Move Over Buddha!

The 'Pu Ta' animist shrine by the pond in the rice fields.

Making offerings for the village's most powerful spirit.

Pu yai baan, the village head, blesses the offerings with water.

The old ladies pour offerings of rice whisky.

Not a bad way to start the day really...

... with alcohol and chicken to follow.

And if his gizzard's straight it'll be a good year.

But her future's not on rails. The world is changing.


A Ceremony Older Than Buddhism

I have just watched a remarkable village ceremony, a propitiation of the spirits at a special shrine that owes no reference whatsoever to Buddhism.

I write in my recent book, “MY THAI GIRL AND I”, about the importance of Buddhism in our village and how it coexists happily with older animist belief in the spirits of the fields and the spirits of the dead. So many of the ceremonies that I see around here, despite the Buddhist trappings, are thus in fact ‘animistic’ in origin, ancient spirit worship much older than Buddhism.

While the Christian god is a jealous god, Buddhism has no god at all and so perhaps can coexist more easily with the spirits of much older beliefs.

I talk (at page 129 of the book) about the special village shrine, the pu-ta which uniquely has no relation whatever to Buddhist styles but looks remarkably like an African shrine to animist spirits. I’ve read that at these village shrines there are two major ceremonies every year but at the time of writing my book I’d never seen them.

Now at last I have and it was truly fascinating.

The other day Cat told me there was to be a big ‘Buddha party’ down by the pond that morning and told me to bring my camera. I was feeling almost too lazy to go but thank goodness I didn’t miss it. She went ahead with some chicken she’d killed and cooked while I followed on my bike.

The shrine by the pond is a square shed of concrete blocks with a corrugated roof, totally unadorned which could be a pump house or small storage hut. The front is open and inside is a raised area on which stand two roughly carved figures, male and female, she vaguely European, he with a droopy Mexican moustache. Scattered around them are several carved wooden rifles, a few chunks of laterite stone and some plastic bowls with the dried up remains of food offerings in them.

You see these shrines on the fringes of every village overlooking the rice fields and they’re always much the same, often newly built, plain and white, in stark contrast to the bright style of Buddhist temples.

Anyway, as I arrived on my bike that day, perhaps fifty people were hanging around the shrine, mainly women and children chatting happily in the easy way they do. Inside on the floor, wall to wall, were offerings of food, mainly cooked chicken and bottles of lao khao, Thai rice whisky.

The pu yai baan, our village head soon appeared and splashed water around the figures on the altar while two old women poured offerings of alcohol into a bowl, everyone casually looking on. Then those who’d made offerings retrieved them and started breaking the heads off the chickens, while an old woman threw buckets of water up onto the roof, laughing and joking. The main focus of the morning was then to examine the gizzards of the chickens.

I’d previously seen this done just after Cat and I had first come to the village… they’d consulted the spirits to see if our future together looked positive. If the gizzard from the neck of the chicken they’d killed was reasonably straight we’d be okay but if not it wouldn’t work out. Old uncle gave the thumbs up, saying we’d be fine… at least that is if Cat didn’t talk too much!

Now beside the pond, having made their offerings and done their duty to the spirits of the pu ta, everyone seemed happy with their gizzards and they all just wandered off home, looking forward to a special meal of rice and chicken.

As usual I asked Cat for her interpretation of the ceremony and it’s to ask for good fortune in the coming year, which of course means a plentiful rice harvest. I wondered too if the throwing of water was a symbolic request for good rains which is the key to a farmer’s prosperity.

As customs such as these are universal over a wide region, and having no holy books, I’m sure that the exact beliefs vary from place to place. I also suspect that they’re not very precise… the ritual simply carries on by habit from year to year and generation to generation because that’s just what you always have to do.

I’ve read that the pu-ta is the chief shrine of the village, the spirit itself deriving from an ancient ancestor who, if duly venerated, like a father figure will care for his ‘children’. However, if a village is racked with drought and illness and other misfortunes, then the influence of the pu-ta may wane because he has neglected this duty. The pu-ta is the central reference for social order, a refuge in times of trouble and a protection against danger. While he may punish the villagers for their misdeeds, they will look for other protectors if they suffer bad times despite having honoured his shrine.

The ceremony that I saw suggests that the old beliefs or practices remain strong in our village… everyone knew this was to be the day and had killed and cooked a chicken as an offering. Rituals such as this will continue though, even when the essential beliefs are slipping. The visit to the shrine was a pleasant social occasion to look forward to and a small investment to assure future security. As Thailand becomes more and more urbanised it will however become a sad affair for the old people left behind in the villages who still remember the old ways.

I now wonder how the little girl I photographed at the scene will remember ceremonies such as this one and what they’ll mean to her as she grows up and moves away from home. Her very traditional old grandmother was one of the crones offering alcohol to the spirit of the temple, while the tiny girl was in a ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ tee shirt.

So where will this child’s life lead her now? Her family is poor and she’ll probably leave school early to go to Bangkok to earn pitiful wages. Despite her village upbringing, life for her will be very different to that of her grandparents. As rice farmers who first had to cut back the forest to make rice fields, facing tigers and elephants and drawing up the ladders at night to keep safe from bandits, for them it’s been hard.

It won’t be easy for their grandchild either and from the sweatshops of the city she may well remember her village childhood with nostalgia and regret.

Andrew Hicks The ‘ThaiGirl’ Blog March 2009

Thai School Girls Made Apsara!

"My Thai Girl and I"... the movie!

A day out of school at Sikoraphum.


School girls hard at work practicing their dance.

And next day transformed into apsaras.

Nearly a thousand years after these figures were carved in stone.






A final bow.


I’ve seen Niagara and a few of the world’s great water falls but none has the impact of the unexpected.

When in Sierra Leone exploring the jungle and pristine beaches to the west of Freetown, we stumbled across a small waterfall that was at least as memorable as Niagara. Following the sound of thundering waters, suddenly there it was, perfect, untouched, unvisited and with so much magic added by surprise.

