An excerpt from my forthcoming book: Towards the eastern edge of Bangkok’s vast unruly urban sprawl, in the grounds of an old Buddhist temple among tenement blocks and shophouses near where the Skytrain reaches the end of the line, beside one of the canals that weave through the capital as arteries of an older waterborne city usually hidden from those on solid ground, is a shrine to a ghost. She is known as Mae Nak, and she lived nearby two centuries ago, when the temple was part of a rural community surrounded by rice fields, long before it was engulfed by the relentless growth of Thailand’s chaotic capital. She died in childbirth while her husband was away fighting a war, but her love for him was too fierce to allow her to move on to the next world, and when he finally came home the ghost of Nak and her dead baby were waiting for him, disguised as living people, or so the story goes. When neighbours tried to warn her husband that he was living with a ghost, Nak killed them, desperate to preserve the illusion that kept her marriage alive. But while making curry paste one day, she gave away her terrible secret, accidentally dropping a lime which fell through the wooden floor of their traditional-style stilted house, all the way to the ground beneath. Unaware that her husband was watching, Nak reached down to retrieve it, her arm unspooling to a grotesque length and stretching down through the floorboards. Abandoned by her husband, who fled the house in horror, Nak’s spirit terrorized the village for years afterwards, unhinged with grief and rage, until a famous monk at last managed to overpower her. She was imprisoned beneath the ground, where her shrine stands today, her corpse entangled in the roots of a tree planted on her burial site to keep her trapped there forever, unable to dig her way out. Monks hold a funeral service at Mae Nak’s shrine once a month to honour her memory and placate her spirit. During the 1990s, the shrine increasingly became a place of pilgrimage for Thais asking for ghostly assistance, part of a trend that Pattana Kitiarsa calls ‘the chaotic re-emergence of various forms of animism and supernaturalism in Thailand’s popular religion landscape’ (Pattana, 2005). Following an acclaimed 1999 movie directed by Nonzee Nimibutr, the story became even more famous. The shrine is crowded every day with Thais tying handwritten requests to the trees and leaving gifts for Nak — portraits, brand new dresses, cosmetics, silk scarves, dolls. She is believed to be particularly kind to couples with a child who is ill or in trouble, young men trying to avoid military conscription, and those hoping for a hint of which numbers will be lucky in Thailand’s state lottery. Inside the shrine, a television set is always on, in case Nak’s ghost gets bored. The story was made into an opera in 2003, a CGI cartoon in 2008, and a musical in 2009. The 2013 comedy horror movie Pee Mak became the highest grossing Thai film ever, earning box office revenue of more than a billion baht. ‘There is no Thai who does not know Mae Nak,’ wrote Ka F. Wong in a study of the tale. ‘While mentioning her can make young children run and scream hysterically in the “Nang Nak game”, mothers invoke Mae Nak’s name to quiet their crying infants; otherwise, the ghost might break their necks and eat their heads with chilly sauce’ (Wong, 2000). The legend of Mae Nak is the most enduring and popular of all the country’s folktales, and as a parable of modern Thailand it is uncannily apt. The country is haunted by the stubborn ghosts of an earlier feudal era, trapped in a toxic relationship with the undead remnants of the despotic monarchy that ruled the kingdom for centuries and still refuses to let go. The extraordinary social and political conflict that has engulfed Thailand in the 21st century is the latest chapter in a long and often violent struggle by ordinary people to free themselves from the grip of the past. As Richard O’Connor observes in a study of ‘founders’ cults’ in Southeast Asia: ‘Only a dead past frees the present to decide its fate. But what if the past is not dead?’ (O’Connor, 2003).
Posted on: Mon, 25 Nov 2013 08:37:00 +0000
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