A Life Beyond Boundaries (10 page)

In the process, I became very conscious of something that I had barely noticed before: how Americans organized the teaching of Southeast Asian languages. The lessons were entirely focused on useful everyday speech. ‘Where is the post office?' ‘How much is a haircut?' ‘Your little son is very cute.' Learning to
read
Thai was for later, and optional. You could soon see why. With the exception of a middle-aged Japanese businessman, none of my classmates
had ever learned to use a non-Roman writing system, and so Thai orthography seemed exceptionally hard.

The school had no interest whatever in Thai literature, or indeed anything ‘beautiful' about the Thai language. The contrast with European language-teaching could not have been greater. Classical Latin and Greek were ‘dead' languages, no longer spoken, so we youngsters at Eton were focused entirely on reading works of very high literary quality. French, German and Russian were taught in the same spirit. I could read and write French very well, but could speak it only in the most primitive way.

I learned a lot at the AUA but always felt deprived. In the end I had to teach myself to read, with the help of friends. I was lucky to be able to stay with (now Professor) Charnvit, his sister, his brother-in-law and his nieces, and they usually tried to help me practise. I think their influence is one reason why, when I came to write
In the Mirror: Literature and Politics in Siam in the American Era
(1985), my first book on Thailand, it was mainly about contemporary Thai fiction and how it was changing in response to deep social and economic changes, current political conflicts, and the influence of the United States.

I cannot say that in that first year in Siam I did any serious or focused research. My Thai was still too primitive, and the language lessons took up most of my days and energies. What I did manage to do was to read thoroughly almost all the English-language scholarship on Siam (in those days there was still not very much), and to follow and clip the newspapers for the future writing of political science articles.

As mentioned earlier, the country's politics from late 1973 to early 1975 were exhilarating. The repression imposed by almost continuous right-wing military regimes since 1947 was gone for the time being. Many important left-wing books banned by the dictators were now republished and widely greeted. Political parties mushroomed, and two or three of them were, to varying degrees, left of centre. When the first free elections in almost three decades were held, it was still possible for a very young and poor teacher, who campaigned on his bicycle, to get elected. This never happened again. Some of my former Cornell classmates had begun to come to prominence as politicians and, I am glad to say, joined one or other of the progressive parties, including the sociologist Dr Boonsanong Punyodyana. Students were extremely active politically, again in a leftward direction. These were the years when a new kind of popular music was created, the Songs for Life, which we quickly learned to sing.

But there were two dark clouds in the otherwise bright political sky. Far the darkest was the impending American defeat in the Vietnam War. In Bangkok, the CIA station chief was spreading the word that if the Indochina states fell to communism, the next ‘domino' would be Thailand, where a local communist guerrilla force had been gaining strength from the end of the 1960s. All this created a growing panic among right-wing groups, including the royals, who by the middle of 1975 started to go on the offensive with increasingly violent means.

The second cloud was the huge American presence in the country: almost 50,000 military personnel, stationed
at dozens of military bases, set up mainly for the purpose of bombing communist-controlled areas in Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia and supporting the right-wing groups in those countries. The social consequences of this presence quickly became very obvious: the novel spread of heroin addiction, unwanted mixed-race children, organized prostitution on an unprecedented scale, the Americanization of popular culture, and so on. Japan's close (if competitive) association with the US also led to boycott campaigns against Japanese businesses, and against Japanese investment in what was becoming known as ‘sex tourism', with its ‘industrial-scale' massage parlours.

Out of this came a new kind of anxious nationalism which was confined neither to the left nor the right. The pressure was so great that Prime Minister Kukrit Pramoj, a moderate conservative, arranged for the withdrawal of all American troops and opened diplomatic relations with ‘Red' China.

