Angels, Devils, and Survivors:Images of the City in

Modern Vietnamese and Thai Literature

Susan F. Kepner

Paper presented at the International Thai Studies Conference

Amsterdam, August 2000

(Do not quote without permission of theauthor.)

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Angels, Devils, and Survivors:Images of the City in

Modern Vietnamese and Thai Literature

Susan F. KepnerBefore moving into the primary subject of

this paper, it is necessary to outline the verydifferent experiences of Thai and Vietnamese fiction writers with regard to their use of language, and their experience with Western fiction.

One of the fundamental ideas we emphasize with new students of Southeast Asian cultures is that of Indianization versus Sinicization. In terms of social and political culture, the arts, and so much else, Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia have been strongly influenced by India; Vietnam, alone among the mainland Southeast Asian nations, has of necessity followed Chinese models. Whereas indigenous versions of the Ramayana have always been and remain a paramount literary influence in the so-called Indianized areas, Chinese classical poetry set the standard for literature in Vietnam until the twentieth century, and Kim VanKieu, the quintessential Vietnamese literary work, is based upon a sixteenth-century Chinesepoem.

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For seven hundred years, literature of Indian origin has been so modified and adapted that, in Siam,1 the Ramayana -- in Thai, the Ramakian -- is experienced as an ingredient of "Thai-ness" itself. Thai, Lao, and Cambodian people have been able to perceive India in rather vague terms, while comfortably experiencing its many legacies as their own creations, and possessions. In contrast, for nearly a thousand years Vietnam was a province of China, and the influence of Chinese government, literature, art and so on indeliblypermeated the fabric of Vietnamese life.

During the colonial era, France did its best to replace China as the paramount culturalmodel. The Chinese-based chu nom characters (so impenetrable and so vexing to the French) were denigrated as an archaic hindrance to modernization and, therefore, to the likelihoodthat Vietnam would earn a place at the table ofmodern, technologically evolving nations within

1"Siam" is used to refer to the nation before the overthrow of theabsolute monarchy in 1932. "Siamese" is used to refer to people of various ethnic backgrounds in Siam; for example, young men sent abroad on government scholarships in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century represented ethnic Thai, Chinese-Thai, andvarious other groups. Not all were "Thai," but all were c itizensof Siam.

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the foreseeable future. The lycee would pave the way for this vaguely imagined outcome by preparing elite and middle class children not only for life in the "civilized" world, but foremployment in the colonial government upon graduation. Someday, there might be a place for Vietnam at the modern cultural banquet table, where everyone would eat with a knife and fork instead of chopsticks; and perhaps, after dinner, instead of composing extemporaneous poetry in chu nom, as their grandfathers had done, they could pen stories in prose using quoc ngu , the Romanized alphabetoriginally developed by Catholic missionaries.

Some Siamese children also received a Western education, but their experience was very different. Because Siam was not colonized, all schools except a few that were founded by missionaries were taught in Thai. Young men were sent abroad, most to England but, purposefully, to quite a few other European countries as well.2 At first, only

2King Chulalongkorn and his advisors astutely calculated the benefits of casting the net wide: future military officers were often sent to Germany, for example, and future lawyers to France.They sought to avoid seeming dependent upon England, even though the majority of young men were sent there.

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the sons of King Chulalongkorn (1868-1910) and other princes were educated abroad, but by the 1920s government scholarships were granted to middle and even lower class boys of exceptionalintellectual ability. Girls studied at Catholic convent schools in Bangkok and elsewhere, and a few were sent to a convent school in Penang that accepted girls from several Southeast Asian countries. English ladies were hired by some families to tutor their daughters. (Women did not receive advanced educations until after the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932, when they were admitted to Chulalongkorn University. But the Thai intellectual experience of "the West" can scarcely be compared to that of Vietnam, where the great chu nom literary tradition was lost almost overnight, and almostirrevocably,3 and where students were immersed in French literature from early childhood on inthe lycee of Saigon, or Hanoi. These students were educated and lived within a sub-culture ofVietnamese society in which French culture,

3The study of chu nom literature today is the work of a very few scholars, most of whom are elderly. The survival of this literature rests in the hands of the even smaller number of young scholars who work under their tutelage.

