Temporarily Thairish regrets to report that my Better-Prettier-Half and I have recently separated, and she has now joined the massed ranks of my Bitter-Prettier-Exes.
Nobody’s fault really. She’s back in Ireland, I’ve decided to stay on in Thailand for a while. We just found it hard to sustain a satisfying relationship with 7,000 miles separating us. I mean, I’m big, but I’m not that big.
Joking aside, I’ve been pretty miserable about the whole affair. Or rather, just the end of it. Mr. and Mrs. Pong noticed that my form obviously wasn’t the best (I was burning her name onto my arm with a lit cigarette), and asked me what was wrong. When I told them, Mr. Pong laughed delightedly, clapped me on the back, and said, “Ha, ha! Now you fwee! You a velly lucky man!”
“But I really miss her,” I whined, choking back a sob. “She was the only one for me.”
Pong gave me an incredulous stare. “Lotta fish in de sea,” he pointed out. “Even more on de beach. Ha, ha!”
“But that’s not what I want to do,” I protested, indignantly. “It’s not all just about sex, you know!”
At that, his stare turned piteous – maybe even a little scornful. Thankfully, Mrs. Pong was a little more sympathetic to my romantic plight. “Bud I see her here wid you,” she said. “She weally love you.”
“I know, and I weally love her too,” I agreed, somewhat cheered by this. A hopeful thought occurred. “Maybe I should just hop on a plane home, and go get her back.”
A worried look passed between them. I’m their very best customer, and it’s still low season for tourists. In a blatant attempt to dissuade me from this line of thinking, Pong rolled his eyes and cracked an imaginary whip. Mrs. Pong said, “No, you tell her to come back ova here.” Thinking I couldn’t see, Pong gave his wife a quick thumbs-up.
“What de problem anyway?” Mrs. Pong asked. “Why she not wanna be wid you?”
“Oh, loads of things,” I sighed. “I don’t think she liked the stuff I was writing very much. Her biggest moan is my lifestyle though. She says I drink too much.”
“Wodka-coke?” Pong asked, automatically getting up from his seat.
I glanced at my watch. It was nearly midday. Only another 90 minutes to go. “Yeah, alright so,” I nodded. Then I suddenly thought the better of it. “No, Pong. It’s probably not a good idea. Actually, I think I’m going to quit drinking altogether. It’s ruining my life. I’ll just have a fruit juice instead.”
The Pongs exchanged further panicked looks. They have four children, two of whom are soon college-bound. Pong went over to the bar and returned with a large glass of orange juice. I took a sip.
“Pong, this is full of vodka,” I complained. Well, maybe I more pointed-out.
“Yeah, wodka wid froot juice,” he nodded, innocently. “Is dat not what you order?”
I took another sip and sighed heavily. Mrs. Pong laid her hand over mine and said comfortingly, “Olaf, don’t worry about her. Pong’s right. Lotta fish in de sea. Even more on de beach.”
I looked up and saw that The League Of Gentlemen was on the TV screen . . .
****************
In a somewhat misguided attempt to cheer me up, the Pongs took me along to a family wedding the following day. One of Mr. Pong’s numerous cousins was getting married and, as he so tactfully pointed out, there would be lots of other eligible female relations attending. “Maybe you find lucky,” he said, giving me a salacious wink. “Nice Thai girl say nutting about you dwinking. Won’t be able to weed your articles needer. Ha, ha!”
It was actually the second wedding I’ve attended on the island, and it was pretty much exactly the same as the first. Although Ko Pha-Ngan has an abundance of hotels, none are big enough to host a large wedding reception, and so the locals usually hold their post-nuptial bashes in the vast assembly hall of the local high school.
Buddhist weddings usually aren’t public affairs. A monk marries the couple in a small private ceremony (usually at one of the parents’ houses, rather than a temple), and only select family members attend. The guests don’t get to see the actual wedding, and just come to the party afterwards. They mostly arrive on motorbikes, and so the dress code is fairly casual. Even so, I put on a shirt and wore my best flip-flops.
The hall was packed when we arrived. Bride and groom were standing outside, under a large pink love heart, greeting their guests with smiles and waves. They were both in their early 20s (respectable Thai society frowns on premarital cohabitation, so people often get married quite young). Just behind them, a group of bridesmaids manned a long table, with two big boxes on it. The boxes were pink and blue, also shaped like love-hearts, and had slots in their tops.