Not far from our sleepy rice village in Isaan, we’ve recently had a similar experience, uplifting in its beauty and revelation, this time a display of traditional Thai dance at the ancient Khmer temple of Sikoraphum.

We had staying with us in our village home in Surin province some documentary makers, who were with us to shoot preliminary footage for a film version of MY THAI GIRL AND I, the book about my life in Thailand with Cat. As nothing much ever happens here, it was going to be hard to find things for them to shoot.

When you’ve seen one dry rice field you’ve seen the lot so I decided to take them to see the temple at Sikoraphum. Dating from the Angkor era and almost a thousand years old, the temple truly is a gem. It’s well preserved and maintained and has a very special atmosphere indeed.

Usually it’s deserted and there’s hardly a soul there but on arriving we found the lawns around the temple occupied by hundreds of school children from the nearby Sikoraphum Phisai School. A teacher explained to us that they were out of the class rooms for a few days for a special ‘integrated learning’ project, using trigonometry for example to measure the height of the temple stupas. And what’s more some of the school girls were practicing for a traditional Thai dance display to take place the very next day.

No movie maker would miss an opportunity like this so we came back the following day and the dance was even more special for being so unexpected. Previously while practicing the girls had been in sports clothes as they went through their dance routines, all giggling and worldly. Today in their elaborate costumes they were transported to another time, back to the Khmer empire, the era of Sukhotai or Ayuttaya. These were ordinary school girls made apsara, the lissom messengers of the gods, seen famously carved in stone at the temples of Angkor, and they danced like angels.

The setting was idyllic, the platform of the temple providing a perfect stage. The costumes complemented the warm browns of the temple’s brick work and the dancing itself was impeccable. I was utterly entranced.

The Thais love dance but so often their current obsession with coyote girls gyrating sexily to loud music obliterates all interest in more traditional forms. How sad this is as traditional dance is perhaps the finest of Thailand’s performing arts. Even in Bangkok it’s rarely seen today except in shows put on for tourists and then not always very well done. I was told a few years ago that traditional Thai dance is so much in decline that many of the forms and skills are being lost.

That a provincial school such as this one should thus excel itself in traditional dance and make so creative a use of its local temple is therefore a huge credit to them. I can only say that they gave us an unexpected and special moment which I for one shall certainly long remember.


WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Thailand, obsessed with sexy dancing from six year olds at school to almost every show on television, has abandoned it's love of traditional dance which is so very sad.

I'D LOVE TO HAVE YOUR COMMENTS.

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog March 2009

In A Pool of My Own Blood!

"Bangkok's bastion of wholesome and culturally acceptable tourism."

Established in the early fifties, it's a quirky place.

And boasts the oldest unchanged hotel lobby in Bangkok.

Koh Samui? No The Atlantas's pool on Soi 2.

"No sex tourists, louts or other degenerates." A principled stand that makes for a pleasant hotel where I always stay and meet interesting people.

But this time I ended up in a pool of blood and on the operating table at the Bumrungrad for three hours.


Now for a whole month I’m unable to see my tongue or even to open my mouth.

That’s how it goes when you end up lying in a Bangkok street in a pool of your own blood.

It all happened like this.

I’d come down on the bus to arrange reprints for my books, THAI GIRL and MY THAI GIRL AND I and to see my American friend Bill who’d just arrived from China. It had all gone pretty well and that fateful day I’d met up for lunch with another old friend, Anthony. We’d both enjoyed the ‘eat all you can’ salad bar at Sizzlers in Thonglor, including a world class chocolate mousse or three and I thought that was going to do me for the rest of the day.

Later at The Atlanta in Sukhumvit soi 2 (www.theatlantahotel.com), an eccentric boutique hotel that’s my home from home in Bangkok, I’d spent the evening chatting to a pleasant English university professor and his family and belatedly had an urge for a slice of pizza. It was nine already and not wanting a full Thai meal, I headed off up the soi and turned right past the Rajah Hotel and into Soi 4. The thought of a quick beer was appealing too but to avoid the hassle of sitting in a bar, I bought a can of Archar from Seven Eleven for 19 baht and sat down on the granite step of a closed shop to drink it and watch the world go by.

Finishing the beer, I got up intent on my pizza but I didn’t get very far. Suddenly the soi was swimming in circles. I remember grabbing at some grey plastic guttering which gave no support and then there was darkness and a terrible crash.

When a suicide gets hit by an inter-city train he must for a nano-second register the impact and I now think I know how it feels. I was puzzled by the crash but soon came round to find myself lying in the street in a pool of my own blood.

First I was conscious of a mouthful of broken teeth, of Thai voices around me, of someone giving me back my glasses, of kind people helping me up and sitting me down on a chair just outside a pool bar. Anxious faces appeared out of the door. Bar workers gave me tissues and one of them sat and attended to me for ten or fifteen minutes.

‘You shouldn’t drink too much,’ she said disapprovingly.

‘I wasn’t drunk at all,’ I replied. ‘Just had a dizzy fit… tired, hungry, low blood pressure maybe.’

My shirt was covered in blood and clutching a handful of bloody tissues, I tried to assess the damage. From the neck upwards it hurt! My jaw ached but I could still talk. I had a big open cut on the bottom of my jaw, my lower lip had been lacerated by what remained of my lower incisors and I’d badly bitten the side of my tongue. And worryingly I was bleeding profusely from my right ear.

Otherwise I had not a mark on me… not on my hands or knees or anywhere. I must have gone down like a rag doll and taken it all on the chin.

The nice bar lady offered to get me a taxi, but no, I said I could walk. With the one-way system a taxi would have to go three sides of a square and it wasn’t far back to The Atlanta. So stupidly I walked and very kindly she came too, talking to me all the way, and delivered me slowly to the door of my hotel.