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values, and art reigned supreme. There was nothing equivalent to this in Siam.

At the opening of the twentieth century, due to the advent of a greatly expanded educational system, among other social and political factors, chu nom was abandoned in favor of quoc ngu. And with the rapid rise of quoc ngu, it became possible to emulate French literature, something that would have been impossible with chu nom.

Thai poetry continued to be written using the Thai alphabet, which was based upon the Khmer alphabet, itself derived from the Indian,Devanagari writing system. Because Siam was not colonized, when modern fiction began to be written, it was written in the familiar Thai alphabet, as it is today. The origins of this alphabet are of little interest to anyone except Thai linguists, and Thais feel a great deal of pride in the fact that they, unlike theVietnamese or the Malay, continue to use their own, ancient writing system.

Siam, by comparison with Vietnam, was rather slower to develop prose fiction that compared favorably with that of the West. Prose fiction was, after all, a Western form ofliterature (and a rather new one, at that). A

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few men who had studied literature in England or France came home to Siam and wrote short stories, or novels. In the main, however, Thais continued to define "real" literature as poetry written according to traditional forms. Even in the 1950s, university students majoringin Thai literature would never study a novel. In 1952, Pluang Na Nakhon published Wanakhodii thaay samrap naksuksaa (History of Thai literature for students); and in 1959, Phra Worawetphisit published Wanakhodii thaay (Thai Literature). Neither of these works, which were considered to be the last word on Thai literature, contains a single word about modern fiction, novels or short stories.

It was not until M.L. Boonlua Thepyasuwan began to teach modern fiction to university students in the late 1950s and early 1960s thata case was made (mainly, by her) for including short stories and novels as "literature" (wanakhodii) as opposed to mere "written works" (wanakam ).

While Thai literature moved forward slowlyduring the decades of the twentieth century, producing romances, stories of family life, adventures, and a few works of "social consciousness," when political conditions

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permitted, Vietnamese fiction divided into two far more distinct and dramatic paths. Fictionabout cities, and life in cities, reflected thedifferences between political and social eventsin the two countries.

Pens Dipped in French InkThe city, in early twentieth century

Vietnam, was a marketplace of goods, and of ideas. Hanoi, built around Hoan Kiem, the Lakeof the Restored Sword, was in its way somethingof a sacred city, but by the time Vietnamese writers were undertaking novels, it had become a predominantly secular city. Saigon continuedto be the frankly commercial city it ever had been. Hue, home of the Nguyen dynasty emperors, in the Central Region, was a nineteenth century construct, the Nguyen idea of a celestial city, as Chinese as they could make it.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, many Vietnamese tales of the city readlike Southeast Asian versions of Les Miserables. One of these is "Household Servants," by Vu Trong Phung.

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I don't need to tell you either the name of the eating house or the street in which it was located. I can assure you, Dear Readers, it was the sort of eating house like thousands of others, where you felt like vomiting as soon as you entered.There was the smell of cheap fish, buffalomeat, tainted pork, pig and cow offal, sour tamarinds, and bad pickled vegetables. OK, that's enough of the unbearable smells, although it was very strange that they didn't seem to bother the woman in charge who held a bamboo fan in her hand and was stripped naked to the waist. (In Lockhart 1996: 124)

The other path followed by Vietnamese writers during the twentieth century was paved by the revolutionary movement, which brought socialist realism -- yet another foreign and Western concept -- into Vietnamese life. Therewas no place, in socialist realism, for the negative view of life presented in Vu Trong Phung's story. Such writing was considered negative, and harmful. A hero of the revolution (much less, a heroine) would strip naked to the waist only to till the honest soilof the motherland, or toil in some other approved way toward the triumph of socialism.

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After the division of Vietnam in 1954, Northern writers who wanted to continue writingwhatever poetry and prose their imaginations suggested migrated south, and most settled in or near Saigon.

