Bangkok, Thailand

Suffering the Tension Between the Seen and the Unseen, the elusive book I have made claim to writing is now in my possession! Via Air Asia it made its way from Malaysia to Thailand on the 21^st of December but rather than arriving at Udon Thani as planned, it was mistakenly routed to Bangkok. But I could not reach Bangkok until after Christmas. Truth is stranger than fiction. Here follows the story of the Bengali Angel and the acquisition of the books.

The Lord used my new friend the Bengali Angel to move the hearts of Thai Customs. Anything I write about the difficulty gaining possession of these books is an understatement. We arrived on the 29th at International Cargo and after four calls to our absentee interpreter Nurse Rittiwong to interpret we left with instructions to return tomorrow. Bright and early we arrived the next morning only to be told that sometime between the time we left the day before and the present moment Thai Customs had decided to add an additional day to their New Year holiday calendar. “Please come back January 2” They said. “No one is here to process your books through customs.” We met a wall of resistance.

My pleas and Pearl’s (daughter) were met with “we are sorry, no way possible, today is now a holiday,” and with this epitaph the man who had come out to meet us from behind the window walked around a corner to disappear into an office deeper into the warehouse. At this moment the Bengali Angel mounted wings and barely touching the ground flew after him and lighting upon him smothered him with gentle pleas insisting that his professor Dr. Age had only one day left to receive the books before proceeding to his next post of duty.

Meanwhile I was pacing the loading deck in incoherent circles muttering insulting prayers to God. Since the shipment, bad luck had followed hard on my heels.  By now my bad luck in obtaining the books had cascaded into a domino effect of ill luck. Chiayee and Dr. Ong from MBTS seminary had pulled out all stops to insure the books would reach me by Christmas and they delivered and they arrived on time! But whilst they arrived in Thailand on time for no fault of theirs they arrived at the wrong cargo depot in the wrong city.  By the time I caught up with them they had been in storage 8 days. Events had side swiped all possibilities of receiving them before Christmas.

Soon Som, the Bengali Angel, came flying back around the corner and seized my computer where the shipping manifest was and disappeared again. He had managed to insert a little wedge in their determination to send us packing without even a chunk of coal in our bags. There were a few customs release agents preparing to depart yet in the office but the big boss had left. The authority to proceed was missing – what to do? Perhaps he could be reached by cell phone, Som reasoned.  Soon he came whipping around the corner again and secured my passport and disappeared. We began to sense that a small window of possibility may be materializing, but we had no free confidence.

Reckoning the passing of time, the matter easily remained suspended in an indeterminate state of being for several hours. The first serious evidence of which way the wind was blowing was that Som returned to fetch me for an interview about who I was and what I was doing in Thailand and the nature of the writing. Debriefing me on the short walk to the lead assistant we integrated our stories that was basically true. By now they had studied my international movements recorded on my passport. The first question was “What was I doing here in Thailand and whether I was selling the books here in Thailand?” Evidently my answer seemed relatively benign so they proceeded to inquire about the books and their content. Casting about for a response I remembered a line from Luther when he was asked by Charles the 5th at the Diet of Worms about what was in his books and he said, “Well these books help people live better lives.” So I said, “My book is about helping people be good people and it is about ethics and faith.”

By this time Pearl, Som and I had taken up residence inside the Customs office where four female assistants were being ostensibly detained from their holiday. If one were writing this tale as fiction almost surely one would compose a climax at this point in the story. But in truth no climax occurred for 5 hours. Evidently some phone calls were made and we noticed two assistants were conferring frequently and then the forms starting materializing and signatures were requested. Then we had to determine the value of the 17 boxes (500 books) for a tax we would pay if they released them. Pearl was bold ­– she said were weren’t selling them in Thailand and had not paid to have them published so the only measurement of value had to turn not by market sales but how much it cost the publishers to print and ship one copy. Using this we put forth a ridiculously low value of 50 cents per copy.

Time was passing and by now we had been in the Customs office for 3-1/2 hours. Recently in Bangkok and all over Thailand, political protests have been roaring. They are almost surely on the verge of their 12th coup since trying democracy. Was I bringing politically charged material into Bangkok to fuel the fires of protest under the guise of a “spiritual, be a better person” glove? The lead assistant that emerged to broker the release process was a young pleasant Thai woman but sensing the buck would stop at her desk if she allowed the divisive material into Thailand she made a call to the for the boxes to be brought from deep inside the warehouse for a physical examination of the book and its contents. I had not seen the printed copy up to this point so we all walked to the fenced in warehousing section, a button was pushed and the gate went up and out came all my books on a pallet carried by a lift truck.

She opened a box and began to examine a copy. Pearl, Som and I had our first gander. I had a little rush but it was still too early for jubilation. The assistant studied the title and looked at the table of contents and then replaced the copy and walked toward the warehouse. Pearl who was doing a quick review was told to replace her copy. I also put my copy back into the box. I studied her face to see which way the wind was blowing. On my word I must report she had a very weird look on her face. I knew what she was thinking, “whatever this book is it is not what I had thought it was.” She seemed a little out of joint, not in her attitude but in her understanding about the book and of me. Thailand is 99% Buddhist and my subtitle has the phrase “The Doing and Undoing of Christian Faith, Religion, Ethics…” It was if she had swallowed an awkward shaped bite of food without chewing it and we did not know whether it was going to go down or come up. The forklift wheeled the books back behind the high-gated fence. Now there they were visible but out of reach.

We regrouped back in the office. And slowing we could sense the tide was not going out but coming in – the tide began to turn in our favor. Forms were delivered to us.  Som, true to form, acting as an intermediary moving back and forth, brokered our questions about how to fill out the forms. They liked dealing with him. He had a tenacious disarming way with them that was far more compatible to Thai social decorum. So called falangs (Westerners) are often subtle as a train smash, but Som was cut from a different cloth and his Bengali accent and wry smile teased their charm. By the end I believe they were leaving many gaps in the process just to enjoy his mediation.

At this point I was summoned to the elder woman’s desk to sign and pay the first of four fees. At the elder woman’s side was the younger assistant. It was at this moment she glanced at me and nodded affirmatively “the process will be completed today” she smiled. With this news we took a walk to the main terminal and ate a 2 pm breakfast with zest.

In all toll I signed my name 37 times and we collectively emptied our pockets of over 5000 Bhat. When the books came through the gate to the loading dock the Thai assistants openly shined on us. In truth, they all blessed us with grace and warmth. When all was said and done, it must be said every single person in the whole process, about nine in total from both departments, was warm and gracious and rejoiced that they had succeeded in releasing the books to us.

Now we knew the “gods” of resistance had been defeated and that whatever challenges remained could not stop us. We had two simple tasks left – get 17 boxes of books from Air Cargo Don Muang Airport to a place of temporary storage. Pearl flagged down a four by four taxi with just enough room for three people, 17 boxes and the driver who we suborned with money into our service. Securing temporary storage was less a miracle, maybe on a scale of 1 to 10, it was a 2 compared to the Bengali maneuver.

One of the lessons in the book is that if we walk by true faith we must endure resistance and contradiction and we must hang in there daring to expect things to work out in the long run while suffering feelings and emotions that tempt one to conclude God has left us in the lurch and is not interested in our plight or frankly opposed to the matter at hand. Ironically, I found myself caught in these polar opposites at the terminus. Maybe I need not only to write this book but read it and well. Perhaps some of you might need it also.

 Photo documentation of our epic retrieval by Som.