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Sep. 4th, 2008 10:46 amI took a lot of things away from my trip to Thailand last month, including but not limited to: a few cute skirts, a strong feeling of guilt about the international omnipresence of the English language, a fondness for mangosteens, several fun stories involving elephants, and a bunch of snippets of Thai history that made me want to learn a lot more about it, preferably from a source significantly more accurate than Anna (as in, 'And the King').
Unfortunately, it is apparently extremely difficult to find good books on Thai history translated into English - the NYPL has several, but they are all in Thai. While this is probably great for authenticity, it does not help me much. The ones that were actually in English, by contrast, looked like they'd be easy to understand but not necessarily accurate. The one thing I did come across while trawling through the library database records was a memoir called The Dragon's Pearl, by Sirin Phathanothai, which . . . did not have much or anything to do with Thai history, actually, but sounded cool anyways!
Basically, Sirin Phathanothai and her brother were sent as children to go live in China under the auspices of Premiere Zhao; their father was a Thai minister who was spearheading a top-secret effort to build relations between China and Thailand (top-secret, because Thailand was an official ally of the U.S. at that time and, it being the Cold War era, they would have been supremely pissed off.) The book centers mostly on Sirin's young adult years in China in sixties, being raised as a child of privilege in a country that wasn't supposed to have privilege anymore. Because Sirin spent a lot of time when growing up around the inner circles of both Thai and Chinese government, there's a lot of secret history and diplomacy stuff that's kind of fascinating - but I wish that Sirin Phathanothai had gone more deeply into an objective analysis of what was occurring. She talks a great deal throughout the book about her immersal in a political world, but much of the time the narrative simply relates how she felt about what was occurring without going too deeply at all into the surrounding circumstances - especially when it comes to major events like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (which she blames mostly on Jiang Qing, which is way too simplistic.) So I would not really recommend this for a deep and complex view of China during the time period.
However, politics aside, I found it worth reading for the various culture clashes involved in being born in Thailand, raised by the Chinese elite, and living among the Chinese proletariat - especially since there are three very different cultures involved there, none of which is Western, which is not something I've read a lot of. I'm not sure I'd recommend it heavily, but it piqued my curiosity on a lot of topics.
Unfortunately, it is apparently extremely difficult to find good books on Thai history translated into English - the NYPL has several, but they are all in Thai. While this is probably great for authenticity, it does not help me much. The ones that were actually in English, by contrast, looked like they'd be easy to understand but not necessarily accurate. The one thing I did come across while trawling through the library database records was a memoir called The Dragon's Pearl, by Sirin Phathanothai, which . . . did not have much or anything to do with Thai history, actually, but sounded cool anyways!
Basically, Sirin Phathanothai and her brother were sent as children to go live in China under the auspices of Premiere Zhao; their father was a Thai minister who was spearheading a top-secret effort to build relations between China and Thailand (top-secret, because Thailand was an official ally of the U.S. at that time and, it being the Cold War era, they would have been supremely pissed off.) The book centers mostly on Sirin's young adult years in China in sixties, being raised as a child of privilege in a country that wasn't supposed to have privilege anymore. Because Sirin spent a lot of time when growing up around the inner circles of both Thai and Chinese government, there's a lot of secret history and diplomacy stuff that's kind of fascinating - but I wish that Sirin Phathanothai had gone more deeply into an objective analysis of what was occurring. She talks a great deal throughout the book about her immersal in a political world, but much of the time the narrative simply relates how she felt about what was occurring without going too deeply at all into the surrounding circumstances - especially when it comes to major events like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution (which she blames mostly on Jiang Qing, which is way too simplistic.) So I would not really recommend this for a deep and complex view of China during the time period.
However, politics aside, I found it worth reading for the various culture clashes involved in being born in Thailand, raised by the Chinese elite, and living among the Chinese proletariat - especially since there are three very different cultures involved there, none of which is Western, which is not something I've read a lot of. I'm not sure I'd recommend it heavily, but it piqued my curiosity on a lot of topics.
