CHINESE-THAI DIFFERENTIAL ASSIMILATION IN BANGKOK: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY THE CORNELL UNIVERSITY SOUTHEAST ASIA PROGRAM The Southeast Asia Program was organized at Cornell University in the Department of Far Eastern Studies in 1951. It is a teaching and research program of interdisciplinary studies in the humanities, social sciences, and some natural sciences. It deals with Southeast Asia as a region, and with the individual countries of the area: Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The activities of the Program are carried on both at Cornell and in Southeast Asia. They include an undergraduate and graduate curriculum at Cornell which provides instruction by specialists in Southeast Asian cultural history and present-day affairs and offers intensive training in each of the major languages of the area. The Program sponsors group research projects on Thailand, on Indonesia, on the Philippines, and on the area's Chinese minorities. At the same time, individual staff and students of the Program have done field research in every Southeast Asian country. A list of publications relating to Southeast Asia which may be obtained on prepaid order directly from the Program is given at the end of this volume. Information on Program staff, fellowships, requirements for degrees, and current course offerings will be found in an Announcement of the Department of Asian Studies, obtainable from the Director, Southeast Asia Program, Franklin Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14850. CHINESE-THAI DIFFERENTIAL ASSIMILATION IN BANGKOK: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY by Boonsanong Punyodyana Cornell Thailand Project Interim Reports Series Number Thirteen Data Paper: Number 79 Southeast Asia Program Department of Asian Studies Cornell University, Ithaca, New York March 1971 Price: $4.00 © 1971 CORNELL UNIVERSITY SOUTHEAST ASIA PROGRAM FOREWORD The first Data Paper in this Cornell Southeast Asia Program series, issued in February, 1951, was a report on the Chinese in Southeast Asia by G. William Skinner. When Skinner emerged on the southern coast of China after a long journey from Szechuan in the late summer of 1950, the Program asked him to visit the major centers of Chinese settlement in Southeast Asia, not only to report on the comparative post-war situations of the "South Seas" or Nanyang Chinese in the various societies of the region, but also to determine the feasibility and potential usefulness of field research in these living Chinese communities for social scientists trained for the study of China proper. In an introduction to Skinner's report on his hurried but remarkably thorough and systematic survey, the Program director suggested that the findings indicated clearly that future studies of both the developmental economics and the ideological and political developments in the region would have to take the Nanyang Chinese into account. There were obvious functional relationships among these areas of study, so that an understand­ ing of one field would be enhanced by an understanding of the others. Studies concerned with the nations of the region or with their dominant peoples could not afford to neglect the immigrant minorities who had moved out from the Chinese center to the neighboring countries to the south. The hope was ex­ pressed that the overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia and their role in the cultural development of th� nations of the region might become major subjects of investigation under the programs of training and research on Asia then established at Cornell. The Cornell Southeast Asia Program did succeed in support­ ing a number of studies in this field. Professor Skinner went on to produce his ably conceived and executed and still defini­ tive studies of the Chinese in Thailand, work which included important innovations in methods of analysis. He also carried out a comparative field research project on categories of Chi­ nese in Java. Donald Willmott, Mary Somers and Giok-Lan Tan have published an important series of papers and monographs on. the Chinese in Indonesia. George Weightman's doctoral disserta­ tion was on a Chinese community in the Philippines. Giok Po Oey has contributed a valuable bibliography which includes Chinese historical sources on the Nanyang Chinese. Finally, the Program has published a translation of N. A. Simoniya's Russian study of the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. To these few contributions to our knowledge of the ten million or more Chinese resident in Southeast Asia must be added, V of course, the work of many other scholars--Amyot, Coughlin, Freeman, Purcell, Smith, Williams, W. Willmott, to name only some of the westerners--who have made special studies in the area during the past two _decades. But as Professor Skinner notes in discussing the joint London-Cornell Project for Social Research in China and Southeast Asia, "While this field of study has not been wholly neglected, its intellectual rewards are only now becoming fully apparent. To begin