tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54359021296781810312024-02-19T22:01:48.057+07:00Thai GirlThe Exotic Adventures of a Literary SexagenarianA True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.comBlogger255125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-15737348072689911902016-01-08T16:41:00.002+07:002016-09-05T04:22:34.222+07:00THAI GIRL in French!<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp7UxYv0Q1uigGZcIx78Tggo83xguqA6AlydHb-trTpCH78DoD7r74kJs6ovIRFJ1VAZnn1g7b4eQ4dR9NERNN3dRyubKPYAZ-olMV2DDeXXrAVH4LrfKWQ3u7MmWohCQOVHmF8Ua98fP0/s1600/Couverture%252520ombr%25C3%25A9e%255B1%255D.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgp7UxYv0Q1uigGZcIx78Tggo83xguqA6AlydHb-trTpCH78DoD7r74kJs6ovIRFJ1VAZnn1g7b4eQ4dR9NERNN3dRyubKPYAZ-olMV2DDeXXrAVH4LrfKWQ3u7MmWohCQOVHmF8Ua98fP0/s400/Couverture%252520ombr%25C3%25A9e%255B1%255D.png"></a><br />
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Amazing! An excellent French publisher specialised in SE Asian subjects, Editions Gope, has just launched my novel, THAI GIRL translated into in French. Needless to say I am thrilled.<br />
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The first edition of the book was published in Bangkok in 2004 with a red cover and became an immediate best seller. One reviewer described it as, "one of the biggest-selling English language novels ever published in Thailand". Wow! The book is still distributed by Asia Books and many hundreds of copies are in book shops and airports throughout Thailand.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi613mpHY0LfayMCaqJ94C1q2z5KndWftNQ3jZG38AWEzy9ITKkgtp5Voxl9T_5QdgKEIF6wSq7TuodSHwvVTWujC4uirVAkoF4aepUl8N2iYnSr3abOPUJi6YIjCMaaU6RM9Tw67XmE8ez/s1600/red+book.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi613mpHY0LfayMCaqJ94C1q2z5KndWftNQ3jZG38AWEzy9ITKkgtp5Voxl9T_5QdgKEIF6wSq7TuodSHwvVTWujC4uirVAkoF4aepUl8N2iYnSr3abOPUJi6YIjCMaaU6RM9Tw67XmE8ez/s400/red+book.jpg"></a><br />
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Then in 2006 the novelist Stephen Leather kindly recommended THAI GIRL to Monsoon Books in Singapore. They met me in Bangkok and quickly brought out a new edition for distribution worldwide. In Singapore it hit second place in the leading bookseller's best seller list beating a host of top selling international authors. Monsoon also issued the novel as an ebook so is available at a touch of the keys.<br />
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I have forgotten how many times the paper book has been reprinted but together with an unknown number of ebooks the novel has sold many tens of thousands of copies.<br />
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This is the cover of the Monsoon edition, an interesting contrast to the powerful realism of the new French version.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjarOv_G9eHC-eGeMvadG0we-ak7TRd8eXFB76vvGMiJ4-EJDMwJ90FLByN3DEVFDJKPrx3227_Hfzn0WKTNZi4S3R1yeLckw5VmBg9iWAIFat_bS-A_VD8_LVDiK1MmtxCxn61jWuGJeqY/s1600/thaigirl-cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjarOv_G9eHC-eGeMvadG0we-ak7TRd8eXFB76vvGMiJ4-EJDMwJ90FLByN3DEVFDJKPrx3227_Hfzn0WKTNZi4S3R1yeLckw5VmBg9iWAIFat_bS-A_VD8_LVDiK1MmtxCxn61jWuGJeqY/s400/thaigirl-cover.jpg"></a><br />
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I now hope the French edition will be as much enjoyed as has been the English original. And a translator is now working on a translation into German.<br />
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A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-86480614642891631312015-04-28T15:53:00.000+07:002015-04-28T15:53:28.562+07:00Jack Reynolds' China Blog is OutJack Reynolds, author of seminal Bangkok novel, A WOMAN OF BANGKOK, has just published his latest book, though he died way back in 1984.<br />
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Called, A TRUE FRIEND TO CHINA, the book is a collection of the newsletter articles he wrote while doing medical relief work in China in the dark days of the nineteen forties. Written for a tiny audience of his Friends Ambulance Unit colleagues and since lost and forgotten, I think it's some of his very best writing. With the day to day immediacy of a blog, it really gives you the feeling of what it was like to be there in a feudal, poverty stricken China, desperately facing civil war and facing revolutionary change. And his writing always sparkles and is funny and perceptive.<br />
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It's available in the USA at <b>Quaker Books at Pendle Hill </b>and online at <b>www.quakerbooks.org</b>. For other sales please contact me at <b>arhicks56@hotmail.com</b>.<br />
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See also <b>www.fauchinaconvoy.blogspot.com </b>for lots more pictures and find me on Facebook.<br />
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It's a truly great book which I can confidently say as I didn't write most of it and I took only about three of the 500 photos. 'Cos I wasn't there in 1940!<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGfpnUETJdDJJq0_z1JHQPDV3MGRyohkewCFwDbfUXDHcDcjjDZJFqCwMLt_5ZRf_74MXFYN3H711VV7o48NsFf1JC4mUe4HZw5WY5BdH1y0uGn4qn_phxJBhLvN-Jm2mHH-iTvablcVAQ/s1600/Jack+Reynolds-Earnshaw+final+cover+friends+0116.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgGfpnUETJdDJJq0_z1JHQPDV3MGRyohkewCFwDbfUXDHcDcjjDZJFqCwMLt_5ZRf_74MXFYN3H711VV7o48NsFf1JC4mUe4HZw5WY5BdH1y0uGn4qn_phxJBhLvN-Jm2mHH-iTvablcVAQ/s320/Jack+Reynolds-Earnshaw+final+cover+friends+0116.jpg" /></a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2lUtBC5p_hM_JSnNXwSI3GOmk3lWa1gwpQbjpMGswaFf9sQTCHVofHq3lVWfvPnkdiZmZKRUD6qZPGM9aK9vsAbLTNTWnelVfAYSM-KAoy9BmshtxoP5iWWFDbY27tFHyXC0bopXsFVek/s1600/Page+28.+TEXT+1..JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2lUtBC5p_hM_JSnNXwSI3GOmk3lWa1gwpQbjpMGswaFf9sQTCHVofHq3lVWfvPnkdiZmZKRUD6qZPGM9aK9vsAbLTNTWnelVfAYSM-KAoy9BmshtxoP5iWWFDbY27tFHyXC0bopXsFVek/s320/Page+28.+TEXT+1..JPG" /></a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKp5NF7jLJRUrGXJ6RLjqP3BFrUUfgqOW-aVJ3nPDsqYM0U_YVvxvF0U8i8Okx8yIbAYI_5RolxvyZKkL9kwbcejwx7FIocnV-heOEfooaCpfDWu8nLRmCJdl5rGCc__v2KqGwRcN_htcG/s1600/Page+63+TEXT+1.+Wil+Jenkins,+Arch+McMillan,+Duncan+Wood,+and+Michael+Harris+in+a+fan+tien..JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKp5NF7jLJRUrGXJ6RLjqP3BFrUUfgqOW-aVJ3nPDsqYM0U_YVvxvF0U8i8Okx8yIbAYI_5RolxvyZKkL9kwbcejwx7FIocnV-heOEfooaCpfDWu8nLRmCJdl5rGCc__v2KqGwRcN_htcG/s320/Page+63+TEXT+1.+Wil+Jenkins,+Arch+McMillan,+Duncan+Wood,+and+Michael+Harris+in+a+fan+tien..JPG" /></a>A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-79907606991867131022015-01-21T22:37:00.002+07:002015-01-21T22:39:49.726+07:00JACK'S BOOKS!<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMvIu0PZ84Dx4Hz6PfdSO-dX3nxhgNGHTxEYV_EAQNfleklc45_05pZK5AdN3GOYOm6LWt2vqwsn2PZQCF9oBSzwPKTELttugkLky7osR7dIr8IZf9n6VFidaK1x9o7uU6yUnlJXK1Gyk0/s1600/Jack+Reynolds-Books+by+Jack+011.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMvIu0PZ84Dx4Hz6PfdSO-dX3nxhgNGHTxEYV_EAQNfleklc45_05pZK5AdN3GOYOm6LWt2vqwsn2PZQCF9oBSzwPKTELttugkLky7osR7dIr8IZf9n6VFidaK1x9o7uU6yUnlJXK1Gyk0/s320/Jack+Reynolds-Books+by+Jack+011.JPG" /></a><br />
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Some seven years ago I became fascinated with Jack Reynolds because he had written only one book, the remarkable novel, A WOMAN OF BANGKOK. It was published in New York and London, was much reissued and translated and is still in print today, a tribute to it's enduring qualities.<br />
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I decided to photograph my collection of books by Jack and they include one of his own poetry, short stories of China and even a survey of industries in Thailand. I now realise it's not exactly true that he only wrote one book, though he was probably at his best with the bite sized piece.<br />
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And soon there will be another one, my own edited collection of his writings in China about the Friends Ambulance Unit, many bites making for a tasty menu of stories.<br />
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JACK JONES-A TRUE FRIEND TO CHINA should be out soon. I'm now pretty impatient after five years' research.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw8c8uBCdjJNY7ORKUPn7ADZV4mjH2ic_JbP3NjjhOMc2ajPYlu5fL3qcIYcVK8myzBZVfIHMfjYz0qUzKlvfrnxNajZ4YHogN3Kniz6zYvSGrkuKFN-pKHirELd777_ISlBLtHIl4qtlu/s1600/Jack+Reynolds-Earnshaw+final+cover+friends+0116.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgw8c8uBCdjJNY7ORKUPn7ADZV4mjH2ic_JbP3NjjhOMc2ajPYlu5fL3qcIYcVK8myzBZVfIHMfjYz0qUzKlvfrnxNajZ4YHogN3Kniz6zYvSGrkuKFN-pKHirELd777_ISlBLtHIl4qtlu/s320/Jack+Reynolds-Earnshaw+final+cover+friends+0116.jpg" /></a>A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-16133743188238248092015-01-16T16:43:00.001+07:002015-01-16T16:43:43.680+07:00A True Friend to China - So Nearly There!<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgffcNk60ZMKpwgmVXHKaxWUJYGSbbI3Bjx01xDG1SHBqk2K2YbTa38Zbg9Qd7GwwTd53Q8PO9K51r6C7QSlSt9cz83ij6WeUqWWvr4aBfynWSGUvsXIS7nfTYnwWUgop-DkPkttELZYioU/s1600/Jack+Reynolds-Earnshaw+final+cover+friends+0116.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgffcNk60ZMKpwgmVXHKaxWUJYGSbbI3Bjx01xDG1SHBqk2K2YbTa38Zbg9Qd7GwwTd53Q8PO9K51r6C7QSlSt9cz83ij6WeUqWWvr4aBfynWSGUvsXIS7nfTYnwWUgop-DkPkttELZYioU/s400/Jack+Reynolds-Earnshaw+final+cover+friends+0116.jpg" /></a>
After five years of research on the Friends Ambulance Unit 'China Convoy' we're so nearly there.
Earnshaw Books in Shanghai have finalised the cover, we have agonised through fifteen drafts of digital proofs, tweaking and editing incessantly, and now it's time for the printers to produce a mock-up of the book for final approval.
In March I am flying to Yunnan, China and with other FAU friends will take a tour of the Burma Road and some of the places that Jack Jones and his men worked in the forties. Then on to Hong Kong and on March 27th I will be giving a talk to the Royal Asiatic Society about the 'China Convoy'. If all goes well a parcel of books will meet me there and I'll be able to show them off and sell them at the talk.
It's going to be a large format book, lavishly illustrated and with a unit cost for printing of about £15 it had better be good.
Wow! I can't wait.
A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-68358727306776651222014-11-20T21:56:00.001+07:002014-11-20T21:56:23.387+07:00Summer of Sixty NineGuess I like my cars and there was no better year than the open road in the summer of sixty nine with hazy Jane, rollin' down the highway and getting my kicks on the Skyline Drive and Blue Ridge Parkway in a great grey Pontiac GTO. Foot hard down, steering one-handed, my extra-tanned left arm out the window,and enjoying the scream of somebody else's rubber on hot tarmac as we stormed up through the hairpins. Auto driveaway from New York to Fort Lauderdale. All we paid was the gas!
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Then on the way home, brought a big Ford station wagon back to New York. Sleeping in the mountains in the car we couldn't get out in the night because of the bears sniffing about.
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Had to go up to Toronto to see what mounties looked like as they must be everywhere. Can't remember what I'd done wrong.
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A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-85542634946760924982014-10-14T20:59:00.004+07:002014-10-14T20:59:47.092+07:00The Breasts of Dora - Shock Photos!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfc1Wt33SKDkgkYUDdFDqK0tHV7qF7uFdNO0mNjOrkEMepZTo7N6Mp-G_wl8h2jvvYRTCGZcPLhPNng_9IZGu1R-9r42w5j2wuBsOIEmnwoWec2JrTquBpi7fbzadesNC9ahtohrXAjq0f/s1600/WOB+Jack+inscribes+WOB+to+Bernard+-+Copy.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfc1Wt33SKDkgkYUDdFDqK0tHV7qF7uFdNO0mNjOrkEMepZTo7N6Mp-G_wl8h2jvvYRTCGZcPLhPNng_9IZGu1R-9r42w5j2wuBsOIEmnwoWec2JrTquBpi7fbzadesNC9ahtohrXAjq0f/s320/WOB+Jack+inscribes+WOB+to+Bernard+-+Copy.bmp" /></a></div>
When Jack Reynolds gave a copy of A WOMAN OF BANGKOK to Bernard Llewellyn, his best buddy from the Friends Ambulance Unit 'China Convoy', he wrote the above on the title page and it puzzled me greatly. Meeting and pausing awhile in the back streets of Bangkok is one thing but...!
So I put the question to Jack's old China friend, Howell Jones in Newfoundland and he quickly came up with the answer. Jack and Bernard were keen climbers when in China; near the FAU depot in Kweiyang there were some strange conical hills which they must have named in Dora's honour. And now at last I even think I have found the hills themselves, to the right of the picture seen across the roofs of the village by the depot.
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But who was Dora? Well, I think I now know this too. In the FAU Register is listed Dora Chau, otherwise Tsou Ling-hwa and this week at the Imperial War Museum in London she took off her dark glasses in my presence and gave a most wonderful smile. At least, we were watching a faded colour film of the China Convoy in the early forties but it was enough to suggest she would have deserved a special association with those mountains.
I believe that Dora was a refugee from the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong, an educated woman, a student perhaps, who fled into the interior of China, to Kweiyang and into a job with the China Convoy. She may have returned to Hong Kong after the hostilities and I would really love to know.
There's more about Jack and Dora in my forthcoming book, but I don't want this blog post to be a spoiler!
A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-46536981333304115142014-10-06T15:55:00.001+07:002014-10-06T15:55:56.893+07:00Magical China PhotosPart of my research into the adventures of Jack Reynolds in China with the Friends Ambulance Unit distributing medical supplies in the nineteen forties has been collecting photos. I had nothing to start with but by tracing families of former FAU members I have managed to build up a fine collection to illustrate my book. What follows is an arbitrary selection, chosen mainly because they are of low definition that should post easily.
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMysmZOi_x5fsT5CnQ9XYpn3AlludSPb0qOJG4WPRjAOVUoMkbtXt68M0e2WzYkVwHVRtt4Pk85fyMDskTeZKO5POy-F56LhFNl7YHS-NZdhpEJ6PTOGHYQJTIqble4Kvhhqj-_Pkw7-BA/s1600/49b+Kutsing+garage.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMysmZOi_x5fsT5CnQ9XYpn3AlludSPb0qOJG4WPRjAOVUoMkbtXt68M0e2WzYkVwHVRtt4Pk85fyMDskTeZKO5POy-F56LhFNl7YHS-NZdhpEJ6PTOGHYQJTIqble4Kvhhqj-_Pkw7-BA/s320/49b+Kutsing+garage.jpg" /></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFGw2u1bf3S2gZeHzfj3NhEZyYtBky251Tp9vclKPKX2y-Tb_IDWvu68Ci8zkokMzEosmTpKTSjmmH3hLb-EhObH6VjSPVPHzD_uS-aXcGMKfRjeRChpFxUH3LkijMcXyLQN5WKax5XeUD/s1600/58a+Betterton+suggests+Paoshan.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhFGw2u1bf3S2gZeHzfj3NhEZyYtBky251Tp9vclKPKX2y-Tb_IDWvu68Ci8zkokMzEosmTpKTSjmmH3hLb-EhObH6VjSPVPHzD_uS-aXcGMKfRjeRChpFxUH3LkijMcXyLQN5WKax5XeUD/s320/58a+Betterton+suggests+Paoshan.jpg" /></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ3V5_zHEDvUrVfTPtbj1zHEV7Zqge7IRO_a6NQYMs1PQr9zb806T1L6bAgY_aatcFdMPHCdQ_i2ldDXFfZwKz0K5yTE7BK19KSiElh3iZGIgZaJiqDjHwcpLPks0l4UaqeiFwzZQPhfR7/s1600/69+Dodge+bus+with+engine+out.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQ3V5_zHEDvUrVfTPtbj1zHEV7Zqge7IRO_a6NQYMs1PQr9zb806T1L6bAgY_aatcFdMPHCdQ_i2ldDXFfZwKz0K5yTE7BK19KSiElh3iZGIgZaJiqDjHwcpLPks0l4UaqeiFwzZQPhfR7/s320/69+Dodge+bus+with+engine+out.jpg" /></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFEZhSWMjeiEfTBcHDumuDlIqZAEpalh-JaZ34gic_XqLJ35gFM4whg_J8ZT5YDORn5oQbM9N7d9xZGgcN_wjCFeq6ABvMhPYDFWXjgDixB7LamEcqwaUnyBR5EiNbZ8n1ZDDMHTXp8Ewm/s1600/D+img123,+Hai+Tang+Chee+queue.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFEZhSWMjeiEfTBcHDumuDlIqZAEpalh-JaZ34gic_XqLJ35gFM4whg_J8ZT5YDORn5oQbM9N7d9xZGgcN_wjCFeq6ABvMhPYDFWXjgDixB7LamEcqwaUnyBR5EiNbZ8n1ZDDMHTXp8Ewm/s320/D+img123,+Hai+Tang+Chee+queue.jpg" /></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZHQ7_fQmCGFfWr3KC-60Fz-aShTKQ1oi4Dhs1shD5SwBSJZ_aqbImcHC1RojFlw6xOCY6yHU_fcoCAKRSKd02oW2EU2c5eW6ShosKwDp-WE3UWtsf2fqNvdnA9LSAKCH-a2Qb6ZgpaE5F/s1600/71+FAU+Dodge+in+collapse+drain.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZHQ7_fQmCGFfWr3KC-60Fz-aShTKQ1oi4Dhs1shD5SwBSJZ_aqbImcHC1RojFlw6xOCY6yHU_fcoCAKRSKd02oW2EU2c5eW6ShosKwDp-WE3UWtsf2fqNvdnA9LSAKCH-a2Qb6ZgpaE5F/s320/71+FAU+Dodge+in+collapse+drain.jpg" /></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_KVNF7teOsU4VJnFE7y-7iPWU4OjC53cuX8ShkdqqelaJNM9r54HjeC4OjLwYqKg9ATDCXUpCudVNol4b8P-bA0cxIVN6CXemm4OIjFAkVW5H3xnf-jF_hcbZyQw0QIT4MMWA9Pq1t_Rl/s1600/Near+Santai,+1+Oct+1947.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_KVNF7teOsU4VJnFE7y-7iPWU4OjC53cuX8ShkdqqelaJNM9r54HjeC4OjLwYqKg9ATDCXUpCudVNol4b8P-bA0cxIVN6CXemm4OIjFAkVW5H3xnf-jF_hcbZyQw0QIT4MMWA9Pq1t_Rl/s320/Near+Santai,+1+Oct+1947.JPG" /></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd03t-SIizaK458aYaqujMr4BiyLNkrgogc13KOCS0z3kxwsSY3mB0yavAwLti5Z9OZCoqNQ0LffP1W1BEvtLxoI1gyHDwRYgL34kcJOYvwaDyWl7ylqIyABAq1NoK659rP48BGMEiQS6T/s1600/Jack+Reynolds-Friends+Library+5+018+Kweiyang+hostel+by+Betterton.JPG" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjd03t-SIizaK458aYaqujMr4BiyLNkrgogc13KOCS0z3kxwsSY3mB0yavAwLti5Z9OZCoqNQ0LffP1W1BEvtLxoI1gyHDwRYgL34kcJOYvwaDyWl7ylqIyABAq1NoK659rP48BGMEiQS6T/s320/Jack+Reynolds-Friends+Library+5+018+Kweiyang+hostel+by+Betterton.JPG" /></a>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdz_1g2PlI4yhpll26mwmKpy03DjXsh4nwlGqyhuyKZCazR-l2tXgsxnzoIgnfe214kavjCyrWG4iHZMXHJQ-yvvai-JRP7z70CJj-ofuoLK5Fgr_YtKj-l9M6zAEuMq9TmdIhyphenhyphenDETyK04/s1600/SACU+gs810-MedicalSupplies.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdz_1g2PlI4yhpll26mwmKpy03DjXsh4nwlGqyhuyKZCazR-l2tXgsxnzoIgnfe214kavjCyrWG4iHZMXHJQ-yvvai-JRP7z70CJj-ofuoLK5Fgr_YtKj-l9M6zAEuMq9TmdIhyphenhyphenDETyK04/s320/SACU+gs810-MedicalSupplies.jpg" /></a> A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-5840238049951262002014-09-18T21:02:00.004+07:002014-09-18T21:02:51.567+07:00Great Wheels for SaleMy drop dead gorgeous Toyota pickup is for sale. To be seen in Sangkha, Surin province, you won't find one cheaper with under 30,000 kilometres on the clock. This time it's not a joke and I can be contacted at arhicks56@hotmail.com.
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBE4FOirV29UMjjuMjZ9b3l2vLKUxDtCPZnBDlmeeVAi6-aY_1cId4rxHoDdQ2hZOC-f4rmPdH6O7CGYFAMJMS-Nk49F5mPYyB6GNps-aOBahBDVD4BMcPP2ljJpOEUgr_FSRwotuQVuV1/s1600/Ch+68+car+in+garden.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBE4FOirV29UMjjuMjZ9b3l2vLKUxDtCPZnBDlmeeVAi6-aY_1cId4rxHoDdQ2hZOC-f4rmPdH6O7CGYFAMJMS-Nk49F5mPYyB6GNps-aOBahBDVD4BMcPP2ljJpOEUgr_FSRwotuQVuV1/s400/Ch+68+car+in+garden.jpg" /></a>
This picture appears in MY THAI GIRL AND I so the truck's famous too!