I got some funny looks at reception but I took my key and climbed the three floors to my room. There I spent one of the worst nights of my life in a lot of pain, bleeding into a towel and getting increasingly anxious.

I am strong, I am invincible… and surely I’d quickly bounce back. Wounds heal very fast. I’d be sore in the morning but in a few days it’d be okay.

Then I began to get increasingly worried.

My tongue was double its usual size and filled my mouth but trying to close my jaw I got a bit of a shock. When the molars to the right side of my mouth touched, the rest of my teeth didn’t touch at all and on feeling below my ears there were some worrying lumps. I must at least have dislocated my jaw, if not broken it.

Come six in the morning I crept gingerly down the stairs to the hotel lobby and there to my joy was a ministering angel in the svelte form of my old friend Le Phoque who’d clearly been up late that night. Roger looked aghast at this bloody apparition but swung into action and promptly called a taxi and bundled me inside. Within five minutes we were in the Emergency Room of the Bumrungrad, one of the world’s top private hospitals. (See www.bumrungrad.com).

People were rushing everywhere and they all seemed to be in a hurry to help me. I was laid on a bed and curtained off and an orderly injected a pain killer while a surgeon, no less, asked me what I’d been up to and cleaned the wounds on my chin. He told me I’d have to be admitted to the hospital if my little problem were to be fixed.

There then began a long perambulation to almost all departments of the hospital except gynecology and geriatrics, with Roger in attendance. I can’t remember what order it all took but I was soon admitted to a four bed ward and within a relatively short time had had an X-ray and CT scan of my head, a chest X-ray, an ECG and consultations with a cardiologist, with a dentist, with an ENT man who told me my eardrum was not perforated and just about every blood test possible. It was all very thorough, proving that the Bumrungrad is an impressive outfit indeed.

The next big event was meeting with the plastic surgeon. He sat me down at a computer screen where I confronted my own death’s head in ghoulish detail. The way the salami slices of the CT scan are made into a 3D image of the skull is quite remarkable but mine told a sorry story. Yes, the doctor told me, the jaw is badly broken, vertically down the front and at the back on both sides in the usual place where it hinges. The lines on the image were hard for me to interpret but smashed would seem a better term than fractured.

The best procedure in this case, he told me, was to do an arch bar intramedullary fixation which involves fitting a metal arch inside the mouth above and below the teeth and then binding these together with rubber ties threaded between each of the teeth. Done under general anesthetic the jaw is manipulated into place so that the lower jaw is biting correctly, the mouth is then sewn closed and the patient is told to put up and shut up and to come back in about a month’s time.

Cat had been told of the accident and dropping everything had got on the bus to Bangkok for the nine hour journey to be with me. It has never been so good to see her and she’s since been by my side feeding me, tolerating my less worthy moments and generally being a tower of strength.

The op was scheduled for 3.30pm on my third day in hospital but with only a few hours to go, it was postponed until 9.30pm because of pressure on the theatres. Hell’s bells, it’s the waiting that’s the worst but I just had to wait.

Then they came for me a little after eight and I was parked in the waiting area with a silly cap on my head contemplating my fate until well after ten. I’ve never had a general anesthetic before. It’s like a brush with death, to be so switched off, so vulnerable, while people you don’t know do unspeakable things to you. I tried not to think too much about it but it wasn’t easy.

The nurses were chatty and fun but with my hair net and a cartoon thick lip like Wallace and Grommit, I wasn’t at my best. One of them said I must be fit because my pulse rate and blood pressure were low, but then maybe that was why I’d crumpled up in the street.

Then at last they wheeled my tumbril into the theatre and bounced me bodily across onto the slab. There was more hanging around and then the anesthetist appeared. As she administered the potion, I felt an unpleasant hot sensation in my left arm and I slipped into nothingness.

The surgeon had a lot of sutures to do in my mouth, sewing my tongue back on and stuff and so the operation must have taken more than three hours. The next thing I knew was the Devil sticking needles into my tongue and I was back in the recovery room. I felt okay except that my body seemed agitated. I just couldn’t settle but kept squirming around. After two hours recovery I was wheeled up to the ward and back to bed for a few hours before the morning light came up.

So that’s my story and it explains why my tongue is now sealed tight in my mouth for a month, and why I can only eat and speak through my teeth. At least I’ve now escaped the hospital and for the next month I’ll just have to get through it and grit my teeth… all too literally.

I have to admit that I just detest hospitals. When they ask if there’s anything I’m allergic to the answer’s always ‘doctors’, and even though the nurses were all Miss Thailand International runners up, I hate being pestered to have my blood pressure taken every half hour while they ask me the same questions again and again.

“How much water you intake and how many times you pee pee/poo poo since mid-day please?”… and so it goes on.

I was also experiencing a terrible pain in my wallet, caused by the hospital’s request for a deposit toward payment of the bill. Their estimate was hugely overestimated and in true Thai style a ‘deposit’ meant pre-payment of the full amount, otherwise the operation would not go ahead. The only way for me to get hold of so much money was to get up from my bed, go to the bank and personally withdraw it.

Actually we took a taxi to the bank and the taxi driver was a wonderful old soul of eighty one. He talked non-stop about his back ache, forgot to put the meter on and when he said, “Mai pen rai, give me whatever you feel like” he earned himself a double fare. To deal with my aches and pains I was just about to spend several times more than he’d earn in a year.

So now I’m back at The Atlanta with Cat taking amoxicillin and trying to work out how not to die of starvation. For someone like me, being almost unable to talk is pretty serious, though at least it’s not life threatening. Cat’s been winning all the arguments by default but she’s also fantastic at finding liquid foods for me so I may not starve after all.

I’m taking a milk formula which claims to be a complete diet and otherwise it’s yoghurts and soups. Cat has been out and bought packets of a rice gruel called ‘joke’ and the hotel kitchen prepares this for me. So my breakfast’s a joke, lunch is a joke and so is dinner. Such is life!

