10/31/95

 

NOOZZZZZ from Daniel

 

Gosh!!! It is Halloween tonight....and nothing to do! I have a big bag of peanut M&Ms for solace, however.  The weather is cooler now -- low 70s at night.....brrrrrr!!!!  Day is much the same, but it doesn’t broil you till you are sweating like a warm cheese.

 

Since I got back from the Philippines and Singapore, I have been a complete slacker.....Travelled twice, both times with Mem, who luckily has an understanding and busy boyfriend.

 

First time went to a little place called Sangklaburi.  Actually, we intended to go to a National Park but we missed the bus.  The town is near Burma; there are three famous pagodas there which are really small.  Actually, they were famous since whenever the Burmese invaded Thailand, they would stream past those little pagodas on their way to sack Ayuthaya.  Frankly, I doubt the invaders were much impressed with the little stucco pagodas, but ah well.  Excitment again: I rode a motorcycle to see them, this time with much protective gear (sneakers instead of sandals).  The kick start gave me a bit of trouble -- again I managed to impress the heck out of the women who hired the bike out to us by kicking the footrests a few times before eventully giving up.  Actually, the Burmese are an attractive people, as far as I can see (ie, women are cute).  The writing looks like interlocked horseshoe brain teasers, which Thai helps not at all in understanding.  I recall it as a fairly synchronic experience -- ie, uneventful and peaceful.   The mountains are however blunter than I expected -- I thought that the barrier between Burma and Thailand should be a bit more extreme, but it was no more daunting than a rumpled blanket.  No wonder the Burmese invaded so often........

 

By the way, my Thai is at the point where I generally understand what our maid/clerical assistant at work says to me.  

 

Second time we went to go off and see the solar eclipse. But before that, I had an appointment with a coffin.  I realized as I was writing about this that I could turn the story into an “article” for a local magazine -- a real rag.  Local media is like the amateur hour for farang; everybody gets their turn.  So this was my attempt......you can see I left little asides to give the mag ideas for side articles....I am such a pro no?  Wait till I get rejected viciously....

 

***ME AND MY COFFIN (title not submitted to the mag)

 

Recently it was my twenty-fifth birthday, although almost nobody knew it because I lie to everyone about my age.  Official people are told I am twenty-nine; if pressed, I “admit” I am twenty-seven.  After all, one cannot be too careful about these things when one is a noisy young farang in age-conscious Asia.  One of the few who did know was Mem, who, as our office manager, gets to see every official piece of paper showing how dek I am.  And being my pii sao (adopted older sister) as well, she had no hesitation in ordering me to celebrate my birthday correctly by making merit in a special way.  One of her suggestions was to liberate some aquatic animal that would otherwise have been eaten, but I rejected that idea -- I would simply feel too absurd carrying around some fish or turtle (I imagine them floating walleyed in a plastic bag, just like the goldfish we bought as children) just to have it come to an untimely end in the dubious waters of the Chao Phraya.  So I went for my other option -- buying a coffin.

 

Why buy a coffin?  Because until recently in Thailand, if you had beat the odds by making it to the ripe age of twenty-five, you were surely banging on death’s door.  So to cheat death of harvesting you at your peak, you siezed the initiative by undertaking your own ritual burial and cremation.  Some have carried this to an almost literal extreme by arranging a funeral, buying a coffin, and actually occupying the coffin for a time before sending it off (empty, of course) to the crematorium.  I chose the hassle-free route by going to a foundation, where you could let someone else take the heat for you, as it were.

 

To do it, Mem and I went to the Ruam Katanyu Foundation on a warm night after work. The foundation is Chinese -- perhaps due to the Chinese preoccupation with death’s financial as well as spiritual implications.  It was a long shallow building close to the street, much like a gas station with garage, although where a car would normally be jacked up there was a glowing and smoking Chinese shrine.  Conveniently, the Foundation is stationed near the lethal Silom/Rama IV intersection -- convenient because when a vicious accident claims lives, the foundations are the first on the scene rescuing the survivors and cleaning up the rest.  Indeed, they are often so thorough in their cleaning that they may extend their efforts to the wallets and glove compartments of the victims.  And their charitableness is so extreme that competing foundations have been known to fight over who gets dibs on the clean-up. 

 

For follow-up research: Describe the foundation.  How long has it been around? What else do they do?

