Suddenly, very aware of my gender...

Some dude wrote this about me on his blog after the FCCT dramatics:

"P., a slight, pretty Indian girl with fierce eyes, gave a nicely written statement detailing that her organization is not anti-Chinese, but rather pro-human rights... She kept it short and sweet."

Matt, my fave Thai whiteboy/lostboy blogger, says this about my blog in his links page:

"I used to think this blog was authored by a man, but it isn’t. Tackles some serious issues with flair. Great stuff on human rights."

Slightly condescending, no?

Persepolis

In some respect, Thailand is the modern-day Asian equivalent of Persepolis. With the successes of import-substitution and special economic zones, Thailand prospered in the late 80s and early 90s. New elite condominiums and glassy office buildings took over the skyline as khlongs were cemented over to make room for the new classy cars which zipped through the city. Thailand was on the way to becoming a majestic example of modernity, where political instability existed but yet the system favoured foreign investment – creating the modern-day “Gate of All Nations”: the regional hub for intern-governmental organisations, multi-national companies and popular media. Just as Alexander the Great looted the treasury of the Persian Persepolis, Thailand’s downfall was also economic. In rapid succession, the world witnessed the fall of Southeast Asia. The promise of industrialization that so benefitted Taiwan and South Korea proved to be a highly flawed development theory that cannot function as a template for all developing countries. Having just read Marjane Satrapi’s gorgeous graphic novel, Persepolis, it becomes apparent that the story is timeless and universal. If the memory of Persepolis can be invoked during the Iran-Iraq war and the Iranian revolution in the 80s, it can also be applied to the current invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In my view, it applies in the contemporary Asian context too.

More personally, I saw parallels between myself as a teenager and the protagonist in the novel, Marjane. I had never seen war, it’s true. But what I had lived through was a recession which started at home, in Thailand, and spread like a contagious disease, hence the nickname “Asian Flu”. What resonated most with me was that, just like Marjane’s parents, I had a set of progressive parents who raised me to be a reader who questioned everything, to prioritise learning before all else and to always cease opportunity. Like Marjane’s parents, I was sent to study abroad as they viewed it as an escape from all things stifling and restrictive, believing that I would only truly flourish if I were Not Here. Like Marjane’s parents, mine said to me “I don’t care what you do, but whatever you do make sure you’re the best at it.” Like Marjane’s dad, the last thing my father said to me before boarding the 26 hour flight to Toronto from Bangkok was “don’t forget where you’ve come from.” And just as Marjane had lived in the deepest guilt over her lifestyle in Europe, I had spent each day in Toronto believing I had failed my parents because I was drowning in average-ness and consistently compromising the morals I had been raised to embrace. Meanwhile, I battled the freezing cold with my tiny financial allowance, adopted a diet of pasta and toast and cursed this new independence in favour of home.

I also moved back “home” partially to be in touch with "struggle", because one forgets struggle when living in a city with fully-stocked grocery stores. Just like the post-war Iran described by Marjane, post-recession Bangkok is also filled with apathy, to the point at which the same mistakes are being repeated. Brand new elite condominiums are blocking the views of the old ones, filling the last vestiges of open space the city has. But what we have now is no Persepolis, it’s an imitation of more glorious days and a disregard for the fact that everyone’s food in their fridge, petrol in their cars and bed that they sleep on are all on credit and, in fact, we are all on borrowed time.

The "silent minority" drinks chai, yaar

The Guru magazine, a weekend supplement to the Bangkok Post, has a brand new column specifically aimed at Thai-Indians written by a Thai-Indian. The column is (unoriginally) called Coffee with Sonia with this week’s title being “The Silent Minority”. The page is covered in images of the Taj Mahal, mehndi, Bollywood posters, women in sarees, glass bangles and (my personal favourite) a plate of paneer tikka. Oh, to be exotified, thus!

The article itself touches on some interesting points, asking why Thai-Indians cannot be related to by Thai people in the same way that the Thai-Chinese community can. I think it is brilliant that Indians in this city are beginning to explore their place in Thai society in a public medium. Of course, my enthusiasm promptly deflated when I read this: “how good would it be if more information could be provided about Bollywood, yoga, clothes, food, culture and Indian parties?” So really, that’s what the column is about. It is the Guru magazine after all, not the Annals of Cultural Discourse. Good effort though, I’m pleased nonetheless.