A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-48385260569360654652014-09-11T17:39:00.000+07:002014-09-11T17:41:41.561+07:00Distracted by the 'China Convoy'<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRjKm4ObI3qjv_alAgZbJ6qi2SUQZTMondXGPAfMN72bg4K6E0AyQvi9jl4G_cYwb6kvtV6QTj7AodVTkWUCdraDJt60vO9QGb5i-zzGYoQuBXnDNBcMvpOyXd9xPGR82rMxCXNSTjwAFm/s1600/26.+INTRODUCTION+GROUP+PHOTO+page+8.++%5BLarge+image+across+the+top+of+the+page.%5D.tif" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRjKm4ObI3qjv_alAgZbJ6qi2SUQZTMondXGPAfMN72bg4K6E0AyQvi9jl4G_cYwb6kvtV6QTj7AodVTkWUCdraDJt60vO9QGb5i-zzGYoQuBXnDNBcMvpOyXd9xPGR82rMxCXNSTjwAFm/s320/26.+INTRODUCTION+GROUP+PHOTO+page+8.++%5BLarge+image+across+the+top+of+the+page.%5D.tif" /></a>
I have been silent on this blog for quite a time for two reasons, first I have been locked out and unable to post as they think I'm an intruder, but suddenly today I'm back in again. And secondly I have been distracted by researching and writing about the 'China Convoy'. [Paragraph]
Further down this blog are some articles about 'Jack Reynolds', the mysterious author of the seminal novel, "A WOMAN OF BANGKOK", in which I ask for help to discover who he was. Well, now I know and have even written a book about him. He finally settled in Bangkok working for Unicef and had a family of seven children but the reason he came out east from England was because he was a pacifist and did alternative service in China in the nineteen forties. [Paragraph]
The photo's of a bearded Jack in 1946 in Chungking where he was transport director for the Friends Ambulance Units 'China Convoy' This was a Quaker relief project which distributed medical supplies and services throughout China for almost ten years from the Japanese invasion to the communist 'liberation'. [Paragraph]
Jack's story in China is an amazing one, full of adventures and accidents and is well worth telling. Called A TRUE FRIEND TO CHINA, 'The lost writings of a heroic nobody', my soon to be published book is an edited collection of the articles Jack wrote for the FAU newsletter that was put together and circulated to all its staff in China. [Paragraph]
He was a great blogger long before blogging and I've thoroughly enjoyed doing the book, even if it has meant that my writings on Thailand have ground to a halt. Perhaps at least I'm back in my blog and it can come back to life.A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-10446687806477146202012-11-08T18:46:00.001+07:002012-11-08T18:50:07.873+07:00Thai Girls Trashed!<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbqk84mxDd-Gk8FzJJiWb70QqOJToCSnkwKfaykTtRcztwRDg_iK6JrYudvHxy5rkX-PNYrkyfR3sXZ-HqnxJ6u3HmtSqaJY_9rnxtON4eIHijVEpENKpyOtlTODHPZyjp0J-9vlHYZgX-/s1600/red+book.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="400" width="274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhbqk84mxDd-Gk8FzJJiWb70QqOJToCSnkwKfaykTtRcztwRDg_iK6JrYudvHxy5rkX-PNYrkyfR3sXZ-HqnxJ6u3HmtSqaJY_9rnxtON4eIHijVEpENKpyOtlTODHPZyjp0J-9vlHYZgX-/s400/red+book.jpg" /></a>.........
My novel, THAI GIRL, is a story of how English student, Ben, goes backpacking in Thailand with Emma, his girlfriend from university. There are tensions between them and Emma dumps Ben on the tiny island of Koh Samet, their ultimate tropical paradise. Ben then falls for Fon, an enigmatic but flirtatious beach masseuse who refuses his advances but slowly is drawn in................
I have received many emails from readers alternatively saying that Emma or Ben are insufferable and that Thai women or western women are money grubbing and awful. Some of these comments are posted on the Readers Forum on www.thaigirl2004.com and I find them fascinating because different readers react so differently to the book and its characters. ...................
I have just recieved another message from a reader which is particularly interesting because she has spent a considerable time in SE Asia as an NGO volunteer. Her uncompromising views thus cannot be dismissed lightly as being from someone who is ignorant or not well-disposed to Thailand............
Her unexpurgated comments now follow............
I just read your book, THAI GIRL, which I found in an op shop in Australia. I've spent the past 5 years going to and through Thailand so was curious to see how it was written about.....well the scenery and setting certainly rang true, also the sense of discombobulation that first time travellers experience. But as a female I found the female characters to be absolutely awful. I know you were trying to create a sense of empathy with the Thais but did you have to make Emma such a horror? And frankly, having seen first-hand the grasping greed of many Thai girls and the terrible consequences of their overwhelming desire for money on naive Western men, I couldn't see anything in the female Thai characters that would cause any guy to 'fall in love'.............
I don't pretend to have an understanding of men, but who would fall for the sob stories and rapaciousness of child-like women who see sex as a monetary transaction? I've sworn, after spending the past couple of years working in SE Asia, to never return to Thailand again. A big part of this decision is due to the constant demands for money, even from supposed 'friends' and even while already volunteering all my time to NGO work. I really fail to see how any self-respecting man could find any happiness when their entire personal value is monetary and not based on intelligence, kindness, humour; all of those necessary attributes to fulfilling relationships...................
Are men really so shallow?...........
Helen................................................................................
Wow say I! There are loads of issues there for comment, but just a brief defence of my female characters from me..........................
Wasn't Emma entitled to her post-university depression, especially in the face of Ben's overwhelming personality! She then had the courage to dump him and to go off and enjoy Thailand without him. And as for Fon, the 'Thai girl' of the title, she pushed Ben away and never asked him for anything. Surely she breaks the stereotype that Helen asserts?..........................
So what's your view? Are Thai women so rapacious and western men so shallow? Do please post a Comment..............................
PS If you'd like to read a case study, non-fiction this time, you could try my later book, MY THAI GIRL AND I.............
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_a029SB3U4rrQl4_wReUD3iptDwATdl1vqpLgIcBIhpKh-XW4dKZ5vh6VO621OZep9pV2OTe4GRVJ2SOn56SCXATYgqkFS0iDvFrf7-R0-Qu0n5hJgFOea9kPLaURg8hlPBwWfCK_kxdx/s1600/thai_girl_banner.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="51" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_a029SB3U4rrQl4_wReUD3iptDwATdl1vqpLgIcBIhpKh-XW4dKZ5vh6VO621OZep9pV2OTe4GRVJ2SOn56SCXATYgqkFS0iDvFrf7-R0-Qu0n5hJgFOea9kPLaURg8hlPBwWfCK_kxdx/s400/thai_girl_banner.jpg" /></a>
A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-18167355429885772632012-04-05T18:40:00.002+07:002012-04-06T15:21:29.226+07:00My THAI GIRL's an Ebook!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB7bYgjnOHmnmMv6O8xBAPkeNF6WVfJJiYkq4ydPZqBGHKysGG2xoVHLVrdNO-PkLwstwovQGmkS0cIO50mgy9ekj0Y5ouw3OebQDvyxemE8pK74nvh5OOXyDlsbFXKLMI-pYg3Itk9JgS/s1600/BKK-Hicks%255B2%255D.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="290" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB7bYgjnOHmnmMv6O8xBAPkeNF6WVfJJiYkq4ydPZqBGHKysGG2xoVHLVrdNO-PkLwstwovQGmkS0cIO50mgy9ekj0Y5ouw3OebQDvyxemE8pK74nvh5OOXyDlsbFXKLMI-pYg3Itk9JgS/s400/BKK-Hicks%255B2%255D.jpg" /></a></div>
For an author like me it’s earth shattering news that my two books about Thailand can now be bought anywhere in the world on the click of a mouse. They have recently become available as ebooks. ****
If you Google the titles or go to Amazon you can find them from many suppliers and you can have them in seconds to read off your Kindle device or your usual computer screen. Images of both books appear to the right of this blog article and you can learn more about them and read reviews and first chapters on www.thaigirl2004.com.> ****
My novel, THAI GIRL, is the story of a young Englishman who falls in love with Fon, a masseuse working on the beach on Koh Samet and tells how he discovers Thailand and its culture through his on-off relationship with Fon. “Thai Girl” was first published in Thailand in 1974 and again by Monsoon Books in Singapore, achieving best seller status in both places. It still sells well and is currently reprinting for the ninth time. A friend recently sent me a shot of the books prominently displayed at Bangkok airport which gave me a very good feeling!>****
MY THAI GIRL AND I, “How I found a new life in Thailand” is my own story of how early retired and living in Thailand I met my future wife, Cat, and how we set up home in the rice fields of North Eastern Thailand. The book is written as a collection of short anecdotes, not unlike the blog articles below. It tells my tale of falling in love in and with Thailand, together with all the joys and tensions of a cross-cultural relationship and of living far from home. It’s an easy read and, I hope, a funny one that can be dipped into as well as read straight through, though I hope you’ll find it hard to put it down!>****
This book has been a special pleasure for me as I have made many friends from it among readers who have had similar experiences or dream of escaping the western rat race, so I am happy that it can now be bought anywhere in the world. In fact as the book has over 100 photos, an ebook is perhaps better in that these all appear in colour and are far sharper than on the printed page.>****
The emergence of the web and of ebooks is causing a revolution in the world of publishing and books. It is said that in the US Amazon now sells as many ebooks as it does conventional books and that these are the future. I struggle with this because I still love the feel of a physical book and of the rows I have stacked tightly on my bookshelves as a reminder of past pleasures. On the other hand, the big publishers and book sellers have had a strangle hold on the book trade which has tended to inhibit the publication of new authors and fringe topics. Now it’s a new world out there with the emergence of ebooks and of ‘print on demand’ books where no physical stock is held but a book is printed off and bound whenever an internet order is received.>****
The availability of books on the internet, obviating the need for visiting a bookshop, is another side of the revolution. This applies not only to new books but to second hand and out of print books too. For the bibliophile or researcher, gone are the days of trawling through dusty second hand bookshops looking for that rare out of print title. Now all you have to do is go online and you can find any number of copies available and order and pay for one in a matter of minutes.>****
This is wonderful for readers of books. It presents a problem though for publishers and authors as an accessible market in second hand books must inevitably inhibit sales of new books.>
Authors generally have to be satisfied with minimal royalties on the price of new books sold and have always complained that multiple reading via lending libraries means that they cannot make a living. I have always thought that a book is almost a sacred thing that should be kept and passed on for others. Now I can’t help feeling that a mass produced paperback should be read and discarded just like a newspaper. The new internet market in second hand books however means that the life of a book can be indefinitely renewed as it is sold on from reader to reader.>****
Writing and creativity does need to be stimulated and in general the new world of books will promote this. I therefore welcome the brave new world of ebooks and commend it to you. Ebooks are cheap to buy and great for the reader and at least they cannot be sold on and recycled. The world of reading is thus becoming a better and richer place.>****
In any event I cannot be a luddite as ebooks are here to stay and if you can’t beat them… just as in “My Thai Girl and I” I advocate that expats living in the cultural melting pot of Thailand can only find happiness there if they learn to ‘go with the flow’.A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-58399014315342581052011-12-21T17:28:00.002+07:002011-12-21T17:34:57.067+07:00"A Woman of Bangkok" is Back!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsdC4aai_QIyuN8vxgwq-SplxLqIyTpA5Hm_4s1MwswATsgPdElWoMmuGAX-_tyz61jQB-rsYb0yPL-2svEeQWJNBJ-Fx9y1lxiwJnsOeJKEHV4L14sTyjnRWjTyk8Ed4hRWPRYYJGEdE7/s1600/WOB+by+Monsoon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="221" width="143" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsdC4aai_QIyuN8vxgwq-SplxLqIyTpA5Hm_4s1MwswATsgPdElWoMmuGAX-_tyz61jQB-rsYb0yPL-2svEeQWJNBJ-Fx9y1lxiwJnsOeJKEHV4L14sTyjnRWjTyk8Ed4hRWPRYYJGEdE7/s400/WOB+by+Monsoon.jpg" /></a></div>
The great news is that, "A Woman of Bangkok", Jack Reynolds' classic novel published in 1956 in New York and London is at last back in print.
If you scan down this blog you'll find many articles about my quest to learn more about it's author. I've now gone far down that road and so am thrilled for him that Monsoon Books in Singapore have issued both a paper version and an ebook.
The blurb that you'll find at www.monsoonbooks.com.sg reads as follows. (If you go to the sample chapter, you'll also find a short bio of Jack.)**********
"Set against a beautifully observed Thailand of the 1950s, this is the story of a young Englishman’s infatuation with a dance-hall hostess named Vilai, who all Bangkok knows as The White Leopard. No ordinary prostitute, Vilai is one of the most memorable in literature’s long line of brazen working girls. An unmitigated liar and brutally transparent about her desire for money, she unscrupulously milks young Reggie Joyce, the son of an Anglican vicar, with complete frankness. Reggie knows her for what she is yet there seems no folly he will not commit for her, no road to ruin he dares not take. Vilai becomes an obsession for him—an obsession that brings Reggie moments of ecstasy, months of anguish and the threat of utter disaster.
Acknowledged today as one of the most memorable novels about Thailand, “A Woman of Bangkok” was first published to critical acclaim in London and New York in the 1950s and is a classic of Bangkok fiction. While the Fifties was a very different world, what is remarkable about this book is that the more the bar scene in Bangkok changes, the more it stays the same. Just as Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill stand eternal, Vilai takes a very special, dare one say seminal, place as the first and best of the many anti-heroines of the now burgeoning Bangkok novel."********
It is a fine piece of writing and well worth reading. Tell us what you think!********** Please forgive this bizarre editing. Blogspot is refusing to accept my paragraphing.A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-34508192246919285302011-02-09T16:48:00.011+07:002011-02-09T17:19:36.043+07:00Preah Vihear Ablaze Again<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKR9Y2PUOMI2_BbNDOhMz7cX8WROz8KSTIFg_HiSTVsH_CjfTAIfLsdqY2TGZw1go7ALbcr7ePoc78NbV7vV24Kc2iJINk5dBy1t0uvJUBHvUQDenHDe4K-hlRCuFOUhk3gjFnIUJF6DfN/s1600/21-08-2007_06-21-24_0295.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKR9Y2PUOMI2_BbNDOhMz7cX8WROz8KSTIFg_HiSTVsH_CjfTAIfLsdqY2TGZw1go7ALbcr7ePoc78NbV7vV24Kc2iJINk5dBy1t0uvJUBHvUQDenHDe4K-hlRCuFOUhk3gjFnIUJF6DfN/s400/21-08-2007_06-21-24_0295.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5571627400244859474" /></a><br />The Cambodian flag flies peaceably above the first temple at Preah Vihear, known to the Thais as Khao Phra Viharn and I cannot now believe that blood is again being spilled in this futile border dispute. The conflict has no real substance but is merely the result of extreme nationalism being fanned by politicians on both sides of the border seeking to distract attention from internal problems and to impress the electorate. It is so ironic that two Asian nations are scrapping over a border that was imposed on them by French colonial Indo-China in an unequal treaty that the World Court then had to interpret.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgdvOAm2J8_k9byMCWwnFDs1b3fauD5w3wEsVVDXOr7Mpf-plPn6fdLiDT4ZtJ-QYzkXOu98tmlfPnGh_Nm7yMwMcVy8TU9hdB9m729yYOBKlF8el6umrET1vD_pyc985OkdJLHBG9VyKQ/s1600/21-08-2007+05-06-09_0192.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgdvOAm2J8_k9byMCWwnFDs1b3fauD5w3wEsVVDXOr7Mpf-plPn6fdLiDT4ZtJ-QYzkXOu98tmlfPnGh_Nm7yMwMcVy8TU9hdB9m729yYOBKlF8el6umrET1vD_pyc985OkdJLHBG9VyKQ/s400/21-08-2007+05-06-09_0192.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5571627193658498178" /></a><br />Bullet holes from the Khmer Rouge era are clearly visible.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1qUkzQUvmLReddaCYxHVI-oznS3aq8FJ6ZT3bbFiFJEPIeuIjhiE0QHrQZgTxfJzy13Bau_gyqNkArHIGf5rZSrjijWkKRprd1q-JQ7eGGkiAqKDukBv6NAanSJbg14_5oo1fDFNy9Yau/s1600/21-08-2007_04-54-38_0220.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1qUkzQUvmLReddaCYxHVI-oznS3aq8FJ6ZT3bbFiFJEPIeuIjhiE0QHrQZgTxfJzy13Bau_gyqNkArHIGf5rZSrjijWkKRprd1q-JQ7eGGkiAqKDukBv6NAanSJbg14_5oo1fDFNy9Yau/s400/21-08-2007_04-54-38_0220.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5571625600709050978" /></a><br />The biggest losers are the traders for whom the temple was a livelihood.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGdJfOEi2ElHXSZfW_s4jrY792oD1tj1wHyV8_6A2Pctja2ujLgX-pOp5OOdaP60zJhDYp_4Qmtv8_XwyZ-eSI25D_8rRcR7kRy3gz-ZpXVeRuzOo3ixV6lZYF8iVSEWaF4YHiR99HAsvV/s1600/Khmer_faces_cropped.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 387px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhGdJfOEi2ElHXSZfW_s4jrY792oD1tj1wHyV8_6A2Pctja2ujLgX-pOp5OOdaP60zJhDYp_4Qmtv8_XwyZ-eSI25D_8rRcR7kRy3gz-ZpXVeRuzOo3ixV6lZYF8iVSEWaF4YHiR99HAsvV/s400/Khmer_faces_cropped.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5571625523330542066" /></a><br />A sacred place, it should be enjoyed as a shared heritage.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu6ENtZVcXnCptQIeSg18xVBz6rOaB1L8e3wkJNXB4xTk3jFHCvxzPrAqRmJ0_pqUNvDSpW9TIxGwD6otShCsO6Nh_vljEHEDoc_VLqhh4TMw-oLnY4b_H1-DqmGYDVSzNRhndgjqNAgnh/s1600/21-08-2007_05-23-12_0212.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiu6ENtZVcXnCptQIeSg18xVBz6rOaB1L8e3wkJNXB4xTk3jFHCvxzPrAqRmJ0_pqUNvDSpW9TIxGwD6otShCsO6Nh_vljEHEDoc_VLqhh4TMw-oLnY4b_H1-DqmGYDVSzNRhndgjqNAgnh/s400/21-08-2007_05-23-12_0212.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5571625431703643666" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZMYuzSZ28LkqypkqOXa3duDE3njt_hwgFGhZp-3qTfgw0x6Ro1d1RcafTASPzkmbbrhfSN4WpLkU9PVqpDoloLJvafDAB6zv0AwAJrdYPB7Vk1Ps1Uo0xBtHlzXhoIuqY7PRyOo3Gg6aX/s1600/21-08-2007_05-20-24_0251.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZMYuzSZ28LkqypkqOXa3duDE3njt_hwgFGhZp-3qTfgw0x6Ro1d1RcafTASPzkmbbrhfSN4WpLkU9PVqpDoloLJvafDAB6zv0AwAJrdYPB7Vk1Ps1Uo0xBtHlzXhoIuqY7PRyOo3Gg6aX/s400/21-08-2007_05-20-24_0251.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5571625341762243826" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip1LksFcLWm_M6LFrsCHEFtUBoGn3qdgX50WXV_RM6znZJx0HUYCnR4WpzQBWemfJ6Mdr3SE-Rp00TTI7VxDqSt3LqPOKfs_9nG4aUs1wZz2sEFTc3YUAv_rDkGgqegFqQKJgBDxPKhmuA/s1600/21-08-2007_06-07-40_0281.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip1LksFcLWm_M6LFrsCHEFtUBoGn3qdgX50WXV_RM6znZJx0HUYCnR4WpzQBWemfJ6Mdr3SE-Rp00TTI7VxDqSt3LqPOKfs_9nG4aUs1wZz2sEFTc3YUAv_rDkGgqegFqQKJgBDxPKhmuA/s400/21-08-2007_06-07-40_0281.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5571625250108130754" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUX77QPER6G6v1PL1DgoYHWDpVd-wHQQJjypxYLqC7EIShLnQk5CH7XOBp2h8QYIpARLhxR2Y_dut-AlSgwPL-GUzqkYZnkblS3xcY4DOMfrsK_eDI01Ps4AxFUdghqmkai3twoQTthR4V/s1600/21-08-2007_06-03-18_0274.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUX77QPER6G6v1PL1DgoYHWDpVd-wHQQJjypxYLqC7EIShLnQk5CH7XOBp2h8QYIpARLhxR2Y_dut-AlSgwPL-GUzqkYZnkblS3xcY4DOMfrsK_eDI01Ps4AxFUdghqmkai3twoQTthR4V/s400/21-08-2007_06-03-18_0274.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5571625157176803426" /></a><br /><br />I wrote the following article in October 2008, never thinking that the dispute would gather momentum for so long. Nothing has changed. Things have only got worse and more blood has been spilled. When will everyone come to their senses?<br /><br />Thailand’s Temple of Doom?<br /><br />I am so sorry that Preah Vihear, the Cambodian temple on the Thai border has once again become a political football, souring relations between the two countries.<br /><br />Called Khao Phra Viharn in Thai, it is just two hours from where we live and I keep on going back as for me it is one of the most magical places in the world. I’ve been there ten times in the last few years and I want to go another ten. <br /><br />Though the Khmer temples at Angkor are grander in scale, the natural setting of Khao Phra Viharn is beyond compare. It sits at the top of a cliff and as you stand there looking down at hundreds of miles of Cambodian plain and mountain spread before you, just behind you a thousand year symphony in stone, this must be one of the most remarkable places in the world.<br /><br />The temple often acts as a lightning rod for tensions between Thailand and Cambodia as it is the Cambodian and not the Thai flag that flies over it. In 1962 the International Court of Justice decided a border dispute referred to it by Cambodia, ruling that the temple was within Cambodia and that the Thais must withdraw their troops. The Thais were outraged and have never forgotten this slight from the minnow to the east.<br /><br />Now managed by the Cambodians in a pleasant state of sleepy under-development, little girls and old ladies wander through the ruins beseechingly selling postcards and cold drinks and whenever there are tensions between the two countries, the Cambodians assert their authority and close the temple to visitors. Whether the pretext is pollution flowing into Thailand from the stream below the temple or a Thai helicopter allegedly overflying Cambodian airspace, it always spells doom for the poor vendors who abruptly lose their livelihood.