We’ve tried ordering some of the soups in The Atlanta’s excellent restaurant but the smallest particles cause big, big problems. With my teeth sewn tight shut, all my nutrition has to come up a straw and be filtered through the gaps between my lower teeth. To finish a bowl of soup can take an hour if there are bits in it as the straw blocks and the solids block clog my teeth.

After a week, the external injuries on my chin are completely healed but the soft tissue injuries to my mouth are still very sore. All food has to be sucked in over my lower lip which is still twice its normal size and has precious little skin. Probing around with a tooth pick to clear my blocked teeth isn’t fun either. And the stitches on the side of my tongue are truly painful and any speech or movement is excruciating. The stitches themselves and the metal work in my mouth are like a mouthful of barbed wire which chafes the cheeks, so I’m a complete mess.

The rubber fixings are very tight and any movement or swallowing feels as if the teeth are being pulled out of their sockets and causes pain to the fractured hinges of the jaw. Some of the broken teeth are very sensitive and I’m terrified that during the next crucial month something will flare up… a severe tooth ache or an abcess or whatever. The dentist assured me that none of the damaged teeth had pulp exposed so I may be in luck, but it’ll be a big problem if this happens.

It’s torture really, especially when I look at what is one of the best menus in Bangkok and watch all around me in the restaurant tucking in. It’s quite scary that the food’s there in front of me but I can’t eat it.

Yes, it’s a gruel and unusual punishment!

At least when Tantalus couldn’t reach the water and grapes, he could open his mouth and grumble about it. For me, even hissing through my teeth is painful!

Cat and I managed to walk up the soi to Boots this morning where we met an English friend from The Atlanta who’s a dental hygienist and we carefully chose mouth washes, liquid vitamins and a stock of amoxycyllin to keep at home as a back up in case anything flares up.

So all in all, it hasn’t been fun, but given that I was alone when fell, I’ve met nothing but kindness from strangers and from the many friends around me… not to mention having a top hospital only a mile or two away. The Atlanta’s been a haven too. Even if I can’t actually talk to any of my friends, sitting by the pool has helped us take the strain and the hotel staff have been great.

It’ll be a difficult month though and while I still feel quite wobbly, when I’m stronger we’ll get the bus back to the village. The temperature in Isaan has fallen to 39 degrees which isn’t so hot and being home and cooking and sieving food in our own kitchen should be much easier than in a hotel room.

Which only leaves a few superficial musings about ‘life’.

I think I’ve done okay so far as this is only my second accident… one when I was aged six and now this one at sixty two. The first was when Nick Drake, my childhood friend fell heavily across my leg and fractured my tibia. I’ve told that story elsewhere in my tribute to Nick, now post-mortem a singer song writer, well known throughout the world. (See www.brytermusic.com Articles.) I guess I was the lucky one.

In this life I’ve not risk been risk averse though, climbing and sailing, driving across the Sahara and travelling to remote places, and I still belt my mountain bike through the rice fields much to Cat’s alarm. Yet the most horrific accident happens to me walking down an urban street!

Okay, the fainting fit could be a cause for worry but the quacks could find nothing of concern and just counseled caution. I shall certainly not stand up too quickly in future.

And thinking of risk, this was the moment I wished I’d had medical insurance. Over the last forty years, insurance companies have made massive profits from me and it would have been better never to have been insured. That’s been my recent attitude and for my uninsured years in Thailand I’m still ahead as the sum total of all the medical premiums I didn’t pay would have far exceeded my recent hospital bill.

Even so this has been a salutary warning and I think it’s time to think again. Trouble is, if I insure myself and Cat, we’ll be fine but then awful things can happen to other family members. I’m sure we can propitiate the spirits for less than the cost of medical insurance though!

So can anyone now advise me on medical insurance in Thailand? A healthy fool of sixty two who indulges in dangerous sports needs to find some reasonable cover.

I sail and cycle and very occasionally walk down Soi 4. And not so long ago I jumped out of an aeroplane high above Australia.

Oh, and I’m married to a Thai wife.

That too should surely be on the list of dangerous sports!


PS This was written a few days ago and we took the bus back to the village last night. It was a twelve hour overnight trip as the wretched bus chose this particular occasion when I was hardly back on my feet to have a hydraulic leak and we were hours late leaving. But it’s good being back home, I’m feeling considerably better and it’s much easier preparing food here than in the hotel.


Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog March 2009

The Bird That Said 'Fuck'!

How does the power supply in Bangkok ever work?!

... let alone the internet!

Wires and rubbish seen from a spotless Skytrain escalator..

Sphagetti for the rampant rodents in our roof space.

Big C drill bits... melting moments!

An elephant comes to visit our soi.

I spy a passing pachyderm from upstairs.

What's Cat been hanging in the tree? Read on and see.


I was woken early the other morning by someone saying fuck, not once but several times in a strange, guttural voice. The sound seemed to be high above us and was moving fast. It was either the disembodied spirit of a departed farang or could even have been a bird.

It might have been a tit babbler but more likely it was one of those big crow-like things you see swooping between the palm trees looking for baby chickens. It really is very loud and well spoken.

And if it isn’t the crow keeping us awake, it’s a rat in the roof that keeps gnawing on something metallic, a steel beam perhaps. It’s very loud and persistent and the damned thing takes little notice when I open the window and bang the gutters with a broom.

Coincidentally just as we were trying to sleep that night, one of the square gypsum ceiling tiles in the next room chose that moment to make its death leap and came down with a godalmighty crash. The ceiling, fitted by a flirty team of fairies five years ago, is an accident waiting to happen, especially when rats walk across it.

Cat was aquiver but I decided to get the ladder and poke my head through the hole to look for the rat which was still up there eating steel. On peering into the roof space I saw no rats, only a tangled spaghetti of wires that serves as rodent food. Recently the television has failed and numerous wires in the kitchen have been dangerously chewed but, never say die, these super rats only come back for more.

