Requiem For a Thai King

My wife was born and raised in Thailand. For seventy years, the Thai people revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej as a veritable demigod. He died last October, and Thais have mourned his passing ever since. This includes those who live outside Thailand. My wife has lived in the U.S. since 2001, and she has mourned her king probably as much as most people inside or outside Thailand.

Today the late king's remains were cremated near Bangkok's Grand Palace. This marked the culmination of a spectacularly lavish funeral ceremony which drew hundreds of thousands to the ceremony itself and millions more throughout Thailand and the world to sites where they could gather to pay final respects to the king.

My wife accompanied several from her local Thai Buddhist temple and a thousand or more other people from the Bay Area and beyond to attend one such event last night outside San Francisco City Hall. Judging from her accounts and from photos and videos published on social media, it was a solemnly beautiful, candlelit affair brimming with emotion I can only begin to imagine, since I did not grow up under a king who served as the spiritual father and cultural glue of my own homeland.

However, I do feel some vicarious grief from the mourning of the Thai people for their king. And I take some poignant pleasure in being able to modestly share in their and my wife's powerful experience of loss. A vital part of being a human inhabiting this earth is feeling intense grief and tenderness toward those communally sharing our grief with us. Perhaps the closest thing in my own prior experience to partaking in this magnitude of communal grief came in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

This, at least for the time being, supersedes my reservations against venerating monarchs and against the fearsomely harsh laws in Thailand prohibiting even the faintest intimation of insult directed at the king or royal family. It also overshadows, for now, my concerns about the potential unrest if not worse that could consume Thailand after being held in abeyance for the past year by the official mourning period.

That period officially ended today. Who knows what tomorrow may bring? I'll worry about that "tomorrow," but not today.

Was There a Ghost in Our Hotel Room?

My wife and I stayed at a hotel in Southern California last weekend. I won't say which hotel it was because I wouldn't want to get them or myself in any trouble. But I do want to report what we saw in our room.

We were lying in bed talking Sunday morning when I caught a fleeting glimpse of what appeared to be a moving shadow on the ceiling in front of the open bathroom door. My wife kept the bathroom light on and the door open a crack so she could find her way to the bathroom in the dark if she needed to. What I saw looked like the shadow someone might cast on the ceiling if they were in the lighted bathroom. But no one was in there.

I didn't think much of it or say anything about it. First of all, I don't believe in supernatural phenomena like spirits or ghosts, although I don't rule them out completely, and I just figured that my eyes were playing tricks on me. I never saw anything else like that the two nights we were there, and my wife didn't mention anything about it at the time.

Yet, this morning my wife called from work and asked if I'd seen anything "strange" in that room. I said, "Like what?" and she replied that she had seen the moving shadow. But she saw it four or five times. She also said she'd had a peculiar dream or two about a little boy in that room. I felt a few chills along my spine. I'm feeling them now too.

I told her that I didn't have any peculiar dreams, but I did see what she saw. I also asked why she didn't say anything to me while we were in the room. She answered that she didn't want me to stay awake looking for anything out of the ordinary and, besides, she didn't feel threatened by whatever it was that she saw.

I should explain that my wife is Thai. As a Thai, she believes in ghosts and takes them rather matter-of-factly. In fact, she and her whole family believe that a benevolent ghost protects their property in Bangkok. The opening fight scene from Rambo III was filmed there and they've called it the "Rambo House" ever since. You can read my blogpost about the filming here. The reputed ghost appears as an old lady sweeping the grounds of the property. She doesn't appear to family members but only to guests staying overnight. Everybody calls her "the caretaker" in Thai.

Back to our hotel room. I don't know what we saw. I'm inclined to believe that there's a natural explanation for it even if I don't know what it is. But who knows what it REALLY was?

I guess only The Shadow knows.

Rambo House

In the late 1980's, an exciting stickfighting scene between John Rambo and his opponent in a ring in Thailand was featured in the movie Rambo III. This scene has special significance for my wife and her family because it was filmed at her house in Bangkok where she grew up. Her family still owns the property, although most of them no longer live there. However, they continue to call it the "Rambo House."

The scene took several days to set up and film, requiring modifications to be made to the building, where my wife's family business built boats, in which the fight took place. After the fight, Rambo gets on a boat and heads up the river from the same spot from which my wife used to travel almost every day to school or work.

Of course, my wife's family was paid for the use of their property, and they certainly enjoyed having the biggest movie star in the world at that time filming a major motion picture in their yard. Below is almost the complete scene, courtesy of the miraculous resource YouTube.

The Gospel of Father Joe

I am not Catholic. Frankly, I believe that the institution and teachings of Roman Catholicism are mostly nonsense, and I was only half joking when I used to say, "Popes are for dopes." But there's no denying that some Catholics, because or in spite of their religion, have done and are doing wonderful work. Here is an article about a Catholic priest named Joe Maier who has spent three decades serving the poorest of the poor in the slums of Bangkok. I look forward to reading the book about this man and his great work.

Bangkok Bombing Update

Earlier today, I posted about the New Year's Eve bombings in Bangkok. I opined that they were probably the work of Muslim separatists taking their campaign of terrorism from the South to the very center of the nation. However, I've just read in the New York Times that Thai national police doubt that insurgents from the South were responsible. They believe or say they believe, instead, that the bombings were linked to the political unrest that lingers in the wake of the recent coup, and one fact that supports their suspicion is that all of the bombs exploded in areas not frequented by foreigners.

Am I too quick to atttibute virtually all terrorist acts these days to Muslim terrorism? Has my admitted distaste if not hatred for a religious faith that has spawned so much violence and misery with relatively little condemnation from Muslim communities at large taken unhealthy hold of me?

Maybe, but I'd still be surprised, although I'd love to be, if those bombings had anything to do with the recent coup and not with Muslim terrorists. I suspect that the Thai police may be engaging in some wishful thinking or damage control to keep the tourists coming and tourist money flowing into the economy.

Bombs in Bangkok

I feared that it was only a matter of time until it happened, and now it has. Bombs have exploded in Bangkok, and I doubt that I'm jumping to unwarranted conclusions in suspecting that Muslim separatists have now expanded their bloody violence from the South to Thailand's geographical, population, and economic center in an effort to gain through force and terror what they will almost certainly never get--a separate Muslim fundamentalist nation.

But how many people will be maimed and killed, how many families destroyed, and how much fear, anxiety, and economic loss will plague that beautiful country and its people as a result of this awful, proliferating violence? Two people apparently died in Bangkok and twelve or more were injured when bombs exploded Sunday evening (Thailand time) near a popular momument, in a fresh food market, and at other places as people were preparing for New Year's Eve celebrations.

What's next? Shootings, more bombs, and beheadings in Bangkok and elsewhere that were previously confined to the South?