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As a reader I’ve greatly enjoyed Susan Kepner’s translations of Thai fiction, especially Kampoon Boontawee’s Luuk Isaan, but as a biographer I must take issue with her assessment–‘a genuine success’–of Morgan’s Bombay Anna. The book is not well researched, has a weak grasp of socio-historical contexts, and consistently presents suppositions as if they were ascertained facts. The result: an account of Anna Leonowens’s life and character that is misleading and heavily fictionalized.
In response to Kepner’s statement that Thais prefer hagiography to critical biography, I would note that Americans have a soft spot for inspirational success-stories and that this cultural bias poses a serious danger for biographers. As Daniel Mendelsohn warns in his account of his quest for information about relatives killed in the Holocaust–The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million–we are all too apt to be ‘compromised’ by the ‘need to make certain random scraps of data into part of the stories we have been brought up to tell ourselves about the world, and which for that reason we cherish’ (p 223). In my judgment, Morgan and Kepner have been seriously compromised by the uplifting story they want to tell about Anna.
This story requires considerable exaggeration of Anna’s ancestral disabilities. Describing her great grandfather, the Revd. Cradock Glascott, Kepner quotes with approval Morgan’s claim that his ‘radical Methodist position had put him and his children outside the sphere of social influence and mentoring’. In fact, Cradock had quite good connections. He attended Oxford University, where after undergoing an evangelical conversion he got a letter of support from John Wesley no less (Google ‘Wesley Center Online Cradock Glascott’ scrolling to 13 May 1764). Yes, Cradock lost his first pulpit owing to his aggressive evangelicalism, but for fourteen years he had the patronage of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon. After that he occupied an Anglican pulpit for nearly half a century, obviously with the backing of his bishop.
Regarding Cradock’s son William, who left England for a Lieutenancy in the East India Company’s army (he was Anna’s maternal grandfather), I would urge all readers to look for Morgan’s documentation of her claims. Those who do so will find accounts of army life but little or nothing on William, whose character, I believe, was very far from what it is said to be in Bombay Anna. Thus, on the assumption that he lived in Bombay for many years, the biographer tells us that ‘Billy’ (as she calls him) ‘and some of the other Europeans spent many of their evenings talking and drinking with their [native Indian] men . . . He learned the views of Muslims and the Hindu castes, so similar in their rigidity of the military rules of rank’. Like most of the book, this passage is in the past tense and indicative mood. ‘Billy’, Morgan appears to be saying, really did these things. Readers should be skeptical. The relaxed camaraderie attributed to him is altogether surprising for an English officer in the late Georgian period (which the reiewer terms ‘Victorian’). And no documentation is provided.
Pending its presentation, I will conjecture that Morgan didn’t find William’s one extant letter. Composed in 1810 after he left Bombay cadet school, it survives in a copy made by proud father Cradock (who never calls him ‘Billy’). This document reveals that he had already been posted to the port city of Surat–and that Morgan’s colorful scenes of his life in Bombay are fictive. It also displays the usual assumption of benign British superiority. Thus William wrote, ‘it is beyond belief what cruelties have been practised by the musselmans & other disorderly casts or sects upon the harmless & peaceable inhabitants, who are now safe under the British protection, & enjoy the same rights as any of his majesty’s subjects’. Doesn’t this one sentence establish an entirely different story from the one Morgan constructs? Indeed, ‘Safe under the British’ bears comparison with Kipling’s more racist ‘white man’s burden’.
Rather than reflecting on absent sources, the review merely reports that ‘Morgan relates that in India, Billy was known for a curious degree of sympathy and tolerance that extended even to Indians’, and, more, that Anna’s progressive views ‘would uncannily mirror’ those of her English forebears. To my mind, the one thing that is uncannily mirrored here is a certain kind of high-minded colonialist attitude. Anna’s views must not be conflated with those of Kipling, but her writings about Siam would often put into play that old safe-under-the-British notion, most notably when, as the ‘English Governess’, she took credit for ending Siamese slavery.
Bombay Anna’s central claim, announced in the book’s introduction, is that after Anna’s husband died in Penang in 1859 she re-invented herself in order to find work in Singapore. While still on the boat, she liquidated her Anglo-Indian history and cleverly devised a new non-Asian identity: henceforth she would be the pure white widow of a British officer. Morgan works the scene out in extensive detail, even telling us how much Anna enjoyed the fun of invention. Kepner mistakenly shifts Thomas’s death to 1857 but she basically accepts the story, stating that Anna ‘became someone else’ in Singapore before going to Bangkok.
