Rotting in the Bangkok Hilton: The Gruesome True Story of a Man Who Survived Thailand's Deadliest Prison (7 page)

He had killed so many people that he couldn’t remember them all. He couldn’t even guess at the numbers. One of the Thai in the cell asked what his sentence was so far. Ling said 400 years or so. He didn’t pay much attention to it.

He knew he’d die in prison, but he was at peace with his fate. His family was rich beyond their dreams. His wife and children were well provided for and were loyal to him. They had a lovely house and new cars. In fact, they were better off with him in jail—so they were no longer in danger of retaliation by someone with a grudge against him.

The secret of his happiness, though, was surprising in its simplicity. He found that by abandoning his desire to live, life became easy. Not caring if he lived or died made everything feel light. His belief was unshakable. His only regret was that he hadn’t made his discovery earlier, before he earned his destiny—to be reborn as a suffering beast for ten, perhaps a dozen, lives.

He stayed in our cell for a week, and his unfailing cheerfulness and generosity made him everyone’s favorite. When he left for Lampang, we sorely missed him.

So strange, he really was the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet.

A True Stoic

H
e wore his pants tied around his waist as a makeshift loincloth and used his shirt as a turban. Like most of his people, he was a stranger to Western clothes. His teeth were a deep reddish-black from decades of chewing betel nut—a mild narcotic, favored in parts of Asia by the poor to relieve drudgery and pain. He could’ve been as young as thirty or as old as seventy. His slightly wizened young-old features, lithe compact body, and depthless eyes made it impossible to guess his age.

His worldly goods were wrapped up in a small plastic bag: a hand-towel, a child’s pocket mirror, a plastic cup, a tin spoon, and a pipe. The pipe was a cunningly made object hand-carved from teakwood; the bowl was a hand-hammered strip of tin, delicately engraved with a chain of elephants holding on to one another trunk to tail.

I had no sooner peered at the pipe for a moment than he pulled it out of his bag and insisted I keep it as a gift. He adamantly refused to take the pipe back, supremely happy in being a benefactor to one so rich as a farang. I assented and in return gave him a new pair of sandals, as he was barefoot. He took the flip-flops after strongly resisting, five ritual refusals instead of
the more usual three. His heartfelt gratitude beamed from his face. My embarrassment was excruciating that he should be so overwhelmed with something that cost a dollar.

He spoke a few words of English and less Thai than I did. No one aboard the bus knew his native tongue, perhaps Yeo or Hmong. There was no way to determine which Tribe he hailed from. Of the six men and one woman on the prison bus, he was the only Hill Tribesman. We were a strange bunch; two Americans, a Pakistani, two Thai men, one Thai woman, and the Tribesman.

We rolled down the asphalt ribbon of highway running along the western edge of Thailand. Leaving Chiang Mai Remand Prison behind, we headed due south to Bangkok, some twelve hours distance. The long border with Burma (also known as Myanmar) is thickly forested and beautiful scenery flowed by the windows. The greenery was occasionally broken by the glittering, multi-layered pagodas of Buddhist temples; a cool and lovely region of wooded hills largely untouched by human hands. Contemplation came naturally, each of us lost in our own thoughts.

I kept catching sight of the Tribesman out of the corner of my eye, his dignified serenity in sharp contrast to my own psychic misery. The heavy iron shackles we wore did not bother him at all; his legs curled up beneath him on the bench as if he were sitting comfortably in his living room at home.

Reminiscing on his people’s history and origins was a relief from facing my inner demons of uncertainty at what lay ahead.

There are many tribes of these descendents of the ancient Chinese pushed southwards by the Mongol invasions of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They were caught between the native inhabitants of what would become Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Burma, and the Mongols to the north.

The Hill Tribes were forced to live in the wide swath of uninhabited jungle in the hilly northern parts of these countries, as well as settling extensively in Laos.

For long, unrecorded centuries they lived at peace; the passing empire of the Khmer, the Hindu Malay, and the others never quite extending their sway deep enough into the wilderness to bother the tribes. Even the advent of the nation-state, brought by European powers in the nineteenth century didn’t penetrate their remote rainforests.

Not until teak became a valuable commodity, as the more accessible forests were stripped, did the modern societies interact with them, and then only in a limited way. Relatively unharmed, no missionaries reached them; the sole contact was limited to trading silver and tin craftwork for iron implements. The cultivation of opium for heroin, spurred in recent decades by world demand, initiated the first sustained contact.

But it was the arrival of global tourism, actively seeking them out as exotic specimens that finally drew the tribes hesitantly towards the post-industrial world of the West. For now, they continue to live in their traditional manner, their cultures alien to the nations in which they reside.

Most lack the rudiments of schooling and are usually illiterate. True primitives, the Hill Tribes live without electricity, running water, or modern building supplies. Indeed, they exist without any of the ‘necessities’ or comforts of our age. Until recently, they lived solely on what the forest provided. Small game, bamboo shelters, wild plants with a few pigs and chickens to supplement their diet. Some plant small gardens—plots laboriously claimed from the ever-encroaching jungle.

Westerners visiting northern Thailand now make a standard ‘jungle trek’ on elephant-back to see the Tribesmen as part of a vacation package. Thus, a Yeo or Hmong Tribesman may know some English (the international traveler’s lingua franca) but is seldom able to speak more than a smattering of Thai.

