Fighter boys, the temple of horrors, and the fighting monk

Tate and I are chronologically incompatible. I’ve never known two other human beings with quite the knack for just missing one another that we’ve demonstrated in the five months that we have, well, not known one another, but known of one another and wanted to complete the equation. We missed each other in Colorado in October (oh, and for the three decades both of us have lived there previously, within in blocks of one another at times, but in different years). We missed each other in southern Thailand in January. I arrived in Chiang Mai just as he was preparing to leave, and couldn’t even call him at a time he could pick up his phone. I burned through pocket change trying to reach him from pay phones all over the city and never got more than the call back service, for which I had no return number to provide.

So when he invited me up to a small town near the border to spend a few days at a muay thai training camp and meet at last, I knew the likeliest result was that I’d get waylaid by any number of inconveniences. I was sure to get accidentally shipped on to Laos, delayed by days or weeks, or otherwise misplaced or detained in ways only imaginable by the travel gods of Southeast Asia. But I said yes, and only had to move my arrival time back twice and for a grand total of four hours. And Tate was there, in the flesh, motorbike at the ready, when I arrived at the bus station in Chiang Kham.


Tate’s a freelance writer, photographer, and videographer. A fighter, an adventurer, and, I’m fairly certain, based on the stories he tells—and I mean this with no offense—a trouble-seeker. He’s got nearly enough almost died, chased a criminal, chased by a mob, lived in a slum, fought the tiger, wrestled the crocodile, conquered Rome stories to keep a story addict like me entertained for days. Which is good, since he’d volunteered to do just that. Another freelance writer I’d spoken to about this trip and travel writing referred me to Tate because he’s spent so much time in Southeast Asia and sold stories about it. He's currently working on a film about muay thai—well, OK, it's about a lot more than that, but that's all I'll say (he's pictured here showing the boys some of the video he's shot of them).

We could have just had a cup of coffee. Instead, he took me in for a weekend, gave me his bed and slept on the floor of a cement room in a boxing gym.

Every morning, I awoke to the sound of the boys, aged about 10 to 16, who live there training as fighters getting up for their morning run. At 6am, the trainer starts knocking on their doors, and he knocks until they grunt in response. The noise escalates from there, then it quiets down for the half hour they’re out running through the rice fields. It hits record decibels when they return and start throwing punches and kicking one another and the punching bags hanging from two-by-fours. They train for a couple hours, go to school, and come back and train again in the afternoon.

They start training as young as 8, and fight almost as soon as they start training. Their bodies develop to make them leaner, stronger, more resilient fighters. Tate wrapped his knuckles on a shin of one of the 16-year-olds, and it sounded like knocking on wood.

The boys speak almost no English, and neither does anyone else who lives at the gym, with the possible exception of the gym owner’s daughter. So Zak came to join us, to translate for Tate so he could finish his interviews with the gym owner, his wife, and the boys. He met Tate when they were living in the same building in Bangkok years ago, living lives, they say, of quiet misery punctuated by the rants of a Noam Chomsky-esque character living in the building with them and offering spare work to Tate.

Zak had a writing assignment, so Tate and I went adventuring, and wandered over to see a temple near the gym. The temple grounds are close enough that I could see the flicker of monks in their orange robes walking through the trees from the end of the gym’s driveway. The temple grounds look like an oddly assembled statue garden with the statues of Buddha, Ganesha, a random military figure, and monks all facing different directions so you're left strolling a labyrinthine path through the grass just to try to see them from the front.

The temple itself looks fairly normal, and though I hadn’t seen the webs of string in any temple, I’ve heard they’re typical. But statues of humans in grotesque agony bracket the temple. Full-body statues of a man and a woman covered in lesions with leeches all over their bodies, held on leashed by towering demons, stand in the temple’s courtyard. Along either side of the outside of the temple there’s a row of torsos, yellow and dripping orange blood, their lolling tongues stretching to their waists, some skewered by weapons or holding a bottle, it’s mouth toward their lips, some with swollen bellies splitting open, and all over, covered in leeches.

There’s plenty I don’t know or understand about Buddhism, and what on earth these statues are doing there is certainly on that list.

My image of Buddhism grew again the following morning, when we went to see the fighting monk. We were out of bed by 3am, and loaded into the back of the gym owner’s pickup truck at 3:30am, covered in blankets and still half-frozen, heading to pay our respects at his temple, then follow him on his rounds through Mae Sai. Of course, we didn’t know that’s what we were headed to do. We’d been told only that we going to see the fighting monk with a few of the boys, the gym owner and his wife.

We paid a chilly visit to his hilltop temple, then headed into town. The fighting monk was horseback in the parking lot in front of one of the main city government buildings, and the line that stretched away from him was so long I confused it briefly for a parade route. People were lined up to bring food, water, juice, and money to drop into his bowl. It barely touched the bottom of his bowl before he scooped it out and passed it on to a man holding a large sack next to him. The sacks piled up, and money piled up.

After over an hour and a half there, he headed out into the street and took donations along the way to a market across town, turned around and headed back. There was a pause, in which he and the gym owner and his wife and their entourage apparently had cake with some of the city bureaucrats, while we walked through the city market, had coffee, napped in the shade, and ate through an entire watermelon. And then he reappeared in a smaller, neighboring village, and presented them with a gold platter of money, wrapped in clear plastic and tied with gold ribbon, which is pretty much the way all the offerings to monks are prepared. It must have been just a small portion of what he’d collected that day. Individual villagers also received amulets and bracelets. Then the monk went to hand out a little money to each villager.

“How much will you get?” He asked (Zak translated). “It doesn’t matter. Because you will be happy with whatever you get.”

He distributed a 20 bhat bill with a red marking on it meant to be interpreted as whatever numbers you think you see there, a good luck totem for prosperity, to each of them, and even to us, the foreigners watching from the back row.

Because the gym owner is affiliated with the fighting monk, the back of the pickup was piled with some of what was collected in the way of food offerings. Cookies, crackers, ramen noodles, cand, and a few bags of uncooked rice separated and set off to the side. We were invited to take whatever we wanted on the drive back, and two of the boys hopped in the back immediately to dive into it. We were all crushed together, half buried under these bags of junk food. Then we repositioned, moving the food inside, except the rice and some bags of corn cobs, plus two bags carrying live chickens, which the boys had brought with them for their afternoon at the monk’s temple, and the four boys in the back of the truck. For a while, it was slightly less crushing than all the food.

As the sun set and it started to cool down, we dug out the blankets we’d wrapped in that morning, and the boys slid from their various perches around the back of the truck deeper into the bed. They became like origami children, folding on top of themselves and one another so that all those legs and arms and heads and even the bagged-up chickens disappeared under the blankets. Only Dia stayed awake through the whole drive.

And we, we watched the stars come out, the fires on hillsides—it’s coming into the height of the dry season and the bamboo has gone brown and shed its leaves, which looks like a covering of straw across dark, dry soil, and burns like it too. Then we unfolded, far more stiffly and slowly, when we arrived back at the gym. Had a quick dinner—some of the donated ramen and canned fish, plus eggs. (This weekend was also a gastronomical adventure. I was served stews with chicken feet, red ant eggs, and guts—all on separate occasions, of course.) Then stretched ourselves out flat, joyously, and slept.