After I had left for home, assassinations of leaders of progressive worker and peasant organizations, leftist students and even mildly left politicians became increasingly frequent. Cornell's Dr Boonsanong, secretary-general of the moderate Socialist Party of Thailand, was gunned down outside his suburban home in the spring of 1976. The denouement came on October 6 the same year, when plain-clothed border police under royal patronage, together with a mob of right-wing thugs, attacked Thammasat University and murdered, in broad daylight, dozens of youngsters. The military toppled the existing moderate civilian government, and an extremist regime, led by
a senior judge very close to the royal family, took over. Hundreds of people were arrested and thousands fled to the countryside, where they found shelter with the communist guerrillas.

When I tried to get American Thai specialists to join me in signing a strong letter of protest to be sent to the
New York Times
, not a single one consented. Aside from myself, the only co-signers were my revered teacher Kahin, Dan Lev, my fellow Indonesianist, Jim Scott of Yale, starting his magnificent series of comparative studies of peasant resistance in Southeast Asia, and the China specialist Jerome A. Cohen. I am sure most of the specialists were horrified by the murders, but they lived in fear of not being allowed back into their beloved Siam if they opened their mouths. I learned the same lesson only a few years later, after Suharto's bloody attempt to annex the ex-Portuguese colony of East Timor. The number of Indonesianists in America who published anything critical could be found on one hand – and for the same reason. I was ‘lucky' enough to be banned from Indonesia, so it was not hard for me to write and lobby for the East Timorese.

But history always has its surprises. I had fully expected to be banned from Siam, especially after I published a long and bitter analysis of what had happened, entitled ‘Withdrawal Symptoms: Social and Cultural Aspects of the October 6, 1976 Coup'.
*
Yet this did not happen.

In 1977, the extremist government of Judge Thanin Kraivixian was overthrown by a moderate group of generals led by Kriangsak Chomanan, who quickly opened diplomatic relations with victorious Hanoi, invited Deng Xiaoping to visit Bangkok, released political prisoners, and offered complete amnesty to all guerrillas who agreed to lay down their arms. Bangkok, and surely the Palace, was stunned when the newspapers printed a photograph of Kriangsak personally cooking a good home lunch for the ‘Bangkok 18', a group of young political prisoners arrested after the Thammasat massacre. They had organized a play about two workers hanged by right-wing thugs, who claimed that the workers' faces had been made to resemble that of the Crown Prince.

Meantime the solidarity and confidence of the guerrillas were severely damaged by the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and the destruction of the Pol Pot regime, and Peking's futile and conscienceless attempted invasion of northern Vietnam. Most of the former students who had taken refuge with the guerrillas accepted Kriangsak's offer of amnesty. Cornell's Southeast Asia Program benefited from this, since several of the most intellectually outstanding of these ‘returnees' came to study there in the early 1980s. About that time, the Thai Communist Party collapsed, leaving the country in moderate conservative hands. Since then there has not been a single leftist party in Siam.

Having been ‘forced' to go to Siam, I was also ‘forced' to start thinking comparatively. Everything I noticed in Siam led me to ask new questions about Indonesia. Siam
had never been legally colonized, and its political culture was Buddhist, monarchical, and, for the most part, politically conservative; Indonesia was an Old Colony, mainly Muslim, republican, and, until 1965, generally to the left of centre. It had a proud popular nationalist tradition that was almost completely absent in Siam. How to compare them, and within what framework? It was out of these two ‘field-work' experiences that in 1983, at the age of forty-seven, I came to publish the first edition of
Imagined Communities
.

I had not been much interested in the Philippines until after my return to Cornell from Indonesia in 1964. About the time I became a professor (in 1967), Joel Rocamora arrived at Cornell with a very unusual project in mind. In those days it was virtually unheard of for any Southeast Asian student to study any country other than his own. But Joel was a young Filipino nationalist who had not only been impressed by Soekarno and the long Indonesian nationalist movement, but had even visited the country before his hero fell. As Kahin already had far too many advisees, he asked me to be Rocamora's chief mentor. We were close to the same age, so we soon became very good friends, often speaking in Indonesian to each other. In the ‘wild' late 1960s, we also went to many parties together, and Joel introduced me to marijuana, which, unfortunately, had no effect upon me. The parties did however convince me that I could dance – a major cultural breakthrough. Thanks to him, I began to get to know the other Filipino students and to engage with Philippine history and politics. I was very proud to supervise his brilliant study of the Indonesian Nationalist Party.