City of Angels / City of Devils: Contemporary Thai Urban Fiction

The city in early twentieth-century Siam, which is to say, Bangkok, continued to carry the aura of the muang, the royal center of theuniverse, "Krung Thep" -- literally, the city of angels, inheritor of the splendors and the ideals of Ayuthya. In addition, it was a marketplace of goods, and of ideas. Throughoutthe twentieth century, Thai fiction writers tended to choose between depicting Bangkok as the city of angels, successor of Ayuthya, center of Thai culture -- or as the city of devils, a secular city in which people sufferedfrom various social ailments of the modern era (none of them ever directly blamed on individuals at the top of the social pinnacle, much less the institution they represented).

When we look at Kukrit Pramoj's famous andstill beloved 1953 novel Four Reigns, it is the city of angels that we see, a city debased

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during the seventh and eighth reigns (1925-1935) by the secularizing engine set in motion by the overthrow of the absolute monarchy in 1932. Yet, the essential royal and holy quality of the city is never really lost, just as the heroine Ploy's essential womanly perfection is never lost, despite the betrayalsand disappointments of life. Ploy and Krung Thep are inviolable, whatever evils may befall Bangkok. As the century wore on, the city was often depicted as a marketplace in which everything, tangible and intangible, as its price, and is for sale.

When Bangkok is thus defined, Krung Thep becomes invisible. You may write about the one, or the other, but if one occupies the foreground, the other becomes invisible. The city of angels cannot be sullied by the city ofdevils. Or, we may describe Bangkok's depiction in modern literature a double mask, with a face looking in each direction: if you want to look at one face, you cannot also look at the other.

Bangkok is the city of devils in "One Dropof Glass," Sri Daoruang's short story set in a glass factory.

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Anong walked back home alone. It did not frighten her, even though her room lay some way behind the factory, over a ditch in amongst a thicket of coconut palm....The room was empty and bare, with little in the way of furniture, but for a lamp, made out of an old tin can....Anong put her friend's sarong, still wet from having been washed, around her while she removed her shirt and trousers. She couldthen wash them in the ditch. She used plain ditch water, for she had neither soap nor washing powder, and once she had finished she washed herself and brushed her teeth in the ditch water. (Sidaoru'ang 1994: 82.)

This kind of writing is reminiscent of Vietnamese writing in the 1930s, revealing the ugly underbelly of the city. But many of the most popular Thai writers continued to celebrate the city of angels during the 1960s and 1970s, when the most celebrated writers were writing a literature of social consciousness. Junlada Pakdipumin's "Grandmother the Progressive" is exemplary:

The only daughter of a wealthy man, Grandmother was born during the reign of King Rama V and married according to the customs of those days for young ladies of

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the aristocracy....Gradually, the family'sland holdings in Bangkok and in Thonburi, across the river, dwindled away. When Grandfather died, she sold the palatial family home in Bangkok and built a simple,big wooden house in Thonburi. There she stayed and gradually drew to her the flockof rotating resident granddaughters. (In Kepner 1996: 45.)

The grandmother in this story has considerable more pluck than Ploy, but the "simple, big wooden house in Thonburi" swarms with happy ladies, much like the Inner Palace world depicted in Four Reigns. There are no happy ladies in Preechapoul Bunchuay's "A Mote of Dust on the Face of the Earth," the tale of a rural girl sold to work in Bangkok. The following excerpt appears near the end of the tale, when the girl has triumphed, in her way, over the city that seemed certain to crush her when she first beheld it. She began life as Malisa, in a Northeastern village; now, she is Lisa, a Bangkok thief and prostitute.

I want to tell you about my Bangkok: it is a splendid city. I have been here for a long time. Of course, it is not thecity my parents believed in, the gold minethat held nothing but prosperity, nothing

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but money. Not that it doesn't have thosethings. It has them -- but not for peoplelike my mother and father, or the child that I was. My Bangkok is a prosperous, glittering city and a lonely one. But don't think that I feel sorry for myself, because I don't.... I had hard teachers: cruelty and contempt and people without mercy. And I was a good student. (In Kepner 1996: 283)

In Letters from Thailand, Botan's 1967 novel about a Chinese family living in Bangkok, Bangkok is unapologetically presented as a destination, a foreign capital, a place to which poor Chinese emigrate, no different from Saigon or Vientiane or Hong Kong, to make theirfortune. To them, the City of Angels is truly invisible, and irrelevant.

