A Slap-Up Good Shrine
If you’re lucky with the traffic, 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 pass the 7-11 store, cross a shabby forecourt, and you’ll come to 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, The Keeper of the Chuchok Shrine.
She ushered me inside and, as my eyes adjusted to the light, I saw that every nook and cranny was packed with statues. Some big, some small, some clothed, some as naked as the day they were born. And many, I couldn’t help but notice, displaying large, erect phalluses. They were all representations of one and the same man - Khun Chuchok.
He was a destitute beggar who had lived at the time of the Buddha, a couple of thousand years ago. But his fortunes changed dramatically one day when he suddenly came into great wealth and was also courted by a beautiful young woman, all thanks to positive karma from good deeds performed in a previous life.
But his fairy tale was not to have a happy ending. Now able to act on any desire that came into his head, Khun Chuchok succumbed to a life of sensual excess, developing particular weaknesses for fornication and feasting. It was the latter that brought about his untimely demise, consuming so much at a banquet one night that his stomach exploded.
Despite this ignominious end, 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 had just been afflicted by a nasty kidney complaint when she came across his story. She prayed to him for help and miraculously recovered from her illness in just a couple of weeks. Back on her feet, she decided that the best way to thank her benefactor would be to set up a dedicated shrine to him. Today, she fusses adoringly over hundreds of Chuchok statues that she has collected over the subsequent years, many dressed up in costumes as fancy as her own, and a favoured few even adorned with Chanel bags and Rolex watches.
Her shrine now welcomes a regular stream of punters who come to pray to 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 the payout, he was keen to thank Khun Chuchok but felt a standard offering of incense and candles wouldn’t quite meet his patron’s preferences. 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 trend and it’s now common for people seeking favours to turn up accompanied by similar risqué entourages.
It was already a lot to take in, but there was also an upstairs to investigate. In sharp contrast to the shrine below however, on the first floor Khun Khemika had set up her very own spa. But show up looking for a mani-pedi or a Thai massage and you would be sorely disappointed. Instead, in this country 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 treatment to overhaul your appearance. Her rigorous “slapping therapy” promises to revitalise and firm up key areas of your body and rejuvenate your skin, all without the need to go under the knife or shell out on pricey pills and potions.
I had a look through the menu and decided to give the facial a try. Her assistant queued up some jingly Thai pop on the stereo and Khun Khemika began to sway gracefully over towards where I sat 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 concluding with 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 improved or not, but my cheeks certainly had a healthy new glow about them.
Khun Khemika has become famous for her slapping, but not the type I’d just received, or even the innovative buttock firming variety that she also offers. No, what she’s really renowned for is given away by her recent legal name change - from Khun Khemika to Khun Ying Tob-Nom or “Madam Boob Slapper”. She claims that, by intensively slapping and kneading a woman’s chest and surrounding areas in her own unique manner, she is able to increase the 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 talk to me again. But she emerged a few minutes later beaming, albeit 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 their way up to this distant corner of Bangkok for a session with Khun Khemika. As we returned to the sliding doors to say our goodbyes and I prepared to return to normality, I couldn’t help but wonder what Khun Chuchok would make of all this going on right above his sacred space. But, after a moment’s reflection, I realised he’d surely heartily endorse the fact that his had now become a slap-up good shrine.