<br /><br />The decision of the Court was that maps drawn up during the French colonial era and at least implicitly accepted by the Thais placed the temple in French Cambodia notwithstanding that geographically it is within Thailand. Standing on top of a gently rising escarpment and cut off from Cambodia by the cliff, it must always have been approached from the Thai plateau. <br /><br />The usual presumption is that international borders follow the watershed. In this case the watershed is the cliff edge, which would put the temple within Thailand, but the Court concluded in this case that the treaty ruled otherwise. Unequal treaties by which colonial powers sought to extend their territory are nonetheless taken to be valid.<br /><br />The latest saga is that Cambodia has now made an application to UNESCO for the listing of the temple as a World Heritage Site and again the Thais are outraged. The new Thai government seems prepared to co-operate but the opposition Democrats have made it a major issue in domestic politics, attempting to bring down the government. Charging that a deal had been done to allow the Cambodian application proceed in return for a casino concession for Thaksin Shinawatra, the shadowy power behind the PM, the opposition has obtained a court injunction to stop the government supporting the application for listing and has stirred up extreme nationalist fervour against Cambodia. <br /><br />The whole conflict is damaging for all sides. If the Thais could only accept the reality of Cambodian sovereignty over the temple and support an application for listing, there would be benefit for all, especially for the poor vendors in the temple. <br /><br />The approach to the temple from the Thai side is scheduled as a National Park so the Thai authorities already collect entry fees equivalent to those charged by the Cambodians for the temple itself. As the access and the only population centres are on the Thai side, the benefit of virtually all associated tourism primarily benefits the Thais. The Thai province of Si Saket is one of the poorest in the country and desperately needs its one significant tourist attraction to be promoted by harmonious progress to a World Heritage listing.<br /><br />The current dispute could now close the temple and sour relations between the two countries for years, thus doing considerable self-inflicted damage to Thailand. <br /><br />The more intransigent the Thais prove to be, the more the Cambodians will try to develop the approaches to the temple from their own side. There is talk of foreign funding for a major road through the jungle, of building a cable car up the cliff and, perish the thought, of casinos in the vicinity.<br /><br />When I first visited the temple seven years ago, the view from the top was totally untouched by humanity. Though the jungle had perhaps been stripped of the best timber, there was not a road or a man-made structure in view for a hundred miles in any direction. Now already there is a dirt road with trucks crawling along it like ants and small shanty towns at the intersections. I fear what the future will bring. The great charm of the temple is that it remains under-developed and innocent, but all that soon may change. <br /><br />In recent times it has been the focus of violent conflict as it was one of the last strongholds held by the Khmer Rouge long after the fall of Pol Pot, the genocidal leader of Cambodia. Indeed one of their cannons still stands high on the hill facing back towards Thailand.<br /><br />Now once again the atmosphere is laden with doom and it all seems so sad. As I walk up the steep stone avenue towards the temple steadfastly refusing all offers of postcards, the little girls gaze hopefully at me. ‘Okay, mister. Not buy postcard now, but maybe later come back.’ <br /><br />Maybe but maybe not.<br /><br />My heart usually melts for them or for the boy who in competent English tells me his life ambition is one day to go to school. My hand slips into my pocket for a few baht, always to be rewarded with a million dollar smile.<br /><br />The temple and the simplicity of these people thus enriches me and all who go there, while the barrenness of racist nationalism and partisan politics that is now rearing its ugly head diminishes all of us. In this most beautiful of places the petty behaviour of politicians could not be more grotesque.A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-11217618430801821272010-12-08T16:29:00.010+07:002010-12-08T16:50:35.785+07:00My Thai Girl's a Hunter-Gatherer<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYNp8YirWQisTo81XlhEZvNfK-UOYkk4ns3dt7X1bLF_kzUG-yi7DBd8t9L_Dhmp_2P9nhKulU6PIeO8H4CySZhhWb7VR_ANhDnHzTFH5pZIxLD_l7HSy1fUhliJXHUGy98ibJR_IOnEPw/s1600/Crab+in+garage.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYNp8YirWQisTo81XlhEZvNfK-UOYkk4ns3dt7X1bLF_kzUG-yi7DBd8t9L_Dhmp_2P9nhKulU6PIeO8H4CySZhhWb7VR_ANhDnHzTFH5pZIxLD_l7HSy1fUhliJXHUGy98ibJR_IOnEPw/s400/Crab+in+garage.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548243626664419234" /></a><br />This crab wandered in and paid the price.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE3ceqzhOrX7Tqj8t4ia1H25ksGQrnCLreZ9RHFxSrcafJTw_Fsqu4l8ChKUbO8jFV0HCOxu_1n5ib5dbDnE049aK8u8shcZZ0r5hhs8MQoyRJtHk0ffxEAAc_gakfWKxKOwL_2mAIaRz8/s1600/Bucket+of+fish.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE3ceqzhOrX7Tqj8t4ia1H25ksGQrnCLreZ9RHFxSrcafJTw_Fsqu4l8ChKUbO8jFV0HCOxu_1n5ib5dbDnE049aK8u8shcZZ0r5hhs8MQoyRJtHk0ffxEAAc_gakfWKxKOwL_2mAIaRz8/s400/Bucket+of+fish.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548243501702239250" /></a><br />During the rains there's frogs and fish in the rice fields.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrPmzj7kWnh6hBR_JfuNrX67vNPcQtBIpROPnHaOrZxgeoKnrOyACIABIzZJzT1Q1GGeciReN-Q2j_uA1z3K7Wr8vuCN0yFxkFdKQ5TLQmAFQrgKaiz93eOzm7D7hU8Zy4q9CbKtp306sn/s1600/Bowl+of+fish.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrPmzj7kWnh6hBR_JfuNrX67vNPcQtBIpROPnHaOrZxgeoKnrOyACIABIzZJzT1Q1GGeciReN-Q2j_uA1z3K7Wr8vuCN0yFxkFdKQ5TLQmAFQrgKaiz93eOzm7D7hU8Zy4q9CbKtp306sn/s400/Bowl+of+fish.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548243390862389410" /></a><br />These tiny fish are delicious deep fried.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQrgwPORCy4aIPcCcm7IQzPDrcTq1BCWRw13_LhXi4OqpUNDOso0olEZnx9a0pQl41Y4NF9WxPpY1hykCcjB9FXFk4cVa6SK5Toho_mS66q4uf_8zpO1nfcm2aCzPPfkmRSTHFtiahDOvp/s1600/07-09-2009+05-50-38_0011.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQrgwPORCy4aIPcCcm7IQzPDrcTq1BCWRw13_LhXi4OqpUNDOso0olEZnx9a0pQl41Y4NF9WxPpY1hykCcjB9FXFk4cVa6SK5Toho_mS66q4uf_8zpO1nfcm2aCzPPfkmRSTHFtiahDOvp/s400/07-09-2009+05-50-38_0011.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548243189758868482" /></a><br />And this was the trap that caught them.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwcRKnUTJhWmP7LoKajjNokcMRly75U5fQ9I8RjAOho9JQulNjWG7UBK9J4QhAWLMEA_UIF8g1gXOMyORxNM1NgUfxp8qZePaWeBH_9SAYwrpKSQ0lh4JQikWT7Ephx5uhq6WO3Jy4r58p/s1600/Bamboo+dish.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwcRKnUTJhWmP7LoKajjNokcMRly75U5fQ9I8RjAOho9JQulNjWG7UBK9J4QhAWLMEA_UIF8g1gXOMyORxNM1NgUfxp8qZePaWeBH_9SAYwrpKSQ0lh4JQikWT7Ephx5uhq6WO3Jy4r58p/s400/Bamboo+dish.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548242782366706802" /></a><br />A spicy dish of bamboo shoot is highly prized.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTAP9u6bE5cMniDLf4-qEQZzYPvpbxe2HKSxND6vBzjRVfUgYSxPD095JP2Hs8T2qeeEkA0P_ud0l6IPXU2oydO6r877byZrKT9mJWza9Ow_jtYuXbOy6GM2w91WnllkgBZWbP2E-BM_Ns/s1600/Bamboo+shoots.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 267px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTAP9u6bE5cMniDLf4-qEQZzYPvpbxe2HKSxND6vBzjRVfUgYSxPD095JP2Hs8T2qeeEkA0P_ud0l6IPXU2oydO6r877byZrKT9mJWza9Ow_jtYuXbOy6GM2w91WnllkgBZWbP2E-BM_Ns/s400/Bamboo+shoots.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548242572159886642" /></a><br />But it takes much time and effort to prepare it.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXbRYcCt90z6d11hyphenhyphenNrUHF9thuoB9Uo0lzpIkuMtmZVfnMZyXUOiubi3LGL95MajNFeqjFQCiXnauuE4X9fABMUmPlmUU0JZPTVQ_R5K3_KfVHBx5wQb0N7muXWmhnnRGbjrgtYMYqVzzT/s1600/Baby.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 267px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXbRYcCt90z6d11hyphenhyphenNrUHF9thuoB9Uo0lzpIkuMtmZVfnMZyXUOiubi3LGL95MajNFeqjFQCiXnauuE4X9fABMUmPlmUU0JZPTVQ_R5K3_KfVHBx5wQb0N7muXWmhnnRGbjrgtYMYqVzzT/s400/Baby.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5548242365439637634" /></a><br /><br />Rural Thailand is changing fast, often for the better, but as always there are winners and losers. For this child, change will not come fast enough and he may have little choice but to join the cohorts of cheap labour that migrate to the cities to fuel the modern economy, thus maintaining the comfortable life-style of the middle classes. The land can no longer provide a living, except for those who own substantial farms and work hard and capably.<br /><br />But it was not always that way. Once there were forests and food for free. <br /><br />I’ve written before about how the Surin countryside where my wife, Cat and I now live used to be bountiful and how it abundantly yielded birds and animals to eat, roots, leaves, nuts and fruits. Her childhood was spent gathering food in the countryside and her memories of that time seem to be happy ones.<br /><br />The trouble is now that every available scrap of land has been made productive and almost all the forest has gone. With increasing population, farming cannot support the population and this unlimited resource of free food for the landless is no longer there. Thus the young and fit have to move away to the cities to find low paid work, often leaving their small children with Mama Papa in the village.<br /><br />I’d never before thought of Thais as hunter gatherers but rather as prosperous growers of rice, so this is a new insight for me. Farmers and pastoralists wandering the world with their cows are the wealthy ones and the hunter gatherers are all but gone. One thinks only of the pygmies in the Congo, of the Punan in Borneo and the Orang Asli or Sakai in the mountainous jungles down the spine of Malaysia. <br /><br />I’ve seen people in West Africa who wore nothing but leaves but even they grew crops. I’ve stayed with Dyaks several days up the Skrang river in Sarawak, sleeping under the huge bundles of human skulls tied up with rattan. They lived off the jungle and just before we went out hunting orang utan, they showed me the paws of a bear they’d killed a few days before. They also grew a few vegetables and kept pigs that ran wild in the forest around the long houses. This was fine by me but in the absence of a WC, when I headed off into the jungle to hide behind a bush, the pigs would come running. They were so keen to get up close and personal as I squatted down that they almost knocked me flying.<br /><br />The only pure hunter gatherers I’ve ever met though were the Sakai in the Taman Negara national park in Malaysia. In the vastness of the jungle we were lucky to come across them sitting in low temporary shelters of palm and leaves. They were very hospitable as they showed us how they whittled the darts for the blow pipes with which they killed monkeys and showed us the roots and the honey they’d recently collected from the jungle. They were delightful people to meet, their most precious possession being the fire that they kept glowing in one of their shelters.<br /><br />I now realize to my surprise that my Thai wife too is a hunter gatherer. There’s nothing she loves doing more in the village than collecting food and despite the loss of the forests, it’s still out there if you know how to find it. <br /><br /> And it also comes into the house too without being asked! The garage is a cool, quiet place where we’ve caught intruding crabs and frogs, rats and even a scorpion, and all of them have gone into the pot.<br /><br />Then when it rains heavily at night, the frogs cry out noisily and Cat gets up and goes out in the dark and the wet hunting them. She takes a powerful head torch and a vicious looking spear and returns with several kilos of frogs and fish in a bucket.<br /><br />We’ve had heavy rain recently and the fish pond overflowed and she made a fish trap of fine netting where the water runs out. This produced quantities of beautiful small fish of the kind that are used to make plaa raa, the foul smelling fermented fish that Isaan people so love.<br /><br />Then Cat takes the bamboo shoots from around the fish pond and spends ages cutting it into tiny slices and boiling it up to soften it. One dish she made recently was to mix it with rice, chopped pork, various spices and a liberal quantity of plaa raa and fiery chili to render it totally uneatable by any farang. Then it was wrapped in parcels of banana leaf to make a local delicacy that was truly a labour of love.<br /><br />She also collects pak ah chet, a leaf that grows on the surface of the pond. And she gathers kee lek from behind the house which is pounded to make a bitter green paste or soup, and at a certain time of the year we go out to the rice fields and climb the sadao trees to collect the young shoots that again are cooked up to make a decent curry as bitter as bile.<br /><br />Then there was the trap with a blue light that accumulates a huge quantity of insects overnight that are fried up and eaten as a snack. The rice fields are full of fish and crabs, shell fish and prawns, all there for the taking, just like at the seaside, so in some ways the countryside is still nothing less than bountiful.<br /><br />Nonetheless, you have to have land as there is no longer enough to sustain the whole population of rural Isaan. And that’s why the middle generation has gone off to the towns to find menial and badly paid work.<br /><br />A few days ago one of Cat’s aunties came in to show off a new grandchild that had just been left with her by her daughter who works in Bangkok. This woman had eight children of her own but with only one of them now still with her in the village, all the others having gone away to the south. She already has two small grandsons living with her, their unmarried mothers gone far away so a third is a real burden, not to mention the cost of milk formula. From time to time her family send back small sums of money her and Papa and the children but for them it’s a poor life, living in what an only be described as a shack. They have absolutely no other income.<br /><br />The new child is of course a joy, but the burden for an old woman of raising yet another baby is hard. But that’s just the way it is in rural Thailand.<br /><br />The comfortable middle classes in Bangkok benefit from a vast pool of cheap labour while Isaan is a totally different world.<br /><br />The village is a real community, though under threat, but it’s sad if more of the benefits of the modern economy cannot be brought to the countryside. That tension is of course what the current political turmoil in Thailand has been all about.<br /><br />Meanwhile Cat has her farang and a comfortable life, but I respect her passion for living off the land and for not running a mile from the toughness of her upbringing. That’s what makes living in the village more rewarding for me as Cat’s enthusiasm for country life brings me a little closer to what remains of ‘the real Thailand’.<br /><br />It still leaves the question though that the countryside has been stripped bare and is no longer capable of sustaining those with little or no land. In times of trouble there is little now for them to fall back on.<br /><br />Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog December 2010A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-8810178695972802632010-10-29T16:14:00.002+07:002010-10-29T16:33:10.957+07:00"Resilient Thailand" Again<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheo_7aYMl77yD2SdJ_KLfp1bW9U9r8B2bjHwjzNl0oLlYE-xhTuBTw7h-Tlz14nYgmUaZGwg-TQFmhPuvGpKAAx8_Nl0-GOrQGAq9JGUYcbC9fI8Zja2bhRo9xDcCf44AI8vI6sPG0b9wk/s1600/Central+World.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 212px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheo_7aYMl77yD2SdJ_KLfp1bW9U9r8B2bjHwjzNl0oLlYE-xhTuBTw7h-Tlz14nYgmUaZGwg-TQFmhPuvGpKAAx8_Nl0-GOrQGAq9JGUYcbC9fI8Zja2bhRo9xDcCf44AI8vI6sPG0b9wk/s400/Central+World.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5533394246527255314" /></a><br /><br />Central World Plaza, the massive retail mall in Bangkok that was devastated during the political protests only a few months ago has opened once again. Comparing this picture to the scene of destruction that you will see if you scan down this blog is remarkable.<br /><br />This is a tribute to the resilience of the established political and commercial powers in Thailand and to the ability of this society to bounce back following seismic tremors.<br /><br />I admire these qualities very much but there is perhaps a negative side as well. If the elite that controls Thailand restores the shiny facade but fails to deal with the grey reality that lies behind, then greater problems are only stored up for the future.<br /><br />The privilege of the moneyed Bangkokian to shop in cool, marble malls has been restored but it is still the rural migrants who do the construction and factory work and run the city for dismally low wages. There is little then to send home to Mama Papa who squat in the dust back home in the village.<br /><br />Amazing Thailand, Resilient Thailand, a country that is admirable in so many ways. Nonetheless, for her sake I desperately hope that she can learn to adapt and change in the very near future as her essential problems will not just go away of their own accord.<br /><br />Andrew Hicks The Thai Girl Blog October 2010A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-80168329534837857192010-10-20T15:50:00.005+07:002010-10-20T16:18:42.624+07:00Some Sad News to Tell<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2l9ll3JbleEaW0WMX9cAt32ogpWI4CUHDQGLh8k37F_H0jNYA4BlKKU8I4RKo627PZF76vubmTY6u39Lizn0Yb6dklYojm5rRuoR9IOw2CvF4o04qjso8HLdnXwz4HOPf9i5iWeoKTO3W/s1600/Kitchen.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2l9ll3JbleEaW0WMX9cAt32ogpWI4CUHDQGLh8k37F_H0jNYA4BlKKU8I4RKo627PZF76vubmTY6u39Lizn0Yb6dklYojm5rRuoR9IOw2CvF4o04qjso8HLdnXwz4HOPf9i5iWeoKTO3W/s400/Kitchen.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5530048933621580754" /></a><br /><br />'Are rural people living in Isaan truly poor' was the theme of a blog article I wrote some months ago. Rather than add more questionable generalisations to the debate, I made it a 'case study' of Cat's old auntie and uncle and I described their hard lives in detail... how that had raised seven children farming rice on a very small holding of land and eking a living digging crabs in the fields and selling noodles. (If you scan down, there are pictures of them and their home and farm.)<br /><br />Now in their seventies the worst has happened. They are both fragile and as thin as sticks, but to keep body and soul together working life has to go on. They have to fend for themselves as little money seems to come in from their adult children who are far away and have many mouths to feed. The old man has continued to take his three buffaloes out to the fields every day and she to walk miles around the villages carrying heavy baskets over her shoulders with a clay barbecue to cook and sell noodles. That is how they survive from day to day.<br /><br />Now he has suffered a collapse and is in hospital forty miles away in Surin. He seems to have blackouts and now is partially paralysed down one side. He has been hospitalised for several weeks and it is impossible to guess the outcome. The story that comes back to me is that as he never eats meat he doesn't have enough blood and so is very weak and they seem to be despairing of him.<br /><br />She too has had a collapse, perhaps exhausted by the responsibility of managing the animals and getting into Surin to look after her husband. Now she is home but she is very much at risk.<br /><br />While some of the basics of medical care are covered by the state, being ill is very expensive and I just don't know how they'll manage. In the struggle to get by, I'm sure money will be their one consuming worry.<br /><br />He always has a gentle smile and is the perfect gentleman, the very best of Isaan farmers. She has enormous spirit and is the life and soul of the party but it is now terrible to see her so down.<br /><br />I don't know what good luck could come their way but I only hope it does as they are among the nicest people I know.<br /><br />Andrew<br /><br />The Thai Girl Blog October 2010A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-3753959536675786742010-07-15T15:12:00.005+07:002010-07-15T16:04:34.517+07:00Bangkok's World Trade Center Disaster<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkeuMnYiXeYqKOXolUEBQtK6j98Vo64iS3W875YIVECjjlHrOHQI9yykFvrmKLy5-FmyHWLy3_NE8zfwEmCcs6_mHbRkYil_csXhyEsvAbW9u3r5rdkB2stp2DFPjZp1T5RQ_geI_Ii1sk/s1600/Bangkok+Burning+May+2010%5B1%5D.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkeuMnYiXeYqKOXolUEBQtK6j98Vo64iS3W875YIVECjjlHrOHQI9yykFvrmKLy5-FmyHWLy3_NE8zfwEmCcs6_mHbRkYil_csXhyEsvAbW9u3r5rdkB2stp2DFPjZp1T5RQ_geI_Ii1sk/s400/Bangkok+Burning+May+2010%5B1%5D.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5494046107320235266" /></a><br />It is truly shocking to see a picture of Bangkok's Central World Plaza in ruins shortly after the recent disturbances in the city. Peaceful protests can so easily get hijacked and run out of control when a widespread sense of grievance is so very strong and raw.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGM5FPwe8vl6Pc8a94q65BkzEay-1tqiR6BSXYGC0Ze87wd6b-3oJeAd9VUGajO3wKa9vLRkBcLvrCD0GvphzGxg9vY6Ohot2GRtwGL7MOOpH5bwqhh-QGqOu_MqrbvQkZBxmWvjDvtjOU/s1600/Central+World+intact.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGM5FPwe8vl6Pc8a94q65BkzEay-1tqiR6BSXYGC0Ze87wd6b-3oJeAd9VUGajO3wKa9vLRkBcLvrCD0GvphzGxg9vY6Ohot2GRtwGL7MOOpH5bwqhh-QGqOu_MqrbvQkZBxmWvjDvtjOU/s400/Central+World+intact.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5494045428531925730" /></a><br />The Plaza was a truly spectacular celebration of consumerism but for the huge majority of Thais their only place in it was as low paid constuction workers, cleaners and skivvies. A pretty girl from the countryside whose skin colour was light enough might aspire to sell burgers there but not much more.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkqB0iF4uXeqvnmhMczd_UxKm07I7zcXo57c2-T0_gi-_ta8eMBbWXHTWBo6APX3AwUyNqD4wCXsFIeN4tgfZK7YDdWYbDeaAAnr7WIZBiLyueTZpJAl7l7NPy-m9KjRHZ7H2a6bIOeyR-/s1600/24-10-2007+06-13-17_0043.