A Fortune-Teller Told Me (18 page)

The story of my flightless year soon made the rounds of the journalists in the area, and the commonest reaction was good-hearted envy. When the subject came up at dinner, many of them had their own stories to tell. One came from Claudia Rossett of the
Wall Street Journal
, who was living in Hong Kong at the time.

Claudia’s family lived in Baltimore. In the 1930s her grandmother had been left a widow, wretchedly poor, with three children to bring up. In those days lottery tickets were on sale in the drugstores, and once she dreamed she had won with the number sixteen. She told her dream to her next-door neighbor, who urged her to put everything on that number. She did, and sixteen won, bringing her a tidy sum of money that changed her life overnight. From then on she never ceased talking about her amazing premonition. Many years later one of her three children, Claudia’s father, went back to the neighborhood where he had grown up. He met up with the woman next door, who told him that her suggestion to play the lottery had been used by his mother’s friends to give her money which otherwise, being a very proud woman, she would never have accepted. When they heard of the dream, they had made a collection, and gave the money to the drugstore owner. He then gave it to her, telling her the winning number was sixteen—the very one she had dreamt!

The last guest at Turtle House before I took the train for Malaysia and Singapore was Joachim Holzgen, a colleague from
Der Spiegel
. In early March the United Nations Transition Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) invited each of the main European journals to send a
reporter there. The aim was to interest European public opinion in the UN peace mission preparing for the Cambodian elections to be held at the end of May. The program included a visit by helicopter to the military installations, and to avoid confronting me with a dilemma
Der Spiegel’s
editors in Hamburg decided to send Joachim Holzgen. It was his first trip to Indochina, and I invited him to dinner with a couple of colleagues who had just returned from Cambodia. The next morning he got on the plane for Phnom Penh, and I went to the Hua Lampun railway station, with my rucksack on my back, and in my head the plan to write about the overseas Chinese.

I have long had a passion for railway stations. I could spend whole days in one, sitting in a corner and observing the life around me. The spirit of a country, the state of mind of the people and their problems are reflected better in a station than anywhere else. In half an hour of watching the sea of humanity as it ebbs and flows beneath the canopies of Hua Lampun station, you can learn more about today’s Thailand than by reading any academic treatise. Trains coming from the north disgorge people by the thousand, mostly young, many of them girls, all full of hope. They have left their villages with a bundle of clothes and a one-way ticket, to look for work in the capital.

Recruiters from the construction industry wait on the platform as each train draws up. They offer about 100 baht ($2.50) per day, plus a camp bed on the site. The prettiest girls are invited to work in the brothels. It all happens in a few minutes: offers, wary hesitations, verbal contracts, and then away in the back of one of the many pickup trucks parked outside the station. In the crowd, looking more lost than the others, quite tiny children can be seen. They too find work, right under the noses of the police, who parade up and down with badges all over them and dashing pistols at their sides. Theoretically even in Thailand there are laws against the exploitation of minors, but in practice, as in so much of Asia, nothing is really illegal.

My southbound train was due to depart at 10:20, and it left on the dot. The Thai railways are an example of that efficient public administration which has fostered the rapid development of the country, and which, along with Buddhism and the monarchy, is still one of its
cohesive elements. The further the train went from Bangkok, the more people in the stations gave the impression of a militarized society. Everyone had a uniform: students, postmen, taxi motorcyclists, ticket collectors. The train conductor, with his chestful of ribbons from heaven knows what campaign, could have passed for an air marshal. The journey was an ongoing banquet. Dozens of vendors with baskets full of local specialties got on at one station and off at the next.

I traveled for a day and a night, lulled by the rattling of the wheels. At 5:30 sharp I was woken by the air marshal-conductor. The carriage had a stale smell. I was unshaven and my tongue was like sandpaper from the bottle of Mekong (Thai whiskey) I had drunk the night before with the railway police. I began to think that perhaps a year of such trips was madness. But I had only to get off the train and inhale a lungful of that pungent dawn air, full of promises, to feel inspired once more. I was in Yala! How many more times in my life would I arrive in Yala?

I thought of Chang Choub and his advice to meditate. Perhaps this traveling, all alone, was my meditation. Free from the daily routine, accountable to nobody but my own conscience, my mind grew calm. Frivolous thoughts rose to the surface, pleasant thoughts, fleeting impressions. Deep down I felt a great joy. I ate some soup at a stall outside the station and went for a stroll.

