's how they pronounce your name. Miss Lalant."

  His hand shook on the polished knob of his cane. He regarded me with pity, because I must have seemed like all new arrivals, a person wrapped in occidental pieties and superstitions, and for us those pieties are about the self, especially the sexual self. "Look at those men vacuuming the carpets," he said. "I love the way they are neither happy nor unhappy. I wonder if we could be the same."

  How would one do it? The Taoists pointed out two thousand years ago that the Good Life consists of perfecting to the greatest possible degree the virtues we share with animals. Not in mastering or subduing them, but in realizing our similarities with them. To gravitate closer to dogs and pachyderms, to monkeys and caterpillars. In Thai Buddhism, the principle of loving-kindness, or metta, is embodied by the gecko. The term "animal" shouldn't be an insult, because it points to what is best in humans.

  On occasion we took a boat across to Phra Arthit in Rattanakosin. Next to the white Phra Sumain fort, overlooking the river, there's a bandstand and a sprawl of tired gardens. A bridge across the Klong Banglampu connects to an enclave of narrow lanes, above which pots of basil rattle in winds coming off the river. The place is often full of monks. Neither happy nor unhappy: it was an unusual desideratum. I was beginning to see that it certainly applied to Dennis himself, who was interested in "the East," and who liked Bangkok because she was partly Hindu, a piece of India.

  "Are you really neither happy nor unhappy?" I asked.

  "I like to paint and to make love to Porntit. I am thankful that you can buy generic Viagra without a prescription at any Thai pharmacy. It works out to two dollars a hit. It's pleasure, not happiness, but I am happy with that—if you see what I mean. My wife, God bless her, would never have understood."

  Life after life. Is that what this was?

  I tried to imagine Mrs. Dennis. They used to go to Polynesia together on holiday. I thought sometimes he was in mourning.

  "Maybe," I offered, "she would have understood."

  "You didn't know Mavis. A real Anglo-Saxon."

  Just like my mother, I thought. Just like me. Do we head to places which we know will undo us, take the long hand of our clock and bend it backward?

  •

  This part of Rattanakosin just north of the canal which empties into the river is one of the few remnants of the old city that the authorities, no doubt in a fit of absentmindedness, have neglected to bulldoze. The surfaces of the houses are a vertical maze of cracks and puzzles, in which cicadas are lodged as if they have mistaken it for a man-made forest. It makes you wonder what these now monstrous Asian cities were like before the West became their model of development. Before the architecture of Citibank became their ideal. Old photographs of Bangkok show wide avenues, lines of trees, a spacious and thoughtful urban planning. The buildings are set back from the roads and are dignified by façades to which attention has been paid. There were canals everywhere, the klong. Then, sometime in the nineteenth century, the Chinese began building densely packed commercial neighborhoods like those of China. The spaces filled in. And finally, between 1960 and 1990, the whole thing was ruthlessly destroyed. The canals were turned into expressways. The great street of Sathorn was a canal until the 1980s. Migrating birds still massed around its trees as if remembering that it was once a body of water. So now it is birds who remember our past more longingly than humans.

  But at night at least the bottom layers of this palimpsest could be felt again. The daytime city fell away and the past seeped back up to the surface. Dennis knew all about this sort of thing. It fed his sense of rage that the world, far from improving, was in fact getting worse by the year.

  Did I know that the World Meteorological Organization had named Bangkok on average as the hottest large city on earth? Then why, he protested, create a labyrinth of huddled cheap cement, steel, and glass, a living hell? The worst possible arrangement for a city where the average temperature is forty degrees centigrade. "This neighborhood, on the other hand," he said, wobbling on his cane. "There is something tender about it."

  Strings of shells moved
. This street was like a glass ship that's been shaken. Hundreds of flowerpots emerged from circles of lamplight. Yellow houses with red doors, slanted gardens. A flowering tree spreading right across the street, and an ancient sound of radios. I was glad I had brought Dennis here, because it made him light up. He waxed angry and it made him bright, because every man from a cold race has inside him a well of unspent lava boiling with bitterness and poetry. I thought about my own people: the British officers, the quiet, prudent yeomen, the musty village churches by the river Ouse filled with damp flags and regimental rags. The vicars tabulated back to the time of Oliver Goldsmith. What kind of race were we?

