Is it a love story or a tale of survival, a heroic cry for help? Maybe just another grim account from Bangkok’s uncaring streets? You tell me. But first, let me tell you about Ang and Tuk.
Both Ang and Tuk are drug addicts, not all the time, but more often than not. And they both have AIDS—that’s all the time, although even their sickness comes and goes, depending on how many meals they’ve had recently. On the street, a full meal is two five-baht packages of noodles, easily affordable when the drugs don’t get in the way.
They also share a love that burns. Born into desperation and nurtured on the streets, they are eternally bound together in lives whose hopes and dreams have been smashed by a history of childhood abuse and abandonment.
Their odds were never good. Ang’s dad died from cancer when he was eight and his older brother died a year later. In the months following his father’s death, Ang’s mother wasn’t coping with life and gave him up to relatives.
By age nine and in third grade, he was already stealing and sniffing glue. When caught by his relatives, he was punished in a manner so scary, he won’t even talk about it. All he would say is that at night he had to sleep outside with the family dog.
The relatives turned him over to a local welfare agency that placed him in a youth detention camp. He spent the next year looking for a chance to escape, finally running away by hitching a ride on the back of a vegetable truck returning to Bangkok.
Ang says he always liked trains and that’s why he has been living in a shell of a building behind the Hua Lamphong Railway Station, the main terminal in Bangkok. Four times our outreach workers have persuaded him to come join us at our Mercy Centre, but he has never stayed long. He gets restless and returns to the train station, catching the 109 bus from the Klong Toey market.
He told us he has an Auntie—not a real Auntie but close enough, in Chon Buri town. He used to help her sell garlands on the street and always kept her phone number on a piece of paper deep inside his pockets when he went on binges. After the drugs wore off and the loneliness kicked in, he’d want to call her. But he never did. Drugs always ate up the phone money.
Tuk’s story is much the same. Her father is dead. We don’t know about her mother, not that it would matter much since she gave Tuk away when she was quite young to a family—not as their adopted daughter but as their slave. They wouldn’t let Tuk use their family name and when she came of age, the men in the family wanted more, telling her it was her “duty.” She was twelve-and-a-half years old and ran away.
Thereafter, what she had refused to give up as her duty, she sold whenever she was hungry and without options. The train station has always been a good place for meeting lonely men. She even has a “train station” boyfriend who helps her find them.
Tuk got into drugs, anything she could get—glue, amphetamines, heroin (they’re inescapable on the street) and then got caught. During her time in a detention center, she was so thin and waif-like that the guards felt pity and always made sure she had enough to eat.
Tuk and Ang met at Hua Lamphong. In the Hollywood movies, train stations are often filled with romance and dramatic moments of tenderness, places where lovers part and reunite with hugs, kisses and happily-ever-after endings. So why shouldn’t two abandoned, run-away street kids meet and fall in love there, too?
I’m not saying they had anything like conjugal bliss or even sex, though they surely shared a needle or two, which is how Ang contracted AIDS—from Tuk or one of the other kids.
More important than their shared needles was their shared need for care, comfort and love. Eight street kids, including Ang, began calling Tuk their mom even though she was only twenty-one. By that time, she had been living in the abandoned building in the back of Hua Lamphong for almost nine years. Ang desperately wanted a mom and Tuk was nourished by the call. I can’t pretend to know what they felt for each other but I know it is moving to be in their presence.
As AIDS bit into her, Tuk sometimes needed respite and would come to us and stay awhile, eat a few steady meals, and get her strength back.
But street people can never settle down, never find any peace of mind or tranquility for long. Every few months, they get a wild urge; there’s never enough freedom when they’re off the streets. They are like the skittish deer and gazelle or the stealthy nocturnal animals you see on Discovery Channel. Except in this case, as they roam the wilds of Bangkok streets, they search for the next hustle, the next scam that might provide money for drugs or food while looking over their shoulder for cops and other street kid enemies. So it was no surprise when Tuk, like a caged cat, would begin pacing and then leave us and return to her street life as both predator and victim.
Sometimes Tuk and Ang would come to Mercy Centre together and look after each other, and during their stays, everyone in our hospice always felt warmed by their tenderness.
Tuk became a heroine here. When TV crews and student groups visited Mercy Centre, Tuk volunteered to tell her sisters in Thailand about AIDS and her story. She warned them. Oh, how she warned them! She asked the TV cameramen to focus in on her face, and then asked every girl and woman in Thailand who might be watching to look into her eyes, so they could understand and remember.
One time, when Tuk and Ang decided to return to Hua Lamphong, we told them they’d lose face with their friends if they didn’t look cool. What we really meant was we wanted to thank them for showing us their love and had bought them presents of new clothes. Tuk chose her first new dress ever. You see, street girls don’t wear dresses; they wear jeans. But we wanted her to feel special and pretty. That day, she was even prettier than pretty.
A week later, Tuk was back with us. She’d sold her pretty dress and was feeling sick. Ang had returned too, just days before her. But it was during one of his restless periods when she arrived at Mercy Centre, and he had gone for a walk in the neighborhood. Tuk saw Ang’s empty hospice bed, searched around the center, and then took the bus back to Hua Lamphong to find him. There, she ran into her old boyfriend and pimp, who told her he was broke and the police were looking for him—and would she please deliver some pills for him.
The police arrested her and booked her for possession with intent to sell.
As I write this, Tuk is in jail, and we’re trying to get her released into our custody. She hasn’t told the authorities she has AIDS yet. When she does, they probably will be glad to get rid of her although right now they are telling us her bail is 30,000 baht. That’s normal, even cheap for a street girl with a record and two prior convictions.
Without legal aid, she’ll be given six years, by which time it will be too late. She will be dead from AIDS.
Ang returned, back from another binge which he spent two days sleeping off. When he first opened his eyes, we fed him and told him he had to stay, that he couldn’t let Tuk—his mom—worry about him. She had to know he’s safe and off the street and that he loves her.
Chances are quite slim Ang will stay with us for long. Same with Tuk, if we should get her back. And both of them are going to die.
But both are life’s winners, too. Tuk knows that we’re trying to get her out of prison so that she can take care of Ang, and Ang is equally expectant in his hopes to look after Tuk, his mom. Ang has also asked me for the Mercy Centre phone number in case he runs.
Now you tell me, isn’t this a love story?