As with weddings everywhere, money is the most appreciated gift of all. As a non-family member, and a complete stranger to the happy couple, I had put just 200 baht (€4) in my envelope. Mrs. Pong assured me that that was the appropriate amount – enough to cover my meal. I popped it into the slot and was promptly rewarded with a gift of two tiny silver spoons.
Once inside, we were quickly led to a table. Unfortunately, I wound up sitting beside some grumpy old git, who made little attempt to disguise his contempt for a farang (Westerner). His attitude was typical of some older islanders, especially the ones who don’t rely on tourists for their living. You can’t really blame them. A little over a decade ago, there weren’t even any roads on the island. If you wanted to visit someone, you either trekked through the jungle or took a boat. Today, there are roads and dirt tracks everywhere, allowing dreadlocked farangs with strange piercings, and even stranger tattoos, access to the whole island. If you’d been looking forward to a quiet retirement after a peaceful lifetime here, I can understand why you’d be pissed off at the recent Western invasion.
Even so, he was a real dickhead. He even looked like one. His head was totally bald and his neck was so wrinkled, it resembled nothing so much as a particularly repulsive foreskin. When a delicious meal of Thai and Chinese food was served, he made no effort to pass me any dishes. There was a bottle of 100 Pipers whiskey put out, so when I poured drinks for the table, I made a point of not serving him. Curiously, we kind of got on after that.
Karaoke is quite popular at Thai weddings, and there was a big screen up on the side of the stage to display the lyrics. This wasn’t being used during the meal and so the computer’s screensaver came on. Unfortunately, it was the ‘Best Of Sexy Girls’ compilation (I know this because it’s also quite popular in some local cyber cafes). The entire hall ate their meal, with a series of lingerie-clad cuties being flashed up on the big screen.
Not much else to report, really. The grumpy git eventually passed out. I couldn’t understand the speeches, which may have been a blessing in disguise. Nobody else seemed to be paying them much attention anyway. The prettiest girls I spotted were all on the big screen. Although public displays of affection are frowned upon in Thailand, bride and groom seemed deliriously happy. The insensitive bastards!
Two days later, myself and Mr. Pong attended another family gathering. This one was a little more appropriate to my black mood. It was a (different) cousin’s funeral.
It was the second Buddhist funeral I’ve attended, though I went to my first by accident (Pong had asked me did I want to go to “a fwend’s fire”). It was being held in the temple at Ban Tai. We arrived about noon and immediately paid our respects to the widow and her family. Again, envelopes containing small amounts of cash were handed over (to help with the funeral costs). This time the return gift was a bar of green Lux soap. Everybody was clutching theirs ostentatiously, as if to say, “I’ve paid my dues.”
There were about 200 people there. Older relatives and friends mostly stayed sitting in the temple, facing the Buddha. Everybody else sat outside. We had a meal – almost as good as the wedding’s fare – and shot the breeze with some of Pong’s mates. Thai tears are always shed in private, and so it was an outwardly cheerful occasion. I didn’t want to ask too much about the deceased while we were there, so I waited until we were driving home.
“How did he die, Pong?”
“He have sick for long time,” Pong explained. “I dunno de Engleesh word. But he weally sick. He better dead den sick like dat.”
“What age was he?”
“He was 49. But in Thailand, we add a year when you die, so dey say dat he was 50.”
“Why is dat? I mean, that?”
Pong looked at me and laughed. “Ha, ha! I dunno why. Dey just do dat.”
“And what’s with the soap? Is that a Buddhist thing? You know, cleansing your soul or washing your hands of earthly matters, or something like that.”
“No – it’s just soap,” he said, simply. “The soap say thank you for coming.”
****************
It was Queen Sirikit’s 73rd birthday recently, and Temporarily Thairish hopes that she got my card (sorry, but it was the only one they had left in the shop). Although Her Majesty usually refrains from commenting on political matters, she used the occasion to make an unprecedented third plea for an end to the violence in the deep and deeply troubled South. Unsurprisingly, religious terrorists have as little respect for royalty as they do for everyone else, and Mujahideen separatists are still bombing, shooting and maiming innocent civilians on an almost daily basis.
Most of the trouble is happening in the three southernmost, predominantly Muslim, provinces of Yala, Pattani and Narathiwat. Leaflets, written in Malay, were distributed in Yala recently, warning local Muslims to stop working on weekends or risk Van Gogh-ing to hell (they said that their ears would be cut off if they failed to comply – or rather, listen). Previous leaflets had insisted that Fridays were exclusively for prayer, and Muslims should refrain from all other activities. The way things are going, deep South Muslims are soon going to have the shortest working weeks in Thailand.