Life in the jungle, to paraphrase Hobbes, is still nasty, short, and brutish. Medical care doesn’t exist, save for the antibiotics and simple medicines brought in by tourists and infrequent traders. Malaria and tuberculosis are endemic. Tobacco use shortens their lives, as does opium.

Their gentle, ethereal cultures are geared toward propitiating the multitude of spirits that populate the rain forest. Animism fares poorly when confronted with Western Materialism. They are subtly trapped, newly unhappy with the ‘old ways,’ unable to fully assimilate modernity—too expensive, too distant in space and time from their homes in the wilderness.

Only tourists prefer to see ‘primitive’ methods used and want to buy ‘native’ handiwork the confused tribes see as plainly inferior. The irony in this is perhaps the only reason their cultures will be preserved—things the poverty-stricken tribes can barter for the joys of factory-made goods. The raison d’etre of the trade empires is alive and well.

Less benignly, warlords and drug dealers in these remote areas take advantage of the tribes people’s desires for Western products. Living in the Golden Triangle, the heroin producers offer tribes people a pittance— seldom more than twenty or thirty dollars—to carry a backpack full of dope into Chiang Mai or Chiang Rai. The chance to earn hard currency to buy Western items ensures a steady supply of Hill Tribes people eager to take the risk. All too often, the ones making this epic journey of more than 100 miles through trackless jungle are caught once they reach civilization.

Knowing nothing of the Thai people except second-hand rumors, never having seen automobiles, cities, and the vast confusing maelstrom that defines modern life, tribes people are overwhelmed.

They’re easy to spot in the towns of the North, standing shellshocked on street corners, staring wide-eyed at traffic. Their dress is a mixture of cast-off tourist clothes and colorful hand-woven costumes of ancient design. Their child-like wonder and delight with life, so at odds with the jaded anomie that marks our civilization, makes them easy prey for the unscrupulous.

Arrested with pitiable ease, led, unresisting to jail, they’re charged with smuggling heroin and receive life sentences. As opium has been a form of currency in the southeast Asian wilds for hundreds of years, many of them
are unaware they committed a crime. What they make of the Thai judicial process is a mystery but is unlikely to bear any relation to the reality. Without money; unable to speak Thai; having no identity papers; having no lawyer or translators, they are helpless. Without any way to contact their loved ones, they have fallen off the edge of the world as far as their families are concerned; lost forever. This horrifying fate befalls thousands of these innocents. Thai society, behind closed doors, by and large regards them as sub-human, and their afflictions merit no more consideration than the cries of animals at a slaughterhouse.

Our tribesman on the bus couldn’t read Thai, and didn’t know what his sentence was. Shockingly, he didn’t much seem to care. At my prodding, he produced a single, much worn piece of paper—the verdict of the court. He had received a fifty year sentence. Via sign language, and a bit of English and Thai, we informed him of his fate.

He smiled pleasantly, a little surprised that we were so concerned. He thanked us for the information but was clearly bored with the subject. I made certain he understood, and he convinced me that he was indeed cognizant of his punishment. He awkwardly tried to comfort
me
, as it obviously bothered me so badly. His soft pats, on my shoulder, and a ‘stiff upper lip’ expression eerily reminiscent of an old British officer made me laugh.

I disliked badgering him, but his attitude of nonchalance was so striking I had trouble believing it. After pressing him on the subject, he finally responded by pointing a finger skyward.

Was he referring to some god? No. He held his hands palm up, and mimicked catching something. Laughing, he managed to convey, “Look! The sky isn’t falling! The sun still shines! I am alive and well.”

Confronted with this incredible stoicism, I was forced to question my own worldview.

His indifference to draconian injustice; his stressless acceptance of events; was it not a healthier response to adversity than my own blank
despair? My innate assumption of the superiority of Western culture was shaken to its foundations. My study of Eastern philosophies and religions, though fascinating, left me unmoved by comparison with this man’s spiritual peace in the face of disaster.

The anguish I felt from my own life sentence was intensely painful and threatened to tear me apart. My mental turmoil contrasted poorly with the carefree enjoyment of the day by a man who couldn’t read or write, who knew nothing of the world through which he traveled. He faced the unknown without fear, with an appreciation of the ‘now’ that I could only marvel at.

The wisdom he possessed, his expressiveness, the elegance of his communication without language, banished the cruel thought arising at least partially out of some crude sense of preserving my self-esteem, that ‘ignorance is bliss.’ It was a false belittling unworthy of so good and decent a man.

When the trip ended, I couldn’t forget his farewell to me. The look of pity in his eyes was unmistakable.

A Day in the Life—Bang Kwang

F
loating in the warm cozy place that exists on the border of sleep and consciousness, I’d put off waking to the last possible instant. My ear plugs were of good quality, so the quiet rustlings of Thai prisoners getting up didn’t affect my repose. Cocooned in a pleasant lassitude, I’d slowly allow my awareness to take in our darkened cell.

As the light in the room grew stronger, the cobwebs of my dreams dissolved, and I reentered the microcosmic world of the prison. For most of my time in Bang Kwang, I lived in farang cells—rooms where only foreigners were allowed. For a dollar a month, you could bribe the blue boys into letting you sleep in every morning. Most farangs took advantage of this opportunity.

The Thai wake before dawn and finish their meager breakfast of weevil-infested rice and thin fish-bone soup as the sun breaks the horizon. I and my fellow Westerners were sluggards by comparison, rarely rubbing the sleep-sand out of our eyes before 8:00 AM.