Tourists come to Thailand to enjoy the great scenery and attractions the Kingdom has to offer and the people working in the tourism industry are always and forever trying to figure out what’s on the tourists’ minds and how they can serve them even better. In The Death Kiss of a Cobra, the short story that opens Jim Algie’s collection of short stories The Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand, the writer takes the reader into the minds of the various people operating on the service side of the tourism industry.
We initially meet Yai, a snake-handler from a poor farming village “where his mother still ran the TV off a car battery.” Working in Phuket, Yai can barely make a living, risking his life every day for the entertainment of hungry-for-novelty tourists. Looked down upon by the local girls who preferred to give their time and attention to wealthy foreigners and frustrated with always being poor and not having achieved his dreams of making a name for himself, Yai has an altercation with a bulky American who is in Phuket for the “Cobra Gold 2000” joint navy exercises. Things go too far when they take their differences into the snake pit where the inevitable happens and the two “enemies” realize that, after all, they’re actually not that different from one another.
The Death Kiss of a Cobra is a strong start to an even stronger book. From the very first pages, Algie starts to scratch the surface of a few of the major socio-economic problems Thailand faces these days: “Everybody looked down on them as country bumpkins and the government never did anything to help them. All of his brothers and sisters and old friends and classmates had left the village long ago to work as taxi drivers, factory workers and prostitutes in Bangkok.”
The belief in reincarnation in a predominantly Buddhist country and the importance the Thai people put on the concept of “saving face” are also two other themes that span the pages of the entire book.
Jim Algie has been a resident of Thailand since 1992 and has contributed work to many travel guides and has published both non-fiction and fiction in several publications around the world. For readers in Thailand, he is mostly known as the author of Bizarre Thailand: Tales of Crime, Sex and Black Magic (Marshall Cavendish, 2010) which deals with the dark side of some of Thailand’s strangest attractions.
The Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand (Tuttle Publishing, 2014) is his first volume of fiction which comes with recommendations by two of the most iconic fiction writers related to Thailand. John Burdett (the author of Bangkok 8) and Christopher G. More (the author of the Vincent Calvino mystery series) both reassure the readers that they have in their hands a book worth saving in their private library to be re-read at any time in the future.
The anthology continues with Flashpoints in Asia, a short story which takes us to the streets of Bangkok during a bloody military crackdown and coup on demonstrators fighting for democracy. We see the events through Kendall’s viewfinder, a freelance photographer who’s always looking for the next best shot: “Further down Bangkok’s Ratchadamnoen Avenue, the dark hulk of a tank rumbled towards him. Behind it, flames shot up from a city bus and writhed in the humid breeze. No time to attach his zoom lens; another perfect shot wasted.”
Eventually, Kendall does manage to take the “perfect shot” and wins a coveted award and lands a well-paid job as a foreign correspondent in Asia. However, the fame and the money come at the expense of the people who facilitated his sudden rise to fame: the memory and ghost of a Thai student who he might have saved had he not decided to first take a photo of the approaching soldier who dealt the injured student the final blow.
Haunted by the atrocities he’s seen throughout his career, Kendall feels he’s being followed by the ghost of his past, when the subjects of his photography “come back to haunt him.”
Set during a time when photographers still used rolls of film for their cameras and developed the negatives in the darkroom, Flashpoints in Asia mingles real historical events with local customs and traditions, especially the Festival of the Hungry Ghost when people of Chinese ancestry believe that the gates of Hell opens to let the ghosts of dead people roam the earth and feast on their relative’s offerings or haunt those who forgot their memory.
A different look at why some women in Thailand end up working in go-go bars is explored in Wet Nightmares, a short story that introduces us to a prostitute’s savage and harsh world: “To end up as a whore in this life she must’ve committed terrible sins in her previous one (probably even killed somebody); that’s why she was being punished like this. But as long as she kept doing good deeds when she could, and giving alms to Buddhist monks, then she might be able to improve her bad karma.”
Unfortunately, for Watermelon, her only way out of poverty is to keep doing what she is doing and hope for a better future after she manages to save enough money to get out of this business and make sure her own “daughter would never end up as a prostitute” as well.
The Legendary Nobody is based on a true crime story, more exactly on See Ouey (aka Si Quey and also See Uey Sae Ung) and his legend as a Chinese immigrant in the 1940s who became Thailand’s most notorious cannibal. His preserved corpse is still displayed today in a window at the Songkran Niyomsane Forensic Science Medicine Museum in Bangkok’s Siriraj Hospital.
However, the underlining theme of the story is not See Ouey’s gruesome killings and his cannibalism but the hardships and demeaning treatment many Chinese immigrants fleeing Communist China had to suffer during, while and after their escape to neighbouring countries. Thailand was one of them.
Obituary for the Khaosan Road Outlaws and Impostors tells the story of Mick, an Englishman who, together with his friend, the narrator, tried to find their luck in Bangkok by trafficking people to other countries (mostly South Asians who went to work in Japan illegally). As the story is an “obituary,” characters die but there’s a much bigger story the writer aims to tell: that of big time crooks, such as businessmen, politicians and officials, who drove Thailand’s economy to its total fatidic crash in 1997.
Compared to these corrupt high-flyers, Mick and his buddies in crime were just a minuscule part of a microcosm of wrongdoers who made Khaosan Road their safety haven during the early ’90s.
The title story of Algie’s collection of “thrilling tales,” The Phantom Lover, is indeed a thrilling tale of an abortion that went terribly wrong. “Golden children,” 15th-Century adulteresses, aborted foetuses, and black magicians are just a few chills the readers get to experience.
Life and Death Sentences is a story inspired by and written in the memory of Chaovaret Jaruboon, also known as “Thailand’s last executioner.” He died in 2012, but for Jim Algie he was “a gentleman, a rock’n’roller, a drinking buddy.”
To merge facts, literature and cinema even more, I also recommend Chaovaret’s own memoirs (published by Maverik House, 2007) and the movie of the same title “The Last Executioner” (directed by Tom Waller, 2014) which has Vithaya Pansringarm starring in Chaovaret Jaruboon’s role. There are many life lessons to be learned from all these three renditions of the same story.
The Vicious Little Monk is a story of White Fang, a cat with buck teeth, which builds a special relationship with his new “master,” a recently divorced man. But, just as the wife had left the man, hoping for a less-depressing environment and a fresh start, the man abandons the cat and leaves Thailand for Hong Kong.
Tsunami, a more than 100-page long novella, ends Algie’s collection of thrilling stories by bringing together many of the book’s characters. The piece is especially relevant and rather poignant because, during this year, we will mark the 10th anniversary of the December 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. “On any level, personal or spiritual, scientific or philosophical, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to sum up the complexity and far-reaching ramifications of a catastrophe that stole or damaged so many lives, and whose shocks were felt as far as Somalia and Alaska.”
The Phantom Lover and Other Thrilling Tales of Thailand by Jim Algie is an excellent collection of stories that puts into context the mentality and socio-economic status of the people of Thailand, with their entrenched belief in Buddhist karma and the strong desire to succeed but save face at the same time. In Thailand, the book is available countrywide at most Asia Books branches and the three Kinokuniya branches at Emporium, Siam Paragon, and Central World in Bangkok.
A much shorter version of this article was initially published in Mango Metro (July 2014, Vol.8, No.8)
