Novel
Letters from Thailand
จดหมายจากเมืองไทย
Botan · 1969
Synopsis
From 1945 to the mid-1960s, Tan Suang U, a young man who has left southern China to settle in Thailand, writes some hundred long letters to his mother, who stayed at home. In them he tells of his daily life in the Chinese quarter of Bangkok and his views on Thai society, and the novel follows, over the years, the clash of Chinese and Thai ways and the abandonment of Chinese traditions by his children's generation.
Context
Published in 1969 in Bangkok, the novel, which the author had written at twenty-one, received the same year the literary prize of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization. Coolly received at first, it then had great success, was translated into English by Susan Fulop Kepner thirteen years after it appeared, then into French in 2002 by the Éditions de l'Esprit ouvert, in Nyon, among some ten languages.
Who it is for
For following, letter after letter, a Chinese immigrant settling in Bangkok and the passage from one culture to the other.
Prizes and reception
The journal of the Siam Society hailed in 1971 a courageous attempt, while finding the hero too cold and too didactic.
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