As the yearly Songkran festival in Thailand draws to a close, it’s probably time to pause and reflect, which is easy for me since I’m not there. For the uninitiated Songkran is the world’s biggest water fight, celebrated around this time every year in Thailand, and especially in the north, where it seems to go on for ages. If you’ve ever been to Thailand, then you’ve certainly seen the pictures, if not actually felt the sting of ice water in your face as you ride your motorcycle down the road trying to secure provisions for you and your family in the early morning hours before the madness starts again. The word ‘Songkran’ comes from the Indian astrological calendar and refers literally to the ‘entering’ of the new month of Mesayon, equivalent to Aries in the Western astrological calendar, with the Ram and the whole shebang. Watch your back. This presumably merged with earlier fertility and renewal rites and since time immemorial has been associated with water, usually ladled over the shoulder in a symbolic act of communion, at least in Thailand. There’s more than a little sympathetic magic at work here, considering that this is the hottest driest time of year, so getting caught up in some water rituals of the splashy sort can be a fairly welcome relief, especially if you’re a child. Well, they say that everyone in Thailand is a child, so things naturally tend to get out of hand. Actually they don’t say that, but I do. The kids rule in Thailand, and there’s no better example of that than Songkran.
Anyway somehow somewhere the simple rites of baptism got transformed into a massive weeklong water fight of the most childish sort, city streets choked with flatbeds and pickups armed with 55-gallon water drums and men at the turrets, dishing out punishment to the not-so-casual observers. All things equal height has the advantage of course, so more powerful weapons come into play. Apparently this is what God invented PVC pipe for. Given a hack saw, the glue left over from the average sniff session, and a basic knowledge of hydraulics, the average street urchin can put together in a few minutes a water cannon capable of destroying the reproductive capabilities of a full-grown man at a distance of thirty feet. The truly creative put the ass end of the weapon right down into the central moat of Chiang Mai mere yards away to ensure an endless supply of, in this case, the brown stuff, water that seems to date back to the era when the moat was really used as a moat. Taking cues from the evolutionary lethality of a Komodo dragon’s saliva, this ensures that each simple squirt of the rubberized weapon is simultaneously an instrument of percussive shock and germ warfare. If it doesn’t kill you now, it’ll kill you later. Obviously such shenanigans are bound to engender some controversy, and Songkran is no exception. ‘Farang’ Westerners are divided on the issue and tend to either get the Hell out of Slidell or instigate their own version of the warfare, using battle tactics taken from American football and ‘The Art of War’ by Sun Tzu. Most leave. After all, what may be good clean fun for a day or even two is absurd after three, downright dangerous after four, and borders on psychosis at five. The casualty figures are outrageous, also, particularly in reference to motorcycle deaths. Does it seem surprising that throwing water at passing motorcyclists might be hazardous? Bodies should be stacked like cordwood for the bonfire by right about now. Who needs a tsunami when you’ve got Songkran?
So the majority of us Farangs hole up in our hovels with our Heinekens and watch cable TV with our stolen Filipino signals and our borrowed Thai connections (something blue, anyone?). Anything else is hardly worth the effort. Not all Thais appreciate the Farang presence on the street anyway. That’s not the case at Khaosan road in Bangkok, however, where foreigners have actually spread the madness southward. Khaosan road is the center of Farang activities in Bangkok and a major hub of backpacker travel in SE Asia. Other than that Bangkok is fairly sedate during the holiday. Many if not most people in Bangkok come from elsewhere, after all, so most everyone goes home for the holidays. The bus stations are jam packed and the northern streets are filled with entire families feasting and celebrating late into the night every night. But Khaosan is where many of the Bangkok locals left behind now go, especially the younger set. A few years ago the big controversy was the type of blouses appropriate for girls to wear while manning the water cannons. Keep in mind that most Thais enter the ocean fully clothed, and as you well know wet T-shirts do have a certain currency in the thinly veiled subconscious. Speaking of thin veils, Muslim Thais down south don’t typically celebrate the holiday, something ‘normal’ Thais just can’t comprehend. Whether or not they ever settled the T-shirt controversy, I’m not sure.
Songkran in LA is refreshingly low-key. It almost seems like the sane Thais left the country to the bozos back home. As they say, sal si puedes, ‘leave if you can’. Actually they don’t say that, but Hispanics do, and they’re usually better at subtle nuances of meaning. Thais are more digital, off or on, all or nothing, which may be good for faithful reproduction of a photographic image, but not much else. So they tend to overcompensate, throwing out babies with bath water, throwing out their culture in their rush to assimilate. Admittedly many are only second-generation Thais anxious to become second-generation Americans, speaking the language of Fukien and money, Thai by circumstance and convenience, dialectical materialist by birth. Still they count, on both fingers and toes, though Americanized Thais seem to acknowledge a Chinese-Thai category more than the homies back home. What is it to be Chinese anyway, but a certain look in the eyes? You won’t find any Thais glomming on to Chinatowns like the Vietnamese, though. These Chinese went south. At least in Thai Town the Thai culture is maintained and nourished, in all its wackiness. It even comes full circle when the ‘Thai’ country music stars Jonas and Christie, both full-blood Farangs, show up in LA for the Thai New Year festival. You can’t get any more Thai than that. But a Songkran without water? That’s hard to believe. I’ll give it a year, maybe two, three at the most, then somebody will show up with a bucket of water, just like clockwork, then someone else, then someone else. Before you know it, it’ll be a full scale war zone, mark my word. You heard it here first.
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