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhkqB0iF4uXeqvnmhMczd_UxKm07I7zcXo57c2-T0_gi-_ta8eMBbWXHTWBo6APX3AwUyNqD4wCXsFIeN4tgfZK7YDdWYbDeaAAnr7WIZBiLyueTZpJAl7l7NPy-m9KjRHZ7H2a6bIOeyR-/s400/24-10-2007+06-13-17_0043.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5494043999503163682" /></a><br />Bangkok's world, it seems, is thus heating up in more ways than one.<br /><br />How ironic it now is that before a substantial upgrading and rebranding a few years ago, this huge retail complex was called the World Trade Centre. While the Marriott Hotel did not change the name of its Tsunami restaurant, any possible association with a terrorist atrocity in Manhattan was clearly best avoided for Bangkok's biggest retail mall.<br /><br />What befell though in Bangkok was entirely a domestic affair, the problems of a young country that has imperfectly integrated its distant provinces such as in the South and North East and since the revolution of 1932 has not fully modernised its essential polity.<br /><br />Now the talk is of getting back to normal through reconciliation between the different factions. This sounds thoroughly appropriate, though it is meaningless if it simply amounts to demanding that the poor go back to their sweatshops and to ploughing the dirt without more. Unless the inequities in society are adequately addressed and a substantial shift occurs in the balance of political power between different interests, then the grievances will only become more bitter and the next conflict only be delayed.<br /><br />History deems that Thailand's achievement in avoiding being colonised was a good thing. However, while it begs the question to say this, in essence its whole structure of power politics is in need of modernisation.<br /><br />This cannot be attempted soon enough, though it is not in the interests of the power brokers to see it happen.<br /><br />Meanwhile, though tourism is down, Thai manufacturing and exports are booming and the government's finances remain healthy. The means to promote change therefore exists and there is little real excuse for not so doing except self-interest.<br /><br />As the pressures continue to build, what then can break the log jam?<br /><br />Andrew Hicks The "Thai Girl" Blog July 2010A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-77699480655843649982010-06-16T15:34:00.013+07:002010-06-16T16:11:48.658+07:00Cute Terrorists-Which Way Thailand Now?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgScB5KFnLRHATUMwq1JxyjZbwZe4tFQWQFDlBK9zcNmMBgu1iRiScSBnoVQNxZiH7ZsxCrpM7uZXzH8bKb6zpl00VocEBmlZ5N1aBAEp1ddyjqHRoVKABgVMpcdX3_FaTSI6eHHm3fBfZ8/s1600/Cute+terrorists.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 301px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgScB5KFnLRHATUMwq1JxyjZbwZe4tFQWQFDlBK9zcNmMBgu1iRiScSBnoVQNxZiH7ZsxCrpM7uZXzH8bKb6zpl00VocEBmlZ5N1aBAEp1ddyjqHRoVKABgVMpcdX3_FaTSI6eHHm3fBfZ8/s400/Cute+terrorists.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5483289396064055762" /></a><br />A scrawled poster pasted up during the recent demonstrations in Bangkok suggests the wide popular nature of the protest. But was it, as the much criticised media coverage suggested, a genuine peoples's movement for democracy or was it in fact a power struggle by new monied interests seeking to seize power from the traditional elites? Where does the truth lie and what's next for Thailand?<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6aBprk7W2ymbb-zeMvmq-FlGKO88pj9-Y4YzxMGMK7Bn4wA82FlGN1njOALQBB2GGQNdEl8n3rcRLbaRKOwSHtL_NWreqoXQx3IzVadlIs__Z13kz8KuQoqIDK4Etrwe4fnjXkTfGb-su/s1600/Peaceful+protesters.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 265px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6aBprk7W2ymbb-zeMvmq-FlGKO88pj9-Y4YzxMGMK7Bn4wA82FlGN1njOALQBB2GGQNdEl8n3rcRLbaRKOwSHtL_NWreqoXQx3IzVadlIs__Z13kz8KuQoqIDK4Etrwe4fnjXkTfGb-su/s400/Peaceful+protesters.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5483289249807261202" /></a><br />The protester organisers passionately wanted to be non-violent.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTwVW4O96Crlmt2zgaBM-WBjBnMlr7UqFoTPENAHREUQfMErRiPXP7GMBVIUmExE-nZQiKjJ-edn5Evw6WhkS7UGciG1gceMXLkhiUAHR6hcB9ddup2DCFe7HdMqVz5qxTOY0AiJs0lWqh/s1600/City+of+Life.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 291px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTwVW4O96Crlmt2zgaBM-WBjBnMlr7UqFoTPENAHREUQfMErRiPXP7GMBVIUmExE-nZQiKjJ-edn5Evw6WhkS7UGciG1gceMXLkhiUAHR6hcB9ddup2DCFe7HdMqVz5qxTOY0AiJs0lWqh/s400/City+of+Life.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5483289082366686050" /></a><br />Bangkok is a vibrant city that relies on armies of cheap labour.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDzM8h-iLSGzX1OEaKnmqG0Tz9U_QG4bzJ_4jYmIeYCuX0whQmpDsxCtKc0xPyL3iiuku3i89h-4WLVClfW2KvjZ-TlX3vtX1o49o2bDU2XTJ2VXlBz2Ftw9yaSdvCQcOpQjjD4iIGw-6N/s1600/09-10-2007+10-25-40_0037.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDzM8h-iLSGzX1OEaKnmqG0Tz9U_QG4bzJ_4jYmIeYCuX0whQmpDsxCtKc0xPyL3iiuku3i89h-4WLVClfW2KvjZ-TlX3vtX1o49o2bDU2XTJ2VXlBz2Ftw9yaSdvCQcOpQjjD4iIGw-6N/s400/09-10-2007+10-25-40_0037.JPG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5483288830492982850" /></a><br />Petty traders survive there just as they would back in the village.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKcm5ATjiXc5ispQKv981K4uz9zYCTLLcREwXso2WWHVfTlzboBebOzEzIdEPCFMs3DB6pN_isi4fnopCIF49-BwAvJ-2Zg3Elp6ljAZ6M_OCVQ5Xika4uIbzdmfppyLvzaJ-is7YWWSvK/s1600/Working+conditons.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKcm5ATjiXc5ispQKv981K4uz9zYCTLLcREwXso2WWHVfTlzboBebOzEzIdEPCFMs3DB6pN_isi4fnopCIF49-BwAvJ-2Zg3Elp6ljAZ6M_OCVQ5Xika4uIbzdmfppyLvzaJ-is7YWWSvK/s400/Working+conditons.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5483288546269216306" /></a><br />Or they work on construction sites in appalling conditions.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0e0wDJF_C_TknA-SRPT5jsSbbBd__Hk1m1YoWr9PlTnOooErLETOUeZ3uvkTgRwarPXlwvf3exZLfMtR_DmeU8KBevmtPDFUdtdF7KOk9h12ab9BCMflGTyWBv-HGGZOkCM2riOLNdC1U/s1600/Airport+link+1..jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0e0wDJF_C_TknA-SRPT5jsSbbBd__Hk1m1YoWr9PlTnOooErLETOUeZ3uvkTgRwarPXlwvf3exZLfMtR_DmeU8KBevmtPDFUdtdF7KOk9h12ab9BCMflGTyWBv-HGGZOkCM2riOLNdC1U/s400/Airport+link+1..jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5483288417945277122" /></a><br />Their salvation is finding support and community in adversity.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOQ9tBDGFfpu6LFBrwakcZZQPOxsRAn1ebaV9kka3PikPvf7Ta5sRIU7DT6VUb-CXNSJoObZ_EvIdhyeJCYVmaRnSQFrFpUIdpQXqkwQZwjLxLLqCbhgy0QdpFV3ZboJpLOi6ZXgTjK6Bk/s1600/Airport+Link+2..jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOQ9tBDGFfpu6LFBrwakcZZQPOxsRAn1ebaV9kka3PikPvf7Ta5sRIU7DT6VUb-CXNSJoObZ_EvIdhyeJCYVmaRnSQFrFpUIdpQXqkwQZwjLxLLqCbhgy0QdpFV3ZboJpLOi6ZXgTjK6Bk/s400/Airport+Link+2..jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5483288298989185346" /></a><br />They are building a sleek airport rail link that they'll never use.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDoAJFQpdXCNjLkQGae3_-39GCOukSWys_TqZWSnJoR2KYXEpylJZPRecRm3p4C6-2FNamOvioI5ysjp2_rqpvbSwVJ30H9mYPZJhZLId2vCd8LbrKPtc0DIS5-yBMr1mgSqLZrD4uhe0e/s1600/Traffic.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDoAJFQpdXCNjLkQGae3_-39GCOukSWys_TqZWSnJoR2KYXEpylJZPRecRm3p4C6-2FNamOvioI5ysjp2_rqpvbSwVJ30H9mYPZJhZLId2vCd8LbrKPtc0DIS5-yBMr1mgSqLZrD4uhe0e/s400/Traffic.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5483288177995909778" /></a><br />Getting to work means a hot bus toiling in traffic.<br /> <br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaLxX6Twi7hMzeZXf1vlk0_IYwMOOjj-T0Rjw9Wiun4Tj-Yf6mw3eQfkvV5SWPRvSB5wsenMr119IUJugHw9U3WRB8wgdboPCxQTGIgM0svIWJr8aWkfVHDsy5m2nUvpCtvmuDGBDmOXUS/s1600/San+saeb.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaLxX6Twi7hMzeZXf1vlk0_IYwMOOjj-T0Rjw9Wiun4Tj-Yf6mw3eQfkvV5SWPRvSB5wsenMr119IUJugHw9U3WRB8wgdboPCxQTGIgM0svIWJr8aWkfVHDsy5m2nUvpCtvmuDGBDmOXUS/s400/San+saeb.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5483288042460477842" /></a><br />Or riding a smelly boat on Klong San Saeb.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinFhAWOlsswiDXJqFVHO4xORqwLH0ic3Yu52CIX5ih3Kk0w4dJYqyHD_aqvAcG9hT4mX5_OqwqI3tWPaU6MOAPlZMDf77DswiDQpjoAUwhWdr3iVHT6fNvkIBGNOP2uoPLoYyU_F970l01/s1600/Moh+chit.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinFhAWOlsswiDXJqFVHO4xORqwLH0ic3Yu52CIX5ih3Kk0w4dJYqyHD_aqvAcG9hT4mX5_OqwqI3tWPaU6MOAPlZMDf77DswiDQpjoAUwhWdr3iVHT6fNvkIBGNOP2uoPLoYyU_F970l01/s400/Moh+chit.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5483287719204184306" /></a><br />Once a year at Songkhran, the Thai New Year, they have a few days off to go home to the village, fighting for a seat at Moh Chit bus station.<br /><br /><br />It strikes me that Thai politics never seems to address the key issues of the day but creates dominant personality cults and focuses solely on the politicians themselves. Which war lord is going to grab power next and what vested interests do they serve? Thus politics is not so much a contention between opposing principles and ideas but a crude struggle for power between rival patronage groupings.<br /><br />Living in a village in Isaan I see this even at the local level. Elections here are always welcomed as you’ll hope to collect a few hundred baht for the promise of your vote. A candidate for a minor position in local government, orbortor or whatever, invests a considerable sum to buy his way into power but winning the post will reap a useful dividend. Nothing can ever be had without being bought. <br /><br />Even a farang living in Thailand openly gets asked for bribes by officials and many times I’ve been stopped by police asking for cash before going on my way. Right up the ladder to the top, office holders use their position for their own benefit. Nobody did this better than Thaksin Shinawatra who used the government coffers to buy the favour of the ordinary voters and became unusually rich during his terms of office. As he was the first leader to make it his policy to benefit the poor farmers, his followers now do not begrudge him his questionable billions.<br /><br />Every political movement or party, even a street protest, whether Yellow or Red shirted, thus needs a powerful backer dispensing patronage. Even if you are an ordinary worker sincere in your protest you cannot survive at the barricades without being paid 200 baht a day. A genuine mass movement of the rural poor can thus be hijacked and distorted by those who use it in pursuit of power.<br /><br />So what of the recent disturbances in Bangkok? Were they a genuine struggle for democracy by the disenfranchised poor or something else entirely? Was it instead a power struggle in which the traditional political, bureaucratic and military elites were resisting an alliance of the newly rich and the rural poor?<br /><br />Perhaps it was both, a broad populist movement which came to be bankrolled and controlled by another patronage grouping seeking power. If the Red Shirt movement was a grass roots movement of ordinary people seeking to better their lives, they soon lost control of it and it became something else entirely. Sadly, the underlying imbalances within Thai society and the sharing of political power and wealth remain unresolved.<br /><br />So was it a genuine populist movement or a crude struggle between opposing interest groups? Whatever view you take, as one strips away more skins of the tear stained onion of Thai politics, there is always another layer beneath.<br /><br />A Comment on my previous blog article, “Thai Rural Poverty - A Powder Keg?”, recommended an article in Newsweek as a good analysis of the current situation. (See www.newsweek.com/2010/06/04/the-end-of-brand-thailand.html) This boldly stated that of South East Asia’s modern economies, ‘only Thailand is disintegrating’ and is ‘becoming ungovernable and a failed state’. <br /><br />That’s not how it feels living in Thailand though.<br /><br />At the time of the troubles, if you were not in the immediate vicinity of the disturbances, life went on as normal. This does not feel anything like a failed state but is a well-managed and broadly stable society.<br /><br />In the last fifty years the country has in fact made enormous strides, creating an impressive infrastructure of roads, power supply, schools and hospitals even in the remotest areas, everything managed by a clunkingly complex bureaucracy.<br /><br />Through the Thaksin years and beyond, outward signs of increasing prosperity have been increasingly evident in the countryside, even if this has been partly based on inward remittances. The comprehensive powers of the police and bureaucracies and the influence of the Chinese dominated commercial sector means that the country is effectively run. Nonetheless, a deferential society such as this may allow pressures and resentment to build up if power is imposed from above and wealth is not equitably shared.<br /><br />Newsweek ascribes Thailand’s relative decline to a poor education system based on rote learning and to concentrating on lower value manufacturing for foreign companies. At an early stage of its development, this approach has served Thailand well, though as Singapore realized in the eighties, lower wage economies can soon become uncompetitive and it is then necessary to gear up and go ‘hi-tech’.<br /><br />Basic education that avoids critical thinking and maintaining low wages is an essential of the old approach and a cause of dissention today. Thailand’s mass labour that fuels the factories is made up of economic migrants from the countryside who passively work for poor wages, but as they become more urbanized and aware, it is they who are now protesting.<br /><br />Newsweek sees a dangerous polarization between the Yellow and Red factions, though that observation states the growing problem rather than identifying solutions. In conclusion, statesmanlike leadership has been lacking, it says, and is needed to pull Thailand out of it present troubles.<br /><br />Of recent prime ministers, the spatula wielding Samak, who was removed from office by the courts for hosting a TV cooking programme, was the antithesis of statesmanship. However, Thaksin himself had many leadership qualities and even occasionally talked about the rule of law. The current prime minister, Abhisit Vejajiva is a man of considerable political skill who would impress any audience for his grasp of democratic principle and who looks good on the international stage.<br /><br />Yet he is in a bind that no one man could disentangle, nor would his backers want a different allocation of power and wealth. A general election is, however, due some time in 2012, so Abhisit’s task is to grimly hang onto power for as long as he can, aware that the will of the people is likely to upset the applecart and hand power back to the other side. <br /><br />A further layer to the onion of Thai politics is its history. Thailand is still a young country and the democratic revolution begun in 1932 when the absolute monarchy was abolished is not yet complete. Furthermore, its far provinces are only recently integrated and then imperfectly. The northern kingdom of Lanna with its centre in Chiang Mai was substantially cut off by the mountains until recently, and the jungly scarps of the Korat plateau made Isaan, the great north east, very difficult of access from Bangkok. <br /><br />Only by herculean feats of civil engineering were railways pushed through at the beginning of the twentieth century to make the nation a manageable political entity. (See “How the Trains Made Thailand”, my blog article of 31September 2010.)<br /><br />On many occasions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the peoples of Isaan have resisted rule from distant Bangkok and these rebellions have been firmly put down. A major communist movement in the north east during the Cold War era was perhaps the last of these insurrections, but the tensions have not yet gone away.<br /><br />Sanitsuda Ekachai, a columnist for the Bangkok Post uses the term ‘racist nationalism’ to describe the expectation of the central Thai power elite that the minorities should conform to their brand of ‘Thainess’ and be culturally assimilated. The failure of the clod-hopping Laos of Isaan to conform to that stereotype condemns them to exclusion and ridicule and to be the eternal funny men of every comedy and farce on Thai television. <br /><br />Newly developing societies often progress at two speeds but the divisions in Thai society are glaring with few opportunities for the poor and minimal social mobility. The privileged seem satisfied with the status-quo. I recently read an articulate but angry rant by a highly educated Thai against the Red Shirts. She argued that the protests were risking the economy and her long running gravy train. Why couldn’t they just go back to their buffaloes was the underlying theme. After all, if Thai farmers are poor that can only be because they’re stupid.<br /><br />It strikes me that educated urban Thais often seem to know or understand little of the conditions in which rural people live; or they don’t want to know. There is also a tendency to say that some of the protesters behaved badly and so the grievances of the poor should be dismissed. However, the Red Shirts do not formally represent the interests they claim to speak for and violence on the fringes of the protest in no way devalues the complaints of the poor.<br /><br />Now the Thai farmers are losing patience. Thaksin gave them a taste of what was possible for them and understandably they want more. The trouble is that conducting a peoples’ protest pure and simple is well nigh impossible in Thailand and even if they can eventually exert their power at the ballot box they will almost certainly choose the wrong leaders.<br /><br />It is highly ironic who they seem to have chosen as their champion so far!<br /><br />In conclusion, there are many new nations where a comprehensive corruption of power allows office holders at all levels to use their position primarily to benefit themselves, where the police can be bought and the rule of law does not operate. It is always hard to see away out.<br /><br />So which way Thailand now? <br /><br />There are no glib answers but the Thais do have a knack for soldiering on in adversity and slow progress towards a modern state is always possible. However, the present tensions will grumble on until the centre of gravity in Thai politics shifts quite radically against the traditional holders of power and the economy is rebalanced to allow a fairer sharing of wealth and opportunity with mass labour. <br /><br />My own key idea is that a major policy of regional development should be developed to devolve factories to provincial centres, thus taking the modern economy to the rural areas. To bring jobs to the people could thus help save the essence of Thai rural society which currently is disintegrating as workers migrate to the bloated urban centres. <br /><br />It won’t be easy though and it will take time.<br /><br />Andrew Hicks The ‘Thai Girl’ Blog June 2010.A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-87647571482696274582010-05-27T15:31:00.012+07:002010-05-27T16:09:13.381+07:00Thai Rural Poverty-A Powder Keg?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIQ3Tbw62gk1f8wW_A8VR7WR8gEzkC1uMNxlOUQrY_th7icbJkNGmLCWbTWDKg3CO5b5h6wWiCslUKuYM_FhXmWxYejGZfbLYRtGCakAk-sc6hMNC3-zh1PE9y6OpN_NpjZj8GaQxTNvZE/s1600/Kitchen.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIQ3Tbw62gk1f8wW_A8VR7WR8gEzkC1uMNxlOUQrY_th7icbJkNGmLCWbTWDKg3CO5b5h6wWiCslUKuYM_FhXmWxYejGZfbLYRtGCakAk-sc6hMNC3-zh1PE9y6OpN_NpjZj8GaQxTNvZE/s400/Kitchen.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5475868284238052882" /></a><br />An old couple in a Surin village smile as they prepare a meal but are they truly poor? This article examines the details of their daily lives to suggest whether Thai society runs at two speeds, for the urban elites who cream off the wealth and the country people who have been left far behind.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpvzIribzu6wLQG7Mpp3xcQhcHMGKCny4GNhyphenhyphenY-JbHpmeBK74nQlJzuOMMPuEKZRTcTfe-GHP2WUuRMhWfUUR8I68ey83-NS5e_PkvOUu2Nscr77OxrfUUSGYuSqj9RLzQ9RfmC4MoxKff/s1600/New+house.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpvzIribzu6wLQG7Mpp3xcQhcHMGKCny4GNhyphenhyphenY-JbHpmeBK74nQlJzuOMMPuEKZRTcTfe-GHP2WUuRMhWfUUR8I68ey83-NS5e_PkvOUu2Nscr77OxrfUUSGYuSqj9RLzQ9RfmC4MoxKff/s400/New+house.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5475868009854176098" /></a><br />This picture shows a typical newly built house in our soi.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUCq7udORApbCl0qZYkWS32BNYOA1-RL9grbA3l98v2flakHBZjsGk4tw2joi-inOir5vfjaqxfCvpkLZi-CVfgvGPxekmxH6vUQnnGdzmSjNuB4ihz-VVKukwLumMOxn3nrVdqRItaWjh/s1600/Sleeping+place.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUCq7udORApbCl0qZYkWS32BNYOA1-RL9grbA3l98v2flakHBZjsGk4tw2joi-inOir5vfjaqxfCvpkLZi-CVfgvGPxekmxH6vUQnnGdzmSjNuB4ihz-VVKukwLumMOxn3nrVdqRItaWjh/s400/Sleeping+place.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5475867647648231890" /></a><br />The old couple live and sleep under these grass roofs.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH7SLk5e5ID8EjEMwNDjxMLqnrvIGJjBBSCdGRuYAtq-7KR0ITJUVuR5PzQdCvuU-EhkBzkkrbZp5u_kTJPQHtpAN_KFmsh6iHjbGWUr1B1aKjA1Xei11MJi-CldqqM-wn9GICUwwo2kZ1/s1600/Pump.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH7SLk5e5ID8EjEMwNDjxMLqnrvIGJjBBSCdGRuYAtq-7KR0ITJUVuR5PzQdCvuU-EhkBzkkrbZp5u_kTJPQHtpAN_KFmsh6iHjbGWUr1B1aKjA1Xei11MJi-CldqqM-wn9GICUwwo2kZ1/s400/Pump.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5475867387870557074" /></a><br />A small electric pump supplies them with water.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr5S8z8VvDh2gNhSEQLxNaWHRl1vLtrcQotpWtzyKdhVU5_Eb40xsRb1nazsaoitsS5JW4emc_7r4Z78hZ96rmIRv-87iKPA394gaNo42GsYNR47J4pKlkaYCQzqG4xUbKQ_38GxlU35C2/s1600/Rot+tai.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr5S8z8VvDh2gNhSEQLxNaWHRl1vLtrcQotpWtzyKdhVU5_Eb40xsRb1nazsaoitsS5JW4emc_7r4Z78hZ96rmIRv-87iKPA394gaNo42GsYNR47J4pKlkaYCQzqG4xUbKQ_38GxlU35C2/s400/Rot+tai.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5475867226077040114" /></a><br />An 'iron buffalo' is expensive but is needed to till the fields.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxV1nzLCyXMc4RXSf43trqyo45r0Z0RbQnGdSD0irb0Boc8h1c8yIYR71yUQ3vHnr59OJhQxDONjhQ8vJ8sHP7TupcUrn669TXRnjoBXB7vQUNNzVi70lzecQNCAtYcQsY_f_miaQs6j8b/s1600/Rice+barn.