"One week, I could visit him only once. Pai asked me if I had changed my mind about him. He said he is a prisoner already but I’m still young and still have a chance to have a future better than this."
“When you can't have what you want, the best you can do is not forget.”
Ashes of Time (1994)
This sentence floats in my mind again as I sit transcribing an interview with a young woman from Khon Kaen University’s Faculty of Law. She is the love of the activist Jatuphat ‘Pai’ Boonpattararaksa.
Pai Daodin is the activist presently imprisoned as he awaits trial under charges of violating Article 112 — Thailand’s lèse-majesté — for sharing a BBC article. He was the first person charged with the crime under the reign of King Vajiralongkorn. Despite a brief few days on bail, he was reimprisoned in December 2016 with all subsequent requests for bail denied.
The line is from the Wong Kar Wai film, ‘Ashes of Time’ (1994), itself based on the immortal ‘Condor Trilogy’ written by the Chinese author Jin Yong. Through the perspective of common warriors, the movie examines the complexities of the human heart, love, disappointment, melancholy and memories that do not leave us — yet, and this is the important thing, it is a movie about ordinary people.
I’m not sure how to explain to her the film’s connections to Pai. I suppose for one, like the film’s protagonists, Pai is fighting for justice. Another is that he is a ‘criminal’ of our generation. Upon reflecting further, another parallel is that — beneath the smile that we see so often [in newspapers], beneath his significance in Thai society, and beneath the social stigma that surrounds him — Pai too possesses a humanity no greater and no lesser than anyone else’s.
Pai’s girlfriend cannot reveal her name because her parents are public servants. They asked her not to mess with politics after her brother and six other students from the activist group Daodin were arrested for protesting the 2014 coup.
I have now spoken with her many times. If I remember correctly, I first met her when I travelled to Khon Kaen after the August 2016 referendum to catch a scoop for which Pai was an information source.
That day, Pai took me to a coffee shop before excusing himself to find his girlfriend. A little while later, he returned with a young lady. Without a doubt, she was beautiful and cute, with a sweet smile and mannerisms no different from any other university youth.
The important thing was that she was not an activist. I was looking at two people able to speak together, despite an age difference of some five years. They called each other ‘darling’.
That day, Pai and his love ordered a dessert that I learnt afterwards is called ‘honey toast’. For drinks, they ordered cocoa and green tea smoothies. I sat interviewing Pai while she sat beside listening quietly. During that first meeting, we almost didn’t speak at all.
But as things turned out, we were to meet again after the courts accepted a case against Pai for sharing the BBC article. Pai was imprisoned in custody and the prosecutors opposed granting bail. This time, Pai would not be joining our conversation.
Each time I travelled to Khon Kaen to report on Pai’s case, I always saw her helping Pai’s mother and father in the work of coordinating Pai’s visitors. Though she was no longer able to visit Pai regularly when semester at Khon Kaen University began, she went to see him whenever she had the opportunity. Seeing Pai for at least five or ten minutes a day is good enough, she said.
She tells me she knew Pai from before university. Pai was a friend of her brother and she had visited the Daodin headquarters many times.
“I don’t know how we developed feelings for each other. At first it wasn’t much. I was still a child. All I felt was that I was happy when talking to him, so I talked with him more. I didn’t tell anybody about our relationship. I fancied him because he was a cute guy. He could act as everything for me: a friend, a brother, a source of advice. He could be it all. But when others saw Pai, they saw an activist. Each day, they spoke to him only about politics, about the village’s problems. But in reality, he’s also a normal teenager. He is a warm person who likes collecting details. He knows what problems I have, what I like, what I don’t like.”
She explains that the Pai many people know is an activist, a fighter for justice, someone who likes talking, and who likes discussing village injustices with friends and anybody who gets to know him. But with her, Pai rarely spoke about these things, and only when she asked. She thinks that Pai understood she wasn’t an activist. He perhaps wanted her to understand the issues on her own terms, rather than by force or pressure.
