An 82-year-old Australian woman was visiting a prisoner at Bang Kwang Central Prison on the outskirts of Bangkok, when he introduced her to Susan Aldous. She told Susan that she’d been writing to different convicts for many years, but had never thought of visiting one until she saw a show on TV about an Australian lady. “She’d been a horrible person… a drug addict and a Playboy bunny, and there she was hugging all these prisoners and AIDS patients. And I thought that if she could do it, so could I.”
Dubbed the ‘Angel of Bang Kwang’, Susan Aldous is best known for her altruistic endeavours in the country’s biggest maximum-security jail.
“I told her that was me,” said Susan, her voice chiming with laughter. “And she said, ‘That programme changed my life. You have no idea how much of an inspiration you’ve been to me.’”
For the last few decades, the nomadic philanthropist has been an inspiration to many: Cambodian refugees and terminally ill prostitutes; Thai cops, drug addicts and mental patients; disabled children in Laos; foreign prisoners in Bangkok; and senior citizens moldering in old folks’ homes in Malaysia. A mighty impressive CV of achievements for a high-school dropout and teenaged troublemaker who rebelled against her suburban upbringing in Melbourne because, “I wanted my life to have meaning. I didn’t want it be just three meals a day, getting married, having kids and dying,” she said at her apartment in Bangkok.
Driven to the brink of suicide and drug addiction when only 16, Susan found a spiritual calling in social work. “Some people challenged me and that’s what I needed. They said if you’re going to throw your life away you might as well give it away.”
She conceded that her grandmother, who received a medal from Queen Victoria for charity work, was an early influence. “She told me about Joan of Arc and angels, and she was a very down-to-earth Christian who loved to have a drink and watch the horse races.” In turn, Susan told her classmates at school about Joan of Arc, who teased and bullied her. “That’s when I realised you either believe or you don’t. And if you do you’re going to get burned at the stake. I always thought that was going to be my destiny.” She laughed. “A martyrdom complex.” Susan, however, dropped out of Sunday School when she was only seven because they couldn’t give her any answers. “So if we came from monkeys then Adam and Eve couldn’t be real.”
Because of her blond hair, blue eyes, svelte physique and extroverted nature, Susan was recruited to work at a high-class Playboy bunny club in Melbourne after the manager saw her handing out religious pamphlets on a street corner. “I just thought, ‘Where do people go when they’re lonely and have problems?’ They don’t go to church. They go to a bar. So I thought this was the perfect place to reach people.” Working the quiet nights, Susan proved herself to be honest and reliable enough for the club to offer her a position as the manageress. “But Asia was already calling me, and when they said they didn’t want me to talk about God with the customers anymore, I thought, you’ve just given me my answer—I’m off to Asia.”
This was not atypical of an Australian generation who came ‘of rage’ in the 1970s—tripping on rebellion, drugs, booze, anti-conservative politics and music, before fleeing to Asia to escape the life sentence of what the Aussie journalist Jim Pollard called ‘death by suburbia’. Like Susan, Jim and many others travelled through, or relocated to, different parts of Asia. For them, the grit and openness of Thailand is infinitely preferable to the hermetically sealed sterility of the Sydney and Melbourne suburbs. Many of these Aussie expats have become activists in altruism. “It gives their lives meaning and they get a buzz out of it,” said Jim, a former crime reporter and ‘Consumer Watchdog’ columnist in Australia, who has been bastioned in Bangkok for the past decade.
In a book he is hoping to complete in 2010, Jim is chronicling the lives of a multi-nationality contingent of humanitarians working with refugees along the Thai-Burmese frontier. He wants to turn the project into a three-book series, profiling the expats doing social work in Bangkok, Laos and Cambodia. Susan will be mentioned in one of the books but Jim also wants to underwrite the efforts of more publicity-shy stalwarts like Denise Coghlan, whom he said is “possibly the only female head of a Jesuit relief centre anywhere in the world.” Asked if she was Australian, Jim wisecracked, “Whack a jar of Vegemite in front of her and if she picks it up, she’s Australian.” He laughed. “Yeah, she’s Aussie. She started working at the refugee camp called Site #2 back in the mid-1980sand returned to Cambodia with many of the refugees.”
