27 October 1995 (revised)

 

BANGKOK, THAILAND -- Recently it was my twenty-fifth birthday, although almost nobody knew it because I lie to everyone about my age.  Official Thai 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 (foreigner) in age-conscious Asia.  One of the few who did know the truth was Mem, who, as our office manager at IIEC, got to see every official piece of paper showing how young I am.  And being my pii sao ("older sister", or female colleague to whom I must pay due obeisance), 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 -- it would simply have been too absurd and pointless to rescue some walleyed fish or bewildered turtle, only to have it come to an untimely end in the dubious, café-au-lait-colored waters of the Chao Phraya River.  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 ripeness, you seized 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.  (Cremation is the traditional disposal route in Thailand.)  I chose the convenient, hassle-free route by going to a foundation, where you could let someone else take the heat for you, as it were.

 

Since ambulances in Bangkok are mostly for the rich, foundations serve as both an emergency service and mop-up squad for the frequent road accidents.  The foundations are usually Chinese -- perhaps due to the Chinese preoccupation with death's financial as well as spiritual implications - and they are funded by donations.  It is also said, rather publicly, that they are funded by the wallets, purses, and glove compartments of the victims.  Indeed, fights have been known to break out among rival emergency crews when territory lines were unclear.   In any case, the foundations do provide free coffins for the poor, funded my people like me.

 

So Mem and I went to the Ruam Katanyu Foundation on a warm night after work.  Conveniently, the Foundation was stationed near an excellent territory -- the highly lethal Silom/Rama IV intersection.  The Foundation itself was simply a building sitting close to the street.  It was longish like a gas station with garage, although where a car would normally be jacked up there was a glowing Chinese shrine smelling of smoke and incense.  And instead of a snack food counter, there was a big pile of yellow coffins in the window.  Otherwise it was pretty similar.

 

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 board 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, his (her?) light pink innards showing indecently; another is charred into a blackened state that reminds me of an unsatisfactory muu grob (deep fried pork).  A particularly horrible one depicted merely the top half of a head resting 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, or about $20.  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 for our money we both got two pieces of paper, one small and pink, the other a more florid yellow.  (I was a tiny bit disappointed that despite the munificence of my donation, the size of my certificate was identical to Mem's.)  I wrote my name in block capitals on both my pieces of paper, 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 paste.  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 and lintel had a plaque saying Donated by Sophie Waxman.

 

From their profiles the boxy coffins did not seem very spacious.  (While this may seem to be a rather Western concern, I did recall that the Chinese liked their coffins big and comfy too.)  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 her to flee to an unclaimed one in another row.

 

My coffin claimed, we went to "make merit" in the next room -- 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.  At this point, of course, I was chock-full of boon (merit), which is roughly like good karma.   If I had been struck down in the intersection outside just after this exercise, I would surely have been reincarnated much more favorably.  Or I would be richer.  Well, there are various interpretations. 

 

We each picked out 20 fresh incense sticks, and lit them with the brass lantern slick with kerosene.  Mem told me what to do: first you kneel on the dusty red cushions and bow with your hands sandwiching the incense.  Then you 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 outside Gotham City, rather few of us have obvious enemies), 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 the bodhisattva curiously got no incense herself.  Mem made a special wai (bow of respect) 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 in the lantern (my receipt!), 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.

 

So what would become of my new life?  This answer would be found through the siem sii sticks.  The sticks were like long, thin tongue depressors, each labeled with a number.  You shook them in a round red cardboard tube until one of the sticks somehow jumped out, and the number would determine your future.  As I was shaking them up (it reminded me of 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?  I know nine is good and four is bad, but eight?

 

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 that 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.

 

Postscript:  So far, I haven't.