peter young’s listopia

6) Siriworn Kaewkan, The Murder Case of Tok Imam Storpa Karde, 2006
There are very few novels that explore the separatist terrorism affecting the three small Thai provinces that border Malaysia, and this one, shortlisted for the 2006 SEA Write Award, quickly became required reading that year with an English translation following four years later. So who killed the much-loved imam in the small village of Tanyong Baru, right outside his own mosque? Terrorists or State officials? Soldiers or police? Is there a suspicious connection with a neighbouring Buddhist village? And why are the villagers closing their doors to an actual investigation? The reader's guess is as good as anyone elses, which indicates the clever structure of this tale of deflections and half-truths that inevitably views the subject from an outsider's perpective yet at the same time lets the story's participants speak (seemingly, often less than truthfully) for themselves. Kaewkan simply provides the necessary pieces to the jigsaw then lets the readers assemble it in a way that indicates there's an inevitable collective madness going on here. There are a number of possible courses of events discernable if this short novel is read closely, which is easily done in one sitting – just don't expect a straightforward whodunnit.

via Not the Nation: PM Declares Inner Bangkok Safe as Giant ‘Croc-zilla’ Terrorizes Pathum Thani.

For anyone who may have been wondering what's my situation re. the flooding in Bangkok: as much as I'm averse to Facebook I've posted far more about this over there because I have friends on FB who are similarly affected (or worse), and we're trying to keep each other updated. Don't want everyone else on my LJ Friends List to feel neglected...

So yesterday the floodwater arrived as expected: our last report was that it's now in the street directly outside our place (it's Benji's old house, which we have not yet put up for sale). The water is probably about 10cm deep or more which means it's probably higher than our driveway and flowing around our front door, which is fortunately slightly raised about another 5cm so it may yet get inside if the water gets any deeper. Just about the entire estate of 50 square kilometres is now underwater to varying degrees. It's mostly large rice fields intercut with slightly elevated roads, but the main road a few kilometres away is anywhere up to 2 metres higher so it's now lined with hundreds of parked cars. No crocodiles sighted as yet from any nearby croc farm; like other croc farms around Bangkok they may have to be released if the local flooding gets considerably worse. Here's a gratuitous news photo from last week of an unexpected visitor dropping in for a bite to eat:



Benji and Miles are now in Hua Hin, where it's 100% flood- and croc-free despite being completely swamped with refugees from Bangkok, and with a couple of similarly washed-out neighbours staying indefinitely. Me, I'm in Houston TX where it's drizabone, but I know where I'd rather be.

Ah well, nil desperandum.

20) Collin Piprell, Bangkok Knights, 1989
Despite having lived here for two years now, this is only my third venture into Thailand's boisterous and often shady breed of expat fiction - my previous excursions all ended as disappointments. Canadian author and journalist Collin Piprell started out writing guide books for Thailand's diving community then worked his way into getting his short fiction published in the Bangkok Post. These are bar stories, yet their quality may be a cut above the rest in this often seedy sub-genre of world literature because Bangkok Knights has now received three different editions from three different publishers. If so, this collection probably sets a good 'bar story' standard: all of them are gently humorous or bittersweet in tone, neither outlandishly sexist nor patronising, and they share a cast of fairly well characterised (if rather clichéd) expat Western males combined with an assortment of colourful (if also rather clichéd) Thai females. What I expected to find, and certainly did, is that uneasy distrust that often sees them eyeing each other warily over the cultural barricades while still needing each other for various pre-determined selfish reasons, in fact it's often the cultural frisson that informs each story's plot.

The first-person narrator of all the stories remains largely invisible throughout except for a couple of episodes, one which describes a journalistic trip up the Maekok river that goes disastrously wrong (in fact the only non-bar story in the collection and probably the best), and the final outing which is an interesting mixture of relationship and identity crises running in parallel, something that probably comes upon any emotionally unattached, long-time expat resident of Thailand. Piprell has also written three novels, one of which is categorically science fiction. I expect I'll be reading them all.

         

Proof that Miles is officially the Coolest Kid in Town: these six photos have been blogged at Hua-Hin.com as part of their Pictures of Hua Hin photostream. No, I didn't submit them or anything; someone's been trawling Flickr and my stats showed someone had clicked through to the last one, which then meant wading through thirty-five pages of stuff (clearly not selected for artistic merit) only to find five more. But at least the photostream reflects that Hua Hin is in fact a decent enough place to live – and even though I won't be around for the annual reggae festival next month, the famous jazz festival in June is something I should at last get to see.