Susan also worked at Site #2. With a population of 150,000, the camp was a virtual no man’s land for Khmers who could not return home for fear of political persecution and could not be sent to a third country. Stripped of their political might but not their firepower, the Khmer Rouge launched mortar shells and sneak attacks on a regular basis. “You’d be standing there talking to a family one week, and come back the next week to see that their hut had been shelled and the whole family had been killed,” said Susan.
Another time, the NGO she worked for had 2,000 pairs of shoes to give out. Once they announced the news on the loudspeaker, refugees gathered for kilometres around while guards with M-16s stood by to keep the peace.
“It was the most horrendous thing I’ve ever been through... it was bedlam, it was madness. How do you say no to someone? How do you choose? So we had to throw them into the crowd. Finally, after I don’t know how many hours, I stood there with one shoe in my hand, and I was an emotional wreck.” Then she looked down to see a woman who’d lost her leg to a landmine and didn’t have a shoe on her other foot. As it turned out, the shoe in Susan’s hand was a perfect fit. “I just burst out crying. It was too much.”
By the early 1990s, Susan had founded her own one-woman NGO, One Life at a Time (entirely funded by private donations), and moved to Bangkok. Her work in Thai jails and police stations aroused the suspicions of the authorities, so the secret police kept her under surveillance 24/7 for three months. When an undercover agent finally showed up at her front door, he admitted that, not only had they been unable to dig up any dirt on her, she moved around the capital at such a frenetic pace that they couldn’t even keep up with her. Succumbing to her bubbly charm, the secret police hired the chatterbox to teach them English.
Some ‘spooks’ from another cloak-and-dagger organisation followed Susan and her daughter into an ice-skating rink in a Bangkok shopping mall. They had walkie-talkies hidden in their shirts. “When cops go undercover they either look like drug addicts or journalists…” Susan laughed. “Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry. We writers are used to the abuse.”
Susan smiled at me and continued. “But when I have a fear I have to confront it. So they were all sitting there with no skates on in a skating rink, and I went over and said in Thai, ‘Where are you from?’ And then I listed all these different branches of the Thai police and the army. ‘Oh, and they make you work on Sundays, you poor things.’ They couldn’t speak. They were just flabbergasted. I wasn’t sure what I’d done, or if they’d kill me. But one of them spoke into his walkie-talkie and they all just dispersed.”
True to the spirit of her late grandmother, Susan’s unorthodox views on Christianity have fuelled the ire of fundamentalists who work for other NGOs. “God had a penis because he made us in his exact image and told us to be fruitful and multiply. One theologian told me that there are no sexual desires in heaven. Excuse me, but I don’t want to go to heaven if there’s no sexual desires. If Jesus came back today he’d wear Levi 501s, have long hair and be very sexy. Jesus never went to church. He was a radical, he was a revolutionary, and they killed him for it.”
A Christian who does not believe in organised religions, her work is inspired as much by righteous indignation as what she calls ‘touching lives’, “You just have to go by faith all the time because feelings are faith, your moods go up and down, especially if you’re a woman and you’re pre-menstrual. Then you can’t do anything except maybe kill someone. I know I could chew someone’s head off. But sometimes you need to be angry. Anger is not a bad thing.”
The supernatural ‘visions’ she experienced as a child have continued to provide her with secular wisdom. When a young woman was brutally slain in Bangkok, Susan remembered feeling upset and sitting down on her bed, when the woman’s face appeared before her. “The dead girl told me, ‘Dying is not difficult. Once you cross the threshold, there’s no more pain or fear’. She told me lots of things about herself that only came out in the press later, so I knew they were real. Then she asked me to go and forgive the man who had killed her.”
“When I went to see him in prison after he’d received a life sentence, I could feel the compassion and forgiveness she had. So I told him she’d sent me and he was blown away. We ended up praying together and he asked her and God to forgive him. The inmate really did well in prison after that, so they used this as an example in the Corrections Department and asked me to talk to the guards about compassion and how to look beyond the crime and examine the motives of the criminals. Like this murderer, who came from a family of ten children; his parents never had time for him, he was uneducated, etc. These things don’t justify the killing, but they do help you to understand it better.”
