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. It is here that normality ends.
A few seconds after I rang the bell, the 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, exhibited large, erect phalluses. They were in fact all representations of one and the same man - Chuchok.
He was a destitute 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 both came into great wealth and was courted by a beautiful young woman. It was said that this was all thanks to positive karma from good deeds performed in a previous life.
However this fairy tale didn’t have a happy ending. Now that he was able to act on any desire that came into his head, Chuchok rapidly succumbed to a life of sensual excess, developing particular weaknesses for fornication and feasting. The latter was what brought about his untimely demise, consuming so much at a banquet one night that his stomach exploded. Despite this 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 him in the 1990s when she was afflicted by a nasty kidney ailment and decided to pray to Chuchok for 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, 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 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 just didn’t quite cut it given proclivities of his patron. 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 rather a lot to process, but there was also an upstairs. Here, Khun Khemika offered a much more hands-on way to enhance your prospects - she 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 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, and concluding with a few rabbit punches for good measure. Examining my face in the mirror afterwards, I couldn’t quite determine whether it had been structurally enhanced, but my cheeks certainly had a healthy new glow about them.
Khun Khemika has become famous for her slapping, but not the variant I’d just received, or even her innovative buttock firming offering. No, what she’s really renowned for is revealed 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. 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 and 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 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 to get slapped around by Khun Khemika. As we returned to the sliding doors to say our goodbyes and I prepared to return to normality, I wondered 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 probably be pretty chuffed that he now had a slap-up good shrine.