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxV1nzLCyXMc4RXSf43trqyo45r0Z0RbQnGdSD0irb0Boc8h1c8yIYR71yUQ3vHnr59OJhQxDONjhQ8vJ8sHP7TupcUrn669TXRnjoBXB7vQUNNzVi70lzecQNCAtYcQsY_f_miaQs6j8b/s400/Rice+barn.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5475867059956082450" /></a><br />The harvest is kept in sacks in a handsome rice barn.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrjcsbh8xhjeUAyLFVOfDstjjcuZefaX8JIbPeKwbQ1_Pct_JlB8PPb0BECh_4QSb03dQ0li7g9WBUCO2fWgoBC8tANmbAtNEI5b2P-ImOriJTOcDjzbCYysQ-W5DE3be-bBQRvtzceSNg/s1600/Cow+byre.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrjcsbh8xhjeUAyLFVOfDstjjcuZefaX8JIbPeKwbQ1_Pct_JlB8PPb0BECh_4QSb03dQ0li7g9WBUCO2fWgoBC8tANmbAtNEI5b2P-ImOriJTOcDjzbCYysQ-W5DE3be-bBQRvtzceSNg/s400/Cow+byre.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5475866900957917986" /></a><br />Every night the buffaloes are brought back to this barn.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioWEergDMzVoQbbm1Mf2LplX6a60sdp75X7vCy23JfMAzLQm_keOGnPsy455DeRGoiseR_PQPZ3iRV3cg9dQds69WmpNbW6xrX-0yjlCUg1nLDn-ccxiYneWfEOoMwyKkdd9aVtu-AXjdG/s1600/Old+man+buffalo.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioWEergDMzVoQbbm1Mf2LplX6a60sdp75X7vCy23JfMAzLQm_keOGnPsy455DeRGoiseR_PQPZ3iRV3cg9dQds69WmpNbW6xrX-0yjlCUg1nLDn-ccxiYneWfEOoMwyKkdd9aVtu-AXjdG/s400/Old+man+buffalo.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5475866607262603970" /></a><br />Every day is spent taking the animals out to find grazing.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3RIcx8Iju663TWguzMcDwNepknwNRP-JjVhe_Qd5SRa2QUU0c1mI273kJRDBaSTDUV1bnQLLcb6bNQtfQ4k0vcdro8pDjUreYAT71GhYB4q9fRcbtwqhb5eyQrrV-6LH80GHKqHMk9KEX/s1600/Digging+crabs.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3RIcx8Iju663TWguzMcDwNepknwNRP-JjVhe_Qd5SRa2QUU0c1mI273kJRDBaSTDUV1bnQLLcb6bNQtfQ4k0vcdro8pDjUreYAT71GhYB4q9fRcbtwqhb5eyQrrV-6LH80GHKqHMk9KEX/s400/Digging+crabs.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5475866260932255570" /></a><br />Hot hours are spent digging crabs to glean a few mouthfuls.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR42mnQFOAVTgxPJtEN-YI65ZWxYv3mOD2Yq421e8MXYjAbTo_YS44OuH3NBbgabUy2zqt7FCG-BdJDr4-8jKY78ZFwbfRqLJzEurDOcZ6PlTnVKQzEi10Pv-TwdZ3bbYR2S7EHNYGGYas/s1600/Poor+house.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiR42mnQFOAVTgxPJtEN-YI65ZWxYv3mOD2Yq421e8MXYjAbTo_YS44OuH3NBbgabUy2zqt7FCG-BdJDr4-8jKY78ZFwbfRqLJzEurDOcZ6PlTnVKQzEi10Pv-TwdZ3bbYR2S7EHNYGGYas/s400/Poor+house.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5475865312473909090" /></a><br />This, the poorest house in our soi, looks pretty desperate.<br /><br /><br />Was it Thai rural poverty that ignited the recent upheavals and violence on the streets of Bangkok?<br /><br />A yawning wealth gap can certainly cause instability and, while I’m not an economist, it seems that the gap between the rich and poor in Thailand is very wide indeed. The wealth represented by Bangkok shopping malls such as Central World Plaza and the very basic conditions in which people live in the villages are worlds apart. When a society is hierarchical and corrupt, social mobility is limited and resentment among the disenfranchised poor could light the powder keg.<br /><br />So are Thai farmers poor? This question is endlessly debated and there are some obvious points to be made. <br /><br />In Isaan for example there are now many more mobiles, motor bikes and pickups than a few years ago, though easy credit for buying luxuries can be a terrible trap. Furthermore, the infrastructure of roads and power is excellent and markets are well stocked. <br /><br />I’ve heard corn-fed farang confidently asserting that in the countryside nobody needs to go hungry but others argue strongly that rural poverty is as grinding as it is hidden. My wife’s village in Surin where we have lived for some years is relatively well off, but even so 45% of the children in the school are under the body weight recommended by the Thai Ministry of Health. Yet they look happy enough. <br /><br />During the Thaksin years money flowed into the rural regions but in changing times there are both winners and losers. You see the winners everywhere enjoying their Nokia and new Honda Dream but hunger is invisible.<br /><br />Let me therefore present to you a ‘case study’ of an elderly couple in our village and then pose the question, ‘are they poor?’. Have the rural poor been left so far behind the urban middle classes that Thai society could become unstable? <br /><br />The couple that I shall describe are immediate neighbours in our village. I have known them for a long time and they are delightful people. The old man is gentle and smiling and Mama is always full of fun, the life and soul of the party when she dances everyone to exhaustion. Now in their early seventies they continue to work hard as they have done all their lives. As small farmers they work 365 days a year and they have hardly ever left the village, nor ever had a holiday. The concept of a holiday just does not exist for them.<br /><br />Like everyone they are rice farmers with a tiny holding of land. They live in one of the better cement block and wood houses on our lane, though they tend to live and sometimes sleep outside in a grass thatched shelter under which they burn a fire to keep warm in the cooler months.<br /><br />They raised a big family of seven children all of whom have moved away to find work in the cities and factories. After minimal education, there is no way up for them. The two youngest sons are unmarried and come and go from the village as and when they can find low paid casual work elsewhere, such as cutting sugar cane. The others visit rarely such as at Songkhran, the Thai new year festival when their factories, eight hours away, close down for a few days.<br /><br />They too have their families to feed and, I suspect, can only occasionally send back a few baht to help support their Mama Papa. The old couple are thus largely dependent on their own resources for food. <br /><br />Their assets include their house, the land and the rot tai or ‘iron buffalo’ which is necessary to till the soil. Water is drawn from a bore hole by an old electric pump. Regular expenses include monthly payments for electricity, fuel and repairs for the rot tai, occasionally pumping out the toilet sump and paying the money contributed at parties, funerals and weddings. Medicines are a significant cost and not so long ago Mama fell ill and Papa had to sell a buffalo to pay the hospital fees. While former prime minister Thaksin introduced an element of free medicine, the locals still have to pay big money if tests, procedures and a hospital stay go beyond the minimal. <br /><br />Rice cultivation keeps them busy for half the year and provides them with their staple food that they keep in their rice barn. Cultivation is not without costs though. Seed, fertilizer, pesticides, fuel for ploughing and bringing the rice home, labour for planting and harvesting, hiring a thresher and then milling the brown rice means that this is not food for free.<br /><br />Papa keeps several buffaloes which at night are kept in a rough barn by the house. There are no enclosures for grazing cattle so every day of the year Papa takes them out on a rope to wherever he can find a few blades of grass in the dust. He sits and watches them eat and moves them on from time to time. If his three animals bring one offspring to maturity annually, he can sell perhaps one a year when they need the cash. For this almost full time daily work his annual income is thus about 15,000 baht on selling a fat buffalo.<br /><br />Around the house they have a few scrawny chickens and grow mulberry leaves for the silk worms which an old lady strips from the stalks, paying them about 40 baht every few months. Coconut and banana trees occasionally yield a few more baht.<br /><br />Mama has long been the entrepreneurial dynamo, selling bowls of noodles around the villages. Every day she loads up two baskets with noodles, vegetable, spices and a substantial ceramic barbecue and heads off down the lane. The baskets are extremely heavy for anyone to lift and she walks with a swinging gait, the baskets slung on a pole across her shoulders. <br /><br />Walking to neighbouring villages, she keeps going until the noodles are all sold, each day taking a different route so that customers do not become bored with her food. When cycling out from our house, I’ve met her many miles from home, as cheerful as anyone could be despite the burden of earning perhaps 100 baht a day.<br /><br />When not selling noodles, Mama also forages for food in the surrounding fields wherever she can find it. There are red ants eggs high in the trees, insects and grubs in the earth and tiny fish, rats, crabs and frogs if you work hard enough to find them. In the long dry season when there is no rain she looks for the holes in the parched rice fields and digs hard in the pitiless heat to find a tiny crab a foot or so down. There is no meat on them but when crushed they add calcium and a little flavour to a hot soup or som tam. <br /><br />She also collects bamboo shoots and leaves from the countryside such as kilek and sadao which add a bitter flavour when pounded into a paste. Eating a few vegetables for a meal, a volcanic chili sauce of this kind is important to help the rice go down. Everyone fears eating rice with salt only, a bitter memory they don’t want to relive. <br /><br />At the end of the last rainy season, several times I saw Mama up to her neck in the muddy water of our pond collecting the shoots of pak ahchet, a weed which grows on the surface in abundance. This looks to be a tough life that is enough to kill off any frail old seventy year old but she is full of spirit and has kept going thus far.<br /><br />The two of them cook on the floor in the kitchen with pots and pans strewn everywhere and while, pathetically thin, they somehow manage to feed themselves.<br /><br />What I have just described is typical for the people living in our soi, in the rest of the village and, so far as I can see, throughout the wider region. Yet this hard working couple have land, buffaloes and a big family to support them and so are by far from being the poorest of the poor in Isaan.<br /><br />Many other old people are also burdened by having grandchildren to bring up. I think of one half blind old soul nearby whose husband is an invalid and totally dependent and who has two tiny grandchildren to raise single-handed. Sometimes babies are dumped with the old folk in this way but then the money their parents should be earning for them never arrives. <br /><br />In our soi there are nine family homes. Almost all of them consist of grandparents with babies and small children while the middle generation of wage earners is almost totally absent, returning perhaps once a year for Songkhran. This separation is necessary to fill the family rice bowls, but it cannot advance the family’s fortunes who inevitably remain near the bottom of the heap. At least they are fed but it is hardly a satisfactory way to raise the children.<br /><br />Other families sink even lower through taking on credit they cannot afford. Within three hundred yards of our house no fewer than three ordinary families recently bought brand new Nissan pickups on credit for a minimal down payment, hoping to earn money with them to cover the monthly payments. A superficial observer would have thought this was a wealthy soi, but within a year all three pickups had been repossessed and sold off by the finance company, perhaps at an under-value to an insider. Each family was then left with a huge outstanding debt. <br /><br />One family was taken to court in Surin town and had their home sold from under their feet, while another stripped and sold every piece of wood and corrugated iron from their house and, in the face of threats from debt collectors, went into hiding. I haven’t seen them since. <br /><br />Farmers often have to borrow to cover the up-front costs of cultivation and when the harvest fails are then left with impossible debts. There is often no way out unless they have a pretty young daughter who will make the inevitable sacrifice in the bars of Bangkok and Pattaya.<br /><br />Much of the apparent wealth in the villages, such as vehicles and house improvements, is that of salaried government servants such as police and teachers, while most of the rest comes in from outside. Construction or factory work in Bangkok is not well paid and the best wages are earned in Taiwan and Korea, while good money can be made in the girlie bars and, what’s more, by marrying a farang.<br /><br />So that concludes the brief story of my neighbours and how they live, exemplified by the old couple who are the ones I know best. <br /><br />But what is my take on all this?<br /><br />Since the seventies, I have lived in and travelled through much of Africa, India, China and South East Asia and visited some of the poorest of countries such as Burkina Faso and Nepal. I have seen peoples who are poorer, but I still would describe my neighbours as poor, indeed starkly poorer than the urban elites. <br /><br />The old couple I’ve told you about will not be the ones to go to the barricades, but the next generation of poor farmers may not be able to restrain their anger.<br /><br />So, in conclusion, do you think my neighbours are unduly poor? <br /><br />If this represents widespread rural poverty, could it ignite the powder keg?<br /><br />Andrew Hicks The “ThaiGirl” Blog May 2010A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-91827222450133725292010-05-20T18:44:00.010+07:002010-05-20T19:18:48.181+07:00Bangkok Burning-Why?<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj30dfgeJ-E1kms0et_Z6H6QaXY2tTvGRYS8uFlIYd4J65_uMWSUG5dr2tPXnGA9qTfd-4xaKHfvXMMwy-1MqK1AeKLTRPNXETkDTXaERj18rOdp_8n0cUr2Cp8XY6hS3Vgk82HxbKV1O9z/s1600/Coke+is+IT.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 324px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj30dfgeJ-E1kms0et_Z6H6QaXY2tTvGRYS8uFlIYd4J65_uMWSUG5dr2tPXnGA9qTfd-4xaKHfvXMMwy-1MqK1AeKLTRPNXETkDTXaERj18rOdp_8n0cUr2Cp8XY6hS3Vgk82HxbKV1O9z/s400/Coke+is+IT.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5473320697067969570" /></a><br />Central World Plaza, to the left, has been on a civil war footing.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglsSLeV3KOsn6oCwnPRomn3NaVVFDoPZyByM4KxoOkct_dXzABWO5z1pNYZt7xe23NXqkhCHsLACto1dRImK9qxeRZvF6zhF87Xf2PrYrU6_RHOwB32v4yFRTekjseFltRWJf8z860ujHk/s1600/Central+World.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglsSLeV3KOsn6oCwnPRomn3NaVVFDoPZyByM4KxoOkct_dXzABWO5z1pNYZt7xe23NXqkhCHsLACto1dRImK9qxeRZvF6zhF87Xf2PrYrU6_RHOwB32v4yFRTekjseFltRWJf8z860ujHk/s400/Central+World.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5473320378053041874" /></a><br />It was cleverly linked to a sky walk and the Skytrain.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhST54ypGpUw0o8xzHmaXKGjKOl9ESDqfOqS8kNswRk_VyyR1zYuU4KLj8YksBoLkHWs55a2q8T6g_7ZlS58n7bwGvxe76qzyGjX3f2_hU_E5Mqg_3GGYVqFsDuhR_77TBkbUWi81P7IvZH/s1600/King.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhST54ypGpUw0o8xzHmaXKGjKOl9ESDqfOqS8kNswRk_VyyR1zYuU4KLj8YksBoLkHWs55a2q8T6g_7ZlS58n7bwGvxe76qzyGjX3f2_hU_E5Mqg_3GGYVqFsDuhR_77TBkbUWi81P7IvZH/s400/King.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5473318416685984802" /></a><br />The King gazes benevolently down and is widely revered.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaoCCfOmrumdfxGVj6nXzOXVD9oUzV9OqFvHQLNYvKuXkbuJCGtvibqRC6bKDbZ9m5TmL9VtO-njV339TDES7KWdXD7HKOnxsjPgkEBDT0rfPkRCiq4kdmcAVBcnvpgjnGyJZKKDEaeVoh/s1600/Construction.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaoCCfOmrumdfxGVj6nXzOXVD9oUzV9OqFvHQLNYvKuXkbuJCGtvibqRC6bKDbZ9m5TmL9VtO-njV339TDES7KWdXD7HKOnxsjPgkEBDT0rfPkRCiq4kdmcAVBcnvpgjnGyJZKKDEaeVoh/s400/Construction.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5473318160906528626" /></a><br />And Bangkok has been booming with upmarket construction.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPofLfkfPesiovRh3XWusj_bZ0HHMkMQF_RZ7VEcpt-ej8TNjJyyi196YKIGZHovw6yYsNcq-JZGYp8q0S7XwhGOiO2NL1qHe2So4JkILqxTZnlUrFjwmJhsQtsHI0-Z574ZihpumafEBJ/s1600/Market.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPofLfkfPesiovRh3XWusj_bZ0HHMkMQF_RZ7VEcpt-ej8TNjJyyi196YKIGZHovw6yYsNcq-JZGYp8q0S7XwhGOiO2NL1qHe2So4JkILqxTZnlUrFjwmJhsQtsHI0-Z574ZihpumafEBJ/s400/Market.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5473317971896076674" /></a><br />Ordinary people, often rural migrants, have to shop in markets like this that are just like the ones in the villages.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuGa8FGi8SHSsO_WVlw6VDe0EgpS_yfvwKP4nRgoP3Bw4orrIWGbV8K2MXD5ktbk1DfCFUlS6mJfTq35l8Zck6n03nm7ADKc9iEmGRagwew1i_2QiQUw-O56LaNcnA1L1Otdbm8UJ1SG-H/s1600/Central+World+2.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuGa8FGi8SHSsO_WVlw6VDe0EgpS_yfvwKP4nRgoP3Bw4orrIWGbV8K2MXD5ktbk1DfCFUlS6mJfTq35l8Zck6n03nm7ADKc9iEmGRagwew1i_2QiQUw-O56LaNcnA1L1Otdbm8UJ1SG-H/s400/Central+World+2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5473317460297291218" /></a><br />But the rich won't be shopping here any more.<br /><br />It’s hard to believe that Central World Plaza, the biggest shopping mall in Asia is now a smouldering ruin. It must have taken some skill to torch it as it is a series of vast open spaces. Shops like Asia Books that I have visited so many times would have plenty of combustible material, but to destroy the whole place is truly remarkable and shocking.<br /><br />Ironically it used to be called the World Trade Centre but presumably to remove the association with a complex that collapsed in flames, the name was changed. It was then given an elaborate face lift and was upgraded to become one of the glitziest malls in Bangkok and indeed the world.<br /><br />So where do the rights and wrongs of all these violent protests lie? <br /><br />We have been rightly warned against regarding the Red Shirt movement as a romantic crusade of the poor and oppressed to achieve democracy. See www.somtow.org/2010/05/dont-blame-dan-rivers.html. A complex situation requires deeper analysis and peeling off each layer of the onion skin of Thai politics always induces tears and often leads to misunderstandings and confusion.<br /><br />Yet there is clear justification in the Red Shirt demands for an election to be called immediately and not at some later date. A charismatic but young and inexperienced old-Etonian prime minister came to power as leader of a party without a full electorate mandate and is struggling to hold together a coalition of disparate interests. This could describe either Britain or Thailand, but the difference is that in Britain the majority of the electorate has not been repeatedly deprived of its franchise by military and judicial coups, as in Thailand.<br /><br />Yet one cannot simply characterize the confrontation in terms of goodies and baddies. Prime minister Abhisit is as liberal and decent a leader as Thailand is ever likely to get, even if now swimming in a tank of sharks. He does not have presidential powers to make decisions as he would wish and has little scope for real action. On the other side, Thaksin, the man who has hijacked the cause of the poor, is the biggest self-serving kleptocrat of them all. Once again the rural poor are being exploited in a way that is totally cynical by him setting himself up as their champion.<br /><br />A few months back I went to a press conference at the FCCT (Foreign Correspondants Club of Thailand) given by the leaders of the Red Shirts who were explaining the aims of their proposed protests. They were, frankly, unimpressive, though to be fair they are not a formal political party with a manifesto and party membership but a loose collecting point for a range of interests and views. It was clear that theirs was not a united or cohesive movement and it was inevitable that they would have little if any control over the way the protest developed, even though their desire for non-violence seemed sincere. <br /><br />After so many years of frustration, ‘protest and be damned’ would be understandable as a philosophy. Nothing else would achieve the changes they seek as reason and dialogue with those monopolizing power had already reached the end of a long road.<br /><br />So what are those changes? <br /><br />Essentially what is sought is a complete shift in how political power is shared in Thailand and perhaps Central World Plaza epitomizes the fundamental divide in Thai society. <br /><br />Who were the men who laboured in terrible temperatures to build the place and the rest of Bangkok’s consumer palaces, living in appalling conditions for low wages? Who are the cleaners and other skivvies that then run it from day to day? Who drive the taxis, clean the streets and do all the menial tasks that keep Bangkok running? <br /><br />It is the children of the rural poor who have to leave their villages to find work as agriculture no longer provides a living. And their sweated wages are hardly enough to feed their children and ageing parents back in the villages.<br /><br />And who enjoys the benefit of Thailand’s evident prosperity, achieved by the low wage slaves of factory and field? It is the urban elites, government employees and middle classes of the cities… the ones who could shop at Central World Plaza and enjoy the dream and comfort of a rich consumer society.<br /><br />Like looking for good guys and bad guys, this thesis may seem simplistic but it is essentially true. Too much of Thailand’s wealth and political control has been held in too few hands for too long. My neighbours in the rural North East are truly poor and there is no way upwards. In a hierarchical society of deference where the poor do not complain, there comes a time when their patience and tolerance comes to an end. That is when they run amok.<br /><br />Had the government called an immediate election a few months ago, all of this might have been avoided. It is hard now to see how further chaos can be avoided. How sad that Abhisit took the poisoned chalice of prime minster when he did, rather than wait for a more secure mandate. How sad that Thaksin so badly betrayed the trust of the Thai people in the two clear electoral mandates that they entrusted to him.