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Tales of Thailand
by Pira Sudham
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Reviewed by: John Walsh
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These heartfelt stories of life in Thailand and, particularly, the poor north-eastern region known as Esarn, form the basis of this collection by the noted author Pira Sudham. In a series of sparse stories focusing on the life of a single person, as is reminiscent of much of Thai literature available in translation, Pira Sudham delineates the grinding poverty, the reliance upon the monsoon, the crushing oppressiveness of what he terms the "powers of darkness," the construct of miseducation, lack of opportunity, superstition, ignorance, corruption and misery that ensures the people of Esarn must not only be condemned to misery but will recreate the misery for successive generations following them.
"When years of drought brought the family to despair, Kum had to go away for over a month with a group of men in search of new land, away from their arid plateau. But he returned severely ill. The village clairvoyant proclaimed that the spirits of his ancestors did not want him to take his family away from the land they had bequeathed him. The question of moving never occurred again to the Surins." (p.106)
The stories also include glimpses of the lives of the rich and the problems that they too may face in modernizing Thailand and those inveigled into supporting their corrupt exploitation of the system to maintain their positions: the servants and workers, the hit man who is hired to kill those who get in the way. A dozen school teachers have been murdered in Esarn over the last couple of decades for the crime of speaking out about the difficulty of conditions. Just like the situation faced by migrants on the fringes of Thailand and Thai society, the poor are not protected by the central state but are instead subject to the vagaries of local power wielders. Hence, their rice is taken from them as rent, their livelihood is ruined by salination when nearby land is converted into salt farms to feed the industrial processes of Bangkok and their children are sold into slavery and prostitution; all the while, the people of Easrn fail to help themselves by their meekness, their adherence to outdated superstitions and their predilections for gambling and fecklessness.
The urgency, the bitterness and the need for justice are plain to see in his intentions for his work and in the work itself but, as he is a writer of fiction then it is as an author that Pira Sudham should be judged. The question is, therefore, can he write? Well, this collection is perhaps not the best advertisement for his talents. It consists of an excerpt from his novel Monsoon Country, some stories from a previous collection Siamese Tales and a couple of new pieces. These are surrounded by an introduction, interview with the author, commendation for the Nobel Prize for Literature and other material serving to add some substance to what would otherwise be an insubstantial work.
Judging the value of the fictional pieces is rendered more difficult by a couple of typographical errors in the early pages; for example, a heartfelt appeal to a parent becomes "oh, feather," while a 'fiancée' becomes a 'financee,' which has a rather different type of connotation and land is ruined not by 'salination' but by 'salivation.' Nevertheless, the prose is sufficiently robust and the storylines clear, while the characters are vivid and their internal lives are presented, albeit in a cursory way in some cases.
Unfortunately, Pira Sudham writes at a snail's pace and although his Estate work in providing resources and help to impoverished local people is of inestimable value, it would serve the cause of Thai literature more if he were able to produce a little more. This would not just be vanity but a demonstration of the purpose of his writing:
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I have set myself up as an example of the possibility of improving one's life in Thailand, of accomplishing what one sets out to do. When I realized that my mind had already been crippled, I determined to overcome this lameness. I had to start from square one, relearning, getting rid of the blindfold, making a revolution in my life. You can imagine, if I could [do this for all]
Thais, what kind of revolution that would be." (p.15)
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