Author Archives: Robert A Findlay

Monday 20th May 2013 Bangkok, Thailand

Just a short one today because I have to get up early and take the morning train. Not to work the nine-to-five, but to ride up to Lopburi where monkeys rule the earth.

IMG_0724I got up early in hopes of visiting Dursit Park and the old European style Royal Palace. Unfortunately, as I found out upon arrival, this giant complex is always closed on Mondays. Not to be deterred, I managed to at least visit the Wat Benchamabophit which is a sort of “modern” European inspired wat that mixed in French marble floors, stain glass windows, and other European architectural nuance into its design.

IMG_0800In the afternoon and evening I met with my Trude and my wise, benevolent, and beloved teacher ajarn Janpanit who treated us to a delicious dinner of fish and other goodiesIMG_0803. It was very delicious. Then just a quick Skytrain and taxi home.

Now to the sleeping.

 

Sunday 19th May 2013 Bangkok, Thailand

Chatuchak Market

Today, I decided it would be a good idea to go and check out Chatuchak Market. This giant outdoor market that many regard as one of the biggest in the world is composed of 26 overlapping sections that crisscross back and forth to create a giant crescent-shaped mall of sorts. Each individual lane maybe as long as a mile! Most of the time it is hard to remember that you are outside as partial roves and a million products surround you at all times. I bought a new pair of pants and a shirt, but refrained from purchasing furniture, pets, giant statues, or any of the other million things on sale.

FoodsWhile in this giant market, and throughout the day, I really pushed my luck with food-borne illness. All the pamphlets and medical advice will tell you that you should avoid food stalls because they are less hygienic, but that is no way to live. You will miss out on so much fun and flavor. In the heart of the market I found a curry shop. My favorite trick is that when you order curry and rice, you can add a scoop of another curry for only a few baht. This particular stand was great. However, my luck quickly changed when I was handed a free sample of “pink drink” by marketers sampling a new dried vitamin powder. I took a few sips and it tasted a little funny, then I looked over to see that they were filling their main water jug with tap water from a hose. There comes a time in every man’s life when he realizes that dirty, metallic taste in his water maybe about to cause serious gastronomical distress. So naturally I ditched the pink drink and strait away picked up a savory lemonade. After all, it is never too early to replenish electrolytes should the worst happen. I decided I would take it easy on my stomach after that, but my love for street foods beat out over m reason and limited knowledge of microbiology. Just around the corner I found a mom selling a sort of semi-raw egg and coconut custard in pastry shells. It was delicious. I figured I would was that down with a banana slow-smoked into a sort of pudding and some hand squeezed orange juice. So far my strong constitution has fended of any unwanted microbes, but we will have to wait and see what tomorrow brings.

Khao San RoadAlso, to round the day out I took the obligatory walk down Khao San road, a sort of landing strip for backpackers, drunk Europeans, and entrepreneurial Thai venders. It was pretty much the same as before, but I first hotel I ever stayed in Thailand, almost ten years ago now, has been transformed by a new Indian family that took ownership last year. Thus the new Ganesh statue in their lobby.

Saturday 18th May 2013 Bangkok, Thailand

Rainy morning, awesome day. After taking in too much sun and experiencing the sweaty results yesterday, I was happy to wake up to thunderous rainstorms that brought the temperature down to a chilly 88 or 89 degrees. I even had hot tea in the morning!

After eating a leisurely breakfast and talking to Laurel on Skype, I made my way down to Siam Square to meet my friend Trude who I took Thai classes with last summer in Wisconsin. When she told me we would eat our way across town I thought she was joking, but that is pretty much how the day went down. We meet in one of the many hyper-modern excellently air-conditionedBathroom mega malls down town. These malls are a very strange sort of space for me. They look and feel like any other semi-elite urban conglomeration of brand name slinging stores in the US, but with little reminders that you are not in New York or LA. My favorite little nuance are the bathroom signs that mix “cute” and sexual imagery with the traditional toilet room markers.

After taking it to the mall, today, Tude and I ate a bowl of noodles and then went to the house of silk magnate and former OSS/CIA operative Jim Thompson. He was one of the first Americans to capitalize on the US power relations in postwar Thailand and built up a king’s ransom by selling/branding Thai silk to the world. Unfortunately they do not let you take pictures in the house, but believe me when I tell you there was some cool and expensive stuff in there (also, our tour guide made it clear that it was cool that Thompson had acquired and displayed thousands of years of Buddhist heritage artwork because he was a collector and not some dirty black marketer… who might sell to a collector).

IMG_0610After of time in Thompson’s house, khun Trude and I hit the bricks and walked around a Middle Eastern neighborhood filled with hukka shops, Lebanese food, and people trying to get us to by imitation, not to mention unhygienic, sex toys. We stopped off at a Lebanese restaurant to eat some hummus and pickled vegetables, hang out for a bit, and cool down.

