Titles from the venerable Penguin Classics imprint are usually books one knows one should have read even if one hasn’t (yet): known unknowns, as the famous saying goes. Behind the Painting by Thai author Siburapha is, even for the well-read anglophone consumer of literature, likely to qualify as an unknown unknown. First published 1937, this slim novel is one of Thailand’s best-known modern classics, has been adapted to film twice (as well as three stage musicals), and is a common set text in Thai secondary schools. Yet it is surely largely unknown outside Thailand.
Thailand
Thailand is known internationally as a popular sex tourism destination. Yet, despite its size and reputation, remarkably little research has focused on the country’s sex industry over the past two decades. Based on original ethnographic data and other sources, Sex Tourism in Thailand is an expansive yet nuanced study of diverse sex markets and their moral economies.
Mai Nardone’s Welcome Me to the Kingdom opens with two migrants from Thailand’s northeast who travel to Bangkok to make a new life for themselves in the bustling city. As they enter, they pass under a sign, asking visitors to “Take Home a Thousand Smiles”. It’s an ironic start to their lives in Bangkok, as the two live an unstable, hardscrabble life on Bangkok’s fringes.
Thailand remains under-represented in English-language fiction, contemporary or otherwise; little has been translated and only a little more has been published by authors who can claim roots in the country. Mai Nardone is a Thai-American writer who, while represented in such mainstream publications as Granta, McSweeney’s and Ploughshares, was raised and lives in Bangkok: any debut would be welcomed; it helps that his is very good.
Half a year on from the publication of India: A History in Objects, the British Museum and Thames & Hudson have released a new volume of the same vibrant format on Southeast Asia, an endeavor at least as ambitious as that for the Subcontinent: “it is hardly possible to be comprehensive,” as Alexandra Green modestly admits in her introduction.
High in the mountains of the Golden Triangle, where Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar once knew no boundaries, lives a rich multiplicity of traditional peoples. Prominent among them are the Karen, Hmong, Iu Mien, Lahu, Akha, and Lisu, six distinct groups who have maintained their independence, identity, and worldview to a high degree.
Before becoming king on the death of his half-brother King Nangklao (Rama III), Prince Mongkut (later Rama IV) of Siam had written a confidential letter in English on the subject of establishing a British embassy in Bangkok to intermediaries of the diplomatic envoy Sir James Brooke (later Rajah of Sarawak). Mongkut explained that such an embassy would not likely happen under Nangklao, because “Siam is now of most absolute monarchy in the world, in which monarchy one’s oppinion [sic] is no use.” He went on to say further that regular people were “equal of animals and vegitables [sic] in the kingdom,” which wasn’t exactly encouraging either. However, Mongkut, unlike the far more intransigent Nangklao, was known to be a man of great perception and intelligence, and while Brooke’s mission ultimately failed, “without King Mongkut’s benign influence and open attitude, the fate of Siam at the hands of the British and other western powers could have been very different.”