Джерри Хопкинс: Thailand Confidential

Not long ago, how the pendulum swings both ways was shown within my extended Thai family. My wife’s youngest sister, her husband, and their three-year-old son shared a room in Bangkok, where they worked in the garment industry. They worked different hours, so someone was at home with the boy at all times. As my wife, Lamyai, told the story, a number of her sister’s husband’s relatives started visiting the room on a daily basis, drinking and talking noisily and filling the small space with cigarette smoke. They weren’t, said Lamyai, showing her sister kreng jai , were not giving her time alone with her son and were creating an annoying, unhealthy environment.

Why didn’t Lamyai’s sister tell the boors to leave? Kreng jai . They were her husband’s relatives. Why, I asked, didn’t she say something to her husband? Kreng jai again. A good wife didn’t complain.

I will add this, however. After Lamyai and I married, and I’d been around for a couple of years, I was welcomed in the garden.

Not long after I moved to Thailand, I witnessed a fender bender involving a taxi and a car. The drivers, both male, emerged from their vehicles like angry animals. It was clear they were going to settle the matter of responsibility on the spot.

Then something happened that I didn’t understand. The cab driver quickly removed his shirt and just stood there, his torso bared to the mid-day Bangkok sun, shimmering with elaborate tattoos, his back covered in Thai script. The other driver ran to his car and drove away. What I had witnessed, a friend later explained, was the magic of Thai tattoos. The driver who ran knew he couldn’t win a fistfight with a man with that much supernatural protection.

When my wife Lamyai and I spent a long weekend in Hua Hin, staying in a bungalow near the beach, before we went to bed that night she put a one-baht coin under each pillow and when we left a few days later she said, “Good-bye, house. Thank you for sleep. See you next time.” She told me that both actions, unheard of in the part of the world I came from (the United States), were to appease the spirits in the house and the land on which it sat.

To the outsider, Thailand may look like a modern country, with cable television available in all seventy-six provinces, internet cafes virtually everywhere you look, and what surely might be Asia’s greatest saturation of mobile phones. The vast majority of Thais also are Buddhist, or say they are, yet over centuries, the national religion has been thrown into a spiritual blender with a much older belief in supernatural forces. Thus, there are tens of thousands of men and women who make their living as astrologers, numerologists, fortune-tellers, shamans, feng shui experts, and other types of spiritualists, and tens of millions of people with computers and cell phones who follow them.

In the West, many disparage such beliefs, calling them groundless superstition and irrational bunk. Yet, it is helpful to remember that while it is true that the wife of Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, a prime minister in the 1990s, worshipped Rahu, the god of darkness who is said to swallow the moon during eclipses, it also is true that the wife of American President Ronald Reagan consulted an astrologer and then advised her husband accordingly, and that 60 percent of all Americans say they read their horoscope regularly.

John Hoskin explained in his book The Supernatural in Thai Life (1993) that Buddhism “is concerned primarily with man’s ultimate release from suffering, from the cycle of death and rebirth. As such, it does not address mundane problems. At the same time, it is a tolerant faith, not necessarily negating additional beliefs that may be deemed relevant and beneficial to daily well-being. Accordingly, the Thais have inherited from their animistic ancestors a host of beliefs in supernatural powers that interact with ordinary life. Rather than contradict Buddhism, these convictions are held in such a close and complex relationship with the national religion that an outsider can scarcely differentiate the dual elements.” In other words, the Thais aren’t taking any chances, and for the man with all the tattoos, they certainly protected him the day I watched him take off his shirt. Nor did any unpleasant incidents occur during our stay in Hua Hin.

It’s probably accurate to say that a majority of Thais believe strongly in the protective power of tattoos, amulets and blessings given by monks. Lottery tickets are purchased on the basis of numbers remembered from dreams or divined while visiting a “magical” tree or shrine. Family members and village elders tie white and gold thread around others’ wrists to bring good luck. Caged birds are released for the same reason.

The omnipresence of spirit houses in Thailand—you’ll even see them outside modern skyscrapers—stems from the belief that prior to human occupation, spirits inhabited the site and lest they become angry and bring misfortune to the new arrivals, they must be given a home of their own and daily recognition in the form of incense, food, and drink. (Often a bottle of pop with a straw in it, which always makes me smile. As does the occasional hog’s head or kilogram of bacon, two other frequent offerings.)

Every year when new vehicle license plates are issued, fiercely competitive auctions are held for those with “auspicious” numbers. A plate with “9999” has been sold for as much as US$100,000, the cash from these sales going to the Land Transport Department’s road safety fund. Ordinary, everyday currency with “lucky” numbers is sold in shops for hundreds of times the face value.

A shrine outside a Bangkok department store is visited by teenagers every day from nine to ten in the morning so that the “god” residing there may bless and help the lovesick. Those seeking good luck in school or in the office or any other endeavor including winning the lottery go to the Erawan Shrine, lighting candles, offering flowers, burning incense, and paying women in traditional costume to dance… then perhaps buy a lottery ticket from one of the many vendors outside the gates. Others on Tuesday nights visit a bronze stature of Rama V, the beloved King Chulalongkorn who ruled as absolute monarch from 1868 to 1910; many believe he will return to rule Thailand again, saving it from its many sins and weaknesses.

Ghosts are a constant, a staple in magazines, books, movies and television soap operas as well as in daily life. When Lamyai’s brother Pairuen died in a motorcycle accident, an elaborate ceremony was performed at the time of his cremation to reunite his body with his spirit, which was believed to have been jarred from his body by the violence of this death. This was followed by a seven-day-long “ghost watch,” with some twenty or so relatives and neighbors spending the nights in our house; several reported sightings and the next week the house in which he died was dismantled and sold as scrap lumber.

I remember going to a bar one night to find the movie Ghost on TV. When this film, starring Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore, was released in Thailand, it became the most popular foreign motion picture of the year. Now I watched all the Thai women in the bar, frozen in place, mesmerized, ignoring customers as they sat staring at the box over the disc jockey’s booth, or stood nearly motionless on the stage; business practically halted until the movie ended. Another time I took an ailing computer to be examined and after half an hour the repair man said he couldn’t find anything to fix, thus my problem must be a phee , or ghost. (We in the West fear viruses; Thais fear ghosts.) Some other examples:

• In 1991, when Banharn Silpa-archa was finance minister, he ordered the removal of two wooden elephants from the front door of the Finance Ministry to a temple on the advice of a fortune-teller who said elephants would endanger his position; the surname “Silpa-archa” means “horse” and as everyone must know, pachyderms trump equines every time. Six years later, the new finance minister moved them back, hoping the move would cure the economic problems the country was having. A month after that, the baht was devalued and the economy of the entire region crashed.