Thomas A. Bass on Fukushima MAY–JULY 2020 VOLUME 5, NUMBER 3 Emma Larkin revisits the Thammasat massacre Peter Yeoh profiles Jeremy Tiang Alicia Izharuddin rails against Malaysian food VOLUME 5, NUMBER 3 MAY–JULY 2020 THAILAND 3 Emma Larkin Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976, Massacre in Bangkok, by Thongchai Winichakul POEMS 5 Anthony Tao Coronavirus CHINA 6 Richard Heydarian Democracy in China: The Coming Crisis, by Jiwei Ci HONG KONG 7 David Parrish Unfree Speech: The Threat to Global Democracy and Why We Must Act, by Joshua Wong (with Jason Y. Ng) TAIWAN 8 Michael Reilly The Trouble with Taiwan: History, the United States and a Rising China, by Kerry Brown and Kalley Wu Tzu Hui INDIA 9 Somak Ghosal The Deoliwallahs: The True Story of the 1962 Chinese-Indian Internment, by Joy Ma And Dilip D’souza NOTEBOOK 10 Peter Guest Isolated JAPAN 11 Thomas A. Bass Made in Japan CAMBODIA 19 Prumsodun Ok An Illustrated History of Cambodia, by Philip Coggan MALAYSIA 20 Carl Vadivella Belle Towards a New Malaysia? The 2018 Election and Its Aftermath, by Meredith L. Weiss And Faisal S. Hazis (editors); The Defeat of Barisan: Missed Signs or Late Surge?, by Francis E. Hutchinson and Lee Hwok Aun (editors) SINGAPORE 21 Simon Vincent Hard at Work: Life in Singapore, by Gerard Sasges and Ng Shi Wen SOUTH KOREA 22 Peter Tasker Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech, by Geoffrey Cain MEMOIR 23 Martin Stuart-Fox Impermanence: An Anthropologist of Thailand and Asia, by Charles Keyes FICTION 25 Siti Keo A New Sun Rises over the Old Land, by Suon Sorin FICTION 26 Bryan Thao Worra Run Me to Earth, by Paul Yoon SHORT STORY 27 Wong Yi Night-shift scenes POETRY 28 Michael Freeman To Gather Your Leaving: Asian Diaspora Poetry, by Boey Kim Cheng, Arin Alicia Fong and Justin Chia (editors) NEIGHBOURHOOD 29 Melody Kemp Vientiane PROFILE 30 Peter Yeoh Jeremy Tiang TRAVEL 32 Conner Bouchard-Roberts Carry across FOOD 33 Alicia Izharuddin Against Malaysian food URBAN 35 Pim Wangtechawat Very Bangkok: In the City of the Senses, by Philip Cornwel-Smith MUSIC 36 Mina Bui Jones WOMADelaide FILM 37 David Scott Mathieson Free Burma Rangers, by Brent Gudgel and Chris Sinclair (directors) THE BOOKSELLER 38 Brian Chee-Shing Hioe Causeway Bay Books in Taiwan mekongreview.com PUBLISHER & EDITOR Minh Bui Jones DEPUTY EDITOR Ben Wilson MANAGING EDITOR Robert Templer CONTRIBUTING EDITORS ko ko thett (poetry), Preeta Samarasan (fiction) DESIGN Ben Wilson WEBSITE Nicholas Lhoyd-Owen SUBSCRIPTIONS Shu Wen Chye SUB-EDITORS Allen Myers, Gareth Richards, Rhiannon Alexander COVER Elsie Herberstein ARTISTS Damien Chavanat, Charis Loke, Gianluca Costantini, Janelle Retka ADDRESS PO Box 417, Broadway, New South Wales 2037, Australia; [email protected] Mekong Review is published four times a year; next issue August 2 THAILAND The silence of 1976 Emma Larkin THONGCHAI WINICHAKUL Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976, Massacre in Bangkok University of Hawai‘i Press: 2020 eet Chair Guy, the subject of a black-and- white photograph taken on the morning of 6 October 1976, in Bangkok, Thailand. Though MChair Guy is smartly dressed—in a safari shirt and what appear to be matching trousers, neatly ironed—he is barefoot. The expression on his face is impossible to read: it could be anger, exhilaration or nothing more than the result of physical exertion. The camera has caught him mid-action as he leaps up and raises a metal folding chair over his head, preparing to bring it down with full force upon a dead body hanging from a tree. A crowd of onlookers form a neat semicircle around the scene, as if they are watching some kind of outdoor circus performance. Most of them are casually dressed young men; their expressions are mixed, but a number of them appear to be smiling. One small boy’s face is lit up with what looks like a broad grin of sheer delight. Clearly visible in the background are the austere facade of the Supreme Court and the golden spires of the Grand Palace. Though nearly forty-five years have passed, Thailand Thongchai Winichakul at Thammasat University in 1976 remains haunted by this image, and by Chair Guy. The attack started just before dawn that day, with It was a fast and savage bloodletting, over before thousands of students barricaded inside Thammasat, noon. More than 3,000 students were arrested one of the country’s top universities. The students had afterwards. The official death toll was forty-one, but gathered to protest the return to Thailand of General many believe it to be more than twice that. Workers for Thanom Kittikachorn, a military dictator ousted by an one of the city’s emergency rescue foundations providing earlier student-led uprising, in 1973, and now found burials for