Ironic Historian

Review of A Good, True Thai by Sunisa Manning (Singapore: Epigram Books, 2020)
By Diane Josefowicz

In June 1973, nine university students in Bangkok were expelled for publishing a satirical account of the ruling government’s botched attempt to conceal an illegal hunting junket. The satire exposed the corruption of Thanom Kittikachorn’s military dictatorship, already under pressure from a series of strikes by workers in critical industries. Protests continued for months. On October 14, 1973, clashes between police and demonstrators resulted in the deaths of more than one hundred people. After losing the support of both the army and the monarchy, Thanom fled. Three years later, paramilitary police and militias staged brutal attacks on students and working people. Undermined by tensions within the country and ongoing American political and military involvements in nearby Vietnam and Cambodia, the new government collapsed. Agents of the revived far-right organized raids on trade unionists and others they disliked, and abrogated rights of press and assembly.

These events provide the backdrop for Sunisa Manning’s arresting debut, A Good, True Thai. A finalist for Epigram’s 2020 Fiction Prize, the novel tangles the turmoil of the “Thai Seventies” into the destinies of three university students—Det, the privileged scion of a monarchy-adjacent family; his best friend Chang, who is poor; and Lek, an idealistic young Chinese woman raised in a Catholic girls’ school in Bangkok. Like university students everywhere, they read, they write, they argue politics and philosophy, they fall in and out of love. But they also produce a subversive play, and it is the performance of this play that links Manning’s fictional students with the real students whose satire touched off the historical events just described.

Forms of dissent—bold, discreet, uncompromising, hedged—permeate Manning’s novel. Det’s parents, who participated in the 1932 bloodless coup that transformed the government from an absolute to constitutional monarchy, preferred discreet criticism to outright protest. During a period abroad, Det’s father reflects on this preference in a letter to his strong-willed wife, whose family connections to the monarchy hardly stop her from disparaging it: “My distance from the Kingdom has me noticing how private we are. This is especially true of your class—those good, true Thais who perform elaborate hospitalities to mask the machinations underway.” What looks like hypocrisy can sometimes be a cunning theater, intended to protect—or not. With these remarks, Det’s father hints at a lesson his son and his friends soon learn more painfully: Dissent by definition puts one at odds with others who may include friends, family, even oneself. For how long, under what conditions, can a person continue to uphold a conviction with which everyone else seems to disagree?

Each of the book’s three major characters confronts the question differently. For all three, however, their dissidence only goes so far. When Chang, a fledgling communist, needs money, Det gladly provides it. Lek teases Chang for his complaisant response to what is, to her, equivalent to royal patronage: “All principles but you give in eventually,” she snaps. Chang agrees but accepts the money anyway. A “little life of compromise” is how he sees his existence. “He slides one or two steps every time he accepts help. [...] Some day he’ll look up and realise he’s slid to the bottom of the mountain of integrity and wonder how he got there.” But the criticism isn’t all one-sided. Chang knows that Det, whose generosity stems from a misguided noblesse oblige, is also a party to these deals. Yet he “doesn’t want to blame Det for that.” Both self-aware and self-deluding, all three characters are riven by competing urges and interests. But they are also compellingly engaged with a basic political conundrum: A principled stance is all well and good, but when ideological purity is too stringently maintained, the result is not a workable politics but just another form of authoritarianism.

That this problem should have no solution is something that Manning’s characters confront repeatedly. Even the disciplined rural rebel forces strike deals when doing so makes more sense than otherwise. Deftly deploying a host of minor characters from one generation back, Manning shows how this hurly-burly spans generations. I’ve already mentioned Det’s parents’ involvement in the transformations of 1932 and their effect on Det. Chang’s mother also casts a long shadow. Precariously employed at a local factory and seeking to exempt Chang from a military conscription that he is otherwise unlikely to avoid due to his social class, she engages her boss in a delicate negotiation, quietly threatening to expose his philandering unless he secures an exemption for Chang. In doing so, she bestows a complex gift. Accepting the exemption makes Chang complicit in the classist system he opposes, but it also keeps him alive to fight that system. What’s more, it brings him into contact with Det, whom he meets in the officer training program that is a prerequisite for university study. Manning is a pleasingly ironic historian, and her attention to generational matters broadens the novel’s historical sweep. Problems are passed from one generation to the next, just like any other inheritance.

Dissent is particularly hard to sustain when relationships are threatened. How much hypocrisy can you live with? Well, how many beloveds can you live without? Manning leans on these tensions to propel her plot, pitting her characters’ personal loyalties against their idealistic convictions. The problem is most acute for Det. Training with a radical group in the countryside, he is revealed as being related to the king. This relationship makes him valuable: If he can be convinced to write a letter home justifying his decision to join the insurgency, he can help to legitimate it. But the same stubborn clarity that made him critical of the monarchy also makes him unwilling to be used in this way, to lend himself so unreservedly to others’ purposes. In this way he remains loyal to the ideals of his clever, thoughtful parents, and so remains close to them despite their painful separations.

Det’s nuanced stance proves hard for his friends to understand. Lek’s struggle is particularly difficult, complicated by her status as a woman in this time and place. She is expected to share out her emotional resources, to tend to Det and Chang by safeguarding their feelings, reputations, and even possessions. When Chang hands Lek his glasses, which he has obtained with the help of yet another cash infusion from Det, the gesture prompts an insight: “Here she sits, a purse for Chang’s glasses, pinging between” the men in her life “like they’re the ones who matter.” She has also been working on the manuscripts of Chit Phumisak, a long-dead radical whose writings inspire their fight. As she grows more aware of her second-class status within the revolutionary movement, the attractions of even this work start to seem like yet more drudgery. “She’s even trying to revive Chit Phumisak’s legacy,” she realizes, to advance the posthumous career of yet “another man.” Burdened by pressure to meet the needs of her male peers, Lek has less space, imaginatively and practically, to experiment with more flexible points of views. Her feminist consciousness remains attenuated, and the novel ends on an ambiguous note, as the unpaid work of pregnancy and labor eventuates in the birth of a girl child—not Lek’s—who seems to represent a better, freer future.

For all its heavy political and historical content, A Good, True Thai is not a didactic book. Manning avoids the temptation to overwhelm history with hindsight. Occasionally an anachronism creeps in, as when a character suffers a loss of “self-esteem,” a psychological concept that, to my knowledge, did not come into wide use until the 1980s. But such moments are rare. Manning’s impressive powers of synthesis, evident throughout in her deft handling of the third-person point of view, are complemented by a streamlined and graceful prose style. The result is a real achievement—a novel that sheds light on a historical episode with striking relevance to the present, as rising authoritarianism is met with rousing protest—and, perhaps soon, intelligent debate.


Diane Josefowicz's writing has appeared in Conjunctions, Fence, Dame Magazine, and Necessary Fiction. She presently serves as director of communications for Swing Left Rhode Island, a progressive political organization.