Tui is a millennial from Chang Rai, the ancestral centre of the ancient Lanna Kingdom.
I am in northern Thailand, heading for the Golden Triangle, where I will overlook Myanmar and Laos once I reach the course of the Mekong river.
Tui picked us up from our hotel in Chang Mai at 6.30am, right on time. A polite, bespectacled nerd, at the crack of dawn he began polemising the traffic, building speculation and ‘colonisation’ of Chang Mai. Adorably fussy and intolerant, he arouses my tenderness when he recounts how the farang residents, white westerners, have made dramatically expensive the places where he would sip tea with his university mates. ‘Luckily the farang can only buy condos,’ he says, ‘Thai law does not allow them to buy land, otherwise it would be The End. The only time this can happen is when they pay handsomely some specific law firms, which (magically) manage to speed up the process of granting Thai citizenship, regardless the foreign buyers have paid taxes in our country for the supposedly mandatory duration of fifteen years’.
The story I will be listening to for eight hours today will have a bitter sweet taste. It will be the tale of a boy who grew up in a land shrouded in myth, whose pride has survived the invasion of the Burmese and incorporation into the Kingdom of Siam, and which today is preparing to soften the impact of globalisation. In ancient Lanna everything is peculiar, the language, the food, the spirituality enshrined in the myriads of temples in the mountains and hills, the tribal villages that still seem to resist undisturbed. For coffee reasons, I have only delved into the question of the Akha tribe, which arrived from Tibet on the banks of the Huai Masang about 2000 years ago and today consists of about 55,000 inhabitants who live off the agriculture of maize, rice, fruit and vegetables, and above all, tea and coffee, which they have begun to cultivate as a substitute for opium. It was the year 1958 when the Thai state, at least officially, banned its cultivation except for medicinal purposes.
Gli occhi e le parole di Tui sono il filtro con cui vedo scorrere le verdi risaie di fronte a me, “qui vengo a passeggiare tutti i fine settimana con i miei amici di infanzia, prima che si inizi a raccogliere il riso a dicembre”. “Chissà se ora riusciremo più a farlo, visto che dalla pandemia in poi stanno iniziando a costruire strade ed infrastrutture tra Chang Mai e Chang Rai. La cosa buona è che finalmente anche noi lanna potremo facilitare la nostra vita quotidiana come a Bangkok, dove c’è lo spettacolare skytrain, la metro, i taxi..versiamo le stesse tasse! Ma non abbiamo mai avuto tutti quei servizi. Chissà che ne sarà però..del mio villaggio. Mia nonna ha paura che presto smetteremo di vedere assieme i tramonti sulla nostra valle sacra. Mi ha cresciuto così, ingozzandomi di sticky rice avvolto nei segmenti di bamboo e nelle le foglie di banani, accompagnato da ettolitri di tè. Credetemi, lo sticky rice come a Chang Rai non si mangia da nessun’altra parte, mia mamma era così contenta quando ospitai qui il mio compagno di studi in Cina, un amico di Singapore. Non riusciva a smettere di chiedere ancora altro riso! Lo mangiavamo tutti assieme a colazione, pranzo, cena. Il pad thai è un piatto per turisti, una trovata mediatica”.
Tui’s eyes and words are the filter through which I see the green rice fields in front of me, ‘I come here to walk every weekend with my childhood friends, before the rice harvest starts in December. ‘ I wonder if we will be able to do that now, as they are starting to build roads and infrastructure between Chang Mai and Chang Rai from the pandemic onwards. The good thing is that we Lanna will finally be able to facilitate our daily lives like in Bangkok, where there is the spectacular skytrain, the metro, taxis…we pay the same taxes! But we never had all those services. Who knows what will happen though..to my village.
My grandmother is afraid that soon we will stop seeing sunsets together over our sacred valley. That’s how she raised me, by feeding me with sticky rice wrapped in bamboo segments and banana leaves, accompanied by hectolitres of tea. Believe me, there is no sticky like the one you can eat in Chang Rai, my mum was so happy when I hosted here my study partner from China, a friend from Singapore. He just couldn’t stop asking for more rice! We all had it together for breakfast, lunch, dinner. Pad Thai is a mere tourist dish, a marketing catch’.
