Reality intrudes
For most of the past month Hua Hin residents, Thai and farang, have been in mourning. Once again, we have been reminded that the truism that death is part of life is of no help whatsoever. Death is evil, the ultimate pain that we who are left behind must suffer over and over again and, most cruelly perhaps, more frequently as we age and approach our own end.
All funerals are nasty, but I find the Thai version even worse than the ones we must endure in the West. For one thing, like most Thai Buddhist ceremonies, they go on far too long, with endless chants meaningless to those of us who understand little Thai and less Pali, and rituals whose significance no one seems to understand nor care to discover. Inevitably in such a circumstance, the mind wanders and, because of the environment, thinks morbid thoughts that of course do nothing to soothe the pain of the great loss that necessitated the funeral in the first place.
This was the third sudden death of someone in my Hua Hin circle in about two years. A fellow survivor, a longtime Hua Hin resident, remarked that he was getting tired of burying people. It struck me that these incidents, when they occur within the expat community, have their own special twist, like the thrust of a dagger designed to eviscerate.
Expatriates, especially in a tropical, languid quasi-paradise like Hua Hin, live by choice in a form of unreality. Even the above-mentioned Thai funeral is unreal if judged against how such things are conducted “back home”: folks coming around with refreshments to ease the late-November heat, the droning Buddhist chants all but drowned out by the din of a construction crew elsewhere in the temple, kids, dogs and cats wandering in and out, a bird dropping a load of shit a couple of metres from where we sit, causing a ripple of laughter and shuffle of chairs away from the danger zone; a haphazard collection of mourners, farangs from all over the world mingled willy-nilly with Thais – business people, tourists, family of the deceased, family of the survivors, bargirls tastefully done up in nice hairdos and their best black minidresses.
We all know that living in a place like Hua Hin is an exercise in unreality; a dream come true for many of us who grew up in places where we would huddle indoors sheltered from the miserable, cold rain, fog or frost outdoors, perhaps looking at magazine ads for faraway tourist destinations of constant sunshine, pristine palm-studded beaches, and beautiful women, then in later years using our government-subsidized education to earn enough money to go to such places, and eventually finding a way not to go home to the rain, fog and frost.
Once here, we found that paradise has its downsides: language woes, cultural barriers, racism, and – in Thailand at least – a schizophrenic government that wants to extract as much money from “wealthy” foreigners as possible but wants to give as little as possible in return, that sets up barriers against us living and working here with the same hand that is burying itself in our pockets. We had no rights, even when we married Thai women and gave them children, or cared for the ones they already had, plus their extended families; our contributions to the economy, to the culture, to anything Thai were exploited, but we ourselves were made to understand we would always be, in the main, unwelcome outsiders.
Yet we endured such things because the alternative – going “home” – was unacceptable. “Home” was too cold – too real.
But then that ultimate reality hit us once again, snatching away someone who had become part of us, tearing him from our collective being, like the unanesthetized amputation of a limb. And the sunshine seemed dimmer, the beaches less pristine, the palms and azure sea and golden-skinned women diminished in their exotic beauty.
And the familiar feelings came pouring back, the self-delusion we all share that death is “preventable”, the sense that this particular life was cut far too short, that it was a horrible waste – and that terrible question (much more intense in this case than, say, in that of a feared but expected death from disease): Why?
But there are other realities too, and ultimately these are the ones we fall back on when our living fantasies are suddenly rendered inadequate. As the deceased was placed in the crematorium and the smoke spiralled skyward, my five-year-old pointed to it and asked where he was going. “Up,” I said. “Why?” she asked. “There is a big, shiny Vespa waiting up there for him,” I said.
“Oh,” she said simply, gazing up at the white smoke dissipating into the blue sky.