  "Everything was for tomorrow," Henry Miller once wrote about his own Nordic ancestors, "but tomorrow never came. The present was only a bridge and on this bridge they are still groaning, as the world groans, and not one idiot thinks of blowing up the bridge."

  •

  The name Rattanakosin appears as part of Bangkok's original ceremonial name in Thai, which is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's longest place-name: Krungthep Mahanakhon Amonrattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilokphop Noppharatratchathani Buriromudomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amonphiman Awatansathit Sakkathattiya Witsanu Kamprasit.

  It is mostly a Thai pronunciation of a blend of Sanskrit and Pali, the ancient languages of India, and it means: "The city of angels, the great city, the eternal jewel city, the impregnable city of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnu."

  So Bangkok was built by Vishnu.

  In the Puranas, Vishnu is described as being dark blue, the "color of clouds." His four arms hold a mace, a conch, a scepter, and a chakra. In the Bhagavad Gita, he is glimpsed by Arjuna and Krishna, to whom he takes the form of blinding galaxies wheeling through infinite time, arcs of cosmic radiation. The creator and destroyer of all existences.

  •

  The Thai kings are incarnations of Vishnu. This means that they are virtual gods, that they partake of the mystery of godhead. From the Khmer royalty the Thais derived this idea of devaraja, divine kingship, and the enormity of this fact escapes the majority of visitors. If the society is presided over by an incarnation of Vishnu, then the whole society must be permeated by magic. Since the military coup of 1932, the Thai kings have not been absolute monarchs. But they are far more powerful than British, Swedish, or Dutch monarchs. They are more potent than the similarly godlike Japanese emperor. The title they take, that of Lord Rama, reveals their lofty status in the cosmic hierarchy. There were nine Ramas between 1782 and 2007; the present king, Bumiphol, is Rama IX. Nine kings, just as there are supposed to be nine incarnations of Vishnu. It is the most mystical monarchy in existence. The Chakri dynasty that founded Bangkok is synonymous with the city.

  It is also a Theravada monarchy. Buddhism is divided into two main branches. The earlier, purer, form was known in India as Hinayana, or "the little raft" (in Sanskrit). Based closely on the early Buddhist scriptures known as the Pali Canon, it adhered to the Buddha's original conception of a political state based on his teaching. It spread early on to Sri Lanka and Burma. It began to call itself Theravada—"the way of the elders"—perhaps to avoid sounding minoritarian.

  The other branch, known as Mahayana, "the big raft," is the form Buddhism took as it spread to societies with complex political traditions of their own, such as Tibet, China, and Japan. These societies did not want Buddhists telling them how to organize their states. Instead, they took the metaphysical dimensions of the religion and fused it with their own colorful mythologies, creating what Theravada purists saw as a corrupted, hybrid Buddhism. But Mahayana is the dominant Buddhism of Asia.

  Living here, one becomes increasingly aware of the nine Buddhist kings who are also incarnations of Vishnu, these Ramas who are called Phranam in Thai. There are even nine expressways, named after each. It is Rama IV and V, though, who most dominate the popular imagination. They ruled during the uncertain period when the Kingdom of Siam was encountering the West for the first time, the second half of the nineteenth century. The British and French were all around them, in Malaya, in Indochina, in Burma, in India.

  But Thailand remained the only society to never be colonized by a European power. Rama IV, also known as Mongkut, was the overbearing semi-archaic monarch in The King and I, and the subject of a dubious memoir by the English governess Anna Leonowens, who taught his children in the early 1860s. The 1956 film with Yul Brynner is considered so offensive to Thais that it is still banned in Thailand. They say it insults the divine kingship.

  •

  But the relations between the impetuous, barking king, torn between East and West, and the indomitable, slightly uptight Englishwoman gave such life to the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, and then the film, because it could be read as a struggle between Asia and Europe. During his life, Yul Brynner played Rama IV over four thousand times onstage, and of course in the film. Anna herself wrote a sensationalist book in which she claimed to have witnessed the public burning of a slave called Tuptim, and to have seen underground dungeons beneath the Royal Palace. The Thais said she was a born fabricator.

