|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
Foreword
Two generations ago, Prof. G. William Skinner laid out a paradigm—that there are no fourth-generation Chinese in the Thai kingdom and hence assimilation in Thailand works—that has come under relentless fire ever since. So many attacked it for the simple reason that even those who claimed to have assimilated looked all too familiarly like Chinese. Gaze into the eyes of some famous Thai statesman, and you can see a grandfather with pigtails, and so forth, or so went the denunciation of the Skinner hypothesis.
But it turns out that such thinking misses the point. What is in the minds of those in the second, third, and fourth generations? Yes, one can drive to the rice paddies outside Bangkok and see a rather different sort of Thai from those we know in the stock market or the ministries. But that’s true everywhere.
Isn’t the point that if you talk Thai, you think Thai, you read Thai, then you are Thai? Of course it requires two to tango. The receiving culture must be welcoming. I have an Indonesian half-Chinese friend, with a Javanese father and name (the same age as Dr. Chansiri) who nonetheless grew up trying his best to be a good Indonesian, but in practice had to shield himself from brickbats at school from taunting Javanese, who wouldn’t remotely be behaving that way were they not encouraged to do so by the official culture.