The Border

This is the Burmese town of Miyawaddi, seen from the Thai town of Mae Sot across the brown and trash-clogged Rim Moei river. The two towns are distinct in name only. In practice, the river is a porous boundary, and the people and societies on either side are bound together in a complicated relationship of dependancy and dysfunction. It's a small-scale version of what happens along the border of the US and Mexico - both parties maintain the trappings of a border while simultaneously benefiting from its permanent rupture. Put a rich country next to a poor country and the poor will relocate while the richer profit from that relocation with the inexhaustibility and inevitability of a physical law. Look at these tracks worn in the no-man's-land of the riverbank by people making unofficial crossings. If I wanted to milk my metaphor I'd say they're like the trails that raindrops leave in obedience to gravity:

But unlike gravity, the process has its regional quirks. Take the Thai/Myanmar Friendship Bridge that connects the two countries:

Thailand drives on the left, Burma drives on the right, thanks to a unilateral decision made by General Ne Win in 1970. The internet thinks that the General took too literally a soothsayer's advice to 'move to the right' (economically), and while this is consistent with the General's well-documented stupidstition (to coin a portmanteau) I think it's more likely that left-hand driving was seen as a legacy of British colonialism. Thanks to sanctions and Burma's economic backwardness, most vehicles in the country remain right-hand drive, so buses have to discharge their passengers in the middle of busy roads, and drivers have to veer way out into oncoming traffic in order to overtake. Also, drivers have to switch lanes on the bridge, an operation that gets accomplished with two traffic lights and surprisingly little chaos.

"Let us all participate in realising the drug-free zone." This sign faces back towards Burma like King Canute. The four commodities that surreptitiously cross the river here in massive quantities are drugs, guns, gems and people. Walking along the riverbank I see a Burmese man openly selling a baggie containing two ya ba pills to a ragged, itching junkie. Ya ba (also known as 'Nazi Speed', supposedly because it was devised by German chemists in WWII to give stamina to their soldiers) is a mixture of meth and caffeine sold in round, brightly colored pills. Ya ba and and heroin are both substantial contributors to the Burmese GDP. The junta can put up all the bridge signs it wants, but it's an open secret that they tolerate and profit from the many labs that flourish in the east of the country. What they don't tolerate, however, is when the ethnic groups do it. In the lead-up to the "elections", the junta is trying to neutralise Burma's multifarious armed ethnic groups by inducing them to integrate into a so-called 'Border Guard Force'. Some groups have acceded, but the most bad-ass, the United Wa State Army (UWSA), continues to hold out. To fund their arms purchases and strengthen their position in advance of the inevitable government crackdown, they've ramped up their drug production to the point where the Thai Army estimates something like 400 million ya ba pills will cross the border this year, most of it from factories in Wa territory. Only about 1 percent of that will be intercepted, and the rest will be consumed by Thailand's wretched amphetamine junkies. The cops here have a wonderful tradition of holding press photo-ops where malefactors are posed like hunting trophies beside the incriminating evidence of their crimes, and the resulting pictures are a fascinating document of the Thai drug problem - dejected, skeletal Thais in shorts and flip flops, squatting beside some sad pile of aluminium cookwear looted from an empty house.

But the most obvious illicit cross-border traffic here is people. In the photo above, a ferryman pulls an inner-tube full of people across the river, in full view of the border guards lounging at either ends of the bridge. This goes on all day, as people cross for work, to see family, to go to school, to visit the clinic, to flee repression, or just to buy cheap Burmese cigarettes. Seeing this actually happen is shocking in the same way that it would be to see someone abruptly levitate. We take the inviolability of borders for granted like we take gravity for granted. When we see them so nonchalantly violated we are reminded that lines on a map are nothing before the forces of war, poverty, drugs and commerce.