Exposed electric wiring in Thailand is a great national treasure and five star tours should be put on to view sites of special interest in the streets. Cities are held together by wires on poles and these entanglements have become a veritable art form. As a result the internet never works and it’s a miracle that there aren’t power cuts every day. Certainly, when there’s flooding more die from electrocution than drowning.

But this is Thailand so while you benefit from its pleasant relaxed atmosphere, you can’t expect all of the things to work all of the time… or even some of them.

As predicted our local electrician who took away the water heater at the beginning of the cold season has just brought it back and fitted it again. Now is the time for cold showers as it’s getting hot again, 38 degrees already, but, mai pen rai, we can use it again next year. And he’s taken away the ceiling fan which isn’t working, and I guess it’ll be back just in time for the next cold season.

It’s not just local services that are a little relaxed. Even if you buy glossy products from a big superstore they’re probably sub-standard too. Recently I bought an electric drill at Big C in Surin which I chose because it included a good range of drill bits which can be quite expensive.

The drill worked okay when you pressed the trigger but the masonry bits hardly made any impression on the hard concrete of our wall. My pictures remained unhung until I bough some real masonry bits from a proper builders’ merchant.

Then I tried some of the bits for drilling wood and they were even worse.

I wasn’t surprised when Saniam, who’d promised to rehang the door to the rice barn after I’d paid to get him out of jail, failed to come back and do the work. So I bought the drill and did it myself.

The door was hanging off its hinges which were secured by a mix of rusty screws and nails that had buckled and been hammered flat. All I had to do was pull them out, drill a few holes and drive in some new screws. The Thais don’t go in for screwing as they only ever have a hammer, but my new drill meant I could now do the job properly.

Strangely though, the first drill bit began letting off clouds of smoke but was hardly cutting into the wood. Then abruptly it seemed to melt and self-destructed in a twisted tangle. This was bizarre and had to be a one-off, so I tried another drill bit and then another. I only stopped trying when the third one melted and I cut my hand.

You cannot buy serious tools from a place like that, a friend told me. They’re only there to look nice on the shelves.

Then Cat had a motorbike accident. I’m terrified of her travelling on two wheels but of course she has to be mobile. A year ago in Bangkok she’d bought a licence to drive the car but as she can’t really drive at all, the motorbike it has to be. Anyway, going into Sangkha on our motorbike with Noi on the back she’d stopped at a bottleneck to let an approaching vehicle come through when a pickup ran slap into them from behind.

The bike was okay but they were both shaken and jarred which put Cat in fighting mood to get immediate compensation. Okay it wasn’t millions but after some argument she took the driver of the pickup for half his worldly wealth.

Of course he put up a spirited defense, saying that it wasn’t his fault. He was wearing dark glasses so he couldn’t see anything in the failing light!

Eventually he opened his wallet (he said he had no bank account), showed them that he only had 200 baht and gave them a hundred. Cat and Noi took fifty each and felt vindicated.

Small victories like this can sometimes be as good as the big ones and equally it hurts when they’re taken way. In different chapters of “MY THAI GIRL AND I” I talk smugly of how my ‘Thai girl’, Cat was rational enough not to go to the village sooth-sayer to have her fortune expensively told, like her two friends. I also describe the ‘battle of the wall’ and how I successfully resisted her pleas to build a huge concrete wall around our house, another satisfying victory for economy and common sense.

Then yesterday Cat casually told me that the reason she gave up wanting me to build the wall was that a fortune teller had told her the old lady next door would soon sell us a strip of land down the side of our house, so we could build the wall later when we’d extended the boundary. Mortified, I asked her how much she’d paid the fortune teller. At least it was only a packet of cigarettes which wasn’t too bad!

Thankfully Cat doesn’t gamble our money away like many Thais do because looking for lottery numbers can become a real obsession. A farang friend told me that one day his lady was gently caressing his shaven scalp with talcum powder. He asked her why she was so affectionate that night… but no, she was searching for lottery numbers in the powdery patterns on his skin.

There are never any lottery wins round here but a week or two ago we went with Peter to Ubon airport to pick up some friends of his arriving from England. As we had a few hours to kill before the flight arrived, we decided to look for a farang hostelry in town called the “Wrong Way Bar’. I had only a vague idea where it was so we looked around for a samlor, one of those tricycle cabs ridden by old men with skinny knees. We soon found one and to my surprise the driver spoke a little Engrish.

“Wrong Way Bar?” I asked him. ‘We go Wrong Way.”

“Okay, okay, go Wrong Way.”

After a few minutes I began to get worried that he didn’t know where we were going or that he was taking us round the houses to ramp up the fare.

“We’re going an awfully long way, aren’t we?” I ask him as he pedals slowly down a slope.

“Long way?” he asks quizzically.

“Are you sure you’re going the right way.”

“No,” he says, “Not go the right way. We go the Wrong Way.”

When eventually we got there we had fish and chips, Thai style. It was well worth the trouble.

Nothing else exciting has happened recently, except the other evening when an elephant came wandering up our soi… which is pretty normal I suppose. And Cat’s been hanging bits of meat and bone in the trees and bamboo.

A tree spirit fetish perhaps?

I’ve ceased asking questions about things like this any more. The farang already talks too much! But I eventually discovered why. There’s no greater delicacy for the locals than red ants eggs and the carrion in the tree was to attract the ants in the hope they’d build their nests there. They were certainly crawling with ants.

Well, I suppose we farang like caviare so why not eat ants eggs too.

Which gives me an idea about the rats in the roof. They must be a bit thin if they only eat steel but couldn’t we lay traps and eat them? Then we’d only have the bird that swears disturbing our sleep.

Now there’s a thought!


Andrew Hicks The ‘Thai Girl’ Blog February 2009

PS D H Lawrence got prosecuted and Kenneth Tynan caused a storm when he was the first to use the 'f' word on the BBC. I contemplated writing 'f..k' but that really would have been a bit silly. Have I offended anyone?