It is significant that "One Drop of Glass," "Grandmother the Progressive," "A Mote of Dust on the Face of the Earth," and Letters from Thailand all were written during the 1960s and 1970s; the characters in these works inhabit what appears, from the outside, to be what Foucault has described as a heterotopia, aclash of mutually exclusive worlds.4 4Heterotopia is discussed in slightly different context, that of postmodernism and the comic vision, in Olsen 1990 , particularly Chapter Three, "A Janus-Text."

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City of Survivors: Contemporary Vietnamese Urban Literature

Contemporary Vietnamese fiction writers have faced tremendously different issues than the city of angels/city of devils dichotomy in Thai literature. Vietnam was not only involvedin the Second World War, an experience Thailandshared, but remained at war for the following four decades. Writing in the North had to conform to the conventions of socialist realism, while writing in the South, after the division of the country in 1954, reflected earlier French and more recent American influences.

For the past two decades, the development of Vietnamese fiction has been nothing short ofastonishing. The work of writers including Nguyen Huey Thiep, Duong Thu Huong, Linh Dinh, Ho Anh Thai, Le Minh Khue, and Bao Ninh, focusing on life during the endless war years, and life since 1975, are innovative, provocative, and courageous.

When controls on fiction were eased in themid-1980s, Vietnamese writers turned with almost inconceivable speed to the exploration of their own often heart-rending experiences

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during and after the decades of war, and to a critical assessment of their government, their society, and their fellow Vietnamese. At first, following the Vietnamese version of glasnost that is called doi moi, some writers frightened the government so badly that they were arrested. But the genies were out of the bottle, and the government knew it. Unless writers directly incited their readers to overthrow the government in power, authorities had no option but to put up with them. Social criticism, even of officials, had to be tolerated.

Even today, it is difficult to deny that the French legacy of high quality in novels andshort stories deserves part of the credit for the quality of contemporary Vietnamese fiction.Most of these writers grew up reading French fiction, and some read American fiction as well, a literary heritage that announces itselfin liberal lashings of irony, and juxtapositions that hint at postmodernism. Thefollowing excerpt is from Le Minh Khue's short story, "Scenes from an Alley."

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In the past, honest people rarely dared toenter this dark and stinking alley at night.... In the depths of the alley lay Quyt's two-story house. In the past, Quyt's father had received the death penalty for murdering somebody. Instead of remarrying, his mother picked trash to raise her child. By bribing someone, she arranged for Quyt to go work as a laborer in the Great Nation of Germany. Five years later, he returned and transformed their miserable hut into a two-story villa. Western currency could perform magic more powerful than a fairy's.... If you wanted a guard dog or ornamental plants, they'd be yours.... You could evenhave a wife who was as beautiful as a dream, a real intellectual and fluent in English. (In Linh 1996: 49-50)

"The Goat Meat Special," a short story by Ho Anh Thai that is more absurd than parodic, also shows its debt to French fiction. A petty official, left alone one evening by his wife and children, turns on the color television set that is his pride and joy, and is amazed to see women dancing about and stripping naked. At work, the next day, it is clear that no one else had seen this program.

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Hoi came to understand that neither the manager nor his coworkers had the luck to see the program he'd watched last night, even though they all hugged their television sets constantly and let themselves be force-fed junk movies, like a flock of hens and cocks being fattened with lumps of steamed rice before being sold to the block. (Ho Anh Thai 1998: 37)

When Hoi invites his manager, Dien, to seewhat happens on his very peculiar television set, to his horror Dien turn into a goat as he sits in his armchair -- a greedy, rapacious, randy old goat. Hoi is forced to hide the goat/manager in his pig shed, even from the manager's own wife. But when she finally sees him, she is not at all surprised.

"I saw him for the first time like this onthe very day he came to ask me to marry him. My parents and siblings were all full of praise for him: he was so handsomeand so talented, a General Manager and barely over 30 years old. Only I saw...a sharp bearded goat, insensitive to human beings.... For over twenty years now we'veshared our lives, and I always see him as he is at this moment, in this pig shed." (Ho Anh Thai 1998: 41.)

