Authors: Charles Foran
Kwok Ka-Shing, Bangkok Unleashed must report, did not help his own credibility much—or make this blogger doubt his diagnosis of a man on the crazy medicine—when, asked to find a recent photo of his missing daughter on a hotel laptop, he proceeded to the Facebook page of his other child, only to then require an excruciating thirty seconds to pick out his runaway from among the rows of photos of young Asian women on display. “They all kind of look the same,” he said. Pretty much everyone agreed the remark was either an admission of guilt or a very, very bad joke.
Is this story done? Not even close. According to IW—don’t be angry with me for sharing a few details; this is too dishy!—the police will be placing calls back to Hong Kong, and asking around Klong Toey, before making any arrests. More anon.
Posted by Bangkok Blogger 0 comments
Labels: Bangkok, Excelsior, Royal Thai Police,
Klong Toey, teen prostitution
www.torontotelegraph.com/news/world/thai-slum-where-Xmas-lives
[Video]
0:01 —————————————————————— 4:16
XMAS PARTY IN KLONG TOEY FOR STREET KIDS
CP Video
Published Wednesday, Dec 24, 20—, 22:10 pm (local time)
Last updated Wednesday, Dec 24, 20—, 22:10 pm
0 comments
Text (for hearing impaired):
Life in the poor neighbourhoods of Thailand’s largest city is never easy, especially for homeless children. And Klong Toey, a sprawling slum perched beneath an elevated freeway and adjacent to a canal prone to flooding, emitting raw sewage, and providing drinking water for the kind of feral—and, as it happens, eye-patched and three-legged—dog like this poor creature, may be the toughest of them all … But it is here, at the fabled Miracle Centre, which offers shelter to orphans and street kids, and to youth with AIDS, that I found a heartwarming scene. More than three hundred children of unknown parentage and long-shot prospects celebrated their “collective birthday” this evening, and it was quite a party … Father John Corrigan, the American priest who oversees the centre, explains the event: “The thing of it is, most of these children were abandoned to be raised hardscrabble and wild in a very harsh environment. They can’t even be sure of their full names, or their ages, and so it was decided to celebrate how we all are so born, really, into one huge family, with a party to be held—why not?—on Christmas Eve, which isn’t, truth be told, such a big deal for Buddhist folk.”
And what do those street kids think of eating cake and singing songs to their own uncertainty? Here’s Somchai, who believes she is thirteen, and whose limited English in no way limits her cheer: “I like party, and being with all my friend. Everyone my sister and brother.” Or this teenager who keeps Somchai close company, and earlier draped a string of white beads, the kind normally found adorning temple Buddhas, around her friend’s neck. Though she seems disoriented and declines to give her name, this striking Thai teen speaks perfect English: “It’s my birthday, almost. I miss having a mom and dad.” When asked if she recalls her parents, she answers that her mother is Filipino and her father was born in a temple in China. She also says that, although she doesn’t know how she ended up at the Miracle Centre, she is happy to be with “such nice people.” Out of such optimism, and love of life and friendship, grows something of beauty, even in Klong Toey …
END
News > Local News
BANGKOK POLICE SEARCH FOR MISSING HK TEEN
Published: 25/12/20 at 00:15
Online news: Breaking story, 24 minutes ago
Royal Thai Police spokeswoman Chuleekorn Dhanarajata released a statement saying that Hong Kong resident Kwok Xixi has been missing from her hotel since mid-afternoon on December 24. Ms. Kwok, who answers to “SeeSee” or Sarah and holds a Canadian passport, is two days short of her 16th birthday. She was spotted in the district of Klong Toey at approximately 8 p.m. last evening, and captured on camera by a Canadian journalist covering a party for street children.
Speaking to reporters, Constable Dhanarajata added that, beyond the statement, she wished to affirm the police’s satisfaction with the status of the missing girl’s father, Kwok Ka-Shing, despite an encounter, reported in the Post Online, at Suvarnabhumi Airport earlier this week. “Having investigated, the police are now convinced that Mr. Kwok and his daughter are in Thailand for a simple holiday, and to escape the difficult situation with the latest SARS crisis in Hong Kong,” the constable said. Speaking on behalf of both parents, she added that anyone who finds the child should be aware that, due to an existing medical condition, she may not be fully cognizant of her surroundings, or of recent events. “She is a good girl, and her family wishes only for her safe return.”
