ZEE OUI, THE EATER OF CHILDREN

The city of Bangkok is a mash up of bizarre contrasts; quiet temples share ground with Pizza Huts, giant malls jostle with skyscrapers shaped like robots, and seemingly quiet little back alleys filled with banana trees play host to sex bars offering every imaginable carnal delight. It is these same alleys where people sell pirated software and, from time to time, see ghosts; in modern Bangkok, the spirit world lives right alongside the flashing neon. This sharp contrast –modern with ancient, serenity and insanity- is nowhere quite so clearly focused as at the Siriraj Medical Museum, really a series of museums on a single campus. A light and airy set of buildings filled with modern conveniences which at first belie the exhibits; body parts covered with the exotic growths of weird diseases, preserved fetuses suffering from congenital defects, internal organs riddled with horrific parasites. One exhibit is a human head sawn in half to show the trajectory of the bullet through its brain, the bullet that killed it. And if you venture deep enough into the Ellis Pathological Museum you will encounter a preserved body in a display case which is unlike all the rest of the exhibits. The name on the case, until recently, gave the body’s name as See-uey sae-ung, but after a refurbishment a few years ago the name has been made more instantly recognizable to Thai visitors. The new name is Si Quey, though he has been known as Zee-Aui Sae-Ueng, Si Ouey Sae Urng, Si Sui Sae Ung, Zee Oui, Si Ui, or even Li Hui. Most modern Thai’s simply call him Zee Oui, the eater of children.

In 1946, in the aftermath of World War II, a Chinese man called C. Sae Wei Ng arrived in Thailand alone and suffering from tuberculosis, having fled, as so many others had, from the atrocities inflicted by the Japanese that culminated in the infamous “rape of Nanking”. As with many refugees, he was renamed in such a way that the locals found easier to pronounce, and came to be known as Zee Oui. He found work as a laborer, working in Thap Sakae, a district in Thailand’s Prachuap Khiri Khan Province, though he moved about to find work wherever he could during the political turbulent age that followed the war. His transition into this new life was not an easy one, and he found himself often humiliated and treated callously thanks to his awkward appearance (he was somewhat taller than the typical Asian, and excessively lean thanks to ill health) and poor grasp of the native language, leading to a sense of isolation and helplessness. Couple to this his worsening tuberculosis and the inevitable sense of dislocation common to sudden culture shock, and his later crimes become almost understandable.

During the ten year period from his arrival to his eventual execution, he came to believe that the only treatment for his tuberculosis was to eat the livers (and, according to some reports, hearts) of children. Though to the Western mind this perhaps seems odd, in traditional Chinese medicine, various body parts from various animals were often prescribed as suitable medicine for a wide range of ailments. Also, compare the fact that many tribes of people through the ages have resorted to eating the body parts of enemies (most often the heart and brains) in order to gain something of their life force, or courage, or even skills they had in life. Consumption of body parts are even known to have been a form of “ancestor worship” for some peoples, in which ingesting a part of a dead loved one bonded them to the living (we see this idea emerge, oddly enough, in the fantasies of certain modern cannibals, such as Jeffrey Dahmer.)

In all it is believed that Zee Oui killed and partially devoured the bodies of at least six children before he was arrested following suspicions about a murder in Rayong in 1956. He was given a trial at which he was found to be insane, and was sentenced to life in a mental home, but thanks to general outcry, this was over turned by Field Marshall Sarit Thanarat who ordered Zee Oui’s execution by firing squad. His body was autopsied, his brain removed and studied to see if there were some abnormality to account for his crimes; there were none, and his body was preserved and eventually displayed at the Siriraj Medical Museum in Bangkok where it can still be seen today amongst the other displays of flesh trauma, fetal abnormalities, and parasitological artifacts. His name on the case he is presented in is given as Si Quey, and, bracketed in Thai next to it, Manut kin khon, “cannibal”; in order that there should be no ambiguity to his crimes, a note alongside explains that he killed “because he love to eat human organs, not because of starving [sic].” The bullet holes are still clearly visible, and his exhibition is a major pull for most people visiting the bizarre museum.

The impact that Zee Oui’s crimes had on popular Thai imagination is displayed in the way he is still used as a boogieman by parents to frighten children into good behavior, telling them that if they break curfew then Zee Oui will eat them alive. To fully understand the significance of this, however, one needs to understand that in modern Thai society a strong belief in the supernatural persists and populates even the chaotic streets of Bangkok with innumerable ghosts, from the murderous urban legend of Mae Nak to the disgusting Phi Krasue, a floating head from which dangles a complete digestive system, that lives by eating human feces; that a real man should be elevated to the pantheon of horrors that gibber in the night is quite remarkable, and a testament to the awful nature of his crimes.