  Her student was Prince Chulalongkorn, who became Rama V in 1868. Fluent in English, a European gentleman, dapper and slim, the abolisher of slavery in Thailand, Rama the Great ruled until 1910 and took the kingdom into its own quirky version of modernity. In the hand-colored photographs he looks like a large elf with his polished mustache and lace-up shoes, a top hat poised on his knee, his assurance subtly muted.

  There is a tormented drama between these three remarkable characters. Was Chulalongkorn a product of Ms. Leonowens and her English ways? The intelligent, cunning Mongkut was not as archaic as he is portrayed, and his spurning of the brittle English governess went hand in hand with a desire that his son be open to the idea of telescopes and steam engines.

  Anna's story, however, was eventually unraveled by the entomologist A. S. Bristowe, an expert in Asian spiders, who showed without much difficulty that most of it was indeed invented, as the Thais always asserted.

  •

  Anna claims she was born Anna Henriette Crawford in Caernarfon, Wales, in 1834, the daughter of a British Army captain named Thomas Crawford. Bristowe, however, that indefatigable tracer of the ancestry of spiders, found no record of any such birth. Instead, he discovered that she was born in 1831 in India, to a cabinetmaker turned army sergeant by the name of Thomas Edwards and a half-Indian woman named Mary Anne Glasscott. In 1845, her elder sister, Eliza, married a British civil servant named Edward John Pratt—their grandson, William Henry Pratt, metamorphosed into the movie star Boris Karloff, most famous of all of Frankenstein's monsters.

  After her army husband died in 1859, leaving his widow and children in dire straits, Anna opened a school for officers' children in Singapore. The Siamese consulate, hearing of this school, offered her a post at the court of King Mongkut, teaching English. The move into an unconquered, un-Europeanized world must have been shocking. Mongkut had thirty-nine wives and eighty-nine children. He was, after all, an incarnation of Vishnu.

  For five years, she lived close to the court, and close to the Crown Prince (when they met thirty years later in London, in 1897, he expressed his debt to her). She became a friend of Harriet Beecher Stowe and made Uncle Tom's Cabin a known book in royal circles, where the antislavery message might have displeased Mongkut, but not his son.

  After Rama IV's death, Anna went to Nova Scotia, where she founded the Novia Scotia College of Art and Design and emerged as a noted feminist and suffragette. She died in Montreal in 1915, at the age of eighty-one.

  Bristowe began by researching the life of Anna's son, Louis, who stayed in Siam, became an officer in the Royal Siamese Cavalry, and founded a Bangkok trading company which still bears his name. Bristowe set out to look behind the novelization of Anna
's memoirs (originally published serially in The Atlantic Monthly) by the writer Margaret Landon in 1944.

  And so it is all lies. Anna is the first farang to use Siam/ Thailand as a place to reinvent herself, to turn herself into a "character." You could do this only in a place that was not yet a colony. In a non-colony there would be no infrastructure of verification, such that nobody could check you up. It's possible, though, that Anna's memoir is a kind of political argument, where inventions and exaggerations serve some purpose. They are a scaffold upon which emotions are hung.

  As a memoir, it doesn't try to relate facts, but then memoirs are rarely empirical in nature. They are statements of purpose, descriptions of life as the writer would like it to be. Many will find this unacceptable, but the faultless memoir doesn't exist—indeed, it's a lame, moralistic fantasy. Every memoir can be fact-checked and proved wrong. But Bristowe's unraveling of Anna's family history doesn't prove that she didn't see an execution.

  The memoir is a treacherous form. Chateaubriand described a 1791 visit to Niagara Falls in his Mémoires d'outre-tombe, and for centuries Frenchmen visiting Niagara Falls took their Chateaubriand with them, extolling the power and veracity of his description of them. Only recently has it been suggested that Chateaubriand may have never gone anywhere near Niagara Falls. Doubters allege that he cobbled his marvelous description of them from various sources. The greatest memoir ever written, the model of the genre—and at its center a plagiarism, a collage, a sleight of hand. If Chateaubriand were alive today he would be flayed on Oprah, disgraced, banished. Where, it would be asked, were the fact-checkers? But do those who read Chateaubriand stop reading Mémoires d'outre-tombe?