Daoists, of course, but also the usual mixture of bizarre little Christian sects that American missionaries usually command. Way down in Sarawak and Sabah, on the Malaysian side of what otherwise is the Indonesian state of Borneo, there are plenty of groups that practise animism and various shamanistic rituals.
The popular understanding is that fundamentalist Islam is most common along the northeastern coast of Malaysia, certainly not in the northwest where we were driving. After three hours, we pulled up to the Thai border, where I got out and crossed on foot, as required, while the driver made his own peace with the authorities and met me on the other side of the imaginary dotted line. Suddenly, as we started up again, heading toward Hat Yai, about forty minutes farther north, the driver became comparatively loquacious.
Ah, I thought to myself, he was anxious about going through immigration and customs. He probably uses his taxi runs as a cover for low-level smuggling. As we chatted discontinuously, however, I had an additional realization: he simply didn’t like Canadians. “Canada people too fat!” he said. He became quite emphatic. “Too much food for Canada. Even good food bad for you in Canada.” Then it was my turn to be quiet.
Many Bangkok expats on a budget come to Hat Yai every three months, usually by bus, to get their visas renewed and then re-enter their temporary country after only an hour or so in Malaysia (whereas more affluent expats fly to Singapore or Hong Kong for the same purpose). Hat Yai is at least twice the size of Butterworth and vastly more urban, but that’s not to say that it is cosmopolitan. It is a border town, a little rough round the edges without being enjoyably picaresque. Mind you, I may have been catching Hat Yai at a bad moment. Certainly I was catching it at or near record high temperatures, so that my judgment may have been skewed. That being said, the city was a brownish yellow all over and seemed to be coated with a thin film of scum, like a dirty cooking pot left to soak in the sink overnight.
Although no trace of the fact appears to survive, Hat Yai was once the site of a most curious experiment in urban planning. The idea originated with Phibun Songkhram (1897−1964), who might be called the Chiang Kai-shek of Thailand. He was a military officer, trained in France, and one of the leaders of the 1932 coup that overthrew the absolute monarchy in favour of a constitutional one and foiled a subsequent counter-revolution. In 1939, the year after he became prime minister for the first time, he changed the name of Siam to Thailand — the homeland of the ethnic Thai people, but pointedly not that of the Chinese and others. Phibun was of Chinese heritage himself, but developed strongly xenophobic ideas as part and parcel of becoming a fascist dictator.
He was a Mussolini-like figure who sided with Japan during the Second World War, though some argue that letting the Japanese use Thailand was the only alternative to having them overrun and occupy it. One should also probably factor in the admiration with which he and many other Thais viewed Japan and its culture, as an Asian nation that had modernized itself without the slightly blessed burden of European colonialism. In principle, Asian influences were preferred to Western ones. For example, Thais tended to fear that France had designs on their country (just as the French themselves feared that the British in Burma were lusting for Laos). The Japanese arrived in Thailand the same day that they, by contrast, attacked Pearl Harbor (though the first occurred on December 7, 1941, and the other on December 8, owing to the International Date Line). Phibun thought they would be a good friend to have one day. But when the United States defeated Japan in 1945, he and his supporters became pro-American, showing their particularly American-style anti-communism by sending a small number of troops to fight in the Korean War. That was in 1950, the year that Phibun commanded that Thailand become modern, a word he considered a synonym for American.
Thailand was a different place in those days, with parts of its ancient culture quite intact. The famous Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, for example, still had no bathtubs or showers, only large brass jars of fresh water to pour over oneself. One day Phibun decreed that the country should be full of cinemas, and suddenly it was. This decision all but exterminated the ancient puppet shows, shadow-plays, and dance-dramas so central to Thai culture (though, in the last-named case, it spared the next generation of five-year-old girls from having their fingers bent back and elongated, a practice comparable to Chinese foot-binding). The frantic building of movie theatres brought American mass culture. Hollywood westerns were especially admired. Accordingly, Phibun came up with the idea of turning Hat Yai, of all places, into a replica of a Wild West town: in his view, the quintessence of modernity. Teams of researchers were hired to dig up archival photographs of such places as Dodge City.
In Hat Yai, many activities, such as kite-flying and betting on fighting-fish, were abolished, though whisky was still to be drunk the customary way, served warm in half-pint portions. Thai thoroughfares were pulled down and replaced with imitation Western main streets with board sidewalks and false-front wooden buildings, including ersatz saloons with bat-wing doors, and all that went with this new aesthetic. Hitching rails were much in evidence though Hat Yai had no horses. Local citizens were forced to wear Wild West costumes. Some were seconded to simulate bank robbers and the civilian posses that pursued them. All this was in 1952, three years prior to the opening of Walt Disney’s first theme park and well before Fess Parker’s appearance as Davy Crockett on American television. At the time, Hat Yai was the favourite R&R destination of Malay guerrillas from the across the border, where they were fighting their long drawn-out war for independence: a foreshadowing of the way Bangkok became such a haven for U.S. soldiers during the American War in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Perhaps because these insurgents, communists though they were, were fighting the British, they were not much interfered with in Hat Yai where, at the time, the local security forces had been issued with coonskin caps — ringed tails and all.
— TRAIN 170, OVERNIGHT TO BANGKOK —
At 1400 hours I was waiting on the platform at Hat Yai for the overnight train to Bangkok. I was still waiting at 1430, 1500, 1530, and 1545. Between departures and arrivals, some of the women operating battered food carts left the plastic crates they used as seats and curled up on wooden benches, putting scarves over their faces as protection from the sun. Let their children tend the stands for a while. Later it would be the kids’ turn to nap. All the while, weary soldiers shuffled up and down. For my part, I was feeling was quite patient, perhaps uncharacteristically so, for I already knew at least something of both the pleasures and the hardships of Southeast Asian rail travel. I was anticipating the former and resigned to the latter.
I had read about and heard about the so-called jungle train in Malaysia that departs Jerantut Station in KL and runs northeastwardly through Kelantan, the province said to be centre for the country’s most militant Islamic fundamentalists. My understanding is that it takes ten hours or so to crawl nearly five hundred kilometres through the jungle, past banana plantations and such. The destination is a small port on the South China Sea. I’m told there are always far more passengers than seats and that the atmosphere is hostile to foreigners. Hostile to everyone’s health, as well; many of the windows are broken out to admit a little air. It all sounds a great deal grittier than the jungle train that used to carry crops across Costa Rica to Puerto Limon on the Caribbean, a journey I was lucky to have made before the entire right-of-way was destroyed in an earthquake. I was similarly well informed about Cambodia’s now virtually non-functioning rail system a couple of decades ago, during the last phase of the country’s civil war. In addition to pulling the carriages, the locomotive also pushed a flatcar ahead. When rebels in the hills would begin shooting at the train, Cambodian troops, crouching behind some sandbags on the flatcar, would send a few mortar rounds in the general direction of the enemy. Westerners enjoyed the privilege of riding the train for free, or almost for free, so long as they rode on the flatcar. Sometimes the engine would push two flatcars. The job of the first one was to trigger mines that might have been attached to the rails.
Finally, the No. 170 to Bangkok arrived and we boarded in a jumbled rush. Simply by looking out the window, one would never suspect that this
