• In 1991, when Banharn Silpa-archa was finance minister, he ordered the removal of two wooden elephants from the front door of the Finance Ministry to a temple on the advice of a fortune-teller who said elephants would endanger his position; the surname “Silpa-archa” means “horse” and as everyone must know, pachyderms trump equines every time. Six years later, the new finance minister moved them back, hoping the move would cure the economic problems the country was having. A month after that, the baht was devalued and the economy of the entire region crashed.
• In 1996, when astrologers told Banharn that bad stars had moved into his horoscope, he changed the date of his birth from July 20, 1932, to August 19, 1932, so he could be a Leo rather than a Cancer. A government spokesman explained that the traditional Thai way of counting days differed from the international method and said that this was the source of the error. Someone else pointed out that Leo was the sign of several previous prime ministers who served long terms, implying that was the real motive. Banharn lasted a year.
• In 1995, The Nation reported that nearly one-third of all members of Parliament collected amulets as a hobby. Some of the amulets were said to be five-hundred-years old and worth as much as US$400,000.
• In 1997, the wife of Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh insisted she and her husband moved house when a fortune-teller told her that a leak in the roof and a crack in the wall of their present abode would cause troubles for the family. She and her husband then conducted a five-hour-long religious rite—she worships Rahu, remember—to dispel the bad luck during the time they moved temporarily into another house while the leak was fixed. It was reported that they both wore black and burned more than one hundred black candles to say farewell to the god who, presumably, remained behind to supervise repairs.
• In 2000, the army demolished an official residence for top brass because it was believed to be shrouded in ill omen; apparently bad luck had come to those who lived there. A new house was built at a cost of US$125,000.
• In 2003, it was widely reported that the 443 Thai military personnel sent to Iraq to support America’s war took with them more than six thousand Buddha amulets, pieces of blessed cloth and sacred phallic images to assure their safety. The following year, all but two of the men returned.
• In 2004, when two historians cast doubt on the authenticity of an inscription reportedly found by a thirteenth century king in Sukhothai, some five thousand residents of the former capital gathered in front of the monarch’s statue and burned chilis and salt in an act of protest, believing the ancient rite would consign the historians to a purgatory of endless flame.
It all sounded to my “rational” Western mind like something you encountered in a novel by Stephen King and I thought a good argument could be made for the benefits that would come if superstition were somehow to vanish from the earth. I also acknowledged the possibility that the world might be thrown into chaos if these belief systems disappeared overnight… and that it would be a much less colorful place. I further knew that one of the quickest ways to get into trouble in Thailand was to examine things logically.
As reported in the Bangkok Post (Sep. 27, 2004), some people believed that delays in construction of Bangkok’s new international airport stemmed “not from man-made errors but supernatural phenomena.” Srisook Chandrangsu, the transport permanent secretary and chairman of the New Bangkok International Airport was quoted as saying he thought the absence of a proper shrine might have caused many of the problems. When a shrine was constructed to house all the deities in the area and troubles continued, experts recommended a larger shrine.
“A Thai-style pavilion was also built to house a foundation stone laid at the site by His Majesty the King,” the Post continued. “Before, the foundation stone was stored in a poorly illuminated place, which some believed was unbefitting, and might also have caused troubles. It has now been placed in a brightly lit place.
“Mr. Srisook said he was confronted with countless problems when he was asked to supervise the project. But after he placed a Buddha image in a meeting room… many of the problems and arguments were peacefully resolved. ‘We have to believe that supernatural powers are real,’ said Mr. Srisook.”
However mismatched these notions and practices may be to mine, I do not scoff. The Thai friend who explained the incident involving the tattooed taxi driver also gave me some good advice. “Not your country,” she said. “Don’t want to see you falling down.” Her English may have been somewhat quirky, but her message made good sense.
Almost as much as my crossing my fingers, knocking on wood, throwing salt over my shoulder, worrying about broken mirrors and black cats, walking under ladders, and numbering the floors in high-rise buildings so they skipped “13.”
Thai Time
Nittaya Phanthachat, a friend who stayed with me from time to time when she was visiting Bangkok (she had a home in Chon Buri), told me one morning as she left my flat that she’d be back in time for us to have dinner together.
She called at four o’clock and said she was running late, but promised to be back at eight. We still had time for dinner. No problem.
She finally showed up two days later.
Was I angry? No, not really. I was concerned about her safety and health, as anyone might be, but the worry, if that’s the correct word, was tempered by the knowledge that Thais don’t have the same concept of time that westerners do. In fact, not only is it different, to many of us raised in the West, it makes no sense at all, as if we’d suddenly awoken on a planet that moved around the Sun at an unfamiliar speed, with, literally, a different sense of gravity.
Consider being on Mercury. Mercury moves with great dispatch in its journey around the Sun, averaging approximately thirty miles per second and completing its circuit in about eighty-eight Earth days. Yet, this tiniest planet and the closest in the solar system to the Sun, rotates upon its axis so slowly, the time from one sunrise to the next is equal to about 176 days on Earth. Try setting your Swatch or Rolex to that. And think about how long Happy Hour might be.
Compared to Mercury’s, Nittaya’s sense of time was easy to grasp. I’d moved to Thailand after living for many years in Hawaii, where there was something called “Hawaiian time,” a complex system of measuring the duration of all existence, past, present, and future, that was defined by a single word: late. So, “Thai time” was just another excuse. Yes?
That’s the farang point of view, of course. Hawaiians are never late, according to “Hawaiian time.” Identically, Thais are never late. They’ve merely been delayed, or perhaps distracted. The ancient Greeks, in whom farangs perhaps put too much faith, advised us to be “ruled by time, the wisest counselor of all” and while that may have worked in ancient Greece and back home in the twenty-first-century United States, as any fool knows, Greek thought is not included in the Thai primary school curriculum. End of discussion.
A little harder to grasp is the Thai’s understanding of “time” as a concept. For this part of my tale, you need some patience, and perhaps a beer or a nice cuppa tea, so put this book down and get the drink of your choice—take your time!—and then take a deep breath and for just a minute, no longer, I promise, let me turn you over to William J. Klausner, a farang who came to Thailand in 1955, lived for a year in a village in Isan, was an editor of the annual publication of the Buddhist Association of Thailand, and taught at both Thammasat and Chulalongkorn Universities. A wise man.