The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand

Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
EIDETIC MEMORIES
In Bangkok's upscale Royal Hotel, Channel 11 is taping a talk show, a special memorial edition of "Looking from Different Perspectives," the Maung Dang Moom show. Three years before, here in the Royal Hotel in 1992, prodemocracy protesters had holed up until the bitter end of a month of street marches against an unelected general who had taken the office of prime minister. Here, under the beaded strings of glittering lights hanging from the atrium, they had set up their field hospital and morgue for those shot by the soldiers. Back then, the video cameras were not deployed smartly for center, right, and left angle shots as they are now. Camera crews were frantically milling about. People were shouting, and journalists from all around the world were tripping over each other, while Thais, peaking on adrenaline, would carry in faint, bloodied people whose expressions were muddled in the confusing moment of their approaching deaths. A camera was an emblem of sovereignty then. People cleared a path, as if for a king. They shouted, "Shoot, shoot, go right ahead!" as they cleared a good space around a corpse.
Then Special Forces stormed the building, and took up all the space in the world's camera lens. Yet it was far from merely unfortunate--from a media business angle as well as from a political angle--that the soldiers would then trample over and kick the protestors with big black jackboots, while the bodies lay shoulder to shoulder on the lobby's bloody marble floor. Beating them with rifle butts, the soldiers corralled them outside the hotel, and made them kneel in the sun, hands tied with their shirts behind their backs, which with a wide-angle lens looked like an endless sea of bare-backed slaves bowed before a machine gun on the horizon. Then they were herded toward trucks that looked like cattle cars and, pulled up by the roots of their hair, lifted onto the vehicles and carted away to wherever that dark, off-camera place is that military dictatorships take people.
Today is the third anniversary of the Black May massacre of 1992. The relatives of the dead have been invited here to be on TV, or at least in the studio audience. Last night, the parents, siblings, and children of the Black May dead, those who were not from Bangkok, slept on the floor in a nearby temple. Later tonight they will sleep on the straight-backed benches of dusty, rumbling buses heading back for their provincial villages and towns. But for now, as they are at this moment part and parcel of Thai national TV in the making, they are actually let into Bangkok's Royal Hotel, where they can sit in first-class style.
Bird is bubbly, happy this morning. He got to sit up front, just as he wanted. I have set up my own video camera and sit with him and his mom for a while before the show starts, because his excitement is contagious. People with walkie-talkies and white pressed shirts are connecting cables and testing electronic things all around us. He likes TV and likes being here while it is made. But it is not his first time on TV. I saw him three years ago on satellite dish, or rather on one of the black-market video tapes of satellite transmissions that could be bought on the streets of Bangkok. The military had suppressed TV images of the violence, but the Thai video piracy industry had nevertheless quickly gotten in on the trade in these images, which was moving freely in most other parts of the world. In freewheeling entrepreneurial spirit, the street vendors and pirate video operators managed to proliferate images of the dead and dying through a local black market. At that time, only a few days after the massacre, they did not do it in the usual tourist ghettos of Bangkok where intellectual property rights are relaxed. Instead, the black market appeared right out in the open, on the actual site of the killing in the heart of the old city; and this market was transacted side by side with massive Buddhist funerary rites of gift exchange being held there for the spirits of the unquiet dead.
Bird's body was a part of this trade. It had been spirited over the surface of the globe by the BBC, and then returned and passed around in cassettes for sale by the enterprising Thai traders on the exact spot where he had been gunned down. The fuzzy pirate video showed the BBC reporter standing right here in the lobby of the Royal Hotel, in front of little Bird, who was a bloody mess on the floor. Like most people facing a camera, if he had had a choice he would have much preferred a chance to comb his hair and put on his best shirt. But he had been shot with an M-16, and the reporter was standing over him, narrating, "The military has not even spared young children. This boy couldn't be more than nine or ten." Actually Bird was thirteen at the time, but because he is retarded he has a face that looks younger, even when in pain and shock.