Articles

The Damned of Thailand

By Dr Noel Rowe

Pira Canning Sudham’s literary works, People of Esarn, Tales of Thailand, Monsoon Country and its sequel, The Force of Karma are quintessentially about Thailand in conflicts.

He speaks on behalf of the impoverished people of Esarn, one of Thailand’s most economically and politically disadvantaged regions. He claimed: "Our Esarn lives are subject partly to the mercy of nature – drought, floods, diseases and scarcity – and partly to the exploitation and price suppression of agricultural produce and low wages. To escape these predicaments millions of our able men and women venture to seek opportunities abroad. Those who cannot afford to pay in advance the abominably high fees to employment agencies to work overseas have to be satisfied with jobs in Thailand’s factories and sweatshops or being drivers of trucks, taxis or fume-belching three-wheelers that choke the streets of Bangkok. Tens of thousands of Esarners in exile eke out their living, selling food on footpaths or work as servants in homes of the well-to-do or in restaurants, bars, nightclubs and brothels. With endurance, the majority of Esarners tend to accept fate as something they cannot alter. Such acceptance stems from a belief in palangkam, the force of karma – our deeds done in past lives. Thus in this life we reap the results or retribution of what we previously committed.

"One knows the good heartedness, silent endurance, submissiveness, superstition and ignorance of majority of Esarners as well as the selfishness, cruelty and arrogance of unscrupulous shopkeepers, ruthless middlemen and harsh employers.

"What I saw and experienced in childhood immensely influenced me. As a result, I tend to sympathize with the poor, the powerless, the suppressed and the much-maligned, whose lives are under the no-win situation. Fortunately there are many lucky ones who, by hook or by crook or sheer luck are rescued by foreigners from the seething morass, from the soul-destroying bars, nightclubs and brothels. Those saviours may be farang admirers, some of whom have elevated the rescued to be their wives or husbands as the case may be or as friends or partners. In some cases, the rescuers take them out and away from Thailand to live in Europe or Australia or in the USA.

"Those farang rescuers pose as a contrast to those who exploit and suppress the poor, the ignorant and the powerless, keeping them voiceless and subservient and in dire needs — a proven method to ensure great authority over the abundant work force and the easy-to-govern populace.

Sudham also declares that he wants to find place in literature for the impoverished people of Esarn so that they would not live voicelessly and defenselessly and then die in vain.

In fulfilling this commitment, the author remains honest about the positive and negative aspects of Esarn life. Even as he celebrates the religious rituals and life-cycles which imbue Thai rural living with coherence and calmness, the writer exposes various forms of corruption, the lure of the cities, the shame many displaced Esarners feel about their ignoble birth and the Lao language. He pertains to the ambiguities of change and the revolutionary dream, which lingers after the October 1973, October 1976 and May 1992 massacres of pro-democracy protesters in the streets of Bangkok.

While Pira Canning Sudham can confidently appeal to the natural and religious symbolism, which is still an integral aspect of rural life, he depicts his people with the objective detachment of a social realist. He also draws on the wealth of autobiographical material, particularly in creating characters and narrators who are positioned within a process of transition.

There is a village boy who, because his parents offer him to a monk in one of Bangkok’s temples, bravely makes efforts to improve his station in life. He attends classes at the temple school, wins a scholarship to study in England and eventually renounces the surface pleasures of European culture to return home and attempt a difficult reintegration. Back in Esarn, he belongs uneasily, yet dedicates himself to helping his people. Oddly, however, this Thai writer who has, in his life as in his masterpiece, Shadowed Country, returned to his village called Napo, writes literary works in English.

Pira Canning Sudham’s writing is dominated by the symbol of Esarn, the Korat Plateau of north eastern region that depends largely on the munificence of monsoon seasons. This region confines its people within its own ambivalence. Esarn is a place of happy, innocent children, but also of petty, brutal officials and local chowpor or godfathers. It is a place of patience, but also passivity, of people attuned to the cycles of nature, but also resigned to be neither happy nor unhappy. This ambivalence prevents Sudham’s Esarn from becoming a sentimental or conservative symbol. In fact the narrative positioning quite often ensures that Esarn is not seen as a simple home but as a place of change in which characters and narrators are trying to fashion some wisdom from their balance of grief and gain.

Any chance that Esarn might function as a nostalgic symbol is swiftly dispelled by stories that expose the sinister side, which includes child trade and slavery in Bangkok’s numerous brothels. In Two Boys of Soka, a story in Tales of Thailand (The Fifth Cycle Edition 2002) Dan, a six-year old boy, attempting to interpret and appease the land’s thirst for sacrifice, kills himself, hoping thereby to summon rain and so prevent his friend, Kum, from being sold into child prostitution. Even as he accidentally brings about his death, Dan discovered that the land is merciless and loses his innocent worldview.

There seemed to be so much of the cynicism in life, the universal suffering, sorrow, cruelty, the primeval bitterness and the futility of all things.

Dan dies without receiving any sign that his sacrifice has been redemptive. There is, in fact, a prevailing sense that his sacrifice has more to do with blind necessity than with freedom, emerging from the helplessness and ignorance, which give characteristics to the Esarn experience.

A great deal of narrative sympathy is devoted to the figures of the ageing parents whose children have disappeared into cities. One example of this is Enduring Esarn Life. Not only are the farmer and his wife left with the work, but also with the feeling that their wisdom is dying with them. Observing how religious and social customs are deteriorating, even in rural Thailand, the wife recalls how the traditions of land and religion once supported her life.

Our lives then seemed to have a kind of code that bound us together and we could go by what our parents and grandparents handed down to us.

Even so, her life is made coherent as much by resignation as by ritual. She invokes the buffaloes to symbolize her acceptance of necessity and accepts that she is "neither happy nor unhappy." Her husband invests the land with peace, which he also discovers in Buddhism. Yet, for all its resignation, this narrative is also a separated one – the wife and the farmer confide to the reader what they do not communicate to each other; how much each wants the return of their children. This narrative structure reveals the loneliness and helplessness hidden by the polite face, which they show during most of their narration.

Sudham’s work is sensitive to the ambiguity of its polite-faced narratives, knowing that there is a pragmatic version of innocence, which cultivates the appearance of calm, even ignorance, as a way of avoiding harsher realities. In From Esarn to Germany, a bar-girl, who married a farang customer and moved to Hamburg, tries to convince herself that she is content, that she is no longer treated with contempt. On the contrary she has a chance to elevate above the state of being sub-human and, more pragmatically, she realizes that a future in Germany could not be worse than her previous life. Gradually, she reveals how she was taken from her village and forced into prostitution and how she resents the complacency and corruption, which allowed this to happen.

Pira Canning Sudham has not produced any literary works in Thai. Writing in English, he aims not only to give the English reader insights into Thai life, but also to give significance to the lives of the poor in rural Thailand so that "they do not come into this world to merely exist, suffer and die in vain."

Dr Noel Rowe
Department of English
The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia