Jim Algie Read online

  ‘Ice’ may be the club drug of choice for many in Pattaya, but it faces some ‘stiff’ competition from Viagra, which dominates the local drug news—with multiple variations on that double entendre and the inevitable tabloid headlines: ‘Police Come Down Hard on Seller of Knockoff Viagra’. The more hardcore chill-seekers combine Ice with Viagra. The combination can be fatal. Every year, a few foreign men die of heart attacks in Pattaya from a double dose of meth and sex.

  In spite of all the improvements and developments spawned by an increasingly polyglot populace, Pattaya will continue to be pilloried as a place where old lechers come to prey on younger women. Like the rest of this bipolar community, these guys are not always what they seem to be either. Take Bill Evans for example. A mechanic specialising in farm equipment, he spent the first 60 years of his life in rural Ohio raising a family and running his own business. When his wife died and his daughters went off to university in a different state, he retired with no intention of spending his twilight years in the frigid weather that aggravated his arthritis. “Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey,” he said.

  Why did he choose Pattaya?

  “This town has got it all. There’s so much goin’ on with international marathons and cricket matches and music festivals and bowling leagues, I don’t think it’s even possible to get bored here. I always wanted to learn about boating and scuba-diving and that’s what I’ve done here. People call it Vegas, but for me it’s been more of a Fountain of Youth. I see that a lot here with some of the older guys. It’s a new lease on life. Back in the States, I was just another old fart collecting a pension. Sure, there’s a few bad apples in the bunch out here, but most of ‘em are pretty decent folks.”

  Bill bought himself an ocean-view condo and married Oi, a 44-year-old former go-go dancer. Oi, or ‘Sugarcane’, said, “I like men 40 and up because they are more stable and honest. Young men want to be butterflies. They go from lady to lady.”

  Did she feel exploited by working the bars in Pattaya for more than a decade?

  “No, I felt worse working in a factory!”

  After being diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2008, Bill set up a trust fund for his wife and her daughter. In some of the final emails he sent out to people on his list, he pondered his mortality. “For places to die, this is one of the best. Not too sure what’s waiting for me on the other side. Only thing I’m sure of is that I hope Sugarcane will be there too, with that all-forgiving smile of hers, a glass of beer in her hand, and I hope it looks just like Pattaya. Sometimes good guys can to go heaven and Fun City, too.”

  Museum of the Macabre: See Uey the Chinese Cannibal

  Many Thai children who grew up in the 1960s received the same warning from their parents—“Don’t stay out after dark or the ghost of See Uey will eat you.”

  The cannibal-turned-supernatural legend and movie villain was, in reality, a poor Chinese man who went on a killing spree around Bangkok and some of the nearby provinces. He had a taste for children. No one is certain, but it’s believed that he murdered and ate anywhere from five to eight children. Speculation also ran rife that his omnivorous ‘diet’ may have included some adults that he was never charged with. Caught in the act of burning one of the corpses by the young boy’s father, See Uey Sae Ung was finally arrested in 1958. His confessions traumatised Thailand, giving birth to a bogeyman who still haunts the nation’s psyche. After stabbing the children in the throat, See Uey told the police, he then slit open their chests and ate their hearts and livers.

  A Hainanese immigrant who toiled as a coolie, rickshaw-puller and vegetable farmer after arriving in Thailand, the country’s most legendary serial slayer was a former soldier, fighting against the Japanese invaders on the Chinese island during World War II. Some believe that his bloodlust was stoked on the battlefields of Hainan province. Said Professor Somchai Pholeamke, the former head of Siriraj Hospital’s Forensics Department, “His military commanders told the troops to eat the livers of the enemy soldiers to take on their strength and power.” Many of the Thai movies about See Uey use the battlefield as the focal point of his motivations. A scene in one such film shows the young soldier, famished and alone, after all his comrades-in-arms had been slaughtered, with nothing to eat but human carrion.