I do wish to point out, however, what the use of the term “Thai-Indian” implies. The Indians that are represented in this article, the ones that have been here for 3-4 generations who began their livelihoods through tailor shops and garment factories, are specifically the Sikh community. The migration patterns are different depending on which Indian community you belong to, not all Indians have adopted a Thai nationality and so live here as expatriates or permanent residents (like yours truly). Gujaratis came to Thailand in the late 70s and early 80s, they were mainly involved in the gemstone business and were here due to excavation of ruby mines in Chanthaburi. This is a similar case of Marwadis too. Men from Uttar Pradesh came to Thailand without their families to work as gurkhas and have been here as long as the Sikh community has, but they lack the prominence. There is a huge South Indian Muslim population here too, who have come in fairly recent years. The Sindhis have their own pattern which spreads across SE Asia, many jumped from India to Indonesia to Thailand and now are moving in large numbers to China. I personally find the histories behind these migration patterns quite fascinating.

Sadly, there is such limited record of Indians in Southeast Asia. There have been Indians in Vietnam and Cambodia for generations. There have been Indians in small mining towns in Burma, where my family have some roots. Yet, there is nothing documented in any historical record. The legacy of this small, Indian community remains only in the form of Vishnu temples built with their donations and the memories of the local elderly.

I wonder, really, why our stories are not as well documented through literature and art the way it is in Africa and the Caribbean. Perhaps Coffee with Sonia will be used for progeny, when discussing immigrant discourse in the SE Asia sub-region. Indian parties, Bollywood and yoga: really, that’s all we Indians in Bangkok do in our free time..!

Being an "Other" in Asia

I tend to float through life very much as an outsider no matter where I am, I never fully belong to a place and that in itself is my identity. It took me my first year at university in Toronto to figure out that in many ways my experiences did not fit neatly into the TCK experience or the South Asian immigrant experience, but instead they straddle the two. Growing up as an expatriate in Bangkok within a family considered privileged and an international school considered fancy, my life here was a night-day comparison to the South Asians I met at Scarborough Campus whose new-immigrant tales of assimilation versus self-preservation I could relate to only to a certain level.

I almost fell off my chair when I came across a blog post written by Preya that I wish I had written, if only for the title itself! In her post “Expats, Orientalism and Questions of Identity”, she highlights how Said’s conceptions of the “Other” become convoluted when you grow up as an Asian expat in another Asian country and then move to the West!

“But for expats there is a privilege in being another kind of "Other." And so my experience is a strange inversion of what it should be. Here, in my grad school class for instance, they look to me, a "minority," (although I am just as much my white mother as I am my Indian father, I suppose) for an experience of being oppressed. They talk of their "white middle class guilt." And this just deepens my guilt. Not only have I benefited from being part of an elite minority, I can't even empathize with my fellow "people of color." For my early arrival into a country I would call home for the next 12 years did not make me anymore Vietnamese.”

Being South Asian in Southeast Asia is a unique experience on its own as perspectives of nationality and identity in Asia are very different than in the West. As an Indian expat in Thailand, I am still an Asian within Asia. Certainly, one could explore what it means to be Asian and derive commonalities from a shared cultural history of religion and art. But, contemporary Asia is not like Europe, the borders are very much alive and strong. So this dichotomy (one of many in my life!) of being Asian and also an outsider within Asia, I think, is unique to Asian expats and not a general TCK phenomenon.

Who Is Navin?

What do you get when you mix kitsch, Bollywood, identity exploration, and a krazee soundtrack? Navin's exhibition, currently on display at Tang Gallery in the basement of Silom Galleria, documents his fantastical journey from Chiang Mai to Bombay. As you walk into the gallery, you are greeted by a life-size wax model of Navin himself holding up a sign of his own name written in different languages. The rest of the exhibit is just as cute, uncanny and entirely useless.

The whole thing has a story, and it's a fascinating story as it is my story and probably your story too. As a second-generation Thai, he discovers one day that he knows too little about himself. He sets off to find others named Navin in order to build a connection and discover who he is. He lands in Bombay. In the form of storyboards and a short musical film, he documents his experiences with Bollywood choreographers, a religious mentor, wig makers, guest house owners all named Navin who assist him in his life goal: to form the Navin Party. I do not know what this Navin Party does exactly, I assume it unites Navins for the sake of unification.

