I recently learned about a totally fascinating part of Thai folklore and wanted to share: the practice of a kuman thong (กุมารทอง). In Pali, kuman means “little boy” and thong means “golden,” so the kuman thong are effigies of children with gold leaf on them. They are believed to represent the spirit of a child and proper treatment of the effigy, thus honoring the spirit, will bring good fortune. It is also a practice of necromancy.
We had just finished a marathon of facilitating two camps for the past five days. I was exhausted from spending each night preparing materials for the next day and making sure that the lesson plans I had written could be easily understood by the Thai facilitators who were not used to using games as teaching tools (turns out, they weren’t understood very well.) Ning, my co-teacher who does get it, turned to me and asked “Do you want to maybe go to Bua Yai and relax and get dinner?” Bua Yai is the next district over from mine, where she lives with her parents and is larger than where I live. I agreed; I really did not want to cook.
One time I came back from a bpai tiao just as dusk was setting in, and the sun sets really fast here. So on my two kilometer bike ride home I turned on my lights to the flashing setting and made it home just fine. When I told my co-teacher about it the next day, she told me that people probably thought that I was a ghost. Because Thai people believe in ghosts, and there are lots of Thai ghosts and lots of superstitions around them.