Susan is renowned for her work in Bang Kwang Central Prison: a squalid, maximum-security jail on the outskirts of Bangkok, which, when she first started going there, only had a medical budget of around 80,000 baht per year for some 7,000 inmates. Because of all the AIDS and tuberculosis cases, the budget was completely spent only a few months into the year. So if you were admitted into the rundown prison hospital, full of vermin and bloodstains, you’d have to bring your own pillow (assuming you had one) and be lucky to get an IV drip and a single aspirin. Working with a group of Singaporean dentists, Susan saw that the prison’s rundown hospital was outfitted with proper mattresses. And in conjunction with the Causarina Prison in Perth, Australia, where inmates fix around 20,000 pairs of broken glasses each year and distribute them to Third World countries, Susan helped dozens of elderly convicts—the majority of whom had never been to an optometrist before—to sharpen their vision.
On one occasion, Jim Pollard was an eyewitness. “For these old men who couldn’t see and got their first pair of glasses late in life, seeing the expression on their faces was incredible. It really improved the quality of their lives.”
Watching Susan in action at the prison while he was out there doing different stories, Jim was struck by the fact that “she speaks the language fluently and understands Thai culture and that they like fun. A lot of her work concentrates on the prisoners who are neglected there, but she does a great job of lifting their spirits. I’m sure she has her mood swings, but she’s just a very positive person. Susan has done some terrific stuff. I take my hat off to her. But we need a lot more crossover from the well-to-do world to the less fortunate countries.”
In Bang Kwang, Susan struck up an acquaintanceship with an American inmate named Garth Hattan, who was serving a lengthy sentence for drug trafficking. “It took a long time to convince him that I wasn’t out to do a good deed at his expense and then, he opened up and said, ‘I’m very vulnerable now, don’t hurt me.’ It just came out of my mouth—‘I’m gonna love you in ways that you’ve never been loved before.’ I blew myself away with the depth of conviction, because I wasn’t really in love with him, but I made a commitment to myself and to his mother to see him home.”
Impressed by the eloquence of his letters, Susan told him that he was going to become a writer and that his experiences behind bars would touch the lives of countless others. Garth laughed at her. “But I told him, I’m starting to have feelings for you that I’ve never had for anybody, and he went ballistic. ‘How can you say that? You don’t even know me.’ And I’d never sworn around him before, so I said, ‘Go and fuck up and have fun then.’ So I went away thinking that he didn’t feel the same about me, but when I came back a week later he confessed that the feelings were mutual.”
Once again, Susan’s intuition was bang on, because he eventually began contributing a monthly column to Farang Untamed Travel magazine called ‘Letter from the Inside’. In his first column, Garth wrote about what it’s like being locked up in a cell intended for four people that actually held twenty. “Aside from the sweltering heat, you’d be deploring the lack of sufficient ventilation and be desperate to just get out for a breath of fresh air, and you’d discover that your physical proximity to the guy you’re meant to be sleeping next to defies every law of your heterosexual ethos.” Even though he had to write out the columns in long hand, his sweaty hand smudging the ink, Garth was our most punctual and reliable contributor. Susan smuggled the columns out. The prison officials didn’t care, because they realised that his writings were cautionary tales for travellers about mixing high times with lowlifes. “There’s no glamour here, just a sweaty inanimate existence riddled with the futile dreams of what could’ve been, mingled with the aching regret of having let so many good people down—especially yourself,” he wrote in another column. “Enjoy your travels, and never put yourself in a position that would jeopardise your freedom to do so.”
