Articles

The Shadowed Country

Change is inevitable. Nothing is permanent. The mighty Pharaohs, the great Caesars, and all the fearsome empire-building warlords have come and gone. Then, one day, after so many lives were lost, the Berlin Wall fell like a ripe fruit. Before that, an Irish poet lamented: Change, change utterly. A terrible beauty is born. Decades later, a Thai schoolteacher, who recalled the Buddha’s words: Everything is transient, reconfirmed his belief that agents of change could come in many forms, visible and invisible, silently, gradually or at times with bombs, guns and grenades, the explosive brutal change.

In Shadowed Country, Pira Canning Sudham has covered the socio-economic and political changes occurring in Siam during the past 50 years. The books portray the subject of social transition, identify agents of change while he attempted to hold on to the life he had known in childhood. He had mixed feelings, when words like "strike," "protest" and "exploitation," which were once unheard in the kingdom, now being used freely and widely in the mass media, creep into the minds like ominous agents of change. He asks himself: How long would the traditional way of life last? Should he, one day, become an instrument of change?

Throughout the long history of change, we ask ourselves: What kind of values should we strive to maintain in spite of all the changes taking place around us? In what way are we changing?

Now peoples throughout the world have become alike in many ways. Men in most parts of the world wear similar shirts, trousers and jackets and use English to communicate. We eat much the same sorts of food, partly due to the worldwide spread of American-based food chains. The cheese used on pizzas or the potatoes for chips and crisps has gradually changed people’s tastes and eating habits. Until recently there were hardly any Thai farmers growing potatoes, which had to be imported for foreign residents. Now a large number of Thai farmers have become potato farmers, changing to new methods of farming, to being commercial farmers to earn larger income from this new cash crop. Milk and cheese are more examples. Not long ago, few Thai people consumed dairy products. Now milk has become part of their diet, and cheese is following quickly. The dairy industry is thriving. More and more rice fields have become grazing land, and vast areas of woodland have been turned into dairy farms. A change in the landscape has occurred as a result.

The age of electricity has come to Thailand, reaching into small communities even in rural areas. What does this mean? It means television, video, telephone and fax machines, satellite discs, rice cookers, refrigerators, computer, Internet and e-mail. Each of these items has become an agent of change in its own way.

Television means that people are exposed to advertisements as well as being entertained. These advertisements make people want goods and services that they never thought they needed before. New products tempt the consumers to change the old for the new. Hand-made Isan bamboo and tar buckets, for instance, have now been completely replaced by plastic ones. Handicrafts are being rapidly replaced by machine-made products. Walk into any village in Thailand today, if you see a man making a basket from bamboo, he would be in his sixties or seventies and probably one of the last of his generation that can and care to do the craft by hand. Soon, too, the art of mud mee hand woven-silk will be gone from Earn. Looking at dramas or television programmes also makes people in villages want to change their lives. They see how other people live and they want to catch up, to achieve certain standards or style. The electric rice cooker is another status symbol, as important as having a refrigerator. Small and innocent as they seem, rice cookers are also secret agents of change. Designed to cook white rice (kao jaow) with water, the sort of rice consumed in most parts of Siam and the world, rice cookers are not for Isan sticky rice (kao niaw), which is steamed. So, once, an Isan person has acquired an electric rice cooker, the family will have to switch from eating kao niaw to kao jaow. This also means that rice farmers have to switch to growing more kao jaow too. When one eats kao niaw, one eats it with fingers; as for kao jaow, one eats with fork and spoon. So the change simply occurs.

Refrigerators are also immense agents of change. Simply put, food can be stored for a longer period of time, causing a major change in the daily life of many refrigerator owners, who previously foraged for food in the woods and in the fields. They harvested what they grew, gathered wild plants, leaves, berries, roots, and mushrooms. In the ponds and streams and swamps, they caught frogs, eels, fish, and shrimps. This was part of their daily routine. Having refrigerators can change all this since the refrigerator owners do not have to gather their food each day. They may be some of those workers who have worked in Taiwan, Japan, Singapore and in the Middle East. These are the "new rich" of the communities. They are likely to dismantle their age-old huts (thatched roofs, bamboo walls, wooden stilts and ladders) to build entirely new houses of bricks and mortar, steel and glass, curtains and iron shutters, a stark contrast to houses of those who remain poor.

Resistance to change

Another aspect of change, good or bad – positive or negative, depends on us who view it or on who may profit from it. For instance, the people who claim that planting eucalyptus trees in vast areas greatly benefits the country are likely to be some giant corporations such as Finland’s forestry consulting firm, Jaacko Poyry, Finnish Stara Enso, Japan’s largest paper producer, Ogi, national bilateral aid agencies including Finland’s FINNIDA, Japan’s JICA and Canada’s CIDA, the UK’s Pira International (which provides information and research services for the paper, packaging and publishing industries), Sweden’s Sunds Defibrator (which supplies papermaking equipment), Eka Nobel (pulp and paper making chemicals), Britain’s Commonwealth Development Corporation (which offers grants from British taxpayers’ money in the form of foreign aid), ABB and Gotaverken (power and steam equipment), pulp and wood chip exporters, investors and shareholders of pulp and paper manufacturing plants, Australian eucalyptus seed exporters, nursery owners, Siam Cement, Siam Pulp and Paper, Siam Cellulose, Phoenix Pulp and Paper, Soon Hua Seng, Advance Agro, and the high-ranking officials of the Forestry Department, who have the authority to lease the so-called "degraded" forests and land to concessionaires to grow eucalyptus trees, among tens of thousands of other beneficiaries. On the other side are the sore losers, who are millions of the populace brutally forced to leave the land, where the authorities want to hand over to eucalyptus planters, the inhabitants of rural areas severely affected by the plantations, and the environmentalists, who fight to safeguard the environment, which includes the soil made more arid and acidic and less fertile by eucalyptus trees, the air and water from being polluted with fumes and toxic waste discharged by pulp and paper factories.