Thanks to Jen Hite for sending me the great pics of wires in Bangkok.

America - Right or Wrong?

This is his hut… bombing co-ordinates not supplied. He’s gone by now anyway!


When staying by the beach on Koh Chang a while ago I got chatting to a middle aged farang in the next hut to ours. His nationality is irrelevant but he’d worked his way up from being a builders labourer to a technical college lecturer and I respected him for that.

We touched on a wide range of topics and so couldn’t avoid talking about the credit crunch and the crisis in the world economy.

“Sub-prime mortgages… toxic debt,” he said. “Nothing good ever comes out of America!”

I was quite taken aback so I asked him to elaborate. He seemed balanced and reasonable but he gave me a huge catalogue of disasters that he blamed on America.

As well as toxic debt, they create far more than their fair share of global pollution, he said. Their toxic fast food’s poisoning the world and they champion a vulgar materialism that seduces and overwhelms the distinctive cultures of smaller nations. And then there’s George W whose election was highly irregular anyway.

As for America’s self-serving abuse of its super power might, he laid out a long and depressing list… for example their paranoia about communism that provoked nuclear confrontation with a much weaker Russia, their manipulation of surrogate struggles causing long term instability in Africa, Central America and South East Asia. Indeed Thailand’s current tensions with Cambodia have to be seen within that context, he argued.

Not to mention Israel!

Long term American support for Zionism has destabilized the Middle East and more recently Bush’s aggressive ‘for us or agin’ cowboy style of diplomacy, his ridiculously misnamed ‘War on Terrorism’ and his ‘crusade’ against Islam has set world peace back by decades.

The threat of “weapons of mass destruction” was lies and a poor excuse to finish the family feud with Saddam Hussain. Not forgetting “regime change”, “shock and awe” and the destruction of Baghdad… misplaced revenge that cost at least a hundred thousand Iraqi and American lives.

My natural reaction was to launch a vigorous defense of this, my own Anglo-American culture but I was so taken aback that I didn’t do it too well.

My every instinct recoiled at his barrage of criticism as I was raised by a father who fought in the Western Desert alongside American soldiers. ‘They were grand fellows,’ I remember him proudly telling me.

Having lived abroad in so many countries I’ve also had more American friends than perhaps of any other nationality and I regret not visiting more often as I love being there. As a post-war Brit, my bias towards the US is thus very positive.

Our discussion was cordial but I struggled to refute his onslaught, though I managed a few positive points.

For example, remembering my father’s experiences, twice in the last century our two nations stood together and defeated fascism. Then after World War II through the Marshall Plan and at Bretton Woods, America promoted a new world order of international institutions and laid the best possible foundations for reconciliation. Not to mention the technical creativity of the moon landings and of Microsoft.

Furthermore, America’s founding principles are a fine example to all nations, its creativity and dynamism is admirable and its music, movies and popular culture deserve the place they’ve won in the world. It’s willingness to shed American blood to promote principles it believes in and the electorate’s choice of a fine new president in Barack Obama indicate a strong and adaptable society.

Well, at least that’s what I tried to say, though I admit I was struggling a bit and I’m not sure I won the argument.

We remained friends but my opponent unsettled me and got me thinking. So I now ask you to help me out and to take the debate a little further.

To what extent are the criticisms of the US that were thrown at me valid and fair? What other points should I have made in her favour?

“Nothing good ever comes out of America?” Really?

I’d love to have your Comments.

(To post a Comment you may have to register an account with Google… a fine American company!)

'Thai Girls' Versus Western Ones? - To Be a Bitter Man!

Bangkok dangerous? From left to right, a primary school teacher, a retired art teacher and an insurance salesperson. Are ‘Thai girls’ sweet and respectful or might an old guy like him get gobbled up? This blog asks for your views on a subject of eternal fascination.



For myself I just hate stereoptyping.

Although it’s interesting to ponder our differences, I hate it when somebody expects people to be a particular way just because they are elderly, Thai, disabled, Muslim, female or whatever. We are all individuals and do not fit any template. We should be free to find happiness as we wish and not have to satisfy the expectations of others.

In my books and blogs I’ve generally avoided pontificating about ‘Thai girls’ and what they’re like, except when making fun of the many strange cross-cultural relationships you see in Thailand. In my view Thai women are like any other group… they’re all different and have their own individual strengths and weaknesses.

Most of all I’ve avoided discussing the supposed differences between western and Thai women because I fear this can be a cesspit of stereotyping and superficiality.

I was thus amazed when a casual remark made by ‘Pauline’ in a Comment on this blog about environmental degradation on the resort island of Koh Chang brought a fire storm of angry abuse from a platoon of western men. On little evidence they called her a feminist bitch.

My blog article was called, “Thai Tourism? Shot in the Foot”, (24 December 2008) and it attracted no less than 36 Comments, far more than the modest response I usually get to my bland offerings. None of the Comments though was about the environment.

These Comments are well worth a read as they reveal a range of strong opinions that I’ve never before encountered. They seem written by some very bitter men, outraged by the advantages that feminist western women have put over them. Their answer is to avoid their own kind and to take a sweet, respectful Thai girl, the epitome of true femininity.

Pauline’s commented that it’s inevitable commercial interests will walk rough shod over the natural beauty of Koh Chang. Developers, like all human beings, simply do what they have the opportunity to do, just as western men, “go to Thailand to get sex partners, girlfriends and wives that they wouldn’t be able to dream of in their country of origin”.

I agree with her main point that the commercial imperative sweeps away all environmental considerations on the island but I hardly even noticed her throwaway aside about western men. The men didn’t like it though and they said exactly what they thought of her.

Pauline then posted a further Comment saying that western men can command much younger Asian wives as they are a privileged group in a much poorer country. Gender equality is an impossibility and men have opportunities in Thailand that are denied to her as an older woman.

