A Slap-Up Good Shrine
If you’re lucky with the traffic, then about forty minutes from the centre of Bangkok you’ll reach an unmarked, dusty side-street with a couple of open-fronted car repair garages. Venture down it until you come to the 7-11, cross the street, and set back behind a shabby forecourt you’ll find a rather dilapidated, two-storey concrete building fronted by a pair of sliding white doors. This is where normality ends.
A few seconds after I rang the bell, these doors slid open to reveal a beaming, middle-aged Thai lady, heavily made-up and resplendent in a sequinned purple robe and huge floral headdress, so large in fact that it housed its very own (fake) parrot. She bowed and introduced herself as Khun Khemika, Keeper of the Chuchok Shrine.
As she ushered me inside and my eyes adjusted to the light, I realised that every nook and cranny of this shrine was filled with statues. Some were big, some were small, some were clothed, some were as naked as the day they were born. And many, I couldn’t help but notice, were sporting large, erect appendages. But they were all representations of one and the same man - Khun Chuchok.
He had lived at the time of the Buddha, a couple of thousand years ago, a destitute beggar who is said to have also been rather short-changed in the looks department. But his fortunes changed dramatically when he reached middle age, thanks to some karma from good deeds performed in a previous life, and he suddenly found himself being showered with great wealth and courted by a beautiful young woman.
Unlike your typical fairy tale however, this one doesn’t have a happy ending unfortunately. In the face of his much improved circumstances, Khun Chuchok succumbed to a life of sensual excess, developing a particular weakness for fornication and feasting. He ultimately came a cropper when he gorged himself so outrageously at a banquet one night that his stomach exploded.
Despite this untimely demise, a few hundred years later people had started to pray to statues of him for good luck. Fast forward to the 1990s, and Khun Khemika was suffering from a nasty kidney problem when she first came across his story. She prayed to a statue of him for help and miraculously recovered from her illness just a few weeks later. Back on her feet, she decided that the most appropriate way to thank him would be to set up a dedicated shrine. Today, she fawns lovingly over some 5,000 statues of Khun Chuchok, many of whom she has dressed up in costumes as fancy as her own, even adorning a favoured few with Chanel bags and Rolex watches.
Her shrine now welcomes a regular stream of punters who come to beseech the statues for good luck. A couple of years ago, one of them had his prayers answered, scoring a big win on the Thai lottery. Flush with his payout, he was keen to thank Khun Chuchok, but felt the usual offering of incense and candles wouldn’t quite cut it with a man of his reputation. So he instead returned to the shrine with a troop of female dancers from a local strip club, paying them to gyrate in front of the statues. This kicked off a bit of a trend, and it’s now quite common for those seeking favours to turn up accompanied by similar entourages.
This was already a lot for me to take in, but it turned out that we were only just getting started - there was also an upstairs.
In sharp contrast to the shrine below, on the second floor Khun Khemika has set up her own spa. But show up looking for a mani-pedi or a Thai massage and you’ll be in for quite a slap in the face.
In this land where physical beauty is an object of adulation and where many turn to cosmetic surgery in its pursuit, Khun Khemika offers an alternative, all-natural option to improve one’s aesthetic appeal. She promises that her rigorous “slapping therapy” will revitalise and firm up key areas of the body and rejuvenate the skin, all without the need to go under the knife or shell out for expensive pills and potions.
I perused the menu and decided to give the facial a try. Her assistant queued up some jingly Thai pop on the sound system and Khun Khemika then began to sway gracefully over towards where I was perched rather nervously on a stool. As she reached me, and without any prior warning, she delivered a solid backhand to my left cheek. She then proceeded to slap me firmly around the face, all the while shimmying in time with the music. This continued for a couple of minutes, interspersed with some chops and a few rabbit punches for good measure. Examining my face in the mirror afterwards, I couldn’t quite work out if it had been structurally enhanced or not, but my cheeks certainly had a healthy new glow about them.
Khun Khemika has become famous for her slapping, but not the facial variety I’d just experienced, or even the innovative buttock firming techniques she also offers. No, what she is really renowned for is reflected in her recent legal name change: from Khun Khemika to Khun Ying Tob-Nom, which translates as “Madam Boob Slapper”.
She claims that, by intensively slapping and kneading the female bosom and surrounding areas in her own unique manner, she is able to increase its size from anywhere between one and four inches.
I persuaded an open-minded friend to give it a try.
Waiting outside the treatment room, I couldn’t help but wince at the sound of palms smacking into flesh, and wondered if my friend was ever going to forgive me. But she emerged a few minutes later beaming, if a little flushed. Yes, she said, it was certainly bracing and had stung a little, but there was no lasting pain and, rather amazingly, she reckoned it had actually worked - she swore her bra was now noticeably tighter.
These kind of results explain why a steady stream of women, both Thai and foreign, now make the journey up to this distant corner of Bangkok for a session. Back at the sliding doors, as I thanked Khun Khemika and we said our goodbyes, I couldn’t help but wonder what Khun Chuchok would make of all this going on above his sacred space. But, after a moment’s reflection, I concluded he’d probably heartily endorse the fact that it had become a slap-up good shrine.