Mae Sot Folk Art

That last post was a little heavy, huh? I thought as a palate cleanser I'd post the shots I've been collecting of some of the folk art that adorns the businesses of Mae Sot. Firstly I'm an enormous fan of these robots made of car parts outside the mechanics on the way to my muay thai gym:

Predator:

This giant crab and prawn are made of old tyres, and adorn the gardens of a seafood restaurant:

And this thing advertises a shop selling (surprise) blue plastic jerrycans:

Warriors

Cockfighting is shocking in its brutality. Usually when animals fight it's in short bursts of pantomime violence, and it's over the instant dominance is established and the beta male slinks away. Cockfighting is different. I’ve never seen anything which so seemingly validates the Skinnerian behavourialist model of animal psychology. The cocks are like small, vicious robots whose kill-switch has been flicked. From the second the referee releases them they are fixated on killing each other to the exclusion of all else. They never run. They fight without pause or interruption until one is incapable of going on, either because it's so injured and/or exhausted that it can no longer stand, or because its dead. It’s no wonder that cockfighting has long been associated with the martial virtues. The Athenian leader Themistocles supposedly watched a cockfight on the night before his vastly outnumbered forces were to do battle with the Persians following the Spartan defeat at Thermopylae. Legend has him declaiming:

Behold soldiers, they do not fight for their nation, nor for their Gods, nor for their idols, nor for their liberty; only pride animates them to fight, so far as neither would like to suffer defeat, and you - compelled to defend so much - would you not do likewise?

Do a bit of research and be astonished at what a central part cockfighting once played in Western culture, and by how thoroughly this fact has been scrubbed from our collective memories. Cockfighting enthusiast Julius Caesar introduced the sport to the British isles, where it proved so popular that a permanent cockpit was later installed in the Palace of Westminster. The English delighted in astonishingly brutal cockfights, including the 'battle royal' where an unlimited number of fowl were made to fight until one winner remained, and the 'Welsh Main', a 16 bird tournament to the death, held over an afternoon. These diversions only ended during the reign of the killjoy Queen Victoria, who issued a decree banning the activity. Across the Atlantic, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson were all avid cockfighters. Abraham Lincoln once refereed at a cockfight, a duty he supposedly discharged so well that it earned him the nickname 'Honest Abe'. And Ben Franklin championed the adoption of the fighting cock as the national bird, losing out by only one vote to the American Eagle(!). Cockfighting, though expunged from our collective consciousness today, nonetheless lives on in the phrases 'to raise one's hackles', 'to turn tail', 'to be cocky' and even, possibly, the word 'cocktail'.

So what changed? The rise of Victorian hypocrisy, for one thing. I love the irony of the greatest imperial ruler in history getting exercised about cruelty to chickens while her soldiers were wading through rivers of blood in the process of subduing half the world. It's an irony that endures today, when otherwise intelligent people can denounce bloodsports with a straight face, over a meal of animals who arguably endured worse tortures than anything a fighting cock has to put up with. And I can't even begin to make sense of the bizarre polarities of squeamishness and apathy inherent in a culture where Michael Vick goes to prison while Dick Cheney and assorted other unrepentant torturers of humans get top billing on Fox. Perhaps one way of looking at it is that we've systematically devalued the currency of 'honour', in favour of a murky philosophy of utility - after all, we need to eat chicken and protect ourselves from terrorists, and who cares how those goals are accomplished, provided the wet work is done in the dark? Cockfights, on the other hand, are frivolous, and we won't accept the infliction of pain unless its to some concrete higher purpose, in which case we'll seemingly accept it no matter how trivial, stupid or wrongheaded that higher purpose might be. Sometimes I think we've retained all the bad aspects of Victorianism (moral and sexual hypocrisy) while discarding all the good (ideals of honour/dignity/virtue). We can no longer even conceive of the possibility that there might be something to take from this bloody morality play. So each time I've attended a cockfight here I've made a conscious effort to recognise my initial revulsion for what it is, not the physical manifestation of some deeply rooted moral disgust, but rather a conditioned response that's culturally specific to my Western middle-class existence. If you can overcome that reflexive revulsion then you start to understand why Caesar and Themistocles and Washington could see two birds fighting in a ring as epitomising martial courage in the face of death.