The male commentators replied that American women are only out to extort money out of their men, that the feminist lobby has managed to skew the law in favor of women on divorce and if Pauline has found herself alone and without companionship then that’s her own fault for being what she is.

Your “whiney comments”, Pauline, are “truly hateful and racist motivated, coming fresh out of the mouth of a bitter, lonely, frustrated American feminist,” said the first commentator.

“American women only want one night stands and are the most sexist pigs to ever walk the earth.” They are “the most loathed women on the planet, mentally deranged,” “supported by a government funded ‘female supremacist’ movement”.

When Pauline again responded she was told, “Tough shit bitch – deal with it and enjoy your toys and your cats, you stupid bitch”, you “man hating, ball busting, intolerant, inflexible, rude Western bitch.” What man wouldn’t prefer, “a kind, pleasant, smart, sane, reasonable, not to mention cute Asian girl.” “An Asian woman respects her man” and is “supportive, respectable and sane.”

The extreme bitterness of these men against their own women surprised me and I’m doubtful too about the stereotyping of ‘Thai girls’. A sweet, doe eyed door mat, her one role is to please her man from kitchen to bedroom.

Is that so!

The Venus fly trap? The sirens on the rocks combing their long black tresses. Have western men never been gobbled up by ‘Thai girls’? Have they never been run onto the rocks?

Many are the shipwrecks and there are too many stories of the naïve male who comes to Thailand and falls for the first girl he meets in a bar. Soon she has her teeth into his wallet and that’s no surprise. What’s she working in a bar for anyway?

Utterly smitten, he goes back west and pines for his girl from afar. He loyally sends her regular money so she can stop work, but she goes back to the bar and collects more patrons. She’ll marry the one whose money makes the biggest bulge in his trousers and he’ll buy her a car and build a nice house on her family’s land. Then when most of his wealth has been handed over, she tells him to pack his bags.

I’ve even heard the story of a wife’s brothers who bundled the sorry guy into a taxi and told the driver to go as far south as possible. Yes, there are as many farang males who talk bitterly of their experiences with Thai women.

On the other hand dead men tell no tales.

An Australian woman who’d read the happy account of “My Thai Girl and I” wrote to me to say that she’d just been staying in Thailand with her son who has a Thai wife. Not one but two of his farang friends had just been murdered, she told me, apparently by family members in league with the wife. These are isolated tragedies one hopes, though the English language press in Pattaya is full of stories of farang men who mysteriously fall to their deaths from the balconies of their condominiums. He was drunk… it was an accident or suicide!

If therefore, bitter western men want to escape women who are after their money, Thailand may not necessarily be the most obvious choice. Why does a young and attractive woman accept an older man anyway? She wants someone to provide for herself and her family and what’s so wrong in that. It’s how the world always was until urbanization and contraception enabled women to play a more varied role in family life and become ‘emancipated’.

Those who seek a wife in a poorer country will thus surely find that money will play an even bigger part than it does back home. That just goes with the territory.

As for characterizing Thai women as a decorative fashion accessory, they are often powerful personalities in their own right with many strong qualities. And that is exactly why I like them and why my ‘Thai girl’ and I have made something of our unusual life together. Let’s face it, door mats are boring.

The male perception of western and Asian women, with its prejudices, distortions, insights and truths is thus a fascinating subject and discussion on this topic could run and run. A Pandora’s box perhaps.

Do you accept the usual stereotypes? As a male, do you look for love in a particular community? Can you explain the bitterness of the men who have so graphically expressed their views? And what do the women think?

I’d love to hear your views.

Do post a Comment below, be you Asian or western, male or female.

But please… keep it clean!

Andrew Hicks The ‘Thai Girl’ Blog February 2009

Freezing The Balls Off A Brass Monkey!

Early morning, auntie's warming the tips of her fingers.

It's often the grannies who raise all the children.

First light and they're trying to get warm outside.

And trying to get warm inside too!

A busy rice farmer's dry season activity.

Caring for the buffaloes though takes up all his time.

There's no farming to be done but you can dig up crabs.

And insects and rats and frogs.

But will his generation accept a life like this?


All around the world the end of last year and the beginning of the new one brought both freeze and squeeze to temperatures and to credit.

My son-in-law, Will tells me that back in Petersfield in the sunny south of England they’ve had temperatures of minus ten centigrade for days which is unprecedented. Now though he tells me they’re having a heat wave… it’s even hit ten degrees in the day time.

Here in our rice growing village in the North East of Thailand we too have had the biggest freeze for ten years and it’s been almost cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey*. Just like Will’s ‘heat wave’, it’s fallen as low as ten degrees at night.

Showering in the morning hasn’t been fun as our water heater decided to go on the blink just when we needed it most. The electrician took it away and has been telling Cat that he’s working on it but four weeks later it still hasn’t come back, so it’s been icy showers all the way. Just when the weather’s getting hot again he’ll tell us he can’t fix it and we’ll have to buy a new one.

This morning there wasn’t any water anyway as the water pump was running all night but was pumping air. Someone must have trodden on and cracked one of the pathetic plastic water pipes, so no water, no shower and I can’t say I was too sorry.

It’s been so cold that in many provinces of Thailand an emergency was declared and the authorities are handing out blankets just as they did this time last year… which always puzzles me a little as I ask myself what ever happened to last year’s blankets. Perhaps the village people used them to light the little fires they always huddle round to keep warm.

For some unknown reason, almost before first light the folks round here leave their beds, throw open doors and windows to let the cold in and go outside and blow at a few sticks to start a fire. There they squat in the dust telling each other how desperately cold it is and warming the tips of their fingers by the embers.

It’s very sociable though and if external warming isn’t possible there’s always kindling of the internal kind. Lao khao, the rice whisky they pass around, at 40 degrees of alcohol warms the cockles of the heart very quickly.

Likewise Cat’s Mama could stay wrapped up warm in our comfortable modern house but no. She’s the first up in the morning and is out there with the best of them, brewing up a strange potion of boiled sticks which she drinks from a green mug to save her from the cold.