  Eating livers is a ghastly rite often associated with black magic in Southeast Asia. Over the centuries it has been practised during times of warfare to dehumanise the enemy and feed on their strength. Just as the samurais believe that a man’s courage resides in his guts (which is why the ritual suicide of seppukko consists of disembowelment with a sword), the troops of the ancient Khmer empire and the more recent Khmer Rouge ate the livers of their enemies to increase their strength and stamina.

  See Uey’s cadaver, waxed with the preservative formalin, is the most popular exhibit at the Songkran Niyomsane Forensic Medicine Museum on the grounds of Siriraj Hospital—the country’s oldest medical facility—in Bangkok. The cannibal’s cockroach-brown corpse stands slumped in an upright glass casket off to one side of the room. The empty eye sockets, as well as the bullet holes left by the executioner’s machine-gun, have been filled in with white paraffin. Beside his final resting case are several others occupied by killer rapists and murderers also sentenced to death.

  Of the two actual skeletons in the museum, the one in a glass case belongs to the former chairman of the hospital’s forensics department, Songkran Niyomsane, who founded the museum in 1965. “He was a true man of forensics,” said Somchai with a chuckle. “He wanted the students to be able to be able to study him after he died.”

  Elsewhere in this academic bone-yard are Exhibits A through Z of murder weapons (knives, pliers, ropes, a hammer and a screwdriver) as well as bullets extracted from the dead during autopsies. More macabre still are the glass jars in which human foetuses, plucked from the womb after the mothers had perished, swim in formaldehyde. One jar houses a two-month-old victim of hydrocephalus with a grotesquely swollen head that makes him look like an alien’s offspring. As a testament to Buddhist compassion, many Thai visitors leave dolls, candies and toys for the spirits of these kids.

  The preserved corpse of Thailand’s most infamous cannibal on display at the Songkran Niyomsane Forensic Medicine Museum in Bangkok.

  Near the preserved cadavers of the mass murderers is a glass case full of skulls with bullet holes in their foreheads. There is no signage in either English or Thai to explain this display. Somboon Thamtakerngkit, the division chief of the hospital’s Forensic Pathology Department, said there is a modus operandi to the morbidity. “King Rama VIII, the eldest brother of our present king, was shot in the forehead back in 1946,” she said. “Not much was known about entrance and exit wounds caused by gunshots then, so they used the skulls of these unclaimed bodies for tests.” The results of these early shots at forensics proved that claims of suicide were skullduggery. Riddled with question marks, the case remains Thailand’s most contentious murder mystery.

  But the real gallery of grotesque is the collection of autopsy photos lining the walls. They portray, in livid reds and bruising blues, exactly what an exploding grenade does to a torso, how a broken beer bottle can tear out a throat, a train sever a head, or a knife shred a woman’s genitals. As repulsive as most of these images are, the doctors who work with the dead learn invaluable lessons from them to help the living. The autopsies and photos, Somboon noted, also assist the doctors, the police and judges to bring the perpetrators of these murders most foul to justice.

  For early shots at forensic science, the skulls were blasted from point-blank range in attempt to solve the country’s longest-running murder mystery.

  The museum doubles as an ad-hoc classroom for students boning up on forensics and anatomy. They refer to the skeletons and cadavers as ajaan yai (‘headmasters’) and wai them—a prayer-like gesture that is local sign language for respect and gratitude.

  Professor Somchai pointed to a glass box containing the cadaver of a killer rapist.
“The museum also might teach the students something else. If you commit a big crime you could end up like this,” he added with a wry smile.

  The Songkran Niyomsane Forensic Medicine Museum has no age restrictions. Some visitors are but schoolchildren on the eve of adolescence. Should they be allowed to witness such horrors? That is debatable. Perhaps what both the young and the old need to see are the horrendous effects of violence: not the slow-motion cinematic ballet of gunfire and falling bodies, but the ugly anatomy of real death.

  In 2007, the terror trove was renovated and linked with five other facilities under the banner ‘Siriraj Medical Museum 6’. For a miniscule entry fee, visitors can drink in a sobering six-pack of mortality checks and loathsome diseases.