5) Fa Poonvoralak, The Most Silent School in the World, 2009
This came highly recommended from Marcel Barang, who also wrote the introduction to last year's English edition, describing it as "a literary UFO". Thailand isn't really on the map for wildly imaginative fiction, let alone science fiction and fantasy, so discovering something so unusual and category-defying was rather unexpected, particularly considering that this was also short-listed for the 2009 SEA Write Award. It's the story of eight schoolchildren of mixed ages at a riverside school in rural Thailand. They turn up when they want, night or day, there are no teachers, they play games with each other, not a great deal happens that's different from one day to the next, and they're not being groomed for a life in society. That's because in our plane of existence they're not really children at all: they're the eight Trigrams of Taoist cosmology, given English/Thai names like Water Nam, Mountain Pukao and Sky Fa. Then they are visited by eight more 'echo children' from the Moon who are all subtly different, then more children arrive from the rings of Saturn, the Oort Cloud, the Sun and various other places around the solar system. They speculate if their school may in fact be some kind of spaceship. They've finally multiplied to sixty-four – the same number of pairings that make up the Hexagrams of the I Ching – and the physical dimensions of their school keeps on growing, instantly adding more rooms as new children arrive. How they all interact may be meant to reflect the inherent subtleties of the I Ching's Hexagrams; although this seems to be the intent it was often difficult to figure out beyond the characters of the children/Trigrams themselves.

All the above is not actually a spoiler as it would have helped to know something of the structure of the book before beginning it. It's also rather inconclusive, but then this story was written more along ancient Eastern lines than that of a linear, modern Western text, with the analogy of the 'Silent School' probably meaning the life situations contained in the I Ching itself, and the physical school representing an expansion of an octagonal ba gua arrangement of Trigrams. This book is both perplexing and entertaining, and for someone who's long been interested in both creative fiction and the inner working of the I Ching it's also a rare and valuable find, regrettably one that I doubt will be showing up at many bookstores outside of Thailand.

44) Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl, 2009
This is offered less as a review and more as a set of notes and commentary, which I may also add to later. I planned to read both this and Robert Charles Wilson's Julian Comstock before last weekend's Aussiecon but, family life being what it is, I got too far behind and I only finished The Windup Girl a couple of days after the Hugo Awards. Needless to say I was pleased that it shared the 'Best Novel' with my favourite novel of last year (Miéville's The City & The City), not only because it is a very strong novel and worthy winner but also because it's rare to see my adopted country featured so prominently in western SF, and award-winning SF at that – The Windup Girl has grabbed the Nebula, the Compton Crook Award and now the Hugo (and was also one of Time magazine's Notable Books of the Year), while China's novel has bagged the BSFA, the Clarke and now also the Hugo.

The future setting:  In The Windup Girl Thailand in the 23rd century is one of the few successful countries in a world in which so many have succumbed to poverty since the Contraction, the massive scaling down of the world's economy that began with the scarcity of oil, and its success is put down to its independence and bloody-minded refusal to give in to external economic forces that pressure its borders, in much the same way that Bangkok is shored up against the rising waters of the Gulf of Thailand by huge levées that keep the city from drowning. Thailand is resisting any dependence on genetically engineered food created by the same Western conglomerates that have plagued the rest of the world with biological nightmares and botanical disasters, but a series of unconnected events are threatening to compromise that stubborn independence. What shouts louder than most of the themes of The Windup Girl are the socio-economic pressures that influence everything in this future time, filtering all the way down from the large corporations to the fruit sellers and rickshaw drivers of Bangkok's streets.

Look! Zeppelins!  'Biopunk' is not exactly a new portmanteau on the block, but I expect that given time The Windup Girl will eventually be properly separated from that misnomer 'steampunk' – unfortunately I've both seen and heard the novel described as such, and this novel doesn't even come close. Yes, it's a future that necessarily has zeppelins but it neither comes across as a box-ticking exercise on Bacigalupi's part nor an indulgence in a current SFnal obsession. The biological and botanical aspects are far more prominent in respect to the final shape of the novel (and its proper categorisation) than merely a cool method of transport that only appears occasionally.