<br /><br />His was the best ever opportunity for Thailand to make political and economic progress but his self-serving greed created the mayhem on the streets that we have seen in the last few days. I hope he does not emerge the winner from all this and that the poor can ultimately find a new champion who can more fairly shift the sharing of power and resources in Thailand.<br /><br />Copyright Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog May 2010A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-39523025303000383532010-05-10T21:57:00.022+07:002010-05-10T23:05:12.026+07:00A Day in the New Kunming<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcyvBBik93wdfvXgZ1Ekd8Ss4v5cO6yrJ5bzlmtJrB7g5xvYrxolL3eXWF-jPaYcQ0IL7ald8vudTyFKjOZtcuUHVomeHLmHAn4gtzq741fgfHQVQC81aHNGszTIcNlRI5detZEc3xBlBG/s1600/Freeway.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcyvBBik93wdfvXgZ1Ekd8Ss4v5cO6yrJ5bzlmtJrB7g5xvYrxolL3eXWF-jPaYcQ0IL7ald8vudTyFKjOZtcuUHVomeHLmHAn4gtzq741fgfHQVQC81aHNGszTIcNlRI5detZEc3xBlBG/s400/Freeway.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469658851973773618" /></a><br /><br />One of the stories in Jack Reynolds' wonderful book, "Daughters of an Ancient Race", which is about his experiences in China in the late forties with the Friends Ambulance Unit, is called "A Day in the New Chungking". What was new at the time was that the communists had just arrived. <br /><br />I first visited China from Hong Kong in 1978, in the eighties, in 1994 and again two months ago, this time from Thailand. Each time the change has been remarkable, but in particular I can hardly believe the material progess in the new Kunming. It is material progress on the scale of a new Singapore and they have built a truly beautiful city. <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg1eW0utiMJt4XGR2ImvzVBT1Vl5WAkNSk_jgw6PEukPYx15mkDV-eZjbT9Tq4Ez_W5B8omDOjMPUZj6tnvYKq6n3_ViN81ebzMRwKhxTh3vG1z6m7olNiu4ucrjzppjAaSCc0oemNkecl/s1600/Louis+Vuitton.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgg1eW0utiMJt4XGR2ImvzVBT1Vl5WAkNSk_jgw6PEukPYx15mkDV-eZjbT9Tq4Ez_W5B8omDOjMPUZj6tnvYKq6n3_ViN81ebzMRwKhxTh3vG1z6m7olNiu4ucrjzppjAaSCc0oemNkecl/s400/Louis+Vuitton.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469658732833201810" /></a><br /><br />The old rural China is still there but so too are the sweeping freeways, the consumer society that a surprisingly large proportion of the people can enjoy and of course displays of the most prestigious branded goods.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiZpO-8BT5K7HmaVpexnVQxr4OIDzOTrnaKLws6vw-r4RN132YK1MtLDNEwdblRvXLRN1OeWqYzjOSVhUy8LEJOV4EuZE1Z2O2GJ6Imjm-NbTryOXyGWZc8hy5cKWWTbj2pL9W1uWnNmyh/s1600/Child+on+lion.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 267px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiZpO-8BT5K7HmaVpexnVQxr4OIDzOTrnaKLws6vw-r4RN132YK1MtLDNEwdblRvXLRN1OeWqYzjOSVhUy8LEJOV4EuZE1Z2O2GJ6Imjm-NbTryOXyGWZc8hy5cKWWTbj2pL9W1uWnNmyh/s400/Child+on+lion.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469658522580861042" /></a><br /><br />The size of China's population and its problems are truly awesome but in a park in Kunming the essential humanity and individualty of its people is always so very evident. A little girl, angelic with pink wings riding a stone lion, a mother and child on a park bench, an elderly couple taking the air, all enjoying a break from the eternal treadmill of work during the Chinese Spring Festival remind one that the teeming millions have a human face. <br /><br />The park is busy and vibrant, a daily festival of people expressing themselves with drama and music by the water. While she knits, he plays his violin and the old men enjoy their small orchestra of traditional instruments.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2X_xKhlUnqX9GQgzUHQEr_vea8rMP9fntB9887Fb73EnMqyB1XjIWnTL7bE3Ge-Jtdb4fq_Xm5mEgijhZLKDVc0d6LtUc99mL_-ZgOad4N2dsZ6v2YwukLTuTP8PkL_bhhjcm7IeDNhad/s1600/Park+mama+monkey.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2X_xKhlUnqX9GQgzUHQEr_vea8rMP9fntB9887Fb73EnMqyB1XjIWnTL7bE3Ge-Jtdb4fq_Xm5mEgijhZLKDVc0d6LtUc99mL_-ZgOad4N2dsZ6v2YwukLTuTP8PkL_bhhjcm7IeDNhad/s400/Park+mama+monkey.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469658385255714082" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAlZvl0cABRnyxVfiO81orYNeV83qUxAJ6EKjcljOt9katYhQKWr8G1CVbwtEdvq0i-qc_6AoE75qVJ66UgF4nxqdhKp5TVEfRVP7Lvwk6fzkLoUCHg1DSXBxoTQCawX_L1JlW9IQZ5vOa/s1600/Park+bench.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAlZvl0cABRnyxVfiO81orYNeV83qUxAJ6EKjcljOt9katYhQKWr8G1CVbwtEdvq0i-qc_6AoE75qVJ66UgF4nxqdhKp5TVEfRVP7Lvwk6fzkLoUCHg1DSXBxoTQCawX_L1JlW9IQZ5vOa/s400/Park+bench.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469658255331047730" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj79Q5KPTNI8J2WWfBPIls1YmNcjQAED44tDW9Al7MliP_NH0KydDlKoHKU-cpFLZW8-ag0Aa6itjdi7Gji25UCNa1rbz8t3JiDG-cS3Uo3pM2HjjRxjwCdqOB3wRvImmksTGjUMnnts8-I/s1600/Child,boat,bench.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj79Q5KPTNI8J2WWfBPIls1YmNcjQAED44tDW9Al7MliP_NH0KydDlKoHKU-cpFLZW8-ag0Aa6itjdi7Gji25UCNa1rbz8t3JiDG-cS3Uo3pM2HjjRxjwCdqOB3wRvImmksTGjUMnnts8-I/s400/Child,boat,bench.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469658133860945618" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicvWQXJUmsuqB63MsrZ7UWUp9JfF6C2CEuGnxX1DOvOmMnZVTaLhSk4NG4tGmFZilbmEUXHe315nY-7_jU7E8yp3frraofmPi1qvIqMG9oyvxV0Bsvo6kqnzLNX7C21fVF3zZ0MmrrrNCz/s1600/Fat+ladies.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicvWQXJUmsuqB63MsrZ7UWUp9JfF6C2CEuGnxX1DOvOmMnZVTaLhSk4NG4tGmFZilbmEUXHe315nY-7_jU7E8yp3frraofmPi1qvIqMG9oyvxV0Bsvo6kqnzLNX7C21fVF3zZ0MmrrrNCz/s400/Fat+ladies.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469658017732129234" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUVfvmXOkk7mAx0O2g-3nXYzOXoi44wy6Ab2K4dpWRzAgDPeJvWwWaLVg1MRAXeFj-ekpWG0g2i2618jtV7tm30VpUmCANiIiAv9FoCnBK6WAra5eR03tsmQM38YAY8d7AdZxG6CoKg-EH/s1600/String+instrument.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUVfvmXOkk7mAx0O2g-3nXYzOXoi44wy6Ab2K4dpWRzAgDPeJvWwWaLVg1MRAXeFj-ekpWG0g2i2618jtV7tm30VpUmCANiIiAv9FoCnBK6WAra5eR03tsmQM38YAY8d7AdZxG6CoKg-EH/s400/String+instrument.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469657902920823474" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivpObKRW85-cQrX7Zod3I2bjiy4nKSmWuaY0vxfFO-3SwoHPjVoQxOz4R7wz2W4LlBFtCo9JggRVtSWr4VD4LVYr_JKAubB-1CApdwniPI1KA1yB-gL_YRTXihhgBTLTKV01_VbS8bCY3b/s1600/Violin.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivpObKRW85-cQrX7Zod3I2bjiy4nKSmWuaY0vxfFO-3SwoHPjVoQxOz4R7wz2W4LlBFtCo9JggRVtSWr4VD4LVYr_JKAubB-1CApdwniPI1KA1yB-gL_YRTXihhgBTLTKV01_VbS8bCY3b/s400/Violin.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469657766800367378" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdPkrh3iqPCnwH0oSP6DrK3QDnlLZd5Muhy9MhyYnw8fhQfeDa-4OgxyYVORCOnQ4XVGBltZxfy5WTMWfC95LSrx7wsR7SASZ7YW84dnHCg7nj1Gdr2_hkKfgJiWaQbpIhq64JVx16Ed_y/s1600/Orchestra.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdPkrh3iqPCnwH0oSP6DrK3QDnlLZd5Muhy9MhyYnw8fhQfeDa-4OgxyYVORCOnQ4XVGBltZxfy5WTMWfC95LSrx7wsR7SASZ7YW84dnHCg7nj1Gdr2_hkKfgJiWaQbpIhq64JVx16Ed_y/s400/Orchestra.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469657658075822290" /></a><br /><br />The communist revolution is now but a distant memory and the old traditions and internal struggles will mean something very different to the new generation. If a regime can deliver stability and prosperity even without political reform that is what will satisfy their pragmatic view.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXSM29UBfY60rrBF2r-iiRZGBpXob1Td2ppxXw2EHyVJ3A58-P4jM1AdCrIAZFxKVydZROJTSKRAuRhz1q9bfV0THKWMbLw0Nip1aejWXAlD-KsLEi_YPKK5RniFpZaGOfDRZ4ADLXtbg3/s1600/Red+flag+soldiers.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXSM29UBfY60rrBF2r-iiRZGBpXob1Td2ppxXw2EHyVJ3A58-P4jM1AdCrIAZFxKVydZROJTSKRAuRhz1q9bfV0THKWMbLw0Nip1aejWXAlD-KsLEi_YPKK5RniFpZaGOfDRZ4ADLXtbg3/s400/Red+flag+soldiers.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469657546478170594" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBIJnSAcad1ceTcoV7yoxkQE13kpRsmJsK5HivxoyBLF56satoS8_YenYBHLt14OZbiO5R3kLubrGLUrMMdg6pIEiwestjp_W7o_CaTeuX6XnglJMa3havtvZR70p7gZSne8w-XPXqQw9a/s1600/Red+flag+is+fun.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBIJnSAcad1ceTcoV7yoxkQE13kpRsmJsK5HivxoyBLF56satoS8_YenYBHLt14OZbiO5R3kLubrGLUrMMdg6pIEiwestjp_W7o_CaTeuX6XnglJMa3havtvZR70p7gZSne8w-XPXqQw9a/s400/Red+flag+is+fun.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469657413598226642" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKGZgZSARoNleIhO2Krphyphenhyphen9CmEuX0Glbgud7HKz0nnjJLON7Vq2tdTVoeuJ9RNJeqxw22oa6-ZGkgFsDJkd62qR4x05lsfy-MT6OiAIRqIaLcWz0W0Sx6zQXr9qlwcY_igTPhZXRqNV2TN/s1600/Red+lanterns.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKGZgZSARoNleIhO2Krphyphenhyphen9CmEuX0Glbgud7HKz0nnjJLON7Vq2tdTVoeuJ9RNJeqxw22oa6-ZGkgFsDJkd62qR4x05lsfy-MT6OiAIRqIaLcWz0W0Sx6zQXr9qlwcY_igTPhZXRqNV2TN/s400/Red+lanterns.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469657291328591458" /></a><br /><br />And prosperity there certainly is. In the towns there are top of the range cars everywhere and the fat cats are very apparent. While the traditional subsists with the new and the older generation readily embraces progress, somehow I doubt though that China will allow itself to be truly coca-colonised. It may take some trinkets from the West but it is too big, too much of a 'middle kingdom' to allow its own culture to be submerged.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJBflr3uw3UK3gZEz1_4Yp9HbUxclNpfKh3iXMSOeiqS3RBuagZZjNXTELwnHgw0zdCk_RW51hY8MLjqG2d1zikcxQw0VJPx-HRA_noiAu2fN78z9PWaWW2oA3QBoGRv_uoRFanu8URDts/s1600/Fat+cat.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJBflr3uw3UK3gZEz1_4Yp9HbUxclNpfKh3iXMSOeiqS3RBuagZZjNXTELwnHgw0zdCk_RW51hY8MLjqG2d1zikcxQw0VJPx-HRA_noiAu2fN78z9PWaWW2oA3QBoGRv_uoRFanu8URDts/s400/Fat+cat.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469657157742323154" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw8LVPswq3vK0v8B0t8Emniqi_fy8SekBFUMGa639rzR8IXYQjXM-3QfweSd0Ye3jP-Z9nVhSByfOCnK8W_DDy5L7OYXvnRHj6HSuUK5bRMMVJM46wjJVRW29QJyf4gHh1J9k1EuvkNdO-/s1600/Coca+cola.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhw8LVPswq3vK0v8B0t8Emniqi_fy8SekBFUMGa639rzR8IXYQjXM-3QfweSd0Ye3jP-Z9nVhSByfOCnK8W_DDy5L7OYXvnRHj6HSuUK5bRMMVJM46wjJVRW29QJyf4gHh1J9k1EuvkNdO-/s400/Coca+cola.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469657031337786482" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnKgsvYNbH__N3YkAW1-xlGphLLtmHpYJaJNz1LWDgOwS7WWemE-IDl8k1CceC3uKsjMo6EwP2SX_XA9MTYBIWwS_odFZPedxPs44Ijpn4QFAdfxmQLMGGoVygENrK_gQLt1wlt33jJWjR/s1600/Old+man+Disney.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnKgsvYNbH__N3YkAW1-xlGphLLtmHpYJaJNz1LWDgOwS7WWemE-IDl8k1CceC3uKsjMo6EwP2SX_XA9MTYBIWwS_odFZPedxPs44Ijpn4QFAdfxmQLMGGoVygENrK_gQLt1wlt33jJWjR/s400/Old+man+Disney.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469656905851621026" /></a><br /><br />The old Kunming has almost been swept away in the face of a tide of modern development. The old university campus is an oasis of calm but elsewhere there is no stopping the twenty first century. Run down streets are closed and quickly demolished. While in smaller towns the new may be rebuilt as a pastiche of the old style there is no sentimentality about slums and they have to go.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8t-8N4yeBHv0gRUZgNkNA4BmmdvzbR12ThQFSTUxQLMELyPC-REpSRn6P17A1Mygq3YNGw-b3DuwBAcYiW81jYIght5lVKLKHDV8XG92r3dWvjU8SQXceFa-6yA6CjU4CKoVZ2GFhlX7A/s1600/Old+streets.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8t-8N4yeBHv0gRUZgNkNA4BmmdvzbR12ThQFSTUxQLMELyPC-REpSRn6P17A1Mygq3YNGw-b3DuwBAcYiW81jYIght5lVKLKHDV8XG92r3dWvjU8SQXceFa-6yA6CjU4CKoVZ2GFhlX7A/s400/Old+streets.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469656779848471730" /></a><br /><br />This is a new dawn and the new year celebration in the park is the place to see it writ large. Kunming is 'the city of eternal spring' and in mid-February the temperature was perfect, the tulips in full bloom and with cameras and mobiles in abundance to record them. Big lenses record the chubby single child of recent policy who can move confidently into a future that offers so much more than her parents could ever have hoped for.<br /><br />Meanwhile the expressways flow fast and the tower blocks soar skywards. This extraordinary place where more than six decades ago Jack Reynolds landed after a rough flight over 'The Hump' would be totally unrecognisable to him. He and his colleagues in the Friends Ambulance Unit who faced the daunting task of moving medical supplies across impossible roads and who confronted oceans of suffering would be truly amazed. The part each one of them played at that difficult time was truly heroic. <br /><br />(Jack was born Emrys Reynolds Jones and was known at the time as Jack Jones. He wrote under the pseudonym, Jack Reynolds.)<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBSNLX2Uiakvn3URTnnzrybrFXEZ5H43Z2tJbq4c6gkb9MICrJKYniMfEuX8XffdvQ0FBZ7kKA2TH3oLcVQIeI8DJv1FOlJoFMJ9IMbvYB_rHIJPWAZpMgarKNNwk_aXgt1yptPOEdN8I7/s1600/Tulip+photos.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhBSNLX2Uiakvn3URTnnzrybrFXEZ5H43Z2tJbq4c6gkb9MICrJKYniMfEuX8XffdvQ0FBZ7kKA2TH3oLcVQIeI8DJv1FOlJoFMJ9IMbvYB_rHIJPWAZpMgarKNNwk_aXgt1yptPOEdN8I7/s400/Tulip+photos.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469656645544219474" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRdijmuBwE4YbdurlvDi2tglrC1QfpNUJ-DJdJ-3zCiu0JQqArh7FaZgey5Z1psG208wqG-gDm6sBjYv04X8Zxk26UPRUaI0HK0FGf9geVgjn16QM-jrsmjCXpCjCrXncYv7EJfe1prnoo/s1600/Long+lens+tulips.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRdijmuBwE4YbdurlvDi2tglrC1QfpNUJ-DJdJ-3zCiu0JQqArh7FaZgey5Z1psG208wqG-gDm6sBjYv04X8Zxk26UPRUaI0HK0FGf9geVgjn16QM-jrsmjCXpCjCrXncYv7EJfe1prnoo/s400/Long+lens+tulips.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469656510765189666" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm_fBGqXfr-dBIEMUxt5j7I7FV9vg_s2J2gc1sCzqdTKPL7mrlT8xu4HX5CZbPa-civYMqfAip5FQ368F-sd0yzCsWeaUNkH8s1MNVhK_8i9KLjVo5rAF0OQEt2sOSFmESHlT-sM_1e8k2/s1600/Little+flower.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm_fBGqXfr-dBIEMUxt5j7I7FV9vg_s2J2gc1sCzqdTKPL7mrlT8xu4HX5CZbPa-civYMqfAip5FQ368F-sd0yzCsWeaUNkH8s1MNVhK_8i9KLjVo5rAF0OQEt2sOSFmESHlT-sM_1e8k2/s400/Little+flower.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469656354400349650" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVifdDTPc5jHbXRp9TpqfsRnOdoXs-aV8Zq2Qq36pCu_U5YOM62QynU1pWXw6ZU4pLO-26DvPSBLpa2we7jA5fIIwylj0WeSZRX2MXghBi30-jN1ud-xbMlBGZDemsu2lrmnupUihEArMw/s1600/Tower+blocks.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVifdDTPc5jHbXRp9TpqfsRnOdoXs-aV8Zq2Qq36pCu_U5YOM62QynU1pWXw6ZU4pLO-26DvPSBLpa2we7jA5fIIwylj0WeSZRX2MXghBi30-jN1ud-xbMlBGZDemsu2lrmnupUihEArMw/s400/Tower+blocks.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5469656134291277138" /></a>A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-3412533722054059982010-04-30T19:54:00.003+07:002010-04-30T20:05:35.100+07:00Susan Boyle Meets Jack Reynolds!<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBPT1L-TH7hQKhTdhrdd0qmk3FadBzZ2Hl1E71mMZQsUjdFIyJPBtRi6FqsbHMkw6gGh8zilBGYBICL677sI19U4tzU0tuedsVdHK8tmI36eg9in2tOf3kxn1KqoGtNPqVReb6xBbXuAKC/s1600/X42%5B1%5D.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 179px; height: 293px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBPT1L-TH7hQKhTdhrdd0qmk3FadBzZ2Hl1E71mMZQsUjdFIyJPBtRi6FqsbHMkw6gGh8zilBGYBICL677sI19U4tzU0tuedsVdHK8tmI36eg9in2tOf3kxn1KqoGtNPqVReb6xBbXuAKC/s400/X42%5B1%5D.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5465913453600259778" /></a><br /><br />A plea for help with my quest to find Jack.<br /><br />If you’ve been reading this blog recently, you can’t have missed the fact that I’m obsessively researching the life of the Bangkok based author, Jack Reynolds, who published a solo novel, “A Woman of Bangkok” in 1956. This seminal book was the first of a long line of ‘bar girl swallowed my wallet” stories and in the view of the critics is far superior to its many imitators.<br /><br />It’s snappily written and Jack had a particular interest in language varieties and dialects, especially Lincolnshire and Thinglish, so he has a keen ear for authentic dialogue which is one of the main charms of his writing.<br /><br />When, a few months ago I read ‘A Woman of Bangkok’ for the first time, one expression used surprised me as it seemed more Estuary eighties than middle class nineteen fifties. I could even say I was ‘gobsmacked’.<br /><br />Later trawling the internet I came across what could be called a meeting of Jack and Susan Boyle. The website in question was www.vocbulary.com and the article is titled, “Susan Boyle is Gobsmacked (and Poleaxed Too)”. It reads as follows.<br /><br /><br />“Unless you've been living under an Internet-free rock, you've probably seen the enthralling video of Scotland's Susan Boyle singing on the television show Britain's Got Talent. According to the latest numbers, the video of Boyle's performance has already attracted more than 100 million online views. But it's not only her singing prowess that is attracting worldwide attention: it has also been reported that "Web searches for the term gobsmacked spiked after Boyle used the British slang meaning utterly astonished when describing her reaction to newfound widespread acclaim."<br /><br />The graph for gobsmacked on Google Trends bears out the huge spike in online searches, buoyed by Boyle's use of the term in numerous interviews. She told CNN, for instance, "I'm gobsmacked, absolutely gobsmacked." Previously, this colloquialism hadn't circulated much outside of the British Isles, but now it's fair to say that Boyle has brought it to much wider notice in the United States and elsewhere… <br /><br />British usage of gobsmacked has only become prominent since the 1980s, but the earliest known appearance of the term actually goes back to 1956. As Jerry Friedman noted recently on the Usenet newsgroup alt.usage.english, Google Book Search now reveals this passage from the novel Woman of Bangkok: "I'm so amazed that only the Malderbury dialect can express my condition: I'm 'properly gob-smacked.'" The author of Woman of Bangkok is one Jack Reynolds, but this is likely a pseudonym: also in 1956, the book was published in Britain as A Sort of Beauty under the name Jack Jones. And just to add to the mystery, the "Malderbury dialect" to which the narrator refers is a fabrication: there's no such place as Malderbury. <br /><br />We can guess that Jack Reynolds/Jones had some ties to northern England or Scotland, where the term gob has long been a slang term for "mouth." According to Michael Quinion of World Wide Words, the word likely spread from Scottish Gaelic (where gob can mean "beak" and also suggests gab "talk"), primarily via insulting phrases like "Shut your gob!" ("Be quiet!"). So it's fitting that a Scot like Susan Boyle, who hails from the town of Blackburn about twenty miles from Edinburgh, should be the one to bring gobsmacked to international recognition.”<br /><br />It’s a good guess but “Jack Reynolds” (real name, Emrys Reynolds Jones) was born in Buntingford, Hertfordshire to a father of Welsh origin who was the Congregational minister there in the village.<br /><br />In “A Woman of Bangkok”, the hapless protagonist, Reginald Ernest Joyce is the son of the minister of the village of Malderbury. The novel thus opens with Reggie taking the train down to Malderbury to say goodbye to his parents before flying out to a commercial job in Bangkok where he falls for a Bangkok woman who swallows, inter alia, his wallet.<br /><br />So there is no such place as Malderbury, the article tells us.<br /> <br />What intrigues me though is that I’ve had access to one of Jack’s old notebooks and in it there is a reference to Malderbury. In the passage in question Jack summarises the key stages of his life in a couple of pages and he says that in the late thirties he was for a year undergardener at Malderbury Grange. <br /><br />But is this true? Did Malderbury Grange really exist? I’m sure my blog readers can find me the answer. Hertfordshire or Lincolnshire would be most probable as he worked as a gardener in both these counties.<br /><br />One of the intriguing things about Jack is that his fiction was partly autobiographical and his writings about himself even in his unpublished notebooks also seem to mix fact and fantasy. In the middle of an accurate description of his life there comes a lurid detail such as that his father was killed in a bombing raid on London which in fact isn’t true.<br /><br />Are these passages simply sketches for another autobiographical novel, spiced up with a little imagination, or are they intended as accurate accounts of his life?<br />To check an aspect of their accuracy I therefore need to know if Malderbury Grange really was real. <br /><br />Now another extraordinary thing has happened. I have just met Michael Llewellyn, son of the late author and Oxfam stalwart, Bernard Llewellyn. Michael handed me a nicely printed book of poems published by Jack in the nineteen thirties, twenty pages of unpublished manuscript poems and a letter from Jack of September 1952 giving them to Bernard. All these are unknown to the world and to his family.<br /><br />The poems are beautifully written but my point is that those dated 1938 to 1940 are written as from Welwyn and Wrotham. <br /><br />When I worked as a solicitor in London half an age ago, one of our clients was the Wrotham Park estate. At around that time, it is known that Jack was working as a gardener. Perhaps therefore he was at Wrotham Park in Hertfordshire, not so far from his village of birth, Buntingford, and it served as his model for Malderbury Grange. This is all a bit speculative but I shall write to the estate and ask if they have employment records from that time and if there is any record of Jack.<br /><br />All this detective work now leads me greatly to respect the many biographers who reconstruct the lives of their subjects years after their deaths. I have so many leads to follow up that I myself am overwhelmed. <br /><br />I have tried but failed to find a local historian in Buntingford who would help me discover details and pictures of Jack at his village school and of the Congregational Church and manse where Jack’s father, Joseph was Congregational Minister from 1911 to 1922. (Jack was born in 1913.) <br /><br />The family then moved to London and lived at 21 Castleton Road, Walthamstow, E.17 where Jack went to Trinity County School. This I have discovered merged with another school to become Wood Green County Grammar School in 1962. Do school records and photos from Jack’s time there in the twenties still exist?