Looking back, I think the beginning of my fieldwork on the Philippines began during the two weeks I spent there in the spring of 1972, on my way to Indonesia. The atmosphere was quite tense, as Ferdinand Marcos was nearing the end of his last constitutional term as president and most people were sure that he would soon install himself indefinitely as dictator (which indeed happened the following September). Rocamora took me to meet his cousin Francisco Nemenzo (who had met my brother, Rory, while studying in England). Nemenzo was then head of the youth arm of the still legal Old Communist Party (from which José Maria Sison, a professor at the University of the Philippines, had broken away to form a Maoist underground party and a significant guerrilla force). Nemenzo suggested that I spend two nights in Cabiao, Pampanga, where the Old Party was still strong, and which during the Japanese Occupation and after had been an important base for the anti-Japanese, left-wing Hukbalahap guerrillas. ‘You will have the chance to meet some terrific revolutionary veterans there, and they will expect you to make a speech to the cadres', he said, as he assigned two sweet teenage boys to take me there. For ‘security', we travelled north by night.

My first night in a Filipino village was a memorable one. The veterans were very welcoming, liquor was passed around, and we chatted till after midnight. They spoke some English, and the two boys, well educated, did a lot of translation. It was mostly a matter of reminiscences, but I noticed a lot of words that sounded like Indonesian or Javanese. When I asked what these words meant,
they almost always turned out to have the same sense as their ‘Indonesian' counterparts. This astonished us all and made us even more cheerful. The next day I had to give my speech, and I was a bundle of nerves. I spoke about Suharto's massacre of the Indonesian Communist Party, and had the diplomatic sense to say that Marcos seemed to be heading in the same direction. Filipinos on the left should be prepared! It seemed to go down well, and in the evening there was more jollity, until the boys and I quietly slipped back to Manila. Some years later, I discovered to my horror that when Nemenzo broke with the Old Party, those same two sweet boys were murdered by the veterans on party orders.

So long as Marcos was in power, I had no intention of returning to the Philippines. Rocamora, however, was arrested there in September 1972. After spending some time in prison he was grudgingly released thanks to the lobbying of his rich American-Jewish father-in-law, a personal friend of the chairman of the US Senate's Foreign Affairs Committee. He went back to America and spent many years there organizing on behalf of Sison's Maoist New Communist Party, of which he eventually became, for a while, a senior member. We were thus able to stay in touch, and he kept me well-informed about what was going on.

By the mid-1980s, many of my best new students, expecting the fall of Marcos, were studying the Philippines. When he fell in February 1986, they hurried to Manila. By that time, Siam had become very quiet politically, and I did not, for the time being, feel like writing about the country.
So I stopped off for a short second visit to the Philippines, mainly to see old friends and keep an eye on the students starting out on their fieldwork. But I became sufficiently excited to start thinking about doing some serious research on the country.

There was, however, also a theoretical motivation on my part. Though the country had strong linguistic affinities with Indonesia, was republican, and had a long nationalist and revolutionary tradition, it was strikingly different in two central respects. The first of these was religion. The Roman Catholic sect of Christianity had, over four centuries, established deep roots in most parts of the country. Here there was a certain attraction and repulsion, since I had grown up in Roman Catholic Ireland. Neither of my parents was Catholic, but a very conservative form of Catholicism completely dominated the country. If it was familiar to me for this reason, I did not find it in the least attractive, despite the snuff box from Pope Pius IX in our house. My Irish (mostly literary) heroes were either Protestants or atheists. But how interesting it would be to see what a Southeast Asian ‘cousin' of Ireland was like!

The second difference was that the Philippines had been colonized twice, and by two completely different empires: one Catholic and Spanish, which was the only European empire to collapse in the nineteenth century; the other a Protestant and American world-hegemon. Since I lived in the US, should I not try to study the American form of imperialism and its consequences?