Anyway, here is the sign for the Mae Sot cockpit:

Fighters:

Before the fight:

This is the stance the cocks automatically adopt - staring into each other's eyes, hackles raised:

The gentlemen on the little pink stool is the referee. If one of the cocks goes down, he will place it back on its feet in front of its opponent, then ruffle both their tail feathers to encourage them to fight. The books in everybody's hands are betting books, and the little arena is filled with permanent uproar as bets are placed and odds adjusted:

Intermission. The guy on the left is holding a bundle of lemongrass, which he dips in water then rubs against a hotplate on top of a charcoal brazier. The pleasant-smelling smoke helps revive the birds.

Workspace. Clockwise from top you see a cloth in a bowl of water for cleaning the bird, a bowl with a feather in it which is used to clear congealed blood and feathers from the cock's throat, lemongrass in a bowl, and the charcoal brazier:

Plunging the cock's throat with the feather. A lot of the trainers carry this same feather behind their ear. The trainers will also suck blood from their fighter's nasal cavities, a practice that was implicated in the transmission of bird flu.

First aid kit. The yellow liquid in the cup is oil, the spoon is used to feed the bird broth, the thread is to sew up the bird's face:

Sewing a wound:

End of the fight - people call in their bets:

The victor:

Note: Despite an unfortunate emphasis on Freudian psychobabble (hint: they're called 'cocks') I'm indebted to 'The Cockfight: A Casebook' by Alan Dundes, incompletely available on Google Books.

Phonetic spelling fail

Isopoda

Woodlice aren't actually insects, but terrestrial crustaceans. Their ability to roll into a ball when disturbed has given the common name of 'pill bug'. I waited 10 minutes for this stubborn little bastard to unroll himself but he was so committed to his defensive strategy that I eventually gave up. Instead I found this, possibly the greatest Youtube clip ever. Play it with sound.

Pentatomidae

A member of the Pentatomidae family (so named for its 5-segmented antennae). Pentatomidae are commonly known as shield bugs (for their shape), or stink bugs (for the foul, almond-smelling substance they squirt when disturbed). They're apparently used in Vietnamese cuisine. Here two stink bugs work on creating a new generation of stink bug:

Envy me.

Polyphylla Tonkinensis

A member of the same genus as the June Bug. I often find these guys blundering around the porch lights in the late evening. The 'Tonkin' I assume refers to the Gulf of Tonkin, which would seem to indicate that these range across South-East Asia. And until they release the Google Insect Identification Database, that's all I can tell you about this one.

Scale:

Rit's Gym

This is my muay thai coach Rit, holding a picture of himself on the cover of a Thai kickboxing magazine. After his boxing career came to an end he worked as a cop for 10 years, then retired to teach muay thai from his ratty house on the outskirts of Mae Sot, where he lives with a shifting menagerie of cats, dogs, birds, fighters, and miscellaneous relatives.

Once we asked Rit if he had kids, and in reply he pointed to his preternaturally placid retriever, which is always wandering goofily through whatever ultra-violence is going on in the ring. Rit has trained the dog to shake hands when he saws 'Sawadhee krap' to it, and also to block kicks.

There's a major language barrier at the gym. Rit speaks almost no English, and I've made no effort to learn Thai, given that everybody at my work speaks Burmese exclusively. My Thai is very utilitarian, extending only as far as the words for 'five', 'ten'. 'knee', 'water', 'slowly' and 'push-up'. So I don't know anything about the little boy above, except that he's Karenni, he lives at the house, and Rit is training him to be a fighter. His parents are presumably in a refugee camp, in Burma, or dead. He trains every day, grunting ferociously as he hits the bags. Here he gives one of Rit's many relatives a massage:

This 15-year-old kid is the most terrifying of Rit's students:

Some of the many scrawny Kareni kids Rit trains:

Next: More insects.

Xylocopa Latipes

This is the first of what I hope will be an ongoing series on the insect life of Mae Sot. Xylocopa Latipes, also known as the Carpenter Bee, is the largest bee in the world, and common throughout Southeast Asia. I found this guy on the side of the highway as I was cycling back from muay thai. He has beautiful iridescent blue wings, pale grey compound eyes, and his body is about the size of my thumb. I don't think he was a well bee; he was dirty and dusty and crawling slowly into the traffic, breathing with apparent difficulty. I turned him around (carefully) and left him be.