The politics:  The Windup Girl doesn't present a complete picture of the politics of the time (nor does it have to), but I felt there were some omissions. There are conflicting Ministries shaking Bangkok apart but with little or no controlling hand of a Prime Minister of whatever political stripe, although reference is occasionally made to a 'December 12 incident' which weakened the political foundations of the nation. The Thai Royal Family is still the focus of allegiance in Thai society, figureheaded in the form of a young Queen, and the biggest problem for me of the entire book was how Bacigalupi enables Akkarat, the powerful head of the Trade Ministry, to be able to simply commandeer the Thai military to slap down another Ministry in a very warlike fashion. It's not even a proper civil war, it's a governmental war. Whilst it's true that, even today, there are factions within the military that are a little more vocal with their political affiliations than they strictly ought to be, I felt that with everyone falling over themselves to prove their loyalty to the Queen, it didn't ring true that the Thai military were freely available for the use of whichever government Ministry was in the ascendancy, and particularly for use against another arm of government. With loyalty to their Royal head of state and not the government or any arm of it, I strongly doubt that the military would allow itself to be used in such as partisan way, even given the mistaken reason for which it was done. But I'll give Bacigalupi the benefit of the doubt here as I'm curious if there is an actual precedent in Thailand's political history that has seen ideologically-opposed factions of government battling it out on the capital's streets. Given that this is Thailand, I would not say it's out of the question.

Naming and title conventions:  The liaison between the 23rd century Thai Royal Family and the outside world is conducted by the Queen's protector, a powerful character titled the Somdet Chaopraya. This was a good choice of title. 'Somdej' (with a 'j') today is usually reserved as a title for royalty beneath the rank of King or Queen, but it is also a title that can be applied to buildings with royal connections, such as a hospital, hence carrying the meaning 'by royal appointment'. 'Chao Phraya' is more commonly understood as the modern name of the major river that runs through Bangkok, however the two terms brought together in the form of 'Somdej Chao Phraya' have a much older significance as a now-obsolete title in feudal Thai society, meaning 'Grand Duke'. It was awarded to male commoners only under extraordinary circumstances and only to those with great achievements. There is also a Somdet Chaopraya Road in present day Bangkok, but let's not allow that to confuse matters.

23rd century folklore:  Chapter 24 mentions three real people important to 23rd century Thai folklore: the Ven. Ajahn Chanh ('ajahn' means 'teacher'), a Buddhist monk and teacher of meditation; the writer Chart Korbjitti, who I've been reading, and Seub Nakhasathien, a Thai environmentalist who took his own life in 1990 after his failure to protect a wildlife sanctuary from logging and dam construction.

Are the Thai characters recognisably Thai?  The Thailand of The Windup Girl sometimes felt like Thailand in name and location only: it could be a less-than-wholesome Singapore, or even a believably gritty Hong Kong. Half-way through I had begun to feel that Bacigalupi had lost his feel for the Thai people and how Thais conduct themselves on the everyday level: the Thais in the novel might not be recognisably Thai in the present day, they could in fact be from almost any South East Asian nation. While they've retained their deference and politeness it seems everyone has lost most of their capacity for happiness which, culturally speaking, is actually seen as an important strand in the present-day national character, this being the Land of Smiles. But this is a different Thailand in the 23rd Century, one that (perhaps a little belatedly, in Chapter 30) Bacigalupi acknowledges may be unrecognisable:

Jaidee always insisted that the Kingdom was a happy country, that old story about the Land of Smiles. But Kanya cannot think of a time when she has seen smiles as wide as those in museum photos from before the Contraction. She sometimes wonders if those people in the photos were acting, if perhaps the National Gallery is intending to depress her, or if it is really true that at one point people smiled so totally, so fearlessly.

This is a small paragraph but it's actually a rather necessary one, the like of which I felt the book could not really have done without. It also holds up a mirror of sorts to the lives of just about all the characters in The Windup Girl: they all have those wrenching moments in which the future that they planned for is supplanted by something considerably less promising, even something that they feared. Thais are an optimistic people and usually retain that optimism even in the face of dire poverty, so, given that the Thailand of The Windup Girl is a successful country on its own terms where others have failed badly, I'd say that given the shape the world is in Bacigalupi has extrapolated a possible future for the Thai national character rather well – they have had to pay a high price in everyday happiness, but the rest of the world has generally fared much worse.