Yala is a town like many others, with no character to speak of. The main street is lined on both sides with shop-houses, all exactly alike: the ground floor is for selling, the upper for living. The owners are all Chinese—my tough, practical Chinese, penniless on arrival, who set up as small shopkeepers. They redeem themselves by spending their lives in pursuit of a goal largely despised by their own culture. The China from which these emigrants came was Confucian, and trade commanded scant respect. Merchants were on the lowest rank of the social hierarchy, just below soldiers, and far below peasants and artisans.

My first destination was Betong, a town in the short mountain range that divides the peninsula and marks the border between Thailand and Malaysia. I shared a taxi with five other passengers and we covered the eighty-six miles from Yala in just over two hours. We passed through
highly fertile red terrain, covered in rubber and pineapple plantations, then climbed a tarred road among splendid rocky peaks which appeared and disappeared between dense banks of mist.

In the time when both Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur were fighting an armed Communist insurrection, these mountains were the natural refuge for the guerrillas, and Betong was known as a danger spot chock-full of spies. All that has changed. The first impression is highly pleasing. A handsome municipal signboard at the entrance to the town announces that “Betong is renowned for its scenic beauty.” Other signs, all in English, point tourists in the direction of the park, the stadium and, for some mysterious reason, the prison. The chief monument they are urged to see is an enormous red letter box on the main square. A sign proclaims it to be the largest in the world.

Despite this façade of touristic innocence, there is something that immediately strikes one about Betong: the number of barber shops. There are dozens of them, one every few yards, and the fact that they concern themselves with more than beards is clear from their strange names—“Funny Barber,” or “Sexy Barber.”

Profiting from the proximity of Malaysia, with its immense market of men sexually repressed by Islamic puritanism, Betong has developed one of the most profitable of all industries: prostitution. The services are provided by Thais; the clientele is exclusively Malay. Without requiring a passport, thousands of Muslims cross the border every day on a twenty-four-hour visa to indulge in pleasures forbidden at home. Betong is a brothel city.

I had come to Betong to look for someone who had been in the Communist guerrillas. I had no idea how to go about it, but the task proved easier than I had expected. The porter of my hotel sent me to a photographer, who sent me to a seller of electrical appliances, who telephoned a friend of his, who came to fetch me with a scooter and dropped me off in front of a small pharmacy of traditional medicine with its window full of dried mushrooms for long life and bottles of green ointment. In the space of an hour, passing from one Chinese to another, I had reached Mr. Wu, a middle-aged man, small, thin and distinguished-looking.

For close on twenty years Wu had been the guerrillas’ doctor. Following their surrender in 1987 he had become the best-known pharmacist in Betong. Thanks to his experience in the jungle, he was the only one with a thorough knowledge of the therapeutic virtues of the plants, roots and barks in the nearby mountains.

Mr. Wu offered me tea and produced the family albums. There were photographs of him and his wife as guerrillas, in Maoist uniforms with their feet wrapped in strips of cloth and old rifles over their shoulders. He said we should visit the guerrilla camp, which was only five miles from the city. He shut up shop and off we went.

The Communist guerrilla war in Malaysia began just after the Second World War. The leader was Chin Peng, a hero of the anti-Japanese resistance. Most of the fighters, like him, were Chinese. Inspired by Mao’s revolution, they too dreamed of creating a people’s republic in what was then still part of the British Empire. The British resisted, declared a state of emergency, and in a fierce military campaign, using tactics later copied with less success by the Americans in Vietnam, they managed to isolate the guerrillas.

In 1957 the British granted independence to a state called the Malay Federation. It was composed of Malaysia and Singapore, plus the territories of Sabah and Sarawak on Borneo (included expressly to prevent the Chinese from forming the majority of the population). Thereafter the Communist guerrilla campaign was no longer a real threat, although a few groups of a strict Maoist persuasion remained active along the Thai border. These groups, however, were torn by internal strife and purges, and in the end they gave up.

In a solemn ceremony on April 28, 1987, the last Communist guerrillas surrendered their arms to the Thai authorities. They were unable to return to Malaysia, so with the permission of Bangkok they stayed where they were, in their camp on Thai territory. They had to make a living, and being clever, practical Chinese, they profitably recycled their past as failed revolutionaries. I had only to set foot in the forest camp to realize this. The old, feared general headquarters, now called “The Village of Friendship,” had become a sort of guerrilla Disneyland with restaurants, video halls, souvenir stalls and tours of the tunnels guided by ex-combatants.

A group of young Malays, each with the Thai “wife” he had rented
for the day, had just finished the obligatory tour when Mr. Wu and I arrived. They were trying on green berets with red stars, having their photographs taken holding old rifles, and buying a potent “guerrilla ointment.” The old Communists had become, like the prostitutes, one of the tourist attractions that made Betong’s fortune.