with, the great and well­ documented Chinese migration which reached its climax throughout Southeast Asia in the third decade of this century, enables scholars to study on a comparative basis the subsequent fate of Chinese immigrants and their descendants. In this regard, Southeast Asia provides a veritable laboratory for research in assimilation and acculturation, for one can isolate for study the descendants of immigrants, members of the same dialect group who migrated from the same port for the same reasons in the same years to a number of different receiving societies. At the same time, the study of Chinese communities overseas promises to facilitate the analysis of institutions in the homeland. The study of Chinese associations in Singapore has provided important clues to the social structure of cities in China proper, and an investigation of changing Chinese kinship patterns in Java has raised new questions about marriage patterns in southeastern China." In spite of such intellectually tempting problems, and this menu could readily be expanded from appetizers to rich main courses, it must be admitted that relatively few western scholars have committed themselves to specialized research on the Nanyang Chinese. One reason for this, of course, is that such work requires for the westerner training in both Chinese and Southeast Asian area studies and languages. While it is important to continue our encouragement of western students to undertake these tasks, it is now clear that recruitment may be painfully slow. In this situation, we should obviously look for aid from eastern students, Chinese ·and Southeast Asian, who start with a linguistic advantage, whose societies must have a continuing interest in Chinese emigr�s and their descendants, and whose universities are now providing for their students sophisticated training in the social sciences.· One such student is the author of this present study of Thai-Chinese assimilation in the capital city area of Thailand. Acharn Boonsanong, after receiving his Master's degree in soci­ ology from the University of Kansas, returned to Thailand as a teacher in his country's national university system. Those who know that system will recognize the difficulties that had to be overcome by this young scholar as he planned and executed the original research project reported on in this Data Paper. While he received help and encouragement from many compatriots, the initiative and the persistence which saw the project through . V1 were Khun Boonsanong's,- and the entire research operation can be described as strictly Thai, without neglecting the fact that it is also good modern social science. It remains now only that this study should be published in Thai in Thailand, as should all publishable work by younger Thai scholars. In the meantime we publish this study in English both for its own value and as a good omen for the future of social re­ search in Thailand and for work by local scholars on the Chinese of that country. For while it cannot be assumed that the author himself will continue his interest in the place of the Chinese in Thai society nor even shift it to studies of China proper (in his continuing post-graduate work at Harvard and Cornell he has been acquiring Japanese!), he nonetheless has been responsi- ble for producing a pioneer study in an area of investigation heretofore unpopular in Thailand, and his work must thus be seen as a kind of breakthrough, in a number of respects, for academic Thai research. Thai academia can use the stimulus of such enterprise, and Thailand can use more soundly researched infor­ mation on its residents of Chinese descent. So the new hope should be expressed that this study may serve as a model for other young scholars in Thailand; and that the Chinese there and theire_role in the development of the nation may become sub­ jects of investigation under the programs of training and social research now being established in Thai universities by modern teachers such as Acharn Boonsanong. Lauriston Sharp Director, Cornell Thailand Project Ithaca, New York August 1970 V11 PREFACE This study of Chinese-Thai social assimilation in Bangkok and Thonburi was initiated as a faculty research project in a Thai university prima�ily with three motives behind it. First, it is my belief· that every university teacher has the duty to engage himself constantly in the search for knowledge. In this respect, Thai university teachers, impoverished by their under­ developed circumstances as they are, need not find research less their duty than anybody else's. Second, it is my desire to encourage and participate actively in international academic cooperation among Thai scholars.and their foreign colleagues. On my part, I can only hope to set a small example by presenting my study in a foreign language as well as in my own. In this regard, we should hope that, if international scholarly coopera­ tion is to prosper, foreign scholars with special interest in Thailand will begin to find reason to disseminate their knowledge in the Thai language as well as in their own.