Your comments:
Viewfromkhaosan
25/12/20— at 00:58
Didn’t I say it before—another girl lost in B-Kok, and raw meat for the carrion birds we call a tourism industry. Kwok Ka-Shing, hang your head in shame! 2 people liked / 20 people disliked this comment
redmeatboy
25/12/20— at 00:59
Yummy! And don’t forget—we carrion birds can smell fresh meat from a slum away
84 people liked / 26 people disliked this comment
At long last, the sky is hosanna blue and not a cloud up there. The air feels washed, the overlay of a hill country morning—eucalyptus, magnolia, lemongrass, and rose petal—besting the stinks that lurk beneath, but usually don’t stay down. Include sewage and exhaust fumes, fried garlic and nam pla on any list. Plus an all-pervasive rot, some of it actual jungle but most manmade, and not from dying. Today, though, promises magnolia and rose petal, clean air and clear sky.
Or so the day will unfold at the shelter, vows John B, standing at the table chopping peppers, the blade a slaughterhouse executioner. So help him Mother Ginger. At her own insistence, after all, is the Safe Shelter compound in On Klang village, Mae On District, Chiang Mai Province, a sanctuary designed to keep outsiders out and insiders in plain sight. The three-metre fence is chain-link, not brick, ensuring maximum protection for those within its square hectare but minimum privacy—also by design. The same goes for the wall-less kitchen where he presently stands, visible to anyone passing on the street, and the equally open classrooms to one side and dining hall to the other. Only the twin dormitories, running
off the main building, are permitted walls and windows, though doors have no locks, including his own. Never again, the old woman vowed when outlining her plans for the new facility seven years ago, and mysteriously welcoming reprobate John Barlow onto an otherwise Sheila staff, would terrible things be done to children behind brick walls or locked doors. John B agreed then and still agrees now, and certainly the girls themselves, close to terror-free for the first time in their young lives, thrill to the openness, the breezes blowing through and the rains slanting in, waves of birdsong and flotillas of butterflies, lizards hanging off the walls at night and the occasional snake at sunrise. Mother Ginger died twenty months ago. Could her original vigilance, along with his own fervour since replacing her as boss, actually keep out those primal stinks, the ones perpetually lurking below? He’d be a right fool if he believed that possible.
He thinks of it this way: with her spirit yet guiding him, and the name on the sign next to the buzzer the moral bottom line, John B guarantees the well-being of any girl who shows up at Safe Shelter, still more widely known as Mother Ginger. (Their policy? If a child asks to be admitted, she needs to be, at once.) There have been square-offs, loads of them, curses and threats and trucks with tinted glass staked out in front, knives brandished in the air, and pistols, hidden beneath shirts, flashed in warning. Once an actual shot was fired at his head by a B-kok hoodlum under the impression he owned one fourteen-year-old. He can handle all that, and does, thank you very much, even the bullet whizzing past. But beyond the shelter gate—the squalid district surrounding the village, the lawless province encasing the district—he can guarantee little and promise less. Inside, he is anvil-skulled, pigeon-chested John B, a cliché of the British underclass at its most feral. Don’t fuck with him, or his charges. Outside, he is nothing and nobody, and that, alas, is that.
Little new in any of these reflections, he grants, moody thoughts triggered by the supplicant at the buzzer late last night, and his failure to fall back asleep once the girl had been settled into a spare bed. Nonetheless, he is sharing them with the kitchen staff while he chops. Among those purported to be listening are his wife, Hom, formerly known as Springroll, though you try calling her by her Patpong
nom de guerre
, and Mrs. Chum, the Cambodian kitchen chief, whose English still isn’t always up to the task of either his accent or, as she—and others, true—like to complain, his sprays of argot, ripe as a pepper-bloody chopper. “If you’d only listen, Mrs. Chum!” he occasionally chides her, well aware of how many of the crew, Hom most prominently, have trouble with his speech, and don’t always attend to his every word. Of which there are plenty, words spoken by John B, some cohering into stories, others gathering into sermons, a few spiralling off into rants. The man is a storyteller and sermonizer equally. Why not, if you’ve a tale that isn’t just your own sad excuse for a life lived in squalor, but rather one for all, of all, us fallen creatures.