Tui tells us how the Chang Rai area has always been connected to the over looming colossal Chinese territory. After the Chinese Civil War, many Kuomintang nationalists barricaded themselves in these mountains, importing their fighting weapons, settling with their families, spreading Chinese culture and initially engaging in opium cultivation. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chang Kai-Shek’s Chinese made their arsenal available to help the Thais put down communist insurgencies in the country’s border areas. As a result of this contribution, many of them benefited from easier procedures for obtaining the coveted Thai citizenship.
In 2024, Chinese power looms again. Tui tells us that there will soon be a railway connecting China-Laos-Thai-Malaysia-Singapore, the inhabitants will be able to reach the major Chinese cities in just five hours, today they can only do so by a long car journey. He himself studied linguistics through an exchange programme in China, I can’t tell if he feels idiosyncrasy or admiration for the Chinese. ‘Those people are crazy, studying in their libraries is impossible, they are always full and sometimes they tear pages out of books out of competition anxiety’ ’If you go to a Thai study room you will laugh, they are almost always empty!’
We arrive at Wat Rong Khun temple, glittering in the sun. Tui argues, ‘however extravagant, it is still a place of worship’. Thai architect Kositpipat, tiny ego, declared to the Times that this project, dated 1997, would give it immortal life and that every human being should witness his masterpiece. Called the ‘White Temple’ by us laymen, the Buddhist place of worship has an unusual colour, it seems the architect aimed to make it the ‘emblem of Buddhist enlightenment’ by setting glass mosaics that would make ‘the wisdom of the Buddha shine throughout the universe’. A loudspeaker continues to admonish us to ‘keep moving’ without forming columns, a real triumph of hieraticism. Tui is annoyed, saying that later he will take us to visit a ‘truly Buddhist’ temple where we can talk quietly about Buddha. He invites us to consider the exuberance of the temple: Hello Kitty and Spiderman are painted on the back wall, next to a depiction of the Twin Towers of New York. It was this one that caught my attention. In the Bankgok and Chang Mai temples I had witnessed the depiction of historical and religious scenes from Buddha’s life, here I came across the faces of George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden, painted in the eyes of a demon. That is a declared extravagant fresco and, I must say, an unforgettable attempt to portray the eternal clash between good and evil.
I take off my shoes, I’ve got used to it by now, I’m starting to forget to be squeamish. I enter the ‘truly spiritual’ temple where Tui accompanies us. Here we can talk. I ask my usual banal question: ‘Why is Buddha always represented with his legs crossed?’ ‘It is the position before enlightenment, Claudia. It seems that it was originally the Romans who first depicted him in the Indies, Siddhartha Gautama lived in North India in the 6th century BC.’ ‘The Romans in India? At that time?’ I mumble. ‘Actually, in the domestic environment Buddha is not always represented in the same way. We associate the days of the week with a different image of the Buddha and a colour, thus we keep a representative statuette of him in our homes.’ I was born on a Sunday, so I deserve the statue in the pose of contemplation of suffering and I am associated with the colour red. When we arrived in Bangkok the whole city was decorated in blue for Mother’s Day: it was the birthday of the Thai Queen Mother, born on a Friday, who knows what year? The counting of the Buddhist era starts in Thailand from the death of Buddha, it is 543 years ahead of the Gregorian calendar, so the year 2024 AD corresponds to the year 2567.