After that it was back to another megamall, Terminal 21, based on theIMG_0609 theme of air travel to various locations. You are greeted to the mall by a flight attendant and each floor represents another airport location such as London, Tokyo, or Istanbul. Then we ate some donuts at Minster Donut. It was actually pretty cool. And it was great to spend time with Trude. Since I have been here I really haven’t talked to people except in short bursts of Thai or broken English.  Not that I can complain. Plus I am really getting into things here as you can clearly see by adaptation to local culture.

Friday 17 May 2013 Bangkok, Thailand

pad thaiToday I got up early and managed to get in a bit more action. I went to breakfast and got the pad thai because the vender told me it was the thing to do.

 

 

IMG_0385After that I hit the Streets and saw a bunch of cool street art and graffiti on my way towards a large outdoor market that specilizes in selling Thai amulets. I bought a Buddha amulet that will hopefully help me do well in my studies and research here over the next few months.

 

After hanging out in the markets for a while I took a ferry across theIMG_0446 river into Thonburi where I spent time walking the streets looking for food and feeling good. I saw some fun stuff like an old wat (temple) and this turtle playing with a toy gun. After hanging out in Thonburi in the morining, I hopped back across the river and hung out at Tommasat University where I spent a little time looking around and trying really really hard to figure out where Iibrary is located. Here is a hint: it’s underground, so you will not see it.

IMG_0499After that fun time I took a taxi for a bit so that I could climb up a big hill with a temple on top know as the golden mount. It was a sweaty experience climbing up this thing in the heat, but the view was really good. After wandering around this area of town for a long time, I decided to head home get dinner and take it easy.

 

Thrusday 16 May 2013 Bangkok, Thailand

Today I was mostly recovering from the flight. But I did get out a bit.Rad na

I got rad na, my favorite noodle dish early in the day and then set out to try and take in some of the sites. I was thinking that because of the jet lag and all, I should do something low key, so I decided to go the National History Museum that happened to be near where I am staying.

 

So I spent most of the day inside looking at cool stuff like this mural. It was still pretty hot as these IMG_0261building don’t have air conditioning. You would think that after all this time in Hawaii the heat wouldn’t be that bad, but that extra ten-fifteen degrees goes a long way.

An American Woman Dating Thai Men in 1950s Thailand

I recently found an interesting article in the 24 July 1952 Siam Rath Weekly Review about a young white American woman attempting to date in 1950s Thailand. Identified only as “ingénue,” she talks about how hard it is to find a man as an intelligent and witty woman. Despite being told “lurid stories of their evil ways” brought on by the hot climate, the writer still sees Thai men as good potential love matches.

Thai, Thailand, men, women, dating, date, 1950s

She tells us that although “young Siamese men seem eager enough” when they first meet her, they quickly become incredibly nervous and find an excuse to leave the conversation only to “grin sheepishly across the room” for the rest of the evening.

Thai, Thailand, man, women, dat, dating

On the other hand, many of the older men she meets at parties and social events are the “I’m-old-enough-to be your father” types and expected her to act as a little girl with few opinions.

In the end, the author finds that both young and older men want to be flattered and feed as if they were “mentally deficient and had an insatiable appetite.” Not a pretty picture.

Selling Oatmeal to Southeast Asia

Of all the many successful products marketed to Southeast Asia from the United States, Quaker Oatmeal does not seem to have made the list. However, in the 1950s, the company was pushing hard to market their product. They handed out thousands of free bowls of the stuff at the Thai 1954 Bangkok Constitution Fair, but apparently few Thais enjoyed it.

Bangkok, Thailand, Constitution Fair, Oatmeal, Quaker

Later, advertisements appeared across Southeast Asia that seem to play on locals’ fears of being able to compete in the labor market. Here are some pictures from the Borneo Bulletin in 1959. Apparently if you eat Quaker Oats you will be a more successful Malaysian!

Quaker, Oatmeal, Borneo, Malaysia, Advertisment

Talking About Race in Southeast Asian History

Recently there has been some good writing done about race in Southeast Asia. Before this, most of the history that dealt with race was pretty influenced by Eurocentric ideas or nationalist narratives that supported a particular race’s “uniqueness.” But this new stuff is pretty, so here is a little intro to the newer ideas floating around out there.

In Southeast Asian historiography, the construction of racial knowledge has largely revolved around and evolved from European ideas of race, nationalism, and coloniality. From John Sydenham Furnivall’s notions of a “plural society” to more recent “clash of cultures” theories, thinking on the racialization of the Southeast Asian body and state has been fairly limited.  However, recent work by a number of scholars in fields such as history, anthropology, and sociology are begging to challenge these older understandings. These authors seek to reevaluate the place of race in daily practice, the formation of modern postcolonial states, and even see implications for transnational race formation that occurred between colonizers and the colonized.

