Susan Kepner has produced an impressive biography of one of the most significant Thai women of the twentieth century, M.L. (Mom Luang) Boonlua Kunchon Debyasuvarn (whose name has also been rendered in English in other transliterations). Although not as well known as a writer as her sister, M.L. Bubpha Kunchon Nimmanhaemin (penname Dok Mai Sot), Boonlua emerges from the pages of Kepner's biography as the embodiment of an upper-class Thai woman of her era transforming herself into a modern (or, in her own terms, “civilized”) woman. As the book has already been given highly insightful reviews by Chris Baker and Thak Chaloemtiarana,Footnote 22 here I will only briefly review its contents and then turn to consider Kepner's book with reference to Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity.
As the title Mom Luang indicates, Boonlua was a descendant of a king, although her title did not merit her being considered as royalty, unlike her father, Lan Kunchon (better known under his royal title and name of Chao Phraya Thewet), who held a higher rank. Her mother was only one of at least twenty women who were consorts of Chao Phraya Thewet, none of whom were ever formally recognized as his official wives. That Boonlua was raised in such a household made her typical of many upper-class Thai children born in the early part of the twentieth century. She would not, however, remain true to type.
In 1932, when she was twenty-one, Boonlua's life was put on a new path from that which might have been expected of an upper-class woman of royal descent. A group of army officers and civil officials compelled King Prajadhipok, the monarch at the time, to accept the transformation of the polity from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy. The coup resulted in descendants of a king no longer being guaranteed a high place in society unless they acquired the necessary credentials to join the Thai bureaucracy. “The end of the absolute monarchy and the opening of greater opportunities to the population at large . . . had a dramatic effect on women like Boonlua (few as they might be), who suddenly became eligible to apply for entrance to Chulalongkorn University” (Kepner p. 91). After graduating from Chulalongkorn, Boonlua succeeded in joining the bureaucracy as a teacher and then as an educational administrator. In these roles, she found herself having to assert herself in a system dominated by men, a system she would invert in her later novel Suratnari, about a country (Surat) run by women. In the post-1932 era, there were few role models in Thailand that Boonlua could follow; she looked, instead, to Europe and America for inspiration. These influences enabled her to develop an independent perspective even as she spent much of her life teaching about Thai classical literature.
In 1959, Boonlua, then forty-eight years old, married Dr. Chom Debyasuvarn, an epidemiologist whose first wife had died. Even then she did not, however, assume a traditional role for a Thai woman but continued, with her husband's support, to take an active role in public life. It was at about this time and especially after the death of her more famous sister that she also began to write novels.
When Boonlua was sixty-one, her life was again redirected by a major political event, that which Thai call sipsi tula, referring to the student-led rebellion culminating on October 14, 1973, that led to the overthrow of the then ruling military dictatorship. Boonlua did not herself become a radical, but she was influenced by the critical writings of some of the students. In the penultimate chapter of Kepner's biography, we learn of a seminar in 1974 when Boonlua offered a liberal revisionist interpretation of a number of Thai classics; in other words, she once again found a way to adapt to the new realities of Thai life while still maintaining her traditional heritage.
The brief sketches of a number of Southeast Asian “figures” in the collection edited by Joshua Barker, Erik Harms, and Johan Lindquist can be seen to be connected to Kepner's biography in that both “civilization” (Thai, siwilai) and “modernity” refer to the influence of Euro-American culture in the shaping of persons (figures?) in Southeast Asian societies. In the reign of King Mongkut (r. 1852–68) of Siam, as Thailand was then known, “the king was determined to appear civilized in ways that [the] grasping colonial nations would respect, so he began the modernization and westernization of Thai society” (Kepner, p. xvii). In the rest of Southeast Asia, all of which had been subsumed in Western-dominated empires, the “modern ethos” (Figures, p. 1) has its roots in Western domination. Those depicted as figures in the Barker, Harms, and Lindquist book are, however, all quite different from Boonlua, who made herself into a modern woman, whereas those sketched in Figures already live in a world transformed by modernity. These include not only modern women such as the Indonesian “career woman” discussed by Carla Jones and the Singaporean “activist” Braema Mathi sketched by Yu-mei Balasingamchow, but women who have been marginalized by modernity, such as the prostitutes from Vietnam (Christophe Robert), Cambodia (Annuska Derks), and Thailand (Ikuko Okamoto). Although some male roles, such as the northeastern Thai kickboxer (Pattana Kitiarsa) and the Malay gangster (Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir), have roots in the premodern past, there are others, such as Filipino “entrepreneurs of violence” (Orlando de Guzman) and especially politicians like the Burmese “political prisoner” (David Scott Mathieson) and his opposite type the Burmese Tatmadaw (military) officer (Jacqueline Menager), who could only exist in a postcolonial modern world. The division of the sexes between male and female has been made more problematic by the existence of transsexual persons, such as the Filipino bakla (Martin Manalansan) and the Indonesian waria (Tom Boellstorff).
Whereas in the past the major links to the outside world came through colonial networks, today there are a variety of overseas connections that come through migrant labor, such as the “Filipino seaman” (Kale Bantigue Fajardo), the “Vietnamese transnational” (Ivan Small), the Thai “transnational farmworker” (Sudarat Musikawong), and the Malaysian “returning urbanite” (Matthew Amster). Further, it is not only those belonging to national majorities who have been transformed; new modern figures have also emerged in minority societies—for example, among the Cham in Vietnam (Truong Huyen Chi and Alberto Pérez-Pereiro), the Black Thai in Vietnam (Christian Lentz), and the Hmong in Thailand (Tracy Pilar Johnson).
Most of the eighty-plus sketches in Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity illustrate types of persons that have emerged because of the conditions of economic and political modernity. Although some sketches of figures in the collection border on caricatures, often with rather tangential connection to real persons, a few are embryonic biographies, such as Ann Marie Leshkowich's sketch of Dung, a Vietnamese petty trader; Christina Schwenkel's of Hoa, a Vietnamese “Soviet-trained scientist”; Dadi Darmadi's of Indonesian Pak Haji Rosyid; and Sven Alexander Schottmann's of Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia's former prime minister. This reviewer would hope that perhaps some of the contributors to this volume might develop their brief sketches into biographies comparable to that by Kepner.