Inheritance is Identity

Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss is a fitting travel companion for someone as stateless as I when returning to the country of her birth. It doesn’t matter how un-often one makes this journey, questions of identity are bound to follow. Especially if identity displacement is your best friend and you keep her in your pocket at all times.

Inheritance has probably been the central theme of this trip as the backdrop involves my father’s bitter decade-long battle with his uncles to regain what is rightfully his. There are some aspects of birthright that we fight to own, there are others that simply run in our veins and linger in the air in the form of stories and memories and dust balls.

For starters, being in a room with my mother’s entire family is like staring your gene pool in its face. Everything from my pointy chin to the inability to finish anything once begun has been inherited. I no longer claim responsibility for anything, it is simply in my genetic make-up and is probably my mother’s fault.

My trip to Gujarat began in a second-class dabba on New Year’s eve. Never again. The train rattled with the snores of a thousand men and smelled of festering faeces, I brought in the new year somewhere on the Maharashtrian-Gujarati border where, officially, booze becomes illegal. In Ahmedabad, I dutifully visited the Sabarmati Ashram from where Mohandas K. Gandhi began his famous Dandi March. I stood amongst huts once occupied by Gandhi and his followers, where he prayed and ate and slept, where he inspired and led people to take back what belonged to them. If this is where the notion of birthright began for contemporary India and Indians, then it is still being fought for in every sense of the word, whether in the domestic realm or in terms of autonomy of state. We are all wanting to take back what is “ours”, divide up and own.

I had never quite felt Indian enough, never knowing my family enough, never being able to speak Gujarati with the confidence I ought to have, always wanting to validate the Indian passport that I hold with more Indianness.

On we went to Khambat (or Cambay, if you like), our “ancestral” town. My great grandfathers from both sides of the family are said to have been visionaries and ahead of their times, they were entrepreneurial and shifted each family from subsistence-living to the throbbing, pre-war gemstone trade (a family business which will end with my generation, if I can help it). They were big fish in small ponds, they set out to Burma and subsequently got chased out, their various offspring now span a bunch of continents. Their legacies remain in the form of two mansions that sit like haciendas amidst shacks. Empty ghost houses, filled only with the stories we remember, rest forgotten. I see romance in these: a dusty gramophone, a teak headboard, an electric water heater. Oddly, I belong.

Everyone in town knows who I am, but I haven’t got a clue who they are, but I know we are part of each other. I know this because an old woman, who used to be my father’s nanny, who has since been forgotten by my family, is filled only with memories of love that moves her to tears when she speaks of them. I cry with her because it hurts to be forgotten.

My past is not made up primarily by patriarchs, mind you. My womanhood is connected to generations of women who personify the words endurance and sacrifice. Child marriages, financial devastation, death of toddlers, young widows, domestic violence, you name it. I sit with them and they laugh toothless laughs because my accent is so silly and they feed me some more because they love me even though they’ve met me, like, twice. And I am proud that their blood runs in my veins because this is blood of silent strength and perseverance. This is Superwoman blood. This blood makes people weep.

What roots are these that clutch? Well, they’re mine: they are my roots.

Fashionably Desi

"She dreads her turn on the matrimonial circuit, especially since Mummy is always complaining about how difficult it will be to find Jeeta a good husband, with her dark skin and sharp tongue..." [link]

Oh, in the name of sweet baby Krishna, please!!

Generational conflict, conservatism as defined by an implied outdated culture versus liberal-seeking, custom-fighting daughter who wins the right to choose. Very dramatic, as every good Indian household ought to be. When I see books like these at stores now, I roll my eyes and summon the deities for divine intervention - but I always read the blurb. I am attached to these books. As a teenager, it was important to me to feel part of some greater collective of diasporic South Asian 15 year old girls all wondering why they weren't allowed to go to sleepovers (to this day, the greatest mystery of my life.) I always felt some degree of shared experience by reading books with sari-draped, henna-painted, Orientalist-tinged covers. So, while this cover makes me want to claw my eyeballs out with henna-covered fingertips, I am actually, deep in my gut, grateful for their existence. Annoyed by their proliferation, but grateful nonetheless.

I need to get in on this McSouthAsianifying of children's lit. I appear to be in fashion.