One degree of separation: several years ago my wife met the renegade Thai general Khattiya Sawasdipol, aka. 'Seh Daeng' or 'Commander Red', who was the strategist behind much of the Red Shirt's street fighting tactics in Bangkok last month. He was cremated today in Bangkok. She met him at the funeral of her best friend's mother, as during his rise to notoriety and years before the tense political climate that exists today he had befriended that particular family with the spoken intention of getting to know Aom better (Aom is the lady in the middle in this photo with Miles), and he actually turned into a bit of a stalker for a while. Bizarrely, at the funeral Seh Daeng took the opportunity to give my wife and others free copies of his latest autobiographical best-seller based on his own exaggerated military exploits. On the cover is a charming photo of him pointing his gun at the reader. It's remaining untouched on our shelves where it's kept purely for its curiosity value at the moment, but while we have it it will remain unread. And because he'd paid his respects to her mother, Aom said she would also be going to Seh Daeng's funeral today even though she had absolutely no admiration for him.

Seh Daeng is survived by one daughter, now a 29 year-old lawyer who reportedly hated what her father had become and has also been an active campaigner for the government-supporting Yellow Shirts. Since his death she's presented a very different face when talking about her late father, and is now planning to work for a small political party he founded in his own name, the Khattiyatham Party. People are inevitably wondering "why the sudden switch?" Seh Daeng received plenty of cash from ex-PM-on-the-run Thaksin Shinawatra, the billionaire puppet master behind the UDD Red Shirt movement and who's currently doing his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech everywhere from Cambodia to Swaziland, travelling the world on both Nicaraguan and Montenegran passports. In fact his visit to Cambodia last November to act as 'economic adviser' raised eyebrows and even annoyed many of his supporters in Thailand; it has since caused more alarm in that many of the weapons found in Seh Daeng's Red Shirt protest camp in central Bangkok, such as M-79 grenade launchers, are not used by either the Thai military or police. So where did they come from? They are easily found and bought in Cambodia, where Thaksin is now reported to have secretly met his UDD supporters near the Thai border. As an investigation it's turning into a case of 'follow the money'. And the suspicion is now that more "money from Montenegro", as Thaksin's bankrolling activities are now euphemistically known, may be swaying Seh Daeng's daughter's political allegiances too.

I'm currently in Phoenix, Arizona, not Bangkok, although I will be passing through Bangkok on Thursday 15th before taking the train south to Hua Hin on the 16th, and then driving a further three hours south to see the family in Bang Saphan, well away from the trouble. Bangkok is actually 95% perfectly safe, if you avoid the Khao San Road, the big malls like Siam Paragon and areas with government offices.

Everyone's getting pretty distressed about what happened in Bangkok yesterday, on what's already become known as Black Saturday. After the events of the last week, Thaksin's rent-a-crowd barmy army – the 'Red Shirts' who want the government dissolved – can no longer claim any pretence towards peaceful protest: their more aggressive factions were seen covering CCTV cameras before storming government buildings, a TV station and military posts, while answering rubber bullets with petrol bombs and AK-47s which of course must have suddenly materialised out of thin air. The result: 20 dead and 800 injured.

A good source of on-the-spot info and opinion has actually been Somtow Sucharitkul's frequent Facebook updates and blog; the best newspaper coverage has probably been from the independent paper The Nation, which has now published a timeline of yesterday's events.

I would like my son to be able to grow up in a more stable country than this, and I fully expect he will. The Red Shirts, who, if they disconnected from their blind loyalty to Thaksin, are fully capable of becoming an effective opposition party if they would only do some actual politics; meanwhile Abhisit's Democrat-led coalition government have been continuing Thaksin's better policies in assisting the poor. Since being deposed and exposed as a crook, Thaksin was succeeded by a military government then two vote-buying, stunt-Thaksin PMs who both lost their jobs in disgrace before the current coalition government had to be formed. Abhisit is anything but a "tyrant", as a Red Shirt leader is now describing him. There is a long way to go before this country straightens itself out, and at the moment the Red Shirts are discrediting themselves all the way down the line, which I find very sad indeed as the non-violent majority are just the country's poor trying to speak up for themselves.