Finally, I ask ‘but what is this enlightenment?’ ‘Enlightenment is the release from chains and obstacles. It is the awakening of the intellect, the ‘switching off’ (Nirvana) of negative emotions and disturbing desires and the attainment of truth, of transcendental reality, the only one possible. Only if we free ourselves from the projections of our mind and let others be and let things happen, accepting them with love, can we attain enlightenment’. Let it be
I wonder if even the buddhas lying on the bed of the Mekong, ‘the Mother of all waters’, have lost hope over this fascinating philosophical thinking. Every time the authorities dredge the river, they seem to find a reckless number of ancient statues, thrown here in the past for ritual purposes. The Mekong originates in Tibet, flows through the Chinese province of Yunnan, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, before entering Cambodia and from there into Vietnam, where it flows into the South China Sea, forming an immense delta. Known today as the water highway of smuggling, the Mekong simultaneously marks three borders, here on the Golden Triangle, where we board a traditional long tail to approach Laos. ‘Now we will skirt the Laotian city of Tonpheung, already called the second Macau. There are only casinos, it is a sort of Chinese empire where building speculation is done in yuan, the kip hardly circulates. The Laotian socialist experiment led to this, to the invasion of Chinese capital. Here 80% of the population is Chinese, the jurisdiction is Chinese! The Chinese mafia has a very solid base, this is the hub from which an unprecedented amount of cyber attacks starts from, not to mention the issue of human trafficking. I don’t want to think about what happens in Tonpheung at night, I’ve only been there once, but it was daytime. You should know that the Golden Triangle is also the place where the largest production of illegal opium is going on, so that the Burmese rebels can finance their weapons to fight the regime. You will see what Tonpheung will be in 10 years!’. As I let these warnings numb me, I look at the Mekong water, it is terribly muddy, murky, it is simply brown! What could happen to me if I set foot in it? Apparently, it is also infested with crocodiles, as well as Buddhas. ‘ Actually guys, the Chinese hate their rulers, they are just used to the idea of having to accept it. They know the rice on their tables is chemical, they know their vegetables are fake, that’s why they import all the agri-food from Thailand. Everything is fake in China!’ Overwhelmed by this guy’s rants, I don’t know how to react – is he right, is he a visionary, or is he hallucinating? He is too nice for me to attribute the last option to him. I wonder what he thinks of us farangs here on the boat, two Italians and four Americans, the latter of whom, just earlier at lunch, didn’t even know ‘what’ Naples was.
The Opium Museum is where Tui is keen to explain the Americans that CIA financed much of the Vietnam War and the Kuomintang through the opium trade in the Golden Triangle. The tour explains the history of this ‘sacred’ plant from the earliest Sumerian to Homeric sources, and provides an overview of the major global production areas. Since 2008, the opium queen has been Afghanistan, which has overtaken Myanmar in production. In Asia, opium cultivation spread mainly from the XVIII century onwards, later falling largely under the monopoly of the East India Company after the XIX century Opium Wars. It seems that also Tui’s great-grandmother consumed opium to soothe menstrual pains and fall asleep placidly at night. Before returning to Chang Mai, Tui takes us for coffee at Doi Chang’s as he thinks ‘us westerners like coffee’. Doi Chang is a chain of coffee shops that has much to tell us about the fight against opium cultivation. A brochure inside tells: ‘The village of Doi Chang received support and kindness from H.M. King Bhumibhol Adulyadej Rama IX to improve the livelihoods of people and to reduce illegal drug cultivation in the area. In 1969 (2512 B.E.), hill tribe farmers were motivated to grow winter plants instead of opium.”
It’s hot and humid in Chang Mai, 10 p.m. I hope to find a bar where we can try the famous khao soi before leaving the Lanna Kingdom, tomorrow we will head south to the islands of the Gulf of Siam. Tui recommends a couple of bars to try, but they all close by 10pm, that’s how it is in Thailand. He asks which islands we are heading to. When I mention Ko Phangan he gasps, ‘Are you going to those beach parties?’ I say no, I don’t like the crowds. ‘Have you ever been there?’ I ask. ‘My family never let me go to the full moon party on Koh Phangan, stuff for dissolute farangs.’ He’s 37 and always replies like this, with a certain innocence. I think I will keep a good memory no matter what, after all he is one of the voices of his land.
Kaa (thanks) Tui, take care.