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One of the most poignant stories of village, if not urban life in post-war Vietnam is Nguyen Huy Thiep's "The General Retires," inwhich an old general who has given his life to the revolution returns home, and understands little of what he finds. The narrator is the son of the general.

The wedding was a ridiculous affair. Three cars. Filter cigarettes that were replaced by roll-your-owns towards the endof the dinner. There were fifty trays of food but twelve were left untouched.... At the beginning of the wedding the orchestra played 'Ave Maria'.... [My father] was bewildered and miserable. He had overprepared his speech. A clarinet punctuated each sentence by blaring stupidly after each full stop.... [H]is body trembled, and he skipped over a number of paragraphs. He was hurt and frightened by the motley mob that milled around and was rudely indifferent to his speech.... You couldn't hear a thing. Theraw band drowned everything out with happysongs from the Beatles and Abba. (Nguyen Huy Thiep 1996: 121)Finally, in a short story written in

English by Nguyen Qui Duc, a young Vietnamese-

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American man finds love and unhappiness in Saigon. When his plane finally lands, he sees nothing from the window.

I unfastened my seat belt, stuck an unlit cigarette between my lips, peered out. There was no light outside. Darkness separated me from Saigon. Its people wereasleep, leaving blackness to welcome me home. I resented it. What can an absenceof light at the point of arrival announce other than the poverty and misery of a place?

.... I was really sad because cement-steel-and-glass blocks were all you could see in many places. Historic houses were being torn down. Beautiful walls and facades full of history, just piles of debris now. They didn't come down during the years of American bombing. but capitalism had arrived, hitting the city badly, and there were foreigners everywhere.... French and Dutch backpackers -- latter-day hippies supporting lice-infested dorm-like hotels,dining on pate sandwiches and imitation pancakes with coconut syrup, smoking Gauloises, and visiting ancient temples, joking about northern Vietnam's dog-eatinghabits. (Nguyen Qui Duc 1996: 111)

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He is depressed by the dingy, cacophonous city but manages to fall in love, anyway. It doesn't work out, but he survives.

Literature Must be For SomethingThe Vietnamese writers demonstrate that

while times may have changed, along with well as ideologies and regimes, human nature unfortunately has not changed, and the old villains appear to have been replaced by new, perhaps even shabbier villains. And yet, there is rarely a sense of preachiness in theseworks. By contrast, much of contemporary Thai literature remains quite didactic, a feature deplored by both Thai and foreign critics. Among them is Chusak Pattarakulvanit, who has written:

Literature, like [other] arts, is perceived as a medium for moral teachings.Literature must be for something; it must be useful. The old guard writes to promote ch»aat / s\aatsan«aa / phr|amah«aakas\at [nation /religion / king]; and the avant-garde write for the poor, the oppressed, 'the people.'Even in contemporary works, I constantly hear a preaching voice in the background.5

5E-mail message to the author from Chusak Pattarakulvanit, November 24, 1997.

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Boonlua Thepyasuwan expressed precisely the attitude Chusak criticizes in her essay, Hua liaw khawng wanakhodii thaay (The turning point of Thai literature):

My idea of a good book is one that provides new information, or wisdom, or a better idea of how one ought -- or ought not -- to behave in the world. (Boonlua 1973: 64)

Yet, Boonlua recognized the deleterious effects of too much message, and too little attention to presenting life as people actuallylive it, or to the development of believable characters. The passage below is from her review of the novel Phu -yay lii (Village Headman Lii), an amusing story of village life in the age of "modernization and development" -- and foreign aid.

What is most important in this novel, and most unusual, is the author's brilliant display of the Thai sense of humor. In terms of the Thai novel, one of the features of Phu-yay lii that is most importantis that the story is character driven, which is so rare in Thai fiction. Phu-yay lii , his

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wife and neighbors seem very real to us, and everything that happens in the novel happens because they are the people they are. (Boonlua 1973: 111)

The "Thai sense of humor" to which Boonlua refers is one of the saving graces of modern Thai fiction. Before the twentieth century, prose was limited to a very few genres; two, inparticular: chaadok (or, jataka), tales of previous lives of the Buddha told by monks to inspire, edify and improve the behavior and thelives of their listeners; and folk tales.