  The Ellis Pathological Museum is devoted to the pioneering work of Professor A.G. Ellis, an American who stayed in Thailand with the assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1919 to 1921, and again from 1923 to 1928. He was the first pathologist in the country. Touring this museum of organs infected with cancer, hearts deadened by strokes and livers pickled with alcohol could very well make you never want to drink, smoke or eat another cholesterol-heavy cheeseburger ever again.

  The squeamish and the anally retentive will have an especially foul time in the Parasitology Museum. Every worst fear and phobia any traveller ever had about the intestinal horrors lurking in Asia has been graphically outlined and exhibited: roundworms, pinworms, hookworms, whipworms and tapeworms. Idolaters of Stephen King and the medical thrillers of Robin Cook may relish opening this can of parasitic worms, but most visitors give it a miss.

  Of the six facilities, it is the Forensic Medical Museum that draws the biggest crowds and, of all the exhibits, See Uey’s upright casket generates the greatest number of glares and gazes. Older Thais who grew up with admonitions from their parents that are straight out of a monstrous fairy tale are hypnotised by the cannibal. Younger Thais who have seen the movies and TV shows are baffled by his tiny size. Many of the travellers and expats look stupefied by this medieval exhibition of killers on public display. After all, the crimes of the serial lady-killer Ted Bundy and the cannibalistic necrophiliac Jeffrey Dahmer were much more heinous than See Uey’s, but no one ever put their corpses on display.

  For all the movie frames and column inches he has racked up, See Uey remains an enigma. The only information about him in the museum is a newspaper clipping in Thai, taped to the side of his final resting case, reiterating the few known facts about him—his upbringing on Hainan, his days as a soldier, his alleged body count and his execution in 1958—along with a black-and-white mug shot in which the rodent-faced man is baring his teeth. But it’s difficult to read the expression on his face. Was he mugging for the crime photographers and living up to his reputation? Is this the glower of an extraordinarily angry and embittered man? Or does he look more like a cornered rat, baring his teeth and snarling out of fear?

  To answer those questions, I spent a lot of time in Chinatown, over the course of many years, writing all sorts of features and guidebook entries about the history of the area and the exodus from China that brought in tide after tide of immigrants during World War II and after the country fell to the communists in 1949. An elderly woman who sold vegetables in the ‘Old Market’ (little changed in the past century) told me, “There’s a Thai expression about ‘travelling with a pot and a mat’ to describe any trip taken on the cheap. But it actually came from the fact that those were the only two things that most of us Chinese immigrants brought to Thailand. Even thinking about that journey by boat makes me seasick: stuck in a cargo hold that stank of shit and vomit and piss for months, roaches and rats everywhere.” She shuddered in disgust.

  “It was bad enough coming to all these foreign lands where people hated us, but our own people preyed on us too. My brothers and sisters never made it to Thailand. They were on another boat, but the sailors knew we’d be travelling with all our valuables. Once the boats were at sea, some of these pirates would rob people and throw them overboard to drown or get eaten by sharks. That’s what happened to my siblings,” she confided, tears glittering in her eyes.

  As a ‘boat person’, See Uey would have shared some of those experiences.

  Wen Liang, another immigrant from Hainan and a retired police officer on active duty at the time See Uey was on the loose, spoke of the xenophobia directed at the Chinese wherever they washed up after the exodus—Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the United States. “There are many Thai slang terms for us. Because we were seen as ‘reds’ they sometimes called us ‘pussy blood Chinks’. Since the communists wanted to destroy religion and the temples we were also referred to as ‘the Chinks who killed the temples’. That one I still hear quite often, but some of the older expressions like ‘rickshaw Chinks’ and ‘human animals’ that were used to describe our status as the lowliest manual labourers, aren’t really used anymore, except by a few older people.”

  As a coolie and vegetable farmer, See Uey would have also been a punching bag for many of the same jabs and swipes.