            Charles Hirschman’s article, “The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology,” Sociological Forum, 1, No.2 (Spring, 1986): 330-361, is a great starting point for this project as he seeks to demonstrate that what we now identify as discrete racial groups in Southeast Asia are in fact legacies of imperial structures from the colonial period. He uses the case of “race relations” in Malaysia to argue that “direct colonial rule” created these racial “byproducts” as a result of classification, stratification, and labor-based exploitation of the colonial subject. While Hirschman acknowledges that pre-modern Southeast Asia was a world of “ethnocentrism,” he argues that the “racial ideology of inherent difference” was a European import. Western ideas of the “lazy Malay,” entrepreneurial Chinese, and the willing Indian laborer caused a “qualitative shift” in the economy and society which hardened local understandings of race.

            These stereotypical ideas of racial differentiation were not merely a popular understanding or a natural outcome of transforming means of production, but rather, according to Daniel P.S. Goh’s article “States and Ethnography: Colonialism, Resistance, and Cultural Transcriptions in Malaya and the Philippines, 1890s-1930s,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49, No.1 (2007):109-142, these differences were created as part of a colonial logic which combined scientific racism and social Darwinism to “make legible” the colonial subject and create systems of knowledge and control. Here Goh argues that the “transcription” of local peoples, knowledge, and methods of resistance allowed colonial officer-ethnographers to debate native peoples’ level of civilization on a sliding scale from “degenerated medievals” which were currently incapable of progress to “model medievals” nearly in line with Europe’s past. While this model employed by late nineteenth century ethnographers did in theory allow for the possibility of progress, in also froze different races in pre-modern time based on cultural differentiation or resistance to white rule and allowed white Europeans domination of racial distinction and classification within the colonies.

            This idea that “white” imperialists brought racial classifications to Southeast Asia and implemented power structures based on the production of the social economy or ethnographic knowledge is challenged by Paul Kramer’s article “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880-1910,” The Journal of American History, 88, No.4 (Mar., 2002), 1315-1353, which seeks to demonstrate that some of the idea of whiteness, or more precisely Anglo-Saxonism” were created in the colonial world and not in the metropole. Kramer argues that the American and British empires shared an “inter colonial” production of “Anglo-Saxon” racial exceptionalism that was created in the empire itself. Rather than bringing hard, pre-formulated notions of race to the Philippines and Malaysia, Kramer demonstrates that these ideas of racial superiority were partially crafted in transnational peripheries to support, organize, and legitimize empire. Anglo-Saxon identities thus were created “in relation to empire.”

            But if Anglo-Saxons could create racial identities in relation to empire, surely colonial subjects in transnational social systems and economic flows could do likewise. Chua Ai Lin’s article “Nation, Race, and Language: Discussing Transnational Identities in Colonial Singapore, Circa 1930” Modern Asian Studies, 46, Special Issue 2 (March 2012): 283-302, explains that just as white racial identity was formed in transnational spaces, racial knowledge of Indian and Chinese Malays were created in a complex mix of local and global influences. As British subjects living in Malaya with ties to familial origins in India or China, these “non-Malay” people utilized notions of language, citizenship, and place in their own logics of race. Primarily concerned with maintaining their identity as “Straits Chinese” and Malay Indians, Lin tells us that these people simultaneously embraced British subjecthood and “gained pride” from the “rising international status of India and China.” Again, this process can be seen as creating harder and clearer cut racial identities where previously other forms of social knowledge and representation existed.

These sharp distinctions in race formation, knowledge, and self-identification would outlive the colonial period and, in many ways, come to define the parameters of race and nationalism in postcolonial Southeast Asian nations. Daniel P.S. Goh’s article “From Colonial Pluralism to Postcolonial Multiculturalism: Race, State Formation and the Question of Cultural Diversity in Malaysia and Singapore” Sociology Compass, 2, No.1 (2008): 232-252, takes up this issue and argues that unlike “postimperial societies,” postcolonial societies “built on colonial racialization” came to view race as integral to nationalism thus creating a societies in which “multiculturalism” was a problematic “fact”; a “dilemma to be dealt with from the beginning of nation building.”

While all of these articles add new ideas and ask a series of interesting questions, they also seem to share a common set of problems. Partially based on their foucauldian analytic methods, they seem to attribute tremendous power to the state and focus away from individual response, reason, and (ir)rationality. Moreover, as these authors seek to sidestep American and European racialization and observe transnational Southeast Asian constructions of race (even the Anglo-Saxon ones) they rely only on English-language discourse and primary sources. Also, some of the authors’ ideas of race fall apart in the light of comparison to say the American Civil War, Jim Crow laws, and continuing forms of racial differentiation often referred to under the contemporary euphemism of “development.” Any compelling notions of race and race production in Southeast Asia must contain these comparative models and ask broader questions. How did Japanese technological progress and claims to be “white” affect the racial ideology of other Asians? How did American, Dutch, and British racism vary and did this have an effect especially on the peripheries of empire? How might America’s internal “decolonization” of black peoples and communities compare to decolonization in postwar Southeast Asia? Such questions combined with a greater use of local sources in non-English-language sources would surely expand the field and produce new and interesting theories and knowledge.