unclaimed bodies said they handled over a themselves besieged. Police blocked the main gates; hundred corpses that day. navy boats were positioned on the adjacent river. And on Sanam Luang, the royal parade ground in front of he subject of Thongchai Winichakul’s Moments the campus, right-wing groups gathered, also in their of Silence is not so much what actually happened thousands. on 6 October, but the silence that followed. There Cold War tensions were at fever pitch as the Thas never been an official investigation, and a blanket dominoes of Southeast Asia toppled to communism. In amnesty issued two years after the event absolved all the previous year, North Vietnamese troops took Saigon, perpetrators from blame. Most school textbooks make Thongchai speaking at a demonstration outside Thammasat in 1976 the Khmer Rouge declared Year Zero in Cambodia and no mention of it, and those that do gloss over it in just a the Pathet Lao abolished the monarchy in Laos. Thailand few sentences. To this day, the event remains cloaked in seized power and placed a moratorium on all news. The was battling its own communist insurgency in the mystery, poorly understood and often misremembered. photograph of Chair Guy might never have been seen hinterlands; the state was trying to prevent communist Thongchai’s revelatory memoir-cum-history charts a had the Associated Press photographer who took it, Neal infiltration and establish die-hard loyalty to the capital, chronological journey through this silence, examining Ulevich, not anticipated the clampdown. Concerned that and the crown, through groups like the Nawaphon (New, its causes, exploring its impact on individuals and authorities would confiscate the film from his camera, or Ninth, Force), which spread right-wing propaganda; a exposing the toll it has taken on the collective psyche. he left the area shortly after taking the photograph and vigilante force called Krathing Daeng (Red Gaur); and a Thongchai is not, in this instance, an impartial hurried to the AP bureau office to develop and print his network of Village Scouts active across the countryside. historian. He was a student leader in 1976 and the book pictures so they could be quickly wired out of the country. At the time of the student protest in 1976, these right- opens dramatically, in situ at Thammasat University, Later that same day, police began raiding newspaper wing groups had been summoned to the campus by with a nineteen-year-old Thongchai speaking into a offices to seize film and photographs of the event. an army radio station and were being whipped into a microphone at the back of the organiser’s stage. As police Ulevich was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following frenzy. Broadcasters had told them that the students were stormed the grounds, it was his voice that reverberated year for his ‘photographs of disorder and brutality in the communists and that many were not even Thai but yuan around the campus, repeating, ‘Please, my police streets of Bangkok’. In Thailand, only one newspaper— (a derogatory term for Vietnamese) and nak phaendin brothers, please stop shooting.’ He was later arrested and the English-language Bangkok Post—reported the fact, (literally ‘heavy on the earth’, or something akin to scum). spent two years in prison as part of the so-called Bangkok and did so without running any of his images. During one broadcast, a presenter chanted, ‘Kill them, Eighteen, alleged ringleaders of the demonstration. The cover of Moments of Silence is illustrated with kill them, kill them …’ After his release, he completed his degree at Thammasat a line drawing of the hanging body from Ulevich’s When police charged the campus, firing pistols, M16 and then left Thailand to pursue postgraduate study in photograph, a ghostly rendition that—like the event rifles, and M79 grenade launchers, the furious crowd Australia, later moving to the United States, where he itself—is devoid of detail and visible only in outline. followed. Wounded students were dragged onto the taught at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Hangings, and photographs of the hangings, play a parade ground, along with the dead, and tortured. Some eventually retiring from teaching to write this book. As grimly recurring role in the story of 6 October. were doused in petrol and set alight. Others had wooden such, Moments of Silence was years in the making and is A week before the crackdown, a photograph was stakes driven through their chests. At least four bodies part of a lifelong journey to bring some kind of justice published in several newspapers showing two dead were hung from the tamarind trees that ring the Sanam to the friends he lost on that day. As he states more than men hanging from a gate.