Folk tales were told to entertain. They were funny, and often scatalogical. Perhaps the best examples are the tales of Sri Thanonchai, the wise fool who used verbal trickery to achieve his ambitions while deflating the pretensions of his superiors.6 Even as he lies dying, Sri Thanonchai gets the last laugh on his arch-nemesis the king. Stillsmarting from the trickster's most recent ruse,the king declares, "We would order your execution were you not dying! We shall have

6This character was not invented in Siam. He is also known as "Siang Miang," in Laos, and by various names in neighboring countries. The character seems to have traveled to Southeast Asia via Burma, from India.

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court ladies piss on your ashes!" Whereupon Sri Thanonchai orders his relatives to use nothing but lantan wood for his cremation. "When [the court ladies] urinated on the hot bones steam and ashes ascended, causing them toreturn to the palace scratching their private parts like monkeys, infected as they were by poison emitted from the lantan wood. (Tales of SriThanonchai 1991: 115)

The Oxford-educated founders of Darunowat, an early twentieth century journal, did not look down upon this kind of earthy humor. In the 1874 story, "Four Fishermen," considered byliterary scholar Jua Satawethin to mark "the dawn of the Thai short story," the four main characters are named "Pointy Butt," "Lots of Snot," "Flap Ears," and "Eats with Three Hands." (Sumalee 1987: 33) It is the kind ofstory that later would be denigrated as "merely" a derivative of the folk tale -- as distinguished from stories in which more or less realistic people have largely believable experiences in contemporary society; in other words, stories that bear more recognizable kinship with the modern, Western short story.

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Thailand never experienced the overwhelming influence of a foreign, Western literary tradition, as Vietnam did. Quite a few Thai writers continued to follow their own parodic tradition. Fortunately, some of the great parodic writing in contemporary Thai literature has been translated, and some of thebest of it focuses on city life. For example, Sila Khomchai's short story "Khrawp-krua klaang thanon" (The family in the street), about a couple who spend their life in the slow lane, because of the infamous Bangkok traffic.

With all the food, drink and other amenities my wife provides, it also is a roving office, and in a sense it is our rolling home.... I suspect that it was when I learned to like the conditions of my life in the car that [my wife and I] began to grow closer.... Often, when we'vebeen stuck in the same place for over an hour, we think up amusing games.

"Close your eyes!" my wife commands playfully.

"Why?""Naa...naa...don't ask," she giggles,

taking the spittoon from the back seat andplacing it on the floor, for its real purpose. She hikes up her skirt, and...I peek through my fingers, stealing a glance

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at the smooth white flesh of her thigh which is, naturally, nothing new. Yet, today this not uncommon event has an astounding effect on my senses.7 The story ends with the narrator joyfully

relating that his wife is going to have a baby -- conceived, of course, during a traffic jam.

Chatcharin Chaiwat parodies contemporary urban life in "C.P. Chicken," a story set in a high-volume chicken farm.8 When Chick 37859 hatches, and is seen to be deformed, he is tossed into a pen with other misfits, includingan aging, expendable rooster. The rooster tells the chick:

"I was a great father of our race, a race known as kay pheun baan -- 'native chickens.' We also were known as kay naa --'chickens of the fields.' And then, therewere those who preferred to call us kay chon...'working class chickens.' In any event, when C.P. came for me, I was already grown.... My mother was not a warmincubator.... I had a big, fat, real mother.... When I hatched from my egg, thefirst thing I felt against my head was my mother's big, fat, lovely bottom....

7This quotation is from a forthcoming work. See Sila, in Sources.8"C.P. " is the actual name of a very large chicken production facility in Thailand.

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"Believe me, the incubator is not yourmother. Your mother...is a chicken."9

The author's message is plain: in our contemporary urban world, those who do not fit in, like C.P. Chicken and the doomed old rooster, will be destroyed. And yet, the rooster tells the chick, the acceptable ones, the ones who look right and fit in ("Every one of those chicks was fluffy, soft and pale yellow, with a becoming yellow and brown beak...") live in a foul's paradise.

