A Slap-Up Good Shrine
If you’re lucky with the traffic, then about forty minutes after leaving 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, those doors slid open to reveal a beaming, middle-aged Thai lady, heavily made-up and resplendent in a sequinned purple robe and large 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.
She invited 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, sporting large, erect phalluses. They were all representations of one and the same man - Chuchok.
He was a beggar who had lived at the time of the Buddha, a couple of thousand years ago. But his fortunes took a dramatic turn one day when he suddenly came into great wealth. Thanks, it was said, to positive karma from good deeds he’d performed in a previous life.
But, sadly, this fairy tale did not have a happy ending. Chuchok’s newfound wealth now allowed him to act on any desire that came into his head, and he rapidly succumbed to a life of sensual excess, developing particular weaknesses for fornication and feasting. The latter was what brought about his untimely demise, eating so much at a banquet one night that his stomach exploded.
Despite such an ignominious end, fast-forward a few hundred years and people had started to pray to statues of him for good luck. Khun Khemika first came across Chuchok in the 1990s when she was afflicted by a nasty kidney ailment and decided to ask for his help. She miraculously recovered from her illness in just a couple of weeks. Once 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 lovingly over hundreds of Chuchok statues that she has collected since then, 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 implore these statues for a change in their fortunes. A couple of years ago, one of them scored a big win on the Thai lottery shortly after his visit. Flush with his winnings, he was keen to thank Chuchok but felt that the standard offering of incense and candles wouldn’t quite cut it given his patron’s proclivities. 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 something of a trend, and it’s now common for people seeking favours to turn up accompanied by a similarly risqué entourage.
It was already a lot to process, but there was also an upstairs to deal with. Here, Khun Khemika offered a much more hands-on way to enhance one’s prospects, as she’d 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 a country where physical beauty is highly prized and many turn to cosmetic surgery in its pursuit, Khun Khemika offers an alternative, all-natural treatment to improve 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 for 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 a number of chops to the neck, then concluded with a series of rabbit punches for good measure. Examining my face in the mirror afterwards, I couldn’t quite determine whether 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 therapy, but not the variant I’d just experienced or even her innovative buttock-firming offering. No, what she’s 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 a woman’s chest and surrounding areas in her own unique manner, she is able to increase its size by anywhere from one to four inches. So I persuaded an open-minded female friend to give it a try.
Waiting outside the treatment room, I winced at the sound of palms smacking into flesh as I started to wonder if my friend was ever going to talk to me again. But she emerged a few minutes later beaming, albeit somewhat flushed. Yes, she said, it was certainly bracing and had stung a little, but there was no lasting pain and, amazingly, she reckoned it had actually worked - she swore that her bra was now noticeably tighter.
These kinds of results explain why a steady stream of women, both Thai and foreign, now make their way up to this distant corner of Bangkok to get slapped around by Khun Khemika. As we returned to the sliding doors to say our goodbyes and I prepared for my return to normality, I wondered what Chuchok would have made of all this going on right above his sacred space. But, after a moment’s reflection, I concluded he’d probably be pretty chuffed that his could now be known as a truly slap-up good shrine.