Now late January and well into the dry season, it should already be getting hot but with cold air coming down from China the days’ highs have barely been reaching 32 degrees. The rice harvest is long finished and the fields parched, dusty and brown so there’s precious little for rice farmers to do around here. Other than long term crops such as cassava, sugar cane and rubber, there’s no cultivation to be done. Even if there water were available, vegetables are difficult to grow as they shrivel in the sun and get stolen as soon as they are ready.

The older men pass the time with alcohol and sleep and taking the buffaloes out to the rice fields, while the grannies do the hard work of bringing up the babies and preparing what food they have.

Most of the middle generation has already gone to the towns to do the pitiable jobs that fuel Thailand’s low wage economy and which assure Bangkok’s middle classes their comfortable urban lifestyle. At this time some of the younger men also travel south to Chantaburi to cut sugar cane for a couple of months. Paid by the weight of cane they cut, this is the toughest of work. Just now the roads are crowded with huge trucks overloaded with sugar cane and twice I’ve seen them lying on their sides, their load thrown everywhere. It’s as if they’re resting.

Meanwhile a little money saved by the migrant workers trickles back home to the village for Mama and the kids. When sometimes it doesn’t come, there’s little food and that’s why the project I told you about earlier (“Thai School Girls Are So Appealing!”) which gives our village school children a good lunch every day is so very important. (See www.adoptavillgeschool.org.)

Money isn’t the only way to get food though and out in the rice fields there’s crabs and rats and insects and frogs and the children and old ladies go out there, find the holes and dig them up out of the ground. They make it look fun, but it takes hard work to produce a tiny amount of protein. The crabs have almost nothing on them and are boiled and pounded together with leaves and herbs to make a soup that adds flavour to the blandness of plain rice.

At certain seasons a few roots can be dug and leaves such as kee lek and sadao are collected to make sauces that are unpalatably bitter, but otherwise the countyside has largely been stripped bare and is no longer bountiful.

So is this poverty I now ask myself?

As the land cannot provide even the most meager living for the majority of people, it certainly seems that way. Families are thus split apart and wage earners live a non-life far from home while the elderly look after the grandchildren. If it were not for the rich community of mutual support that tenuously survives in the villages, I wouldn’t rate life here too highly.

Meanwhile, in Bangkok’s ‘Siam Paragon’, perhaps the most opulent shopping mall known to man, a dark faced woman from lower Isaan eternally polishes the glittering acres of marble floor. For this she is paid little more than 4,000 baht a month which is hardly a living wage, let alone enough to keep the child she’s left back home in the village with Mama. Meanwhile on Sukhumvit road at night the prettier young girls try their luck at winning a week’s wage by spending a few hours with a passing tourist.

In glamorous showrooms in the shopping malls there are Porsches for sale, Lamborghinis, BMWs, designer clothes and all the opulent symbols of a wealthy consumer society. The wide marble corridors are almost empty of shoppers but downstairs the food hall is packed as the Thai middle classes indulge in that most necessary of luxuries, fine Thai food and world cuisine.

Two distinct worlds thus exist in Thailand, one of near poverty, the other a thriving consumer society, the country being divided between the rural poor and those with salaries or successful businesses who can enjoy a comfortable urban lifestyle. And the tensions between these two have been causing ferment in Thai politics.

The recent political disorder in Bangkok seemed fixated on the personality cult surrounding the disgraced former premier Thaksin Shinawatra… there was little political debate on the substantive issues. The battle played out as a brutal power struggle, though who the contenders were and what principles they stood for was hard to understand. Was it the vested interests of urban society clinging desperately to their historical position, opposed by the mainly rural majority with its recently realised electoral muscle?

During the confrontation on the streets prior to the emergence of the new Democrat led government, the anti-democratic ‘Peoples’ Alliance for Democracy’ promoting the demonstrations could articulate no clear political manifesto for the future. Most vehemently it objected to the fact that Thaksin’s government had diverted substantial resources to the rural poor by giving them free health care and village lending funds. To buy the voters’ favour, they said, he was spending their hard earned middle class tax revenue on the great rural unwashed.

Such a policy in principle is right and proper however, as that wealth is substantially created by the have-nots, the low paid labourers working on the land, in sweated factories, cleaning the streets and driving Bangkok taxis. No modern economy should be run for the sole benefit of those that already have a good income to be taxed.

The new Democrat government is well aware of these crucial tensions but it has a mountain to climb if it wishes to redistribute wealth. Ironically Thaksin himself is now complaining that new Democrat prime minister Abhisit Vejajiva, a privileged product of Eton and Oxford, is now stealing his populist policies.

Let’s hope though that Abhisit has sufficient resources and does a better job of it than Thaksin, many of whose schemes were inefficient and wasteful. For example, a ‘privilege card’ project to attract wealthy tourists and business people, just axed by the new government, failed to sell and lost 1.14 billion baht between inception in 2003 and 2006 alone. (Bangkok Post, 29 January 2009.)

The stresses that have been tearing at Thailand will thus only moderate when the present inequalities of wealth and opportunity are substantially narrowed. But with agriculture unable to support a large population, the provinces should not have to remain dependant on politically motivated handouts and on making handicrafts for OTOP, one of Thaksins’s more successful projects (“One Tambon One Product”).

The rural areas should be brought firmly into the twenty first century with a modern economy of their own and that means a policy of regional development to bring jobs and industry to the people, instead of forcing them migrate southwards to Bangkok to find work. Proper jobs should come to the countryside with factories and industry in small urban centres..

How long should village people in Thailand have to remain dependent on digging crabs, rats and insects in the dry rice fields?


*So what is a BRASS MONKEY?
In Napoleonic times cannon balls were stacked high on a stand called a ‘brass monkey’. In winter water in the stand would turn to ice and expand, thus freezing the balls off the brass monkey.

Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog. January 2009.