 

Many non-profits find it difficult to make their work meaningful to donors.  Not so here: a series of bulletin boards covers the street-facing walls of the foundation, and each is tiled with photos showing the freshly dead -- the primary beneficiaries of the foundations’ work.  The pictures are so gruesome that I am sure they would quickly find numerous high-school aged customers back in the USA.  Here someone has been dismembered along a railroad track; there someone has been crushed, their light pink viscera showing indecently; another is charred into a blackened state that reminds me of an unsatisfactory muu grob.  A particularly horrible one depicted merely the top half of a head resting (absentmindedly one could say) on a sidewalk, staring into traffic -- it certainly makes one reconsider whether to reclaim hats dropped on the street.  More mysterious are the dead ones with no mark at all, just awkward cadavers lying on a linoleum floor.  The sense of mystery is enhanced by the numerous disembodied hands (yes, our foundations at work!) pointing at random spots on the corpses.  

 

Whether this is all a memento mori exercise or a call for greater safety is uncertain.  In any case, after careful examination of the faces of death, we stepped into the building and sat down with a burly stubbly man who was to take our order.  I decided to buy a whole coffin. After all, you are only twenty-five once, and it was a steal at a mere 500 baht.  Mem made a smaller donation -- 100 baht.  I idly wondered how one claimed a fifth of a coffin while Mem chatted with the Stubbly Reaper.  In return we both got two pieces of paper, one small and pink, the other a more florid yellow.  (I was a teensy bit disappointed that despite the munificence of my donation, the size of our certificates was identical.)  I wrote my name in block caps on both, wondering a little whether I should be calling attention to myself that way.  We then proceeded to a large stack of mustard-yellow wooden coffins, where we were to affix our pink slips with tongue depressors and tiny pots of schoolhouse glue.  That spooked me more than anything else about the place: are they really going to put one of those mangled dead bodies into my coffin?  Actually, I was more distressed just to imagine that they would be burying my little piece of paper with it.  Plus it reminded me of the Florida synagogues where every wall, lintel and cornice had a plaque saying something like Donated by Sophie Schatzman.

 

From their profiles the boxy coffins did not seem very spacious, but I suppose I was anthropomorphizing.  I also realized that all the coffins I had seen previously (in the United States of course) were built like American cars, with gleaming enameled steel, plush interiors, and chrome “accessories.”  Indeed, in both color and luster the coffins tended to resemble the automobiles that my defunct relatives had driven in this life.  These musings were interrupted when Mem started positioning her pink slip on a coffin that already had quite a sticker population on it, and motioned to me to do the same.  “But I paid for a whole one,” I protested, and went to put my slip smack in the middle of a fresh new coffin off to the side.  I was already trying to think of ways to repel others who might muscle in on my territory when Mem came over and started to put her sticker on my coffin. “Oh Mem,” I said, in my sweetest possible voice, “we are going to be on the same coffin together -- forever.”  The thought caused Lethal Uayporn to flee to an unclaimed one in another row.

 

The next room was for merit-making -- a small one-room Chinese shrine.  I recalled seeing it from outside, impressed by the snaky dragons with red light bulbs for eyes twined around the columns framing the door.  Smoke filled the room, and everything was covered with the powder of exhausted incense sticks.  We each picked out 20 new sticks, and lit them with the brass lantern slick with kerosene.  Mem told me what to do next: kneel on the dusty red cushions and wai with my hands sandwiching the incense.  Wish your merit upon everybody: your parents, your friends, your relatives, your ancestors.  You can even give some to your enemies, be they intentional or accidental -- finally, a way to repay all those frogs you squish on the roadways.  And be sure to mention your birth date somewhere along the way -- that was essential.  Although I had a little trouble figuring what to do at first (I can’t remember the last time I actually prayed for something, and it is hard to figure out who one’s enemies are nowadays), I managed to squeeze everybody in.  Nearing the end of my recitation Mem pulled me up.  “That’s enough. Their answering machine is running out of tape.” 

 

After that, we began offering our incense sticks.  Three went to a horse statue; six were placed before some elongated Chinese deities clutching peaches.  Three more each went to a tiger statue, a dragon, and a small shadow box that sat below the leaning goddess of mercy, Kwan Yin -- although she curiously got no incense herself.  Mem made a special wai before the Tiger -- an astrologer said this was an auspicious sign for her.  The two remaining sticks we each had were stuck in the sand-filled vases under each bulb-eyed dragon.  To complete the circle, we lit our yellow certificates (my receipt!) in the lantern, setting the crisp remains in a large bowl once they had burned satisfyingly.  With that, I had completed my ritual death, cremation, and purification -- or so I hoped.

 

For follow-up research: what is the significance of those beasts?

 

So what would become of my new life?  This answer would be found through the siem sii sticks.  As I was shaking them up (it reminded me of once savagely shaking to bits a canister of Pringles potato chips) and asking myself how on earth one could jump out, I realized that this really was a sort of monitoring and evaluation component of my merit-making.  If I had done it right, I would receive a good fortune; if not, things were sure to be tough, at least until I had some pretense to shake the sticks again.  Out came number eight.  I wondered: a good number?  It was two to the third power, and infinity balanced on its edge -- but who knows what it could mean for the Chinese?