<br /><br />Then Jack says in one of his articles that he was the only speedway rider to be son of a minister and to have a poem published in ‘The Listener’, the influential BBC magazine that published early poems of most of the great names of modern poetry. I know the speedway teams Jack rode for but have failed to find and trace anything about him on the internet. Trying to find his poem in ‘The Listener’ I have likewise drawn a blank. Where can indexes or copies of ‘The Listener’ be found?<br /> <br />I have unearthed Jack’ father’s obituary which of course defines his childhood and I have the passenger list for the ship on which he sailed for China in 1945. Extraordinarily I am in touch with a China friend of Jack’s now in Canada who is sending me pictures and anecdotes about Jack from the time. And I will go to a Friends Ambulance Unit reunion in London in May in the hope of meeting old China friends of Jack.<br /><br />But can anyone open doors for me in Buntingford or about his Wood Green school, his speedway career or his poem in ‘The Listener’? <br /><br />I feel sure the information is out there somewhere if only I can find it.<br /><br />Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog March 2010A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-13910601284075132652010-03-14T07:14:00.025+07:002010-03-14T08:14:55.566+07:00Tossing the Condom - From Tin to Tofu<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUa5KiGIhA4bhDKOTilQjF7V6PS3TrfP1vldJrcYpwSs2rndfLrf8ZGvjzJcwlz8qzXiGowXLb4VbxjIVhUxoittaKNBLZFxIjpRGttwIc2zCSPLE7PG1QxOO6-HC1slcsHzOpuvgbgoZH/s1600-h/Shiping+from+the+gate.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUa5KiGIhA4bhDKOTilQjF7V6PS3TrfP1vldJrcYpwSs2rndfLrf8ZGvjzJcwlz8qzXiGowXLb4VbxjIVhUxoittaKNBLZFxIjpRGttwIc2zCSPLE7PG1QxOO6-HC1slcsHzOpuvgbgoZH/s400/Shiping+from+the+gate.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448282062995964802" /></a><br />The Chinese town of Shiping seen from the gate is like any other.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNVazaCeZCR-lP7APAwxYUIXEx-KYcX4b4pAlKq6NKiSohUBFTet2yb14sEONfLuEiUoALdHmiNLsXI8o-Mvuztdh3gPr44G_jMK2L9itx-f-LHb7XAIXFvDzrJ0EgmsmiBoRBmCgJP0q5/s1600-h/Street+mobile+phone.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNVazaCeZCR-lP7APAwxYUIXEx-KYcX4b4pAlKq6NKiSohUBFTet2yb14sEONfLuEiUoALdHmiNLsXI8o-Mvuztdh3gPr44G_jMK2L9itx-f-LHb7XAIXFvDzrJ0EgmsmiBoRBmCgJP0q5/s400/Street+mobile+phone.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448281839046463266" /></a><br />Modern cars and mobiles contrast with the old back streets.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNL6SWUdDmYKmedYYDyZhZV9NxFMJgBgVTvyRjZjuvFn2FSmCUhc5opzWF3xwAXTniYmNGxl7p7AE3G_TPT5oXOo_vj26r9LCsuDpDWLS51h69_O_KsaS_QfDAva-puwnxjm7ePDZ2jAB2/s1600-h/Washing+up.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNL6SWUdDmYKmedYYDyZhZV9NxFMJgBgVTvyRjZjuvFn2FSmCUhc5opzWF3xwAXTniYmNGxl7p7AE3G_TPT5oXOo_vj26r9LCsuDpDWLS51h69_O_KsaS_QfDAva-puwnxjm7ePDZ2jAB2/s400/Washing+up.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448281574917265250" /></a><br />The daily grind goes on as a woman washes dishes in the street.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXCp76A85SLHNDIiZ13tq0yFjRbF5NmHm_B_lC2D6kY-GpTaI4NsPEJfYdHyR9XIezzOsjPfdPbsKTogrJiR66D-D0OP-3yFGVBQDuEZafQBXdsiC90qPIp0gJDqByRWaEG-4SNArpcrbU/s1600-h/Selling+peanuts.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXCp76A85SLHNDIiZ13tq0yFjRbF5NmHm_B_lC2D6kY-GpTaI4NsPEJfYdHyR9XIezzOsjPfdPbsKTogrJiR66D-D0OP-3yFGVBQDuEZafQBXdsiC90qPIp0gJDqByRWaEG-4SNArpcrbU/s400/Selling+peanuts.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448281386231581874" /></a><br />And others wait in the early morning selling peanuts and oranges.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihOousdUJCB5uprjq53XU2BdUPT20esVnfH0ekEGNxgTI4HhAmX17wusVyb4j0-pDezLtOIqE8z_EHEri0HUx6xljH0joRwui7yNWyOJ7hCvpgUJGvZQ5cmDPXRSfJbE93qcLId1p_aVTs/s1600-h/Barbecue+tofu.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihOousdUJCB5uprjq53XU2BdUPT20esVnfH0ekEGNxgTI4HhAmX17wusVyb4j0-pDezLtOIqE8z_EHEri0HUx6xljH0joRwui7yNWyOJ7hCvpgUJGvZQ5cmDPXRSfJbE93qcLId1p_aVTs/s400/Barbecue+tofu.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448281180298791586" /></a><br />A lady barbecuing breakfast tofu looks more animated though.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg4Sv8NVwSSISIw3kqKOfq0iIlEuE8bCHYS3-Zjtzir_wbdKGT6HQzPzu5adasX1BQxqCoQWyrIE43KPXOP7GG-ieR8dqkagQ8CIDr3SExEapAkpTenV2C4ct2qo0cl7thsejYEXm7jFQQ/s1600-h/Food+seller.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhg4Sv8NVwSSISIw3kqKOfq0iIlEuE8bCHYS3-Zjtzir_wbdKGT6HQzPzu5adasX1BQxqCoQWyrIE43KPXOP7GG-ieR8dqkagQ8CIDr3SExEapAkpTenV2C4ct2qo0cl7thsejYEXm7jFQQ/s400/Food+seller.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448280942594526978" /></a><br />While a food seller stoicly waits eternally for sales.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgYCbyBJBXHT3kHCN2qWsPMVLY3VE4AseCxOwnFYeiHgdOVnpykMTGL6Buv0X50C06_WwuSsKIXc4s71L0IXpO6PEn_y6pxT1YVH3UCKxsPtdy-26nGKlD0adtLGHqa1vaz8cp6MLDIoid/s1600-h/Pedestrians.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgYCbyBJBXHT3kHCN2qWsPMVLY3VE4AseCxOwnFYeiHgdOVnpykMTGL6Buv0X50C06_WwuSsKIXc4s71L0IXpO6PEn_y6pxT1YVH3UCKxsPtdy-26nGKlD0adtLGHqa1vaz8cp6MLDIoid/s400/Pedestrians.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448280685740906610" /></a><br />The streets are busy, though what are they laughing at?<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-_5KbxroUJBjMNn2p5vVwqcYd3MJyOfN-UvbTEIELxQkjgZ-8-Apk6OLNKwh9V-AYSJCXEb_WUiLi6WkkEycW3R3rWsTGZS6_-8KCKjPnbGy0OnvelJnJ7Pi2fzn9UG2ofE6flp4lOeX9/s1600-h/Spitting.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-_5KbxroUJBjMNn2p5vVwqcYd3MJyOfN-UvbTEIELxQkjgZ-8-Apk6OLNKwh9V-AYSJCXEb_WUiLi6WkkEycW3R3rWsTGZS6_-8KCKjPnbGy0OnvelJnJ7Pi2fzn9UG2ofE6flp4lOeX9/s400/Spitting.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448280350300420690" /></a><br />Street life is open and public and privacy is not much valued.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif2U_qVZu_jlTKrrTGFFcI0OVm7JeGjS8GN6Q0XoHRPlC5h3TpXxaGlWWuIQ_Mm3o8b2D1pBV_XMCUEj62QCXI44psvs-1CAhKjM4pwJ4v9m6O3-hmuLbPNzUAmyDCm34LwcPUx_aepCh0/s1600-h/Shiping+station.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEif2U_qVZu_jlTKrrTGFFcI0OVm7JeGjS8GN6Q0XoHRPlC5h3TpXxaGlWWuIQ_Mm3o8b2D1pBV_XMCUEj62QCXI44psvs-1CAhKjM4pwJ4v9m6O3-hmuLbPNzUAmyDCm34LwcPUx_aepCh0/s400/Shiping+station.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448280169495934802" /></a><br />The railway station where Jack Reynolds arrived in 1947.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_I6DFRIP6LMiW_Czx329kiMLSkcSmwplOU8Na3VXGSHBHhU_eWxkqsj8izs0M6KnPMRp07ehKth6oIQ3EAMP1vKpBxH6fFFqSSB7dQYjS3jOotkYde1jY8-_-qFXZ0xsJ6Z-YOaMmlskG/s1600-h/Rainy+street.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_I6DFRIP6LMiW_Czx329kiMLSkcSmwplOU8Na3VXGSHBHhU_eWxkqsj8izs0M6KnPMRp07ehKth6oIQ3EAMP1vKpBxH6fFFqSSB7dQYjS3jOotkYde1jY8-_-qFXZ0xsJ6Z-YOaMmlskG/s400/Rainy+street.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448279904368708770" /></a><br />A rainy street scene in an old village near Shiping. <br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigGNf8ghU9u7_gMWIXZ_LsEhHHeuW89rJblsRFhb0SM_TEV2dYBoYjBgG5fIHgcx7p6ThzbOaEm295SDmD_n84gpfrUOUdXRVfvzPVuEkRqDubZ0a-FTobApewBJJvK7RzrUFozcHaNm4j/s1600-h/Rooves.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigGNf8ghU9u7_gMWIXZ_LsEhHHeuW89rJblsRFhb0SM_TEV2dYBoYjBgG5fIHgcx7p6ThzbOaEm295SDmD_n84gpfrUOUdXRVfvzPVuEkRqDubZ0a-FTobApewBJJvK7RzrUFozcHaNm4j/s400/Rooves.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448279571937277842" /></a><br />Roofs of an ancestral temple epitomise old China.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4tH5row3I51CeGLVVN0p9UV_jFwePgSRGc9e2fkinZnp4MdsUfooXNkhn5CRasfQX5MbwHCfbesfAtXIUQ46EExhMsaf3Qj65rG8FZC6Yv6v-_R1BuICXUgDA-qIKT3Udf_rzZvyM6LuL/s1600-h/Window+roofs.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4tH5row3I51CeGLVVN0p9UV_jFwePgSRGc9e2fkinZnp4MdsUfooXNkhn5CRasfQX5MbwHCfbesfAtXIUQ46EExhMsaf3Qj65rG8FZC6Yv6v-_R1BuICXUgDA-qIKT3Udf_rzZvyM6LuL/s400/Window+roofs.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448279372448820754" /></a><br />And a fret work window makes another classic image.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcz9O4H3ccuBx-UfHI-g-aN6hjNtXK9exPSvnzHv_WzvsybKoM75OZUpJXJXo5ClrcabwRuHd2Dv7Ig0YXA6RKU3wOaJO0percFXKCTyo49BYP79Op6E7ccDImvwGKznmQrEdmyUE-2KV-/s1600-h/Old+mens%27+games.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcz9O4H3ccuBx-UfHI-g-aN6hjNtXK9exPSvnzHv_WzvsybKoM75OZUpJXJXo5ClrcabwRuHd2Dv7Ig0YXA6RKU3wOaJO0percFXKCTyo49BYP79Op6E7ccDImvwGKznmQrEdmyUE-2KV-/s400/Old+mens%27+games.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448279174806750322" /></a><br />Old men play old mens' games in the warm of one of the rooms.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6cAhye-wn6RVYOROA4lqUe1QLHsrksKjo8zz9EsIVZejt_VNnIkR1jMM1qYVIeJPFBNdxpjTTefJozRBa3wTeO4Qus7-IgEJ1ZgUjHWA1VxZ_Mz811kcTG5hvVl6IxIKuorCdBiUWJGLo/s1600-h/Two+old+men.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6cAhye-wn6RVYOROA4lqUe1QLHsrksKjo8zz9EsIVZejt_VNnIkR1jMM1qYVIeJPFBNdxpjTTefJozRBa3wTeO4Qus7-IgEJ1ZgUjHWA1VxZ_Mz811kcTG5hvVl6IxIKuorCdBiUWJGLo/s400/Two+old+men.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448278862787856482" /></a><br />These two take the money to see inside the courtyard house.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihiWZn7THktlfT9_qBpLHvvszhGuy1dU8eB_oNlIV16c4AD7H2DzCf9f8z8yC3AW4-8jM-hOZHGmmiqMDaBDCXuYJB1qPlymAJccsdxkSAx2D0Dsrt1NkPjXpkEDXt7O_UZ6fUzp7De0ez/s1600-h/Denise+picture.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihiWZn7THktlfT9_qBpLHvvszhGuy1dU8eB_oNlIV16c4AD7H2DzCf9f8z8yC3AW4-8jM-hOZHGmmiqMDaBDCXuYJB1qPlymAJccsdxkSAx2D0Dsrt1NkPjXpkEDXt7O_UZ6fUzp7De0ez/s400/Denise+picture.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448278670265218178" /></a><br />Meanwhile, Denise photographs a fine interior.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisKjUmF_mJXJK9lm_VwKWOrzds0oHg7dwCCLLpgfT5RlomTradNy8OSJETVQANTcNbnBRUHHQ1_0Wc5bqaQ365lCI_3PgJLSZDfGNT-ToijzjelgXYRFLEHF159E3kU2SgBj0sKEdwc3hm/s1600-h/Door+carving.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisKjUmF_mJXJK9lm_VwKWOrzds0oHg7dwCCLLpgfT5RlomTradNy8OSJETVQANTcNbnBRUHHQ1_0Wc5bqaQ365lCI_3PgJLSZDfGNT-ToijzjelgXYRFLEHF159E3kU2SgBj0sKEdwc3hm/s400/Door+carving.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448278417635940514" /></a><br />A detail on a carved door suggests the opulent life of the few.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKFATxlmzwipKJwVHpG97uAFzQ92GlrWXP9_FmmCqiqqjpzorypn0uUgXXqB230nrcJ_K483XoAGF7YIQ525Rni-idHQARzCOnXTPjoO9teRQSdMVAkPKaGLJWAl48bBUoV-ZPyxRC9o7t/s1600-h/Ancestral+hall.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKFATxlmzwipKJwVHpG97uAFzQ92GlrWXP9_FmmCqiqqjpzorypn0uUgXXqB230nrcJ_K483XoAGF7YIQ525Rni-idHQARzCOnXTPjoO9teRQSdMVAkPKaGLJWAl48bBUoV-ZPyxRC9o7t/s400/Ancestral+hall.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448278206964960034" /></a><br />An ancestral hall, built to commemorate the rich forebears.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvRwbYtE7fC9EIs0lBp4dqaEP84qIHfcR6TQs9s2i3dIe_em-74v2GAUxl66AcfROtBXNFGaAT8agiAQw89YktfIWhfpKC3RP7wNZyAkeBcnd1pTLUF9SzmNtCai4LctOpIdwNJYKKXGkl/s1600-h/Bossy+old+lady.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhvRwbYtE7fC9EIs0lBp4dqaEP84qIHfcR6TQs9s2i3dIe_em-74v2GAUxl66AcfROtBXNFGaAT8agiAQw89YktfIWhfpKC3RP7wNZyAkeBcnd1pTLUF9SzmNtCai4LctOpIdwNJYKKXGkl/s400/Bossy+old+lady.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448278001476649986" /></a><br />Family and friends await a lavish wedding breakfast.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXWIboMYv8aXeNkI4O6QrWibzB1mIr1Mi0MBpvyIfEGqYCMYOPD4aWpHBn9oBzD9CurBjDzEVibdX7-9JcND50ah7k_I-jRfWNw9Gw7YFYqmiEjXsW1H9iN38GNLwDz6O1Tk8tyZr7Udds/s1600-h/Food.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXWIboMYv8aXeNkI4O6QrWibzB1mIr1Mi0MBpvyIfEGqYCMYOPD4aWpHBn9oBzD9CurBjDzEVibdX7-9JcND50ah7k_I-jRfWNw9Gw7YFYqmiEjXsW1H9iN38GNLwDz6O1Tk8tyZr7Udds/s400/Food.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448277727742321426" /></a><br />The wedding food looks distinctly appetising.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkFRBX4G8K6fmDF5wPGPOdlkZ7R1oVwr6Q9efbHhjLcleIAeWYRJih4deKPNI71euLG8QA11IIkYnz73Gsb5LLmNotpyXuvN4aJ2yjjK5V3CENJR6456Y_Rkr3LLwKeYPjPQqqapQpq6_P/s1600-h/Mud+halls.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkFRBX4G8K6fmDF5wPGPOdlkZ7R1oVwr6Q9efbHhjLcleIAeWYRJih4deKPNI71euLG8QA11IIkYnz73Gsb5LLmNotpyXuvN4aJ2yjjK5V3CENJR6456Y_Rkr3LLwKeYPjPQqqapQpq6_P/s400/Mud+halls.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448277526528364674" /></a><br />This fine house is remarkable for being built of mud bricks.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOyujOW-paAQfOmJT-X8RP30tU-RrjIt7XCoEQsYsBR9IqfRUJkQaDDpKE6uwSE8_A5glEQwm7hXjXa1UxNJDffQ77hMqe-h-H71xq79pE1UurAC4c16QDE8ZE7k0FHbLk0SKUv8nbWVMN/s1600-h/Interior.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOyujOW-paAQfOmJT-X8RP30tU-RrjIt7XCoEQsYsBR9IqfRUJkQaDDpKE6uwSE8_A5glEQwm7hXjXa1UxNJDffQ77hMqe-h-H71xq79pE1UurAC4c16QDE8ZE7k0FHbLk0SKUv8nbWVMN/s400/Interior.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448277289082931490" /></a><br />The interior is spacious and elegant but today is just a farm house.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfrdjsh230TdGNpxx4oR9x8UGk9IpGYKMjannRPADaGwczIeDjIu_ffOvJ4UbvfBFU4lTQlhaymFOZtJSuIqx1KCAI_ANiyc50ne_xevMLRKjQE3XSTo_DsIgIUEpJkVNZ82a3tXHQe5If/s1600-h/Burden.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 353px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfrdjsh230TdGNpxx4oR9x8UGk9IpGYKMjannRPADaGwczIeDjIu_ffOvJ4UbvfBFU4lTQlhaymFOZtJSuIqx1KCAI_ANiyc50ne_xevMLRKjQE3XSTo_DsIgIUEpJkVNZ82a3tXHQe5If/s400/Burden.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5448277005095228162" /></a><br /><br /><br />Word is going around Shiping in Yunnan province in western China that when the foreigners have difficulty negotiating an important matter of personal relations, they reach a decision by the strange practice of tossing the condom.<br /><br />Over the Chinese New Year, we were on holiday there (See the two blog articles below.) and had just arrived at Shiping. This is a typical small town that promised us some traditional architecture, and we’d found our way to a clean modern hotel in the town centre. The problem was that they only had two rooms that were very different, a slightly gloomy one on the ground floor and a more pleasant one that demanded a climb up four flights of stairs. So who was to have which room? <br /><br />The receptionist looked on as we debated and dithered. Then Bill suggested we toss a coin. Trouble is, they don’t seem to have coins in China. We could toss something else then, but what? The girl looked mildly aghast when we used the one thing that’s beside the bed in every hotel in China, which duly made the decision for us. I’m not surprised if she later told all her friends about our bizarre behaviour. <br /><br />Shiping is famous for making tofu and its present wealth is based on tofu factories, big and small, which are everywhere. Even half a century or so ago it was an unusually rich town but that was when the local tin industry was flourishing.<br /><br />Jack Reynolds, the Bangkok based novelist, whose fascinating life story I’m hoping to write, was in this region of China in the late forties doing transportation and relief work. He was working with the Friends Ambulance Unit and was sent by them to Shiping to investigate an outbreak of malaria. He arrived by train, alighting presumably at the impressive French built railway station that we saw, which still stands at the end of the line exactly as it must have been in his day.<br /><br />On coming into the town Jack was struck by how very prosperous it was.<br /><br />“Plodding around I quickly realised that Shihping was the most prosperous town I’d ever visited in China. In the main streets the temples were tumble-down but the markets were stuffed with food and goods. But it was the side streets which were the revelation. They were incredibly quiet and empty for Chinese streets. They were lined on both sides by high stone walls. At intervals in the walls there were roofed gateways adorned with some of the best stone carving I ever saw in China. Behind these gates the tin mine owners lived in vast compounds built on the traditional plan – a succession of four courts joined by moongates. You were always asked inside the main gate, asked to sit in straight-backed chairs in a reception room just inside, and provided with tea and sunflower seeds.”<br /><br />The shocking truth though was that this wealth was built on slave labour and child labour at that. In a fine article in the Bangkok Post in 1977, which I hope to include in my forthcoming book, Jack exposed the awful story that the miners were all little boys because they were small enough to move through the low galleries of the mine. To stop them getting too big they had an inadequate diet and were given opium to keep them going. Working in these appalling conditions, their life expectancy was about two years.<br /><br />For his persistence in investigating and visiting the mine, Jack very nearly paid with his life. A serious attempt was made to kill him.<br /><br />The arrival of the communists a few years later put an end to all this, but now, more than half a century later, on seeing some of the fine buildings in the town it constantly struck me that while they truly are beautiful, the ostentation and display of their owners was built on the bones of small children who never had a proper life.<br /><br />Today most of the old buildings in the town have been swept away though and Jack would recognize little in the town other than the railway station. For tourists like us wanting to find old ancestral shrines and courtyard houses, you thus have to go out to surrounding villages. Nonetheless, despite China having moved confidently into the twenty first century, I’m sure that the feel of the place would be familiar to Jack. The people, though now better off, are still much the same as ever. The experience of eating breakfast out on the street in the chill of the morning, sitting on stools six inches high, cannot have changed one bit. And the food would be familiar too, even if tofu has edged its way onto the menu. The light, the mist, the smells, the mud… all these things in China are eternal and unchanging.<br /><br />After exploring the town centre, we took a day trip out to a village called Zhengying Cun which is about ten kilometers to the west and is known for its fine domestic architecture and temples. <br /><br />As always, once out of the town, it was apparent that China has a huge appetite for steel and for vegetables; there were factories of some sort scattered everywhere and tight between them sprawling acres of vegetables.<br /><br />As you drive along motorways and side roads, in valleys and villages, between houses and commercial premises everywhere you see row upon row of vegetables. The Chinese ability to grow vegetables in abundance is remarkable. Every inch of ground must be fully exploited and to this end their vegetable gardens are incredibly neat and orderly. I have the feeling though that this strict imperative exhausts the national capacity for tidiness and, apart from their modern townscapes, rural China is often a chaotic mess. On the way to the village for example everywhere on the side of the road were sprawling heaps of coal just dumped untidily by its owner. If tidiness doesn’t make money, then it’s not worth bothering about.<br /><br />When our taxi reached the village it began to pour with rain. That’s the end of any decent photos, I thought. Even so, as we walked on through the drizzle, I was optimistic that misty grey skies and wet pavements would evoke China as it so often is. Certainly the traditional buildings did not disappoint. What was so pleasant was the relative absence of vehicles as the whole place had a human scale with small paths and passages between the buildings with their pan-tiles swept up roofs. It had not been planned around the motor vehicle.<br /><br />We were able to visit a number of fine ancestral halls and courtyard houses and they were superb. In one of the halls there was a wedding feast in full swing and it was fun being a fly on the wall as food was carried from the kitchens to the tables where the friends and family were sitting at tables. Certainly we attracted a few curious glances but generally we passed largely unnoticed as foreign tourists are no longer a rarity.<br /><br />The house I liked the most was at the end of our walk, a large and elegant building whose fine quality was not diminished by the fact that it was made of mud brick. We had a nose around inside the courtyard and it was apparent that this was no longer the home of a rich, capitalist road landlord type but of modest ordinary people. Yet despite relative neglect it looked strong and was surviving the years well despite its form of construction, which is a tribute to its builders.<br /><br />Our visit over, I hardly believed that the promised bus would actually arrive as it was getting late and we were well off the beaten track. Should we walk therefore or should we wait? Could we phone for a taxi? We seemed to be at odds over what to do. How therefore would we resolve this awkward impasse between us. <br /><br />The light was fading and I was trying to think it all through. If we could narrow the options to two and if there were a pharmacy nearby we could buy what we needed to give us a final decision. But by this time everything was now closed.<br /><br />Then thankfully there was a hoot and a bus came round the corner to take us back to Shiping. <br /><br />Perhaps in future I should carry a packet with me to deal with situations like this, though explaining the reason to my wife, Cat, might be a little bit difficult. I’m not sure she’d believe me.<br /><br />Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog March 2010A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-80477546325319525432010-03-08T12:16:00.014+07:002010-03-08T12:49:59.067+07:00Yunnan's Yuanyang Rice Terraces<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmJYLehb927eVxPma-4R4dXEopbG3uk7NC3i0pW_jXfwgW1-2HRzRHR_HHPWp7zv1cyFfZyaXtFOqA7RqEZMFxD8RhNxkG69fsp4yN5PYKCK5fkjlpsbFm5zEc51Jjr0uD3CN2C121nsLW/s1600-h/Grandmother+in+door.