For the first three years of their relationship, Garth and Susan didn’t have a ‘contact visit’ because Garth thought he wouldn’t be able to control his longings, or act like himself in what amounts to a ‘monkey cage’, with some 60 prisoners and their kin sitting around at tables. Most of the Asian inmates, overwhelmed by the emotional reunions, do not hug or kiss or do much more than stare at their food. Eventually Garth agreed to a ‘contact visit’ and they’d sit in the corner, hugging, kissing and making love, using her long skirt as a veil. During one hands-on visit—the prison guards would tease her mercilessly on those days—Garth asked her to marry him. She said yes and he gave her a ring that once belonged to his grandfather. The stone was missing, so he asked her to replace it. She refused. The missing stone was symbolic of their relationship. Not until after he was out of jail would she find a replacement.
Because of a prisoner-exchange agreement with the United States, Garth was sent back to Los Angeles in late 2002, where he served only a few months before being let out on parole. (Every year served in a Thai jail counts for three in America.)
Late in 2003, the couple was married on a deserted beach in California as a flock of pelicans flew past. The wedding photo shows the two of them in front of a gold and crimson sunset, which ‘turned’ the seawater into volcanic lava. Garth is holding her up in his arms. Both of them are clad in denim pants and jackets, and their smiles are on high beam.
In an email she wrote, “We will eventually be having a larger ceremony with family and friends in 2004, when we can wear something a bit more spectacular than thermal underwear.”
That ceremony never took place. In the middle of 2004, she sent a newsletter from her own NGO to all the people on her mailing list. “I did not wish to break up with Garth. He left me, he had numerous affairs and to this day, participates in recreational activities that are not in accordance with my lifestyle or convictions. I did state, however, that I would go on with or without him and have done so. He had fallen in love with another woman and decided to leave me very soon after I returned to the States.
“It was an extremely trying time for me, I held on, did not move away from him or stop loving him, forgave him and eventually let him go free with my blessings and hopes that he will find true happiness and real love—perhaps one of the most difficult things of my life to do and some of the hardest choices to ever make.
“Then in turn I was left as a foreigner in a strange land with no rights and for the most part, alone without sufficient money to survive. On top of it, my health failed to where I nearly died, due to uterine polyps and the life-threatening anaemia that followed. At one point I was without food or water in the apartment where I lived, and had it not been for the intervention of a friend in Norway, I may have not made it out alive. Ironic to have to face possible death, feeling so alone in a first world country after caring for those in dangerous situations in the third world, ha! Eventually I wound up for a time with nowhere suitable to live, Talya [her daughter] was admitted to a mental ward and diagnosed as bipolar and it was a real slice of personal hell for her as well for a good many months.”
Susan felt devastated and rejected. She also felt blamed by Garth for this break up. “It’s enough to feel bitter about, and many would, but it’s not worth feeling such soul-destroying thoughts and I believe that these forces would do me more harm than the supposed injustices that I have suffered would.”
In a few terse emails I exchanged with Garth, he complained that Susan’s intensity and religious zeal were too much for him. After years in jail, the only work he could find was as a caddy. Garth soon started dealing drugs again. Caught violating the rules of his probation, the former rock drummer was sent back to prison. As of 2010, he is out of jail and on a 12-step programme. In a spirit of reconciliation, he and Susan are now friends on Facebook, but she ignores his more sentimental overtures, saying, “I don’t trust him anymore.”
One has to wonder why so many intelligent women are attracted to such incorrigible criminals and why someone like Charles Manson gets dozens of love letters, and even marriage proposals, every month. Is it because the women like playing to a captive audience? Or that old rock ‘n’ roll cliché about good girls loving bad boys?
Even though she hadn’t reaped what she had sown, Susan returned to live in Thailand, completing and publishing her autobiography, The Angel of Bang Kwang (an honorific bestowed by the press) in 2007. My suggestion to the petite dynamo that her angel wings have been clipped, her halo tarnished, and that she should have called her book The Angel and She-Devil of Bang Kwang made her laugh.
The book opened a new chapter in her life as Susan began a sideline career as a writer. In 2008 she co-authored two books: Ladyboys: the Secret World of Thailand’s Third Gender and Bad Boy. Splitting the writing credits and royalties was Pornchai Sereemongkonpol. What surprised him about working on the book was that “because I’m Thai they wouldn’t open up to me like they did to Susan. She isn’t judgmental and she shared with them a lot of unhappy moments from her own life and that encouraged them to open up. Her charm is disarming, so the interviews were more of a sharing process than a typical Q&A. And she’s a lot of fun to work with.”
