Novel Ways of Remembering Thai History: On Two New Books About Bangkok

By Rosalie MetroApril 10, 2023

Novel Ways of Remembering Thai History: On Two New Books About Bangkok

Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok by Emma Larkin
The King of Bangkok by Chiara Natalucci, Sara Fabbri, and Claudio Sopranzetti

IN EUROPE and North America, Bangkok is best known for what it offers to tourists: glittering temples, floating markets, red-light districts, and lung-choking traffic.

But this city of 10 million has a hidden geography. Sanam Luang, the green oval park where travelers might pick up a limeade after a trip to the Grand Palace, holds the ghosts of hundreds of protesters who were killed and disappeared in 1976 and 1992 as they voiced opposition to right-wing militarism. Hualampong, the main train station, hosts the dreams of millions of villagers who have come to the big city looking for opportunity. High-rises are built on the bones of cleared slums. Malls tower over immigrant communities both long-established, like the Thai-Chinese one, and much newer, like those made up of undocumented workers who keep streaming in from Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos.

Thai authors have captured these histories in a range of notable novels. To name just two recent ones, there is Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s narratively experimental Bangkok Wakes to Rain (2019) and Veeraporn Nitiprapha’s magical realist Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat (2022).

Yet foreign authors have often focused either on what Thailand means to tourists, as in Alex Garland’s The Beach (1996), or on the topics most likely to grab the attention of Western readers, as in John Burdett’s bar-girl murder mysteries.

Two literary works published early in the 2020s by people who are not Thai but know Bangkok well break with this tradition by delving beneath the city’s glossy surface in nuanced ways. Emma Larkin’s 2021 novel Comrade Aeon’s Field Guide to Bangkok weaves together generational histories of resistance against militarism and rampant development. Claudio Sopranzetti, Sara Fabbri, and Chiara Natalucci’s 2019 collaborative creation, The King of Bangkok (English edition from University of Toronto Press, 2021), is a graphic novel following a young man’s migration to the city in the 1980s and his involvement in the Red Shirt protests of 2010.

These authors bring deep understandings of the context. Emma Larkin, whose new work marks the fiction debut of a pseudonymous author whose previous books were both warmly received nonfiction volumes on Burma, was raised in Thailand and still lives there. Claudio Sopranzetti, the lead author of the graphic novel, is based in Vienna, where he teaches at Central European University. He spent a decade doing ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand on political movements, initially showcasing his findings in scholarly journals and a UC Press book that won the Society for Applied Anthropology’s Margaret Mead Award. Both are fluent in Thai, and it shows. The acclaimed Thai edition of The King of Bangkok is called Taa Sawang, literally meaning “bright eyes”—an idiom referring to a democratic political awakening. Meanwhile, Larkin’s dialogue sometimes feels like it was written in Thai and translated into English; she memorably describes the irresistible nature of a rumor by using the Thai idiom “dogs get off on sniffing fresh shit.”

Not only are these books well informed, but they are also captivating. Larkin’s novel follows characters brought together by a particular plot of land—one of the few undeveloped green spaces in Bangkok, bordered by a slum and surrounded by high walls. Witty, one memorable character, is an architect looking for a spot for his next skyscraper, and his wife, Wongduan, even more engagingly drawn, is a former movie star who writes soap operas; their son Win disappeared during the Black May demonstrations in 1992. Ida is a troubled American expat housewife whose apartment overlooks the mysterious jungle enclave. Residents of the slum include a resilient snack-seller, a former fireman who home-brews rice wine, and a volunteer EMT who raises Siamese fighting fish.

The titular Comrade Aeon, who survived the 1976 crackdown on leftist protestors and years as an underground revolutionary in the jungle, might be called “homeless.” But it would be more apt to say that all of Bangkok is his home. As Larkin puts it, he “is no longer bothered by bad smells.” Inhaling the smells of Bangkok’s neglected canals, he breathes in “a top note of raw sewage, ripe and overpowering, but his second and third breaths uncover multiple middle notes; spilled diesel; algae, sweet and musty; the noxious tang of E. coli; and … a distinct base note of dead cat.” Whether readers have personally sniffed these canals or not, Larkin’s evocative descriptions make us feel as at home as Comrade Aeon does. Her carefully intertwined plots propel us toward a conclusion that is satisfyingly revelatory yet realistically ambiguous.

The King of Bangkok has a less complex narrative structure but relies on similarly vivid portrayals of Thai life. Nok is a blind lottery-ticket seller—a familiar figure to anyone who has walked Bangkok’s streets—and the book tells the story of his past as a motorbike taxi driver and a methamphetamine addict, as well as a supporter of former prime minister (2001–06), and now exile, Thaksin Shinawatra. Over the course of the story, we learn how he eventually became disillusioned by both his political hero and by the revered Thai monarchy.