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 267px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmJYLehb927eVxPma-4R4dXEopbG3uk7NC3i0pW_jXfwgW1-2HRzRHR_HHPWp7zv1cyFfZyaXtFOqA7RqEZMFxD8RhNxkG69fsp4yN5PYKCK5fkjlpsbFm5zEc51Jjr0uD3CN2C121nsLW/s400/Grandmother+in+door.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446132940125406354" /></a><br />In Yunnan, a Hani grandmother smiles at us from her doorway.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4YvsJZ8z3aaKELb757V28WHbgYbQIISLzp7UcKjm-mNV7cUDlTCV2imuqIpT0JOBzh5NHdUrGuRx1zjwwD3kyHQKWRfDOfb5DMqqVmS1-ktelPYt7FYWX3_THxHFJFYAArsG7J69yUy_R/s1600-h/Mountain+buses.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4YvsJZ8z3aaKELb757V28WHbgYbQIISLzp7UcKjm-mNV7cUDlTCV2imuqIpT0JOBzh5NHdUrGuRx1zjwwD3kyHQKWRfDOfb5DMqqVmS1-ktelPYt7FYWX3_THxHFJFYAArsG7J69yUy_R/s400/Mountain+buses.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446132658472326130" /></a><br />High on the mountain, our bus stops to top up its radiator.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK8Q2JpY_tkolIq5FEvqGIK_ePlXlnvtPg6wfWRFGNoK-TMiiZh0z9RbfAAnqv2IDjJTENihoy6kVZIMeFSLx8KJKjRcHGGLg3JZvqTFAYg_883Vdgb7Pwlo3NMd5vrsx4IqZBz55drTXV/s1600-h/Dawn.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK8Q2JpY_tkolIq5FEvqGIK_ePlXlnvtPg6wfWRFGNoK-TMiiZh0z9RbfAAnqv2IDjJTENihoy6kVZIMeFSLx8KJKjRcHGGLg3JZvqTFAYg_883Vdgb7Pwlo3NMd5vrsx4IqZBz55drTXV/s400/Dawn.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446132173258009298" /></a><br />Misty light at dawn on the flooded terraces.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2nOpbPdPn-vtQ24KdaBSmkJS_L6uIcV0sX_A1rqpsqBzn5lHM-AR3sBhEKvwjB_UrPDQEHLtGYTMIhHNG3uU3JTZgT5Wy9XeprYnUtgEatP4ooNnjLdBjKJvqvZpsYDhcM6yRtmXNb3sc/s1600-h/Dawn+2..jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2nOpbPdPn-vtQ24KdaBSmkJS_L6uIcV0sX_A1rqpsqBzn5lHM-AR3sBhEKvwjB_UrPDQEHLtGYTMIhHNG3uU3JTZgT5Wy9XeprYnUtgEatP4ooNnjLdBjKJvqvZpsYDhcM6yRtmXNb3sc/s400/Dawn+2..jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446131975777301858" /></a><br />The mist filled the valley for much of the morning.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqiab8UqvGbe6MxMPBUBf6A2G4AwjmgFl0vnr8YJkPx2mbgMH0qzMdRfZEqO9jQ3OnOaHKkC63GU2pyJsbgbmk7-ywm_FsVWG2gqMMaDc9K5lpxAH_Z4NFFzBh4Iwt9OZHdgxq8UQLwaAM/s1600-h/Misty+terraces.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqiab8UqvGbe6MxMPBUBf6A2G4AwjmgFl0vnr8YJkPx2mbgMH0qzMdRfZEqO9jQ3OnOaHKkC63GU2pyJsbgbmk7-ywm_FsVWG2gqMMaDc9K5lpxAH_Z4NFFzBh4Iwt9OZHdgxq8UQLwaAM/s400/Misty+terraces.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446131745898438066" /></a><br />And it was difficult to stop taking photos.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAgd_tYBJur6_8CY3vvWuTnVsnbeXd88oxS6KPMgqeexihzaZKf4-l8__mXitrkwkR5KazIttpm9sfa607b29SH3JjAAS8DpmGNJ0ceXMyZGc6Cdcyia4IzMBaoVtxIWx9PXi74o7imRqw/s1600-h/Figures+on+a+terace.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAgd_tYBJur6_8CY3vvWuTnVsnbeXd88oxS6KPMgqeexihzaZKf4-l8__mXitrkwkR5KazIttpm9sfa607b29SH3JjAAS8DpmGNJ0ceXMyZGc6Cdcyia4IzMBaoVtxIWx9PXi74o7imRqw/s400/Figures+on+a+terace.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446130230573269778" /></a><br />It only needed figures in the landscape to take another one.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwfjIFTFgMN2ulMdM4Y5mKNWFeF2N8Lak6C1RLUr6ftRT35g54qT3DEqNNTwe6d6nFTG4_xPEyAw_cZaw6VbI7vfcZGsTLm-3U2DhmV_UVq8hFKgBW8AVa-TQ2IFsnClsNEVuQ9K0ORMDb/s1600-h/Duck+lady.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhwfjIFTFgMN2ulMdM4Y5mKNWFeF2N8Lak6C1RLUr6ftRT35g54qT3DEqNNTwe6d6nFTG4_xPEyAw_cZaw6VbI7vfcZGsTLm-3U2DhmV_UVq8hFKgBW8AVa-TQ2IFsnClsNEVuQ9K0ORMDb/s400/Duck+lady.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446129928400512450" /></a><br />This old lady was going to bring in her ducks for the night.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHjWMGCynW0nl5O3jO6lYBLB58n-vjaBdFAXh7vtoxSjJt-WpZOf-CJqXSErgVt2yD9F5pfFs0R4KTsYx618cpwFzTKzStUYDzmA9O2hq1zES3Ai6wkp3FwNgTovOGgmHTjUXfAyw67GNZ/s1600-h/Breakfast.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHjWMGCynW0nl5O3jO6lYBLB58n-vjaBdFAXh7vtoxSjJt-WpZOf-CJqXSErgVt2yD9F5pfFs0R4KTsYx618cpwFzTKzStUYDzmA9O2hq1zES3Ai6wkp3FwNgTovOGgmHTjUXfAyw67GNZ/s400/Breakfast.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446129619092200962" /></a><br />Breakfast was with all the other visitors in the kitchen.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFm2p4T0iDS8m6lbCqwzu8pvO1XuxPusTBd4zyEWrQi9Bs8rmPwgprybw13K4_Pwv1eyy9O87ZHsZKH8e9F382Assm6C3_TovqppMozj4MABtei8Mxp7GECThFPLvwRu6p1vzmityZxRIO/s1600-h/Pig+lady.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiFm2p4T0iDS8m6lbCqwzu8pvO1XuxPusTBd4zyEWrQi9Bs8rmPwgprybw13K4_Pwv1eyy9O87ZHsZKH8e9F382Assm6C3_TovqppMozj4MABtei8Mxp7GECThFPLvwRu6p1vzmityZxRIO/s400/Pig+lady.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446129345800925906" /></a><br />A buffalo's bottom, an old crone and pigs in the mist.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWZptuUBDkwvijpGDBXitb7CpYDhcmmv4Kk0Q3hZ3HwL_EdM315Y0cdFsyki4KDnW78eK3vfunt3e2_MhCyIsd8z8kxZ8kQxKUQKLDveV-_421X_7U1kOIcP3shbrTihjLk19jidA4SWrV/s1600-h/Scissor+sharpener.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWZptuUBDkwvijpGDBXitb7CpYDhcmmv4Kk0Q3hZ3HwL_EdM315Y0cdFsyki4KDnW78eK3vfunt3e2_MhCyIsd8z8kxZ8kQxKUQKLDveV-_421X_7U1kOIcP3shbrTihjLk19jidA4SWrV/s400/Scissor+sharpener.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446129072892580770" /></a><br />An old man sharpens his scissors on a stone.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho1HpSXvNrz01bAfkR3ArGfu9qq3dzbn62osK2a7PHCpqPqDKwsBSUKSOtuwsfRitU163l59_jA9zxk4esTI5jzCZe5qHRQ2yvR7uN5wFRUZQgaRzSDyoYhFN5fGjpQZMmh8b6SIjDL09G/s1600-h/Little+girls.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEho1HpSXvNrz01bAfkR3ArGfu9qq3dzbn62osK2a7PHCpqPqDKwsBSUKSOtuwsfRitU163l59_jA9zxk4esTI5jzCZe5qHRQ2yvR7uN5wFRUZQgaRzSDyoYhFN5fGjpQZMmh8b6SIjDL09G/s400/Little+girls.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5446128370036774194" /></a><br /><br />I’ve seen a few rice terraces in my time in Nepal, Bali and the Philippines but for sheer scale they are all dwarfed by the Yuanyang rice terraces in Yunnan province in S.W. China that Cat and I have just visited with our friends, ‘American Bill’ and ‘Chinese Denise’.<br /><br />Our trip had started with a night in the atmospheric center of Jianshui. (Scroll down for the pictures). In the morning it was noodles in the street and then many hours in a small bus over the mountains to the rice terraces. The roads were a miracle of engineering, with long snaking hairpin bends taking us to terrifying heights with thousand foot drops and no guard rails. Meanwhile the overloaded bus, its roof piled high with luggage, bumped and swerved and brought us close to the brink. Soon we came to a grinding halt and the reason became clear. The tortured springs had collapsed under the strain and we were left miles from anywhere waiting to be rescued by another bus.<br /><br />Soon we saw the Red River thousands of feet below us, passed the spectacular barrage which dams the gorge and arrived in the bleak modern town of Nansha. Here we booked a comfortable taxi all the way to the terraces, but at Xinjie, the old town on the hill, we were told to get out and join a mini-bus. This was driven by a middle aged woman who was surely on speed. <br /><br />After a terrifying journey through the mountains she stopped abruptly and told us to get out and walk. The village and guesthouse we had booked was, she said, a few hundred feet down the hill and there was no road. This seemed unlikely and a raging argument erupted during which we were threatened with death and worse besides.<br /><br />Shouldering our heavy packs, walk we did, not knowing where we were going, until a nice lady said she’d only show us the way if we gave her 20 Yuan, a good day’s wage. When we got to the square concrete guest house which was still half building site, we were shown our bare room with six beds for a price that would buy four star luxury in Thailand. Then we went off into the village to look for food but there wasn’t any. It was to be eating in the guest house or nothing.<br /><br />It’s strange though how even after two days travelling and a bad start, things can quickly warm up and we really enjoyed our two days there in the mountains above the spectacular rice terraces. The family who ran the place were pleasant enough, and even if they were milking the New Year festival for all they could get, they produced mountains of edible food for all their visitors who were an interesting crowd.<br /><br />The village itself was very strange. Apparently designated as a tourist village, all the houses had been painted in a pleasant shade of pale shit brown and fake thatched roofs had been stuck on top of the tiles. From a distance it looked quite quaint, though totally unauthentic, while inside it the daily life of the farming families went on as usual.<br /><br />The first day dawned with the valleys full of cloud and we took a long walk down into the terraces in the grey mist of the morning. There was nothing artificial about all this though and we saw rural life in the raw, much as it has been going on for centuries.<br /><br />The terraces were flooded but not planted and were quite remarkable, an extraordinary feat of civil engineering created over many generations. And the villages, in part of well-made mud brick, were exactly what the tourist hopes to see, a vision of a traditional life with black pigs and buffaloes, children brightly dressed for the festival, men tilling the soil by hand and the duck lady going out to bring her ducks back at night. It was National Geographic in 3D, with smiling locals, buffalo dung, sounds, smells and all.<br /><br />These were not Han Chinese but the Hani people, one of many minorities who make up a large proportion of the population of Yunnan. What their history was and how they got there I have no idea. Perhaps more powerful peoples had driven them from the lowlands into the mountains many centuries before where they had since had to survive in these unforgiving mountains. How they had created such stupendous terraces and generated so large a population and substantial villages is a tribute to their ingenuity and it should command great respect.<br /><br />Nor do I know how their relationship with the men from far away on the plains now stands. All I can say is that the Hani seem to be worlds apart from the China of the industrial lowlands and big cities. Up on the road behind our village there was a viewing platform and at dawn perhaps thousands of Chinese holidaymakers came, like us, to see the terraces and the human zoo of the minority peoples. <br /><br />They had come in their big, plush cars and SUVs, sporting smart clothes and shoes and cameras with long lenses to capture the light on the terraces at dawn. And for this privilege of looking down the mountain they had paid 70 Yuan each, a fee that would not be cheap even in the West. Then with the short official break over, they’d pile into their cars and go back home for another year’s work.<br /><br />I marvelled at this transformation of China from the poor country I’d first seen in the seventies, now with its confident and expanding middle class even in far Yunnan, out for a good holiday in the mountains. I wish them well and I admire them for becoming prosperous in so short a time. Somehow though, this place where one group of rich and mobile Chinese was so busy taking pictures of country people stuck in a nostalgic past seemed to encapsulate all the potential problems for the future.<br /><br /> How can China’s new found wealth be reasonably fairly spread and how can fringe minorities be included in the wider polity? How to respect and preserve their traditions and individuality but not in the process make them a mere spectacle for the majority to stare at? Such are the problems of modernizing a fast developing economy.<br /><br />China claims to now have a middle class of 300 million people and from my brief glimpse of this far region I can well believe this to be true. In the next few years China will become the world’s biggest economy which is no surprise because until relatively recently it always was the world’s biggest. For China has always been the most populous country on earth.<br /><br />While we were in Yunnan there certainly were a lot of people on the move. Even on the country roads to the terraces there were traffic jams. But of course the week we were there was the Spring Festival, the New Year when China stops work and everything closes down for a week of celebration. Like lemmings we were thus taking part in the biggest ever migration of mankind in the entire history of the world.<br /><br />It was an interesting time to go, but boy, was it tough for Denise when she was trying to buy us bus tickets! I wouldn’t have liked to have done it without her.<br /><br />Copyright Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog March 2010A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5435902129678181031.post-73928329523783423982010-02-25T16:58:00.010+07:002010-02-25T17:42:47.601+07:00China Fifteen Years On<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY3uwvUODV9v7uRxH0vb5ozB69wQmiUtIUO31qKKw3lriPuz8rK1RJW-jrSd_kEKKrWRY8Y4za6TNeui28d2e9yrgOq1senXQhc7NoPbCAkc8avKaIlBDCvAAVQLmkrQ5mpJIGIbfeGQW8/s1600-h/Jianshui+door+gods.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY3uwvUODV9v7uRxH0vb5ozB69wQmiUtIUO31qKKw3lriPuz8rK1RJW-jrSd_kEKKrWRY8Y4za6TNeui28d2e9yrgOq1senXQhc7NoPbCAkc8avKaIlBDCvAAVQLmkrQ5mpJIGIbfeGQW8/s400/Jianshui+door+gods.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5442124070743000450" /></a><br />The door gods in Jianshui have been renewed for Chinese New Year.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfcmQKXa3rtmoZH__5enViq6F3b3-JqJaLyX-8IWfm5yXSI0O8xnxPBCUg_EzR0WuX6ODoAwGTaljbhLSqnjc-flm8Lt-YQT1I95J49rKulhIy5v67EfeAwmzGaaMuzVtOoXNhN9RmQhC_/s1600-h/Jianshui+Yue+garden.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgfcmQKXa3rtmoZH__5enViq6F3b3-JqJaLyX-8IWfm5yXSI0O8xnxPBCUg_EzR0WuX6ODoAwGTaljbhLSqnjc-flm8Lt-YQT1I95J49rKulhIy5v67EfeAwmzGaaMuzVtOoXNhN9RmQhC_/s400/Jianshui+Yue+garden.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5442123625298044002" /></a><br />The Yue family gardens are already open early in the morning.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4TQBgDW_0hpvRcDAkdgXr-til0nrdR6jHjFF3csIzSU3bIGHLD_3yqRcCIP2NGfLTyupmPxcmCM-eQayKKeOxrMhbWBENFdniUehijSQVtsdMcDjLFStvWY3CISFWYyFgpyoWyJU5Cutf/s1600-h/Jianshui+boy+tricycle.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4TQBgDW_0hpvRcDAkdgXr-til0nrdR6jHjFF3csIzSU3bIGHLD_3yqRcCIP2NGfLTyupmPxcmCM-eQayKKeOxrMhbWBENFdniUehijSQVtsdMcDjLFStvWY3CISFWYyFgpyoWyJU5Cutf/s400/Jianshui+boy+tricycle.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5442123219164956178" /></a><br />This little boy waits for his papa and for breakfast.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuEArOPYw9wjnYgUagn8QoOrNfpoDp20yiLuJhLaHjs68ZZSY2RvLhtJ_oi9VYZ4NvO1D2zA-i5aSkOV3rbCfJPI-tJkZcSdVQwcJGouJi55gpO2Ux2_UYzP56U1EsbXdsF2Mb7y7kB6Bt/s1600-h/Jianshui+breakfast.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 267px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuEArOPYw9wjnYgUagn8QoOrNfpoDp20yiLuJhLaHjs68ZZSY2RvLhtJ_oi9VYZ4NvO1D2zA-i5aSkOV3rbCfJPI-tJkZcSdVQwcJGouJi55gpO2Ux2_UYzP56U1EsbXdsF2Mb7y7kB6Bt/s400/Jianshui+breakfast.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5442122820719790946" /></a><br />There are clear signs of prosperity as this family enjoys their noodles.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH0aI9jZwC6tbq35eZ4xyy60Flu8fwSyTLq0cegITcbU3KMkZ5HHSFopAwwGigRVRDv5gckKbSLTpyQ0LIfrSmYdQFhIXzNf43Fap5o2UquYIrD-fZkwGerDpQoQ3j9WB7fYW2no3-YdTm/s1600-h/Jianshui+red+lanterns.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhH0aI9jZwC6tbq35eZ4xyy60Flu8fwSyTLq0cegITcbU3KMkZ5HHSFopAwwGigRVRDv5gckKbSLTpyQ0LIfrSmYdQFhIXzNf43Fap5o2UquYIrD-fZkwGerDpQoQ3j9WB7fYW2no3-YdTm/s400/Jianshui+red+lanterns.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5442122074319311282" /></a><br />They're all waiting for something but I'm not sure what.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBTOcRDo8BA30Ard0rSvNzYSQTZ2XdnqCCiQ1aXVqZPqznipKwIlDV6MFGY3gEWGOU9lWzRBKH8q9ZE3iugT0AOW9q-YylvL93BG4kXKC-rjr_-8MRH55oDzueYH48SvVfVojnw1UEgNli/s1600-h/Jianshui+heavy+load.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBTOcRDo8BA30Ard0rSvNzYSQTZ2XdnqCCiQ1aXVqZPqznipKwIlDV6MFGY3gEWGOU9lWzRBKH8q9ZE3iugT0AOW9q-YylvL93BG4kXKC-rjr_-8MRH55oDzueYH48SvVfVojnw1UEgNli/s400/Jianshui+heavy+load.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5442120641184427042" /></a><br />For the elderly though it looks as if life's still a struggle.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlKpkrKX_HVL5pNiGFh_6JOT_7F2hfD-_ouO30_9O5TgfDtTrmmqoYS4hGvYFoKhdYBlsNF3n9fh1CHUEBaRPadxgZuP7BdsPOn7sWIHSHEISPp0G0sXZTgbwcH9w6lsjuEKAhWVFs9Do3/s1600-h/Jianshui+house.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 267px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjlKpkrKX_HVL5pNiGFh_6JOT_7F2hfD-_ouO30_9O5TgfDtTrmmqoYS4hGvYFoKhdYBlsNF3n9fh1CHUEBaRPadxgZuP7BdsPOn7sWIHSHEISPp0G0sXZTgbwcH9w6lsjuEKAhWVFs9Do3/s400/Jianshui+house.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5442119066058944338" /></a><br /><br /><br />A few days ago Cat and I were eating pao-tze in the soft sunlight of Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan, in the South West of China. <br /><br />I was last in China fifteen years ago and before that in the mid-eighties. The very first time I visited was in 1978 when travel was first allowed after the doors had slammed shut and China became embroiled in its own self-destructive turmoil. Sadly for much of the seven years I lived in Hong Kong (1976 to 1983), China was thus not accessible to foreign travellers.<br /><br />Each time I’ve been back the changes have been remarkable and the Kunming we have just visited is more reminiscent of a sparkling Singapore than the drab Guangzhou of the communist era that I visited more than thirty years ago.<br /><br />While there I received an email message from an American called Howell Jones who told me he had flown into Kunming in 1954 just after the end of the War, arriving to work for the Friends Ambulance Service. As far as I know, he’d been given my name by the Friends Library in London as being interested in the remarkable history of the FAU in China.<br /><br />With his email he enclosed an article he’d written many years before for a journal produced by the Medical Faculty of Hong Kong University which described his arrival in China and his first convoy carrying medical and relief supplies many perilous miles over the mountains to Chungking. <br /><br />“Walking through the old town of Kunming at night had all the magical sounds and smells of old China,” he told me in his email. His article also describes the joys of eating pao-tze, the ubiquitous white dumplings with savoury pork inside.<br /><br />Howell Jones is thus an important new contact for me as I am currently researching the life and experiences of ‘Jack Reynolds’ (Emrys Reynolds Jones) who likewise arrived in China to work with the FAU, landing at Kunming on 10 October 1945 and later became a noted author in Bangkok. It seems that Howell is not aware of my very specific interest in Jack and in his email he did not mention him to me.<br /><br />Howell and Jack would now find Kunming very changed, but if they went further into the countryside, they’d find scenes that would be thoroughly familiar to them. <br /><br />At the airport we were met by our friends, Bill, a quiet American from Sichuan University, Chengdu and Denise, a Chinese translator/interpreter also from Chengdu. They immediately took us to the bus station where we boarded a bus for Jianshui, a town about four hours south. The outskirts consist of modern brutal tower blocks but after checking in at our hotel, we discovered that the town centre was still like something out of old China. We sat on low stools in an open fronted eating place and watched the busy world of the spring festival flowing noisily around us in the street.<br /><br />Next day we were up early and had a quick look round the town. While many old buildings have been demolished, an attempt has been made to recreate the past by putting up new buildings in traditional style. This architectural pastiche is relatively successful and it’s not easy in some cases to distinguish the new from the old. <br /><br />The streets are all beautifully paved in natural stone, are kept reasonably clean and while we had our breakfast, again in the open on low stools, we could see the signs of new prosperity as people ate their noodles and enjoyed the New Year holiday. Changing times as always create a curious mix of old and the new, of winners and losers and the elderly people still seem to live a frugal life of heavy toil, the lines etched deep into their faces.<br /><br />I then spent a very interesting week in China, often thinking of Jack and Howell as our bus toiled up the hairpin bends and over high mountain passes above precipitous drops that were utterly hair raising. Now back in Bangkok, I’ve been going through the old photo albums that Jack’s family have very generously lent to me. One picture I’d until now overlooked was of a fresh-faced young man in a mortar board who was obviously just graduating from university. It did not seem at all relevant to Jack’s family story, but then I noticed some writing on the reverse.<br /><br />This showed that the portrait had been taken in a photo studio in Queens Road, Hong Kong and it was inscribed in a neat hand as follows.<br /><br />“To my dear Jack, without whose help this would have been quite impossible.”<br /><br />It was dated 6.9.53 and was signed, “Howell”.<br /><br />I am thus, it seems, holding in my hand a picture of the now elderly man who a few days ago sent me the article about his China experiences in the first half of the last century, not apparently knowing of my interest in his mentor, Jack Reynolds.<br /><br />I’m hoping to hear more from him about all this, but in my search for the life of Jack Reynolds nothing much now surprises me any more.<br /><br />Copyright Andrew Hicks The “Thai Girl” Blog February 2010A True Friend to Chinahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10953073219104650895noreply@blogger.com3