"You fool!" Uncle Rooster cried out."You're a damned fool to want to be a perfect C.P. Chicken -- to want to sit in your private pen and eat your vitamins....They see only their pen and other chickensexactly like themselves. They eat and eatand wait for the knife to slit their neck.Their life is only that.... They don't know a single thing beyond hunger and thirst and bobbing their silly heads."10

Chatcharin's portrait of city life is bleak indeed. The acceptable chicks, the perfect, pale yellow fluffy chicks who fit intomodern society, are genuinely happy because 9See Chatcharin, in Sources.10Ibid.

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they have no imagination, no idea of another way of life, and no knowledge of their purpose,and their destiny.

ConclusionVietnamese fiction in general, and urban

fiction in particular, has continued to focus on survival, and survivors. The details have changed, but the subject of human survival in ahostile environment, whether that has been created by invaders (Chinese, French, or American) or, more recently, by their own countrymen, remains the core of many short stories and novels.

Nguyen Huy Thiep's "The General Retires" is a somber tale of small town life in the north after 1975; Hoi Anh Thai's short story, "Goat Meat Special," is a farcical view of post-war city life. These works are very different, yet each focuses on the lives of people who have survived terrible times, and who continue to survive in a disappointing world. In Nguyen Qui Duc's short story, "The Color of Sorrow," a young Vietnamese-American men travels to Saigon, where he finds love and also sorrow, both of which he survives.

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Thai contemporary short stories about lifein the city reflect the continuing importance of edification, and also of entertainment, in Thai literature. The didacticism that grew naturally from the pre-modern prose tradition continues to this day, but the sense of humor that had its origin in the folk tale is alive and well. Sila Khomchai's story about terrible Bangkok traffic never denies the awfulness of the situation, but makes a joke ofit nonetheless. Chatcharin Chaiwat's "C.P. Chicken" is immensely poignant, yet the style of the writing and the descriptive details are often amusing. Social messages and humor are often braided tightly, in these writers' works,

The most impressive of the younger Thai writers depict the city as home to many devils,but a place in which angels may yet be found.

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Balaban, John and Nguyen Qui Duc, editors. Vietnam: A Traveler's Literary Companion. San Francisco: Whereabouts Press, 1996.

Boonlua Thepyasuwan. Waen wanakam (Lens of/onliterature) Bangkok: Aan Thai, 1986.

_______________. Wikraw rot wanakhodii thaay (Approximately, Analysis of Thai

literature / "rot" signifies the "taste" of Thai literature) Bangkok: Social Science

Research Council, 1974.

_______________. Hua liaw khawng wanakhodi thay (The turning point of Thai literature). Bangkok: Thai Watana Panich, 1973.

Botan. Letters from Thailand. Translated by Susan F. Kepner. Bangkok: Duang Kamol, 1982.

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Chetana Nagavajara. "Literature in Thai Life: Reflections of a Native." Paper delivered at the Fifth International Conference on ThaiStudies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1993.

_______________. "Parody as Translation: A Thai Case Study." In Translation East and West: A Cross-Cultural Approach. Literary Studies East andWest, Volume 5. Honolulu: East- West Center,1992. (Distributed by the University of

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Duong Thu Huong. Novel without a Name. Translated by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

_______________. Paradise of the Blind. Translatedby Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson. NewYork: Penguin Books, 1993.

Kepner, Susan Fulop. The Lioness in Bloom: Modern Thai Fiction about Women. Berkeley: Universityof California ress, 1996.

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Kukrit Pramoj. Four Reigns. Translated by Tulachandra. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1998.

Linh Dinh, editor. Night Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam. New York: Seven Stories Press,1996.

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Manas Chitkasem, editor. Thai Literary Traditions. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University Press, 1995.

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Nguyen Qui Duc. "The Color of Sorrow." See Balaban.

Nitaya Masavisut and Matthew Grose, editors. S.E.A.Write Anthology of Thai Short Stories and Poems. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 1996.

Olsen, Lance. Circus of the Mind in Motion: Postmodernism and the Comic Vision. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1990.

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