Much of the violence is being directed against symbols of the Buddhist national establishment, and the most recent leaflets also warned Muslims to stop sending their kids to study at state-run schools. The terrorists, brave warriors that they are, are targeting teachers in particular, and the number of teacher transfer requests is apparently now in four figures. Hardly surprising, given that they’re being murdered at a ferocious rate.
In July, the government granted special rights for teachers in those provinces to carry guns. “They need guns!” insisted the deputy education minister Rung Kaewdaeng. “This is now a necessity as many people have survived attacks because they shot back at the attackers.” More than 2,000 teachers are now packing heat. Although nothing’s happened yet, as Michael Moore got rich pointing out, schools and guns are never a good combination – no matter who’s carrying them.
On the plus side, nobody’s forgotten to do their homework recently.
*************
Arming teachers isn’t the only response the government has offered to the southern problem. Prime Minister Thaksin has so far ruled out sending in the military, saying that he wants permanent peace in the South to be his lasting political legacy. With the government’s emergency decree in place, however, the full extent of the violence, and the means used to quell it, may not be being fully reported.
The decree gives the authorities carte blanche to close down print and broadcast media outlets, impose curfews, tap phones, monitor emails, intern suspects, and, well, basically do whatever they want, whenever they want, however they want. The usual civil liberties groups have made the usual protests, but to no avail.
They’re obviously developing a taste for these special powers – and not just in the deep South (which is all the decree supposedly covers). On August 9, over two dozen armed policemen stormed the transmission room of 92.25FM, a popular community radio station in Bangkok’s Sathorn district, and verbally accused a female producer of an array of charges, ranging from interfering with aeronautical signals to breaching national security by inciting hatred against the Thai Rak Thai government (the first one-party government in Thailand’s history). 92.25FM is loosely linked with the opposing Democrat Party.
The station was then totally stripped of all its broadcasting equipment, and has been off the airwaves since (though they’ve recently started again on the web at www.fm9225.com). Prior to its closure, it had been bombarded with mysterious, intruding frequencies from programmes promoting a more pro-Thai Rak Thai outlook. It had also been heavily restricted in the amount of advertising it could accept, and in the strength of its transmission frequency. Despite all this, it was estimated that the station had a regular audience of 20,000 listeners.
Ironically enough, just the week before, Thaksin had told the general assembly of the Confederation of Asian Journalists that the Thai press was “the freest in the region.” Given that the region includes such repressive countries as Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Cambodia, this could well be true. However, that reputation took a bit of a hammering in 2002, when two Western journalists with the Far Eastern Economic Review were nearly expelled from the country for writing about business connections between the Crown Prince and Thaksin. While they were ultimately allowed to stay, the censorious actions came as a shock to many media observers.
Although it’s the only country in South East Asia that’s never been colonised, Thailand had almost 20 coups and counter-coups last century (some extremely bloody), and is much more used to being governed by military rule. Sceptics argue that the current system of democratically elected governments will only be a short-lived deviation from the norm, and that there’ll probably be another military coup before long. The kingdom has come a really long way in the last 20 years, and they’re hopefully wrong, but the heavy-handed closure of 92.25FM doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the healthy state of Thai democracy.
Finally, on the subject of freedom of speech, I came across the following rather excellent story from Laos in an old issue of Farang magazine recently. A couple of years ago, the catchphrase from a Lao skin cream TV commercial caught on big in Vientiane. Whenever somebody looked a bit rough after an evening on the notoriously lethal ‘lao-lao’ rice whiskey, their friends would greet them with a cheery, “Vongduan, you look so beautiful today – what’s your secret?”
Apparently, the joke was that the woman starring in the commercial really wasn’t very beautiful at all. In fact, she was startlingly ugly. She was, however, the mistress of a high-ranking government official – which was undoubtedly how she got the job in the first place. Anyway, the joke just wouldn’t die, and it eventually reached the burning ears of her lover. He was high-ranking enough to be able to make repeating the joke illegal. Well, to be able to try, at least.
An announcement was broadcast over Vientiane’s citywide loudspeaker system, warning that anyone caught using the catchphrase would be subject to a fine of 5,000 kip (less than a euro, but still pretty hefty for the locals). But you can’t keep a good joke down and, pretty soon, braver citizens were greeting the cops on the street with cries of, “Oi Vongduan! You look so . . .”
Nobody got fined. After a while, the commercial was discretely dropped.