Over by the older girls’ dormitory, Sameth Chum is waiting on the new arrival, sketchpad, as ever, in hand. Everyone is waiting for her to emerge and explain her dramatic appearance at four in the morning. The cab driver from Chiang Mai, who must have thought long about taking a fare into the hills east of the city at that hour, idling until his passenger roused the night watchman, had said nothing. John B has figured out who she is now, and although he certainly remembers her lawyer mother from some years back—exactly the kind of confident, attractive Western woman who didn’t bother pretending around scum like him, and whom he, in turn, had once upon a time longed to smack, or even violate, out of low-self-esteem rage—he can’t claim distinct memories of the daughter who tagged along one trip. But
Hom remembers her, as does Mrs. Chum. As for the cook’s son, Sameth/Sam, he apparently never forgot the girl. Now seventeen, and a potential cat in the henhouse, Sam is in fact gentle and thoughtful, a friend and part-time art teacher of those same hens. According to his mother, the stoic Khmer has been quietly pining for the Hong Kong refugee, awaiting her return all the while, and has done so with the improbable hope of the young, and their naive faith in happy endings. And now, improbably, naively, here she is! Her passport, which she surrendered on arrival, reveals that Xixi Sarah Kwok, born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, turns sixteen tomorrow. That fact doesn’t help clarify anything.
But then Xixi Sarah Kwok herself is curled bony knees to chin in a chair, sleep still shading her face, sipping tea and smiling. Fighting-a-blush Sam lurks nearby, watching but not yet sketching her, Mrs. Chum scrambles her eggs with rice for breakfast, and Hom, who only bothers to inform him later in the afternoon about the online
Bangkok Post
article, which solves a few mysteries without really explaining anything, fusses over the teen. Prettiness aside, is Xixi Kwok so special, or is her appearance on the very day that Christ likewise made his big splash being taken by these good ladies as augury? Women, he thinks—there is no talking to them about their babies, even those near grown-up, with their own independent impulses, equal parts light and dark, overlay and undergrowth, already formed.
Speaking of which, he is hard at it, the boilerplate sermon he feels obliged, and quite enjoys, delivering straight away, a little for its shock value, a lot more to allay natural worries about why
his
variety of cat, closer to a full-grown Bengal tiger, has been let loose among the shelter hens. As far as he can tell, nothing has proven too adult, or too threatening, for her tender ears. An interesting one, he decides, admiring her irrepressible dark eyes, and not your usual
princess in the tower, her hair only lately let down. Or rather, given the evidence that she has very recently, and none too expertly, cut off most of her locks, she is the princess turned female monk, abandoning Daddy’s prison tower for the monastery.
“A predator I was, make no mistake,” John B says, forearm muscles slithering with each imprint of blade on wood, “roaming the alleys of Patpong seeking low-cost snatch. Girls were so starved—for food, literally, or cash for
yaba
—that by midnight, with no other johns in sight, they’d do me for the price of a meal or a hit. I knew it, and used it, and being forever high on skag, glorious raw opium harvested from these very hills, fancied myself a ladies’ man, can you believe it, rather than a lower-than-low-life
farang
, a stinking, diseased junkie, so lost to my true self I wouldn’t have recognized skin-headed, tattooed John Barlow in a photograph. It was only after I fell further, sank deeper, into my self-induced misery, my woeful, delusional ego, that I, me, the exploiter, the right prick, got taken in by the very ladies I’d been using and abusing. Most notably that one there,” he adds, gesturing towards Hom, “one of a dozen Khmer girls, from the same village up near the Laotian border, sharing a single room in the metropolis. They’d been the fairly lucky ones too, sold by their parents to B-kok pimps with the expectation of them firing their wages home for fridges and microwaves for the relations. That’s what set off the selling of tribe females, I shit you not—electrification in the remote areas, and the hunger for appliances! Imagine what new levels of slavery everyone wanting an Xbox or iPhone must be triggering. And working the streets in Patpong at sixteen was better than being chained together in a sweatshop or, the honest-to-God nightmare, imprisoned in a makeshift cathouse on some construction site, which is the fate of too many Burmese girls, who are docile and can’t speak the language. Springroll, as I knew her then—sorry, pet—Springroll, and Lychee, and Cat, and
all these other street birds, although
they
were the victims and
I
the victimizer, for no good reason except that they
are
good souls, good folk, and are
not
docile, not on your life, they took me in, cooked me meals, and helped me kick. Me, sharing a room with a dozen juicy girls, some of them with their own bad
yaba
habits and two, at least, HIV positive. I slept with a few, I did, couldn’t help it—you Thai ladies are such bits of fluff—but that wasn’t the—”