“I’m not an activist, I’m an average young adult. I got to know him because it was fun. We chatted together. I met his friends. But I also absorbed [information] when seeing them at work, listening to them talk until I began to understood what Pai was working for. Sometimes I even sat alone and questioned why we were studying the law, when studying the law is one thing but dealing with it in real life is completely another story.”
I ask her how Pai was on 22 December 2016, the day he found out there was an appeal to revoke his bail. She says Pai didn’t show his worry. That day, he only told her that he would have to report himself to the courts. He said she didn’t have to come with him because no matter what happened, he would return to her. They made a promise that they would go travelling together in the new year after court procedures finished.
But now it is Valentine’s Day and the two have not yet had the chance to go travelling together.
“Pai doesn’t often speak about his private life. He usually keeps it to himself because he believes he can handle the strain and his feelings himself. He never really spoke about these things to me. But I could tell he was more stressed each time he had to go to court. Some nights he sleep-talked like some would come to hurt him. Sometimes he muses that he just has a nightmare”
She later heard from a friend that on the morning Pai went to court and had his bail revoked, they went together to a coffee shop because he wanted to take in the atmosphere. She says it was as if Pai knew there was a chance he would be in jail for a very long time.
Still, he never spoke about this possibility to her. Perhaps he didn’t really believe it yet and still had faith in the justice system. In the end, Pai’s right to bail was withdrawn.
“I’m under strain too. Normally on any given day if Pai wasn’t out doing activist work, he was always with me. Many people probably think Pai isn’t someone to be stuck on his girlfriend. But whatever anything was up, we always discussed it together. Whenever he went to Bangkok, he always video-called me to chat but he actually doesn’t like doing such things. Now we can’t be together like before. I’m stressed and perhaps so is he. He says he wishes we could meet everyday, if only to see each other’s faces.”
She proceeds to muse that many people who visit Pai notice that he is always smiling. But she thinks her love’s current smile is different from before. She says that people can force a smile, but that eyes always betray the truth. Those who really know Pai feel too that something has changed in him.
Pai’s father, Viboon, agrees that his son is someone who smiles easily. Whatever problems Pai encounters, he keeps smiling. He is still smiling, even though this time he has been accused of violating Article 112. Many people who meet Pai perhaps think his smile is a rebellion against authorities.
But this may not be the case, Viboon tells me. No matter how tough the going gets, Pai would keep smiling because that’s the sort of person he is. But a father can tell when the expressions in his son’s eyes change.
Pai always smiles even behind jail bars
I ask her how she manages her own feelings when dealing with a situation like this. She is still and quiet for a long time before replying. She doesn’t know how to reply. Amidst the arbitrariness of Thailand’s justice system, the only thing that gives her answers now is superstition.
“We all see how the justice system is, right? Lawyers or anyone else can’t predict what will happen. I’ve turned to superstition and fortune tellers. I don’t know if what they say is true or not but at least it gives me hope. The fortune teller says that there is a chance Pai will be released but it may be a while. This gives a little encouragement, even though I don’t know how accurate the prediction really is.”
Besides fortune tellers, what helps to quell her worries most is visiting Pai as often as she can. When Pai was previously imprisoned after the referendum, she would look at old photos of him on her smartphone when she could not visit.
But since then that smartphone has broken, and the photos it contained of her and Pai are gone. She muses that it is as if the memories have been lost too. And she doesn’t know when she will next have the chance to take another photo with Pai.
“Once I didn’t have a car to go [visiting Pai]. Do you know that my dormitory is far from the prison? When I don’t have have a car, I have to ride three rounds of minibuses. I don’t have enough money for a taxi fare. Sometimes I can’t hitch a ride with Pai’s mother. And there are many friends, teachers and others from Bangkok visiting him so I didn’t want them to wait for me.
At the end, I could visit him only once a week. Pai asked me if I had changed my mind about him. He said he is a prisoner already but I’m still young and still have a chance to have a future better than this.”
I’m not sure what Pai means by ‘a future better than this’. But in the hour or so that I have sat speaking to Pai’s love, it has been obvious that ‘a future better than this’ is one where Pai is released to be near her once again.
This story was written by Taweesak Kerdpoka and translated into English by Cat Yen