With his wife Gai, their son Sun, and his best friend Hong, Nok offers the reader a firsthand perspective on the human beings behind the headlines of Thai politics. Through their eyes, we can see why Thaksin’s political moves—his socialized medicine plan (known as “30 baht health care scheme”) and the numbered vests he provided for motorcycle taxi drivers, for instance—were so wise: they offered people who had been looked down on a sense of dignity and recognition. And we can also understand the heartbreak Thaksin supporters felt in 2006 when they saw “the king, a man we’d always thought was on our side, give [the army] power.” I suspect that this is one of the several lines that the authors decided to black out in the Thai edition of this book, given the country’s strict lèse-majesté laws. By letting Nok’s character voice anti-monarchy sentiments, Sopranzetti, Fabbri, and Natalucci honor the views of Thai people for whom it felt too dangerous to say those words.

Sara Fabbri captures this story in stunning drawings based on meticulous research. The authors collected a visual archive of Thai life spanning several decades and use it to help the reader time-travel, from the label on the 1980s Nescafé canister where Nok stores his savings to the phone with the curly cord that he uses in the village to call Gai back. Those familiar with Thai politics will notice their carefully considered details (e.g., Sulak Sivaraksa’s 1980 essay collection Siam in Crisis being passed around), but any reader can see the beauty in Fabbri’s illustrations.

The King of Bangkok is part of the University of Toronto Press’s ethnoGRAPHIC series, which follows a trend of the past decade that guides anthropologists to present academic knowledge in artistic rather than argumentative forms. Similarly, the Ethnocine Collective supports anthropologists to create documentaries using decolonial and feminist methods. These are endeavors worth following for their potential to bring specialized knowledge to a larger audience.

While The King of Bangkok goes so far as to include discussion questions and a reading list at the end, Comrade Aeon also reflects careful research. Larkin’s acknowledgments section cites political scientist William A. Callahan’s Imagining Democracy: Reading “The Events of May” in Thailand (1998) and historian Thongchai Winichakul’s memoir Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976, Massacre in Bangkok (2020). For readers interested in digging deeper into repression in Thailand, I would add Tyrell Haberkorn’s In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (2018), and for those whose interest is piqued by haunted construction sites, Andrew Alan Johnson’s Ghosts of the New City: Spirits, Urbanity, and the Ruins of Progress in Chiang Mai (2014).

Beyond carefully packaging academic knowledge for popular consumption, the enduring value of these two books is that they tell parts of an ongoing story. Prayut Chan-o-cha’s 2014 military-turned-judicial coup stands, and his suppression of pro-democracy and anti-monarchy sentiments continues. These two works of fiction help readers see how this situation developed and why it may continue.

Inspiring these fictionalized accounts of political repression are real people whose lives have been lost. After finishing these books, I returned to Luke Duggleby’s photography series For Those Who Died Trying, 1974–2018, in which he collaborated with the families of Thai human rights and environmental activists who were the victims of extrajudicial killings, staging and photographing their portraits at the presumed locations of their murders.

Artistic projects like Duggleby’s, and like the two books reviewed here, prevent these lives from being forgotten. There is no shortage of incredibly courageous Thai activists, drawn from the ordinary people who walk the streets of Bangkok and other cities and villages, who continue to risk everything to speak out. It is inspiring to see non-Thai people like Larkin, Sopranzetti, Fabbri, and Natalucci using their relative security to amplify these stories. These books have entertaining elements—e.g., a humorous subplot involving the outrageous plots of a televised historical drama runs through Comrade Aeon, while there is lively artwork in The King of Bangkok—but they are not exactly beach reads. Still, they are by no means dry and moralistic accounts of political history. Much more than didactic good-versus-evil tales, they shine by doing justice to the complex people who animate a country that many of us would do well to know better.

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Rosalie Metro is an assistant teaching professor in the College of Education & Human Development at the University of Missouri–Columbia. She lived in Thailand for several years while conducting research with migrants and refugees from Burma.

LARB Contributor

Rosalie Metro is an assistant teaching professor in the College of Education at the University of Missouri-Columbia. She researches conflicts that arise in the classroom around history, identity, and language, both in Southeast Asia and in the United States. She is the author of Teaching US History Thematically: Document-Based Lessons for the Secondary Classroom (Teachers College Press, 2017) and a novel, Have Fun in Burma (Northern Illinois University Press, 2018). Learn about her work at rosaliemetro.com, and follow her @rose_metro.

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