Some environmentalists claimed that five kilograms of sulphur dioxide are released to the air for each ton of pulp produced from using sulphite solution in the process of boiling wood chips, that cellulose fibres disintegrated during processing are discharged as waste water, which can deplete oxygen in rivers and streams. The sulphur added in the pulping process reacts with organic chemicals present in the pulp to form unaccountable organo-chlorine pollutants, including dioxin, which are some of the most potent poisons known to man.

Each year Isan, where large-scale eucalyptus planting has taken place, is becoming more and more like a semi-desert state of Australia, while its two main rivers, the Pong and the Shee, have been so devastatingly polluted that dead fish appeared on the surfaces for hundred of miles, that animals could not drink the water, and men could not make use of the rivers.

The drive to expand eucalyptus plantations and establish pulp and paper industry in Thailand as in several third world countries has become one of the greatest agents of change in the 20th century.

History of change

The process of change in Thailand escalated rapidly in the late nineteenth century. King Rama V (King Chulalongkorn) toured Europe twice during his reign to broaden his outlook and to enable him to find out the good and bad features of colonial rule. In Europe he saw many that impressed him and he brought back ideas and institutions with the intention to transform or modernize Thailand, especially in the area of education. He had 76 children by 36 wives (32 sons and 44 daughters). The princes were later sent to Europe for education in order to prepare them for service to the State. This period was similar to Japan’s drive to Westernize its society by bringing in Western clothing, customs, architecture, education, industry, and Western military training and weaponry. King Chulalongkorn realized that European imperialist powers, Britain and France especially, posed a threat to the political and economic integrity of Thailand. His aim was to find some way to prevent the kingdom from being colonized. His Westernizing efforts were successful. The Westernization of Thailand included the engagement of European advisers and teachers. The English produced beneficial results in education, police, surveying and railways, while the Danes were employed in the navy, the French in law and public works, the Italians in architecture and construction, and the Germans in railway construction. The first railway line was built in 1892 to link Korat in the northeast with Bqangkok, while the postal and telegraphy services were established. In 1888, the tram appeared in Bangkok streets, to be followed by the first motor car in 1902. On his return from the first European tour, King Chulalongkorn had an avenue of five kilometres built from the Grand Palace to his new Dusit Palace, after the pattern of the Champs Elysees in Paris, the Mall in London, and the Unter den Linden in Berlin. He gave it the name of Rajdamnern Avenue (Royal Progress Avenue).

For the first time, surnames were given to the people, in 1913. Prior to that, the only way to identify a person was to refer to him as son of Nai (Mister) so and so or as belonging to this or that place or village. Under the king’s influence, men and women adopted Western hair styles and clothing. He also introduced football and Western dancing to the country.

The wind of change began to increase in velocity when the king sent not only his sons, but also sons of noblemen, as well as commoners’ sons to study in Europe. Most of them went to the United Kingdom, where they entered professional schools and universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, London, Edinburgh and Manchester.

In 1911, in the reign of King Rama VI, a plot to overthrow the government was hatched by a group of army and navy officers, civil servants and civilians. But the revolution did not succeed. On June 24, 1932, in the reign of King Rama VII, another revolution broke out. As a result a fledgling democracy was born in place of absolute monarchy. The king stepped down and left the kingdom for England where he died in exile. Out of the fifteen party leaders of revolutionists, thirteen were educated in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Since then democratically elected governments have come and gone, almost at the whim of despotic leaders. Against the despots, tens of thousands of the Thai people rose in opposition, resulting in the massacres which occurred on the 14th of October 1973, the 6th of October 1976, and the 18th of May 1992.

Looking back at the history of change in Thailand, it is easier to map and gaze at the landmarks of physical change, while it is unlikely that one can locate any clear record of the change in the minds of the people, their mentality and attitudes. Westernization has presented superabundant demands, sometimes changing Thai society for the better, sometimes for the worse. Perhaps due to the Westernizing reforms around the nineteenth century, Thailand was one of the few countries in Southeast Asia, which escaped the colonial grasp of the Western countries. Paradoxically, this is one of the reasons why Siamese people even today remain open to influences from the West. Western or foreign ideas, technology, and institutions are taken into Thai society without prejudice. Now, you may ask, is this good or not? Certainly this is a question which confront all intellectuals in the kingdom. One may ask: Are we going to change most things? What about questions of value? What shall we choose to keep and what shall we choose to change?

"What I would like to see unchanged is the love and respect young people hold for their elders. Perhaps you might think me old-fashioned and conservative to place such value on filial piety. But what a pity that old people are not respected in so many countries throughout the world," said Sudham. What the author truly wants to see change is the attitude that accepts corruption as a way of life. "We should be a people that know the different between right and wrong, a people of conscience. The word "conscience" is new to Thai society. In a sense, it is a foreign import, perhaps deriving from Christianity. There has not been a word for "conscience" in Thai until recently, when few words have been coined as a translation of it. I wonder whether it would be a subversive task to implant "conscience" in the Thai mind as it is important as a safeguard against accepting corruption as a way of life. How else can we be respected by other peoples, not only in trade but also in our daily life?"

Having said "change is inevitable," we may go further to ask whether we have the power to influence what sorts of changes take place around us. Can we uphold what we believe to be valuable? Can we hold on to our heritage and also encourage changes that are necessary? We are not helpless in confronting change, but we are often confused. Who will take the initiative in guiding change? Should it be the people in power or the people on the street? These questions are left open, but for Pira Canning Sudham’s part, he claims that he would do what he could, as a writer and a teacher, to steer his students towards a positive course of change.