Broken Bangkok

A few weeks ago I cut my trip to Burma short so I could get back to Bangkok and see the resolution of the Redshirt protests (which, as you know, turned out badly for all concerned). I arrived a few days before the curfew was implemented. The army had erected checkpoints on all the streets leading up to the protest areas, and the surrounding areas were eerily quiet. I told the taxi driver to take me to Patpong, (Bangkok's notorious red light district) figuring that it was A. adjacent to the protest areas and B. that nobody would question my motives for being there.

And this is Patpong, nearly deserted on a Friday night. As soon as I got out of the taxi I was mobbed by a crowd of desperate pimps. Bar? Drink? Massage? Hotel? 'Boom boom'? Pity the poor pimps, whose livelihood must have taken a serious hit during this period of unrest. A few bars were open, but the few sad old white dudes making up their clientele were vastly outnumbered by members of the press filming them, for news reports that you can probably write for yourself:

Deserted stations and deserted streets:

And that was it. The city was nervously holding its breath. And while it was clear that the government was going to take action to resolve the situation, it wasn't clear when that would be. The state of siege could have persisted for another week, and I didn't have a week to spare, so I went South to the islands. That's why when the army went in two days later, leaving 80 people dead, 2000 people injured, and the heart of Bangkok a smouldering ruin, I was here:

When I got back, things were almost entirely back to normal. The Redshirt rank-and-file had dispersed back to the countryside or into the mass of urban poor. The high-profile Redshirt leaders were under arrest or, in the case of Thaksin, sheltering from the Thai government's warrant for his arrest on terrorism charges in Montenegro, where he's a citizen. And the government seemed torn between the conflicting aims of promoting 'reconciliation' in the form of some kind of restorative justice process, and justifying the heavy-handedness of its response by demonising the Redshirts. The demonisation took two forms - portraying the protesters as terrorists, and insinuating that their true intention was to overthrow the monarchy. Dark comparisons were drawn with Nepal (where the monarchy was recently deposed), and with the storming of the Bastille. This is an especially serious charge in Thailand, with its archaic and punitive lèse majesté laws (I'm going to save my post on the monarchy for another day, perhaps when I'm no longer living in Thailand).

The city was being energetically cleaned, though evidence of the riots was still everywhere throughout the protest areas, like the melted bus shelter seats above and, of course, the smoking wreckage of the Central World mall. There are weird echoes of Fight Club in the targets that were chosen for destruction, all those shopping malls and boutiques and entertainment complexes and billboards. Was it just because they were convenient, or were they picked out as symbols of a consumer capitalism that has left so many in Thailand behind? Or a combination of the two? On the other side of the equation, the destruction of these landmarks elicited a suprising outpouring of grief. Something strikes me as odd about leaving flowers for a burnt-out mall where no-one actually died, while neglecting the numerous other symbolic sites available where people did actually die (the Rama VI statue in Lumphini, for example). It may be that the mall, by virtue of its high visibility and central location, became a convenient locus for a more general outpouring of grief. It may also be that by leaving flowers at the mall, Thais distance themselves from the Redshirts and proclaim their fealty to the established order. The op-eds that filled the Bangkok Post in the following weeks bewailing the loss of the mall and the theatre (but we'll always have the memories, etc) may have served the same purpose.

Random images of destruction - The corner of Lumphini Park where the main barricades were located. The only evidence that remains is the paving stones, ripped up to provide the protesters with ammunition.

A scorched palm:

A broken billboard:

The smoking remains of the venerable Siam Theatre:

Fortunately this poster advertising Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston in 'The Bounty Hunter' survived the blaze:

The government dotted the city centre with this cheerfully conciliatory ad campaign:

In the same spirit, the newspapers were full of stories of peppy, civic-minded teens taking to the streets to clean up the city. This zeal for putting things back in order and for empty rhetoric of conciliation (while simultaneously demonising everyone) virtually assures that the grievances which led to the whole mess will remain unaddressed. At least until the next coup or uprising.