 

From the pigeonholes on the wall, Mem pulled a hot pink slip with Chinese and Thai poetry written on it -- neither decipherable to me.  Her translation:

 

The crops you have sown will not be damaged;

You will win seven out of eight.

(Like) mountains and rivers which endure forever,

And pine trees which last 10,000 years,

The person who gets this leaflet, in whatever they do,

Will achieve long-lasting success.

 

In other words, I am to be blessed for the duration of my venerable life.  At least, I was happy to adopt that superstition since fate had worked out in my favor.  As we started to head back, I realized that everything had gone right, except for one thing: I had forgotten to pray that I would never, ever appear in the snapshots in front of the Foundation.

 

List names, address, telephones of this and other foundations.

 

Suggested supplemental material:

 

Short piece on the history of Chinese foundations.  Who founded them and why? Where did the idea come from? How old are they? What ever happended to ambulances, anyhow?

 

Short piece on the alleged tendency of foundation rescue workers to steal victims’ possessions.

 

Lurid pictures of accident victims, foundations around Bangkok, the lucky fortune.

 

******** THE END ************

 

Anyway, back to the eclipse.  We went to Nakhon Ratchasima prvince in central Thailand, since there the eclipse would be total. 

 

We bought some very dark glasses (like 3-D paper cheapies), and looked up, and boom, there it was, the moon eating the sun.  Actually, here in Thailand, people believe that the sun is being eaten by the evil green legless demon Rahu, and that it is extremely bad luck to view an eclipse, and that it is best to hide indoors with the windows shut, or possibly to meditate with one’s back to the eclipse.

 

Despite these warnings, I had received the lucky number 8 at the coffin shop (coincidentally, 8 is Rahu’s “unlucky” number, and those with ID numbers beginning or ending with 8 (as mine does) are supposed to sacrifice 8 black things (black chicken, blackened 100-year old egg, black grass jelly, etc.) to Rahu so as not to have a bad time of things) and also, I was a farang, making me exempt from all such superstitions.   The best place to view the eclipse was supposedly Konburi, a hot dusty soulless town where the wind blew abandoned white plastic bags through the air over the streets.  Thousands of Thais also came to brave Rahu, including several dozen monks, who looked silly as they pressed the paper glasses up to their eyes and  bared their teeth as they squinted.  Indeed, piled in the backs of trucks and staring through the lenses with shaved heads and orange robes, they looked a little like mental patients.  Needless to say, just by writing this, I have lost what little merit I head before seeing Rahu, and perhaps have knocked myself back by several incarnations.

 

The sun lost intensity; it came to resemble an autumn sun in a northern clime.  Slowly it grew darker and much cooler; shadows were spangled and fringed with tiny crescents.  I occasionally stole a glance at the sun; I wasn’t convinced that the glasses had strong UV protection. Darker and the sun bacame too dim to see with the glasses -- and boom -- an eerie black disk in the purple-black sky, surrounded by a glowing ring, with white misty streaks curling off.  The upper part of the sky was like night, although the horizon had the mellow pink-blue glow of sunset.  People screamed and launched fireworks (another ancient anti-Rahu measure).  In two minutes, the sun peeked out and the disk disappeared -- glasses back on. 

 

As exciting as the sun’s eating was, the regurgitation lost most everybody’s interest.  All those who had forgotten to launch their fireworks during the scene proceeded to do so.  After that we spent most time in traffic, not to mention a traffic jam that made a 3.5 hour trip take twice as long.  We arrived in Bangkok at 11 pm! 

 

Back to Bangkok.  We had some flooding near the Liver.  Since we are sort of in the central business district here, however, the government realizes that they can’t allow us to flood without crippling the national economy....so we here are high and dry.  People in the suburbs, however, need only look outside to view Waterworld.  Ayutthaya, the ancient city, has been submerged for a month...everything is falling apart. The nespaper said the river was at its highest level in 200 years ----we can always blame the eclipse (see below).

 

Well, Rahu got me back after all.  Also recently got food poisoning after eating at Sizzler--we had steak, but it came with a salad bar.  We bet it was some cold Chinese noodles.  Thais aren’t used to the salad bar maintenance routine, it appears.  Mem, who wanted to go, got sick first, and recovered quickly; I on the other hand. felt it hit me after a huge meal, had indigestion all Sunday night and missed work all the next day, too dizzy to stand up.  Pretty pathetic, walking back and forth between bed and bathroom, flipping among the 4 English language channels....I know everything there is to know about Islamic Jihad, after watching 8 BBC news broadcasts in a row.

 

Anyhow, now I’m better....and signing off........

 

Take care,

 

Daniel