  Like many people interviewed for this story, the retired cop expressed skepticism that the cannibal killed and ate as many children as he was charged with. “Let me put it this way. It would not have been difficult to pin some other unsolved murders on a poor, illiterate ‘human animal’. He did confess to killing some of the children, but it’s possible he may have targeted some adults, too. We found a few other corpses that had been cannibalised in Bangkok around that time, but he was never charged with those crimes or confessed to them.” Slowly and solemnly, the ex-cop nodded. “We detectives are forever examining motives. Some of my colleagues in the police force interviewed him after he was arrested and they did not think he was insane. I have often wondered if his anger was not a more generalised rage against the world, mixed with a kind of sorrow that came from knowing he would never see his homeland again. Many Chinese immigrants of the time could probably identify with those misgivings.”

  In the forensic museum, Professor Somchai had also addressed the quandary of whether See Uey was insane at the time of his homicidal binge. He pointed to a long scar on the cadaver’s forehead. “Here you can see the incision. After he was executed, they did an autopsy to see if See Uey’s brain was normal, and it was. But of course it was impossible to really assess his state of mind during the period leading up to his arrest.”

  No matter what anyone might say to humanise this enigmatic killer, refugee, coolie and soldier, he will remain an inhuman monster—frequently compared by younger Thais to Jack the Ripper, Hannibal Lecter and Jeffrey Dahmer—while drawing crowds bound to be disappointed by the fact that his tiny shell does not live up to the monstrous legend created by cinematic hype and xenophobic overkill.

  Feeding on all these different quotes and anecdotes, facts and fictions, features and guidebook entries— and after a lengthy period of indigestion—I combined a bunch of them, adding a few of my own embellishments and allusions to Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, for a novella that was long-listed for the Bram Stoker Award in 2008 (which you can read at www.bizarrethailand.com).

  A Night in the Lives of Corpse Collectors

  6:30pm. In the main Bangkok office of Poh Teck Tung Foundation on Bamrung Muang Road.

  A volunteer for the famous charity foundation that wheels out the ambulances and morgue-mobiles of Bangkok is flipping through a photo album of crime-scene shots and accidents. He stops at a photograph of a motorcycle lying on its side. “We found a helmet down the road from here and I went to pick it up… the driver’s head was still inside the helmet.” A grin curls his lips. It’s either that Thai penchant for making light of the darkest situations, or this guy’s had a few too many nightmares about headless motorcyclists.

  7:12pm. In the videographer’s pick-up truck.

  Poh Teck Tung pulls in millions of baht in donations every year. Started as a tribute to a Chinese monk who lived 900 years ago, the foundation (which means ‘Goodness, Merit and Remembrance’)
was officially founded in 1937. Donating to the organisation is good karma, says the videographer, who asked not to be named as we weave through Friday night traffic, because they help to rush the injured to the hospital and take the dead to the morgue. They also arrange coffins and funerals for the poor. If nobody claims the body, they bury the remains at their cemetery in Samut Prakan province. Every few years, dozens of volunteers help to unearth and burn the bones of thousands of corpses in a mass cremation ceremony.

  The foundation’s rescue work on the blood-slicked streets of Bangkok has been documented by National Geographic TV, the BBC and CNN. When the latter network attempted to follow them around one night, their van crashed and Poh Teck Tung had to come to their rescue, the videographer says with a smug grin. It’s an apt warning for the kind of driving these speed demons do. When saving a life is a matter of minutes, speed is of the essence.

  A call comes in on the radio, he guns the gas and we’re off, bulleting down the road like a getaway car. The speedometer needle, glowing green, creeps up… 40, 55, 80, 100. He’s too busy passing cars to talk now. And we have no idea what the emergency is.

  Snapshot memories whizz by like the cars and lights. In 1997, I interviewed photographer Philip Blenkinsop about his grisly collection of black-and-white photos, The Cars That Ate Bangkok. Many were taken when he travelled around with Poh Teck Tung for a few weeks. The book is a horror-monger’s gallery of bodies lying in the street, surrounded by chalk-line skeletons and rivulets of blood and close-ups of pulped faces. The cover shows a bloody hand hanging from the bonnet of a car, making it look as if the person has been eaten alive by what Philip refers to in the text as a ‘petrol-powered beast’.