University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 8-2018 North, South, and City: Novellas and Stories Richard James Hermes University of Tennessee, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Recommended Citation Hermes, Richard James, "North, South, and City: Novellas and Stories. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2018. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/5082 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Richard James Hermes entitled "North, South, and City: Novellas and Stories." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Michael Knight, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Christopher J. Hebert, Alisa M. Schoenbach, Rachelle M. Scott Accepted for the Council: Dixie L. Thompson Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) North, South, and City: Novellas and Stories A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Richard James Hermes August 2018 Copyright © 2018 by Richard Hermes All rights reserved. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, who have always supported me; to the memory of Bob Halliday, who embraced me like a brother; and most importantly to Katie, who read every page, and has every ounce of my heart. My sincere gratitude to my committee members, Michael Knight, Lisi Schoenbach, Chris Hebert, and Rachelle Scott, for their mentorship and support. A fiction writer could not ask for a more insightful, conscientious reader than Professor Knight. I owe thanks to the many people who agreed to share their personal stories with me, including Toun, Yaena Salaemae, Yvon Cohen, and many others. Thanks also to Kat Powell, my writing partner of several years, for her wisdom and generosity. Research for this dissertation was supported by a McClure fellowship from the University of Tennessee Office of International Programs. “The Rubber Tapper’s Knife” first appeared in (with minor differences) in phoebe 47.2. iii ABSTRACT The novellas and stories in North, South, and City follow key moments in the lives of a diverse cast of characters—including ethnic minorities on the margins of state influence, upper-class urban Thais, and Westerners at both ends of the economic spectrum—as they make their way through the changing landscape of contemporary Thailand. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Critical Introduction ...............................................................................1 Works Cited ............................................................................................37 Caravan ...................................................................................................40 Here, Where We Can Be Honest ............................................................137 The Rubber Tapper’s Knife ....................................................................154 Silhouettes ..............................................................................................166 On Ratchadamnoen .................................................................................212 Until the New Season Is Born ................................................................253 Vita .........................................................................................................317 v Critical Introduction “Border without a boundary line”: The Consequences of Cultural Difference in North, South, and City In 1883, in an effort to stave off European colonialism by exerting European-like administrative control over semi-autonomous vassal states on the periphery of the Siamese kingdom, King Chulalongkorn dispatched royal commissioners to the four Lao provinces under Bangkok rule. Writing to one commissioner, he said: you must remember that if you are speaking with a westerner on the one hand and a Lao on the other, you must maintain that the westerner is “them” and the Lao is Thai. If, however, you are speaking with a Lao on the one hand and a Thai on the other, you must maintain that the Lao is "them" and the Thai is “us.” —King Chulalongkorn (Rama V), 1883 In Chulalongkorn’s attempt to define “Thainess” in different ways for different audiences, we see the beginnings of a prismatic conception of Thai identity that lies at the source of some of the deepest divisions in Thai society today. Before the pressures of western colonialism, the kings of Siam saw themselves as ruling over something more closely akin to an ethnically diverse empire than a nation. They measured their kingdom’s reach in the number of people under its orbit, not by its area of land. By the 1890s, the effort to present Siam as a coherent, homogenous nation 1 (that, it would follow, should not have its outer provinces colonized by France or Britain) to the West also began to necessitate an internal homogenization of how Thai rulers saw race—the creation of the myth of a homogenous “Thainess” within the borders of Siam. In the triangle of the westerner, Lao, and Thai in Chulalongkorn’s message, we also see a microcosm of three forces—cosmopolitanism, cultural nationalism, and regionalism—that are key to understanding not only Thai history but also the most pressing issues in Thailand today. Each of these three forces are in complicated relation to the other, and each play a part in shaping the contexts that animate many of the stories that comprise my creative dissertation. The collection aims for a diverse cast of characters who illustrate the social, political, and geographic fault lines that have emerged more prominently in Thailand over the last decade and a half. They include cosmopolitan Thais and foreigners who enjoy outsized cultural and economic power—sometimes responsibly, often not—amidst the country’s vast working class, including migrant labor from rural provinces; villagers living in regions that were once so remote that allegiance to the idea of the Thai state was tenuous at best; members of border-crossing ethnic minorities often referred to as “hilltribes,” who are themselves in complicated relation to both dominant lowland populations and to each other; soldiers and paramilitary who wield state- sanctioned power over religious or cultural minorities in the periphery, such as Southern Thai Muslims or “Red Shirt” protesters in the heart of the city; Westerners who came to the country out of altruism or academic or artistic interest, only to find that, while their status as Westerners afforded them many advantages, it alone did not insulate them from financial vulnerability and frustration. In the essay that follows, I begin by elaborating on the historical and theoretical backgrounds that inform my stories. In the second section, I consider what it means for my 2 stories that they are linguistic and cultural translations, including translations without an original. As Thongchai Winichakul describes in Siam Mapped, until Siam was asked by the British to define its western boundary with Burma in 1825, the premodern Siamese notion of borders differed from that of Western colonial powers. The Siamese understood the reach of their kingdom, which included a constellation of semi-autonomous states, in terms of relationships, not territory. Rather than a sharp line, Siamese kings understood their borders as ambiguous zones that might include vast stretches of uninhabited land or might not even be contiguous— what Thongchai calls “a border without a boundary line” (75). A series of treaties with colonial powers set the borders of Thailand more firmly, but in remote mountainous regions such as the Luang Prabang Range that separates Thailand’s Nan province from Laos, where “Caravan” is set, this sense of tenuous demarcation persisted into the second half of the twentieth century. Bo Kleua, for instance, Apai’s home district, would not receive electricity or paved roads until the 1980s. It’s not surprising that conceptions of territory and allegiance would have more to do with local relations, with topographical and agricultural necessity, and with the network of overland trading routes that served as locals’ main links to distant places: the mule caravans, which were almost always run by Yunannese Muslims called “Jeen Haw” in Thailand or Panthay in Burma. The “city men” from the provincial capital in “Caravan” may see themselves as occupants of the center to the montagnards’ periphery, but while it is true that Nan was once the capital of one of those aforementioned semi-autonomous kingdoms, stretching into present-day Laos, in other contexts—namely in view of someone from Bangkok—those same “city men” would be regarded as nothing more than provincials, backwards in their own right, speaking a northern dialect that marks them as outsiders to the “standard” Thai of the central plains. 3 As a member of the Muslim Chinese ethnic group that has dominated overland trading routes for centuries, the