Outsiders say the old pig, cattle and water buffalo Slaughterhouse neighborhood at the southeast end of the Klong Toey slums, just where the river wraps around the port, is a dangerous part of town. Some even say it has the worst reputation in Bangkok, one it has earned from decades of crime and violence.
But that is just legend. In its early days, almost fifty years ago, the Slaughterhouse actually was a safe and fairly healthy place to live. Even the pigs were kept reasonably clean. The men did the heavy work—slaughtering and butchering the animals—while the women and children cleaned the guts. The operations required tons of water and its effluent poured into the adjacent canal. At around three o’clock every morning, they scrubbed the slaughterhouse with caustic soda.
There were over 200 families—most of them Catholic, originally Vietnamese from several generations back—living in nearby ramshackle shacks or in tiny one-room homes perched precariously on stilts above the pens. The Buddhists and Muslims have codes against killing pigs, so here in the Slaughterhouse the poorest Catholics were able to find work. Their first church in the Slaughterhouse was just a room under a bridge. Later, about thirty years ago, we moved it to a small wooden house with a corrugated tin roof.
In the early days, you could still fish in the canal. Occasionally you would see snakes, more rarely a few shrimp, and just now and then, a turtle that lost its way.
Nevertheless, there was real life in the canal—whole worlds of thriving ecosystems! And when the yearly monsoon floods came, sure, there was garbage floating to the surface but you could still walk barefoot, ankle- or even knee-deep in water without getting severe infections. Only on very rare occasions would you have to wear Slaughterhouse “slum boots.” That’s what we call the plastic bags that you tied around your feet with rubber bands.
We had our share of heroin in those days, but everyone knew who delved into such things, and the users kept to themselves. Same with the gangsters. Generally, they loved their children and respected the neighborhood. They committed most of their crime in someone else’s neighborhood. We had our local thieves but they received swift and rough justice when caught and then rarely stole again, at least not in the Slaughterhouse. There were occasional shootings and stabbings. (People who butcher pigs for a living know a lot about knives.) But such violence was always against the neighborhood code.
People didn’t lock their doors back then. Not that they could afford padlocks or had anything to steal. It was a neighborhood in the truest sense. Four big families dominated the gene pool, and everyone knew everyone else. The same was true with our Muslim brothers and sisters who lived beside the cattle and water buffalo section of the Slaughterhouse. We stuck together, a bit defiant but proud.
In fact, coming from the Slaughterhouse was like wearing a proud badge. You just have to say you were from the Slaughterhouse and lesser mortals would back away. Even in jails, prisoners who gave their home address as the Slaughterhouse received lots of leeway.
We all understood the codes—the unwritten rules of conduct. The Slaughterhouse codes kept us in neighborly peace while our reputation—the legends—kept us safe from the intrusion of the outside world.
Seven years ago, it all began to unravel. Authorities decided that the old method of butchering pigs, the way we had been doing it for generations, was not hygienic, and that it was time to move the Slaughterhouse.
No work meant no cash for food. No cash for electricity and water. No cash for children’s school fees. No cash for mom to buy cloth to sew a dress for her daughter during the annual church feast. No cash for the boards and sheets of corrugated roofing to patch the monsoon season leaks. No cash when grandmother gets sick. Nothing for funerals. No booze money. And not enough for the old brand of cigarettes. Many men and women resorted to rolling their own.
The Slaughterhouse residents were told they would soon have to leave, that they were being evicted from the homes and shacks that their families had homesteaded for over fifty years—that they had no rights.
This in a legal sense is kind of true. The Port Authority of Thailand actually owns the land and most of the slum residents are squatters. Nevertheless, the city social welfare authorities do recognize loss of home by fire, providing the home “owner” as well as his tenants financial compensation. So the laws are rather confusing.
Authorities tore down the pigpens and cemented them over as a massive parking area for the trucks that carry products to and from the adjacent Klong Toey Port. They also wanted to wall in the slum but neighbors banded together and told the officials that they wouldn’t accept a wall. If it was built, they guaranteed that no truck, no truck driver, and nothing in the trucks would be safe.
Sometimes a Slaughterhouse threat works and in this case, it won the day. No wall was ever built. But it was a hollow victory.
With the trucks came their drivers seeking drugs, alcohol and temporary female companionship. We no longer heard the squeals of pigs at night. In their place were the sounds of trucks, their engines, their airbrakes and horns (especially their horns) honking all night, and the incessant shouting of the touts who park the trucks and run drugs for the drivers. And it’s all happening every night in a dense neighborhood filled with babies and school kids trying to sleep.
The residents of the Slaughterhouse were given a choice: either move into the five-storey walk-up flats the city was building beside the canal (where bubbles of foul-smelling methane now gurgle to the top) or move out of town—way out of town. The authorities would provide housing in new suburban slums outside of the city, miles and hours away from where they could earn a livelihood.
Suddenly in late 1997, with the collapse of the Thai economy, there was no work to be found either in or out of the Slaughterhouse. So the neighborhood women sold noodles and the men didn’t do much of anything. Grandmothers and kids ran drugs. Strangers in trucks and their drug suppliers started to appear everywhere. Then more strangers came to buy drugs.
Safety and security broke down. People bought padlocks and had more dogs. Everyone stayed indoors after dark.
Life is grimmer. Every family has lost a teenage son. Some drove their motorcycles full speed into cement pillars. Others were shot by the police, accused of being gangsters. A few died of heroin and other drug overdoses.
The codes are in disarray.