The biography
of a tout, male prostitute, alcoholic, dope fiend and actor in scat-porn
videos, Bad Boy is one of the grimmest and most sordid reads to come out
of Bangkok’s red-light strips of Patpong and Boys’ Town. Towards the end of the
book, the titular character was pummelled to a pulp and left for dead on
Patpong 1.
Even his own wife did not recognise him in the hospital. When Susan and
Pornchai went to visit him, “She got down to pray with him. Because we were
around the nurses and doctors thought that he wasn’t just another bum, so they
waived the medical bill of a 100,000 baht and put it on his 30-baht health care
card. He had a lot of time to think in the hospital, and now he’s quit
drinking, gotten back together with his wife and wants to become a forest
ranger.”
From scat-porn actor to forest ranger—not the kind of career moves Susan’s neighbours in the shrink-wrapped suburbs of Melbourne would have ever considered—but once again her benevolent influence, and that of her co-author, has brought a measure of redemption to the life of another lost soul.
Asked how he would describe Susan in a few sentences to someone who had never met her, Pornchai paused. “That’s a difficult question because she’s complicated. If you only knew her from the things she’s done you would think she’s lofty, but she’s not, she’s real.” He paused again. “I respect the fact she believes in Jesus but she’s never brought up the subject of religion unless I mentioned it first. She’s not preachy and has never tried to impose her views on me.”
For the past few years, the Aussie expat has curtailed many of her prison visits, citing the failed marriage and emotional burnout as reasons, in favour of working at a shelter for battered women and giving classes in ‘laughing yoga’ at the Chest Disease Institute in Bangkok. The postures and eruptions of mirth stimulate the respiratory systems of more than a hundred patients per class. To amuse them, she dresses up as a clown and cracks quips in Thai. “I get to dress up as a lunatic for free and help a charitable cause,” she said with another laugh.
Susan has also been working with the Don Muang Home and Emergency Shelter for battered women and girls as young as 12, who have been raped, impregnated and cast out of their family homes, under the aegis of the Association for the Status and Promotion of Women. In a country where domestic violence runs rampant, and not a single complaint of sexual harassment has ever been lodged with the authorities since a law ostensibly protecting women from such was first promulgated in the mid-1990s, the shelter is a sanctuary and safe house for a floating population of anywhere from 150 to 200 women and children.
When she first started working there, many of the girls and women were almost mute from battery, estrangement and a serious shortage of self-esteem. Through scripting and staging dramas about the traumas they have suffered, many of the women have found they do have a voice and means to express their woe and call for justice. “I don’t work with them in the Thai tradition of a teacher dictating to their students. They have an equal say in everything we do, and they also decide what other skills they want to learn, such as public speaking. I’d also like to start a blog with them so they can voice more of their concerns and connect with other women who have similar problems.” Sunday evenings are devoted to the children; some of them are HIV-positive and have opportunistic illnesses such as tuberculosis. “I get covered in snot and vomit and wee. I call it my ‘Sunday night perfume’. Don’t take me out on a Sunday night!” Her eyes twinkled as she laughed. (Susan must have more laughs per day than any person I’ve ever met.)
Having interviewed and bantered with her many times over the years, it doesn’t seem like her personal philosophy has changed very much since I first spoke with her back in 2002, when she spoke of a Jewish rabbi who worked with the terminally ill in America.
“He said that most people can get used to the idea of dying, but what they can’t die with are all the regrets. And I’m one of those people who can’t stand living with regrets, so I really want to live my life as if I could die any day. That’s not a morbid thing. It just means doing your best, and it doesn’t have to be great big things, but just passing those little tests every day—like not losing it with the taxi driver, making the right choices, or giving that extra tip. I think those things prepare you for a good death.”
She laughed again, which seems to be her antidote to all the different strains of misfortune and mortality she’s been infected with over the decades. “I think you die as you live.”
Susan’s website is: http://onelifesusan.homestead.com/OneLife.html