There is no doubt that Anna reinvented herself over time and that she took the Penang-Singapore packet in June 1859; her name is on the passenger list. But that list is the sole basis for Morgan’s elaborate scene, which, furthermore, ignores the awkward fact that after the Leonowenses left Western Australia in March 1857 there was a fifteen-month period when they resided in Singapore before moving to Penang. The Straits Directory for 1858 (ignored by Bombay Anna) has Thomas living on Brass Bassa Road and clerking at the Borneo Company Ltd. His superior at this trading company was William Adamson–the same man whose recommendation would get Anna her important teaching position in Siam. Clearly, Adamson must have known her husband was no officer. Chances are, he also knew she was born in India and was of mixed race and had no trouble with that; there were many British Singaporeans who resisted the growing tendency to blackball Anglo-Indians.
One can be categorical: Anna could not possibly have managed the disguise that Morgan and Kepner take as settled fact. Whatever the exact course of events may have been, they would have reflected conditions in the remoter parts of the Empire, where ‘Englishness’ got redefined in fascinatingly ambiguous ways, often with the help of Irishmen like Thomas and Scotsmen like Adamson. My particular guess is that Adamson saw Anna as English enough for the Siamese, who were well known not to make a fetish of racial purity.
What is most disturbing is not Anna’s eventual choice to pass as white (there we surely cut her some slack) but the false and denigrating accounts of the Siamese court that she circulated in the West. Of these the most egregious was the story of the burning of Tuptim (who Kepner confuses with Boon). Another story told how Mae Pia cut out her tongue to save the Princess of Chiang Mai from Mongkut’s lust. Both narratives appeared in The Romance of the Harem, both were ‘authenticated’ by Anna’s claim to have been observer and participant, and both depicted her employer as acting the part of a fiendish tyrant. Yes, the king had a temper, but the questions for a biographer are: 1) Do these excruciatingly painful tales seem to be based on fact? 2) If not, what do they disclose about the teller’s imagination? Instead of confronting these problems, both the biographer and the reviewer seem chiefly concerned to offer a blanket justification for Anna’s deviations, this being the point where they bring in the notion of romance as defined by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Romance has long been seen as a key idea in nineteenth-century American fiction. In Morgan and Kepner’s view, it was Hawthorne’s position that a ‘writer could, and often should, transform the mere facts, should “mingle the Marvellous”, in order to present the truth’”, and it was this program that Anna adopted. Mingling fact and fiction ‘to convey what she felt to be greater truths’, she used the identical technique as Hawthorne, ‘whom’, Kepner advises us, ‘Anna met in 1872’.
The truth is, Hawthorne died in 1864, well before Anna left Bangkok. She never met him, and there is no reason to think she paid special attention to his work or took it as a model. All early reviewers of The Romance of the Harem assumed that its stories were meant to be reportorial. No one characterized them as romances ├а la Hawthorne. It looks as if Morgan and Kepner have appropriated this classic writer for their own cherished story, and in so doing have failed to see that he and others conceived of romance as a category within fiction. In speaking of ‘the Marvellous’ he was referring to the supernatural, the fantastic–an element felt to be out of place in realistic fiction (Hawthorne’s practice being to break this rule). He was not referring to the mixing of fiction and fact in travel writing or journalism. To invoke his name in order to maintain that Anna’s factitious reports about a faraway and little known country served ‘greater truths’ (and where have I heard that before?) seems a very odd way to shield her from the unavoidable questions.
Morgan’s best insight, which Kepner justly praises, is that Anna’s sympathy with Indian and Siamese women reflected a secret sense of her own Asian identity: underneath the white mask she knew she ‘was really just another Easterner’. Yes! But, again, the picture has been prettified. Deeply divided people, especially those who emerge from a severe colonial regime, can end up carrying a lot of baggage: locked-up feelings, strange disciplines and insistences, strange ferocities. No one survives what Anna lived through without showing signs of trauma. There was a fierce vengefulness driving her pen. When her first book was in press she confided to a friend that ‘Bangkok is the most hideous word I have ever written or uttered’ (Bradley Papers, Oberlin–another collection Bombay Anna ignored). Surely, this sentence offers a vital clue to the feelings that went into her writings about Siam.
Among the bravest, steeliest and least forthcoming people of all time, Anna is a fabulously tough biographical subject. One reason she has eluded biographers is that her psychology was formed by certain obscure phases of the colonial encounter of East and West: what she was was a product of that history. To tell her story one has to get both the psychology and the history approximately right, and to get them right one has to do the work, by which I mean not merely the research, travel and language study but the disciplined labor of imagining a life in conditions remote from one’s own. What Bombay Anna shows is how fatally easy it is for biography to create one more romance about ‘the English Governess’ and how she saved Siam. In saying that, I am using ‘romance’ in the book’s own sense, as a mix of fact and fiction.

As neptunian noted, there is now such a proliferation of private education providers (these are businesses), catering to just about anyone or anyone’s offspring to have a degree. Let’s take our private medical colleges for example- a surgeon friend recently remarked that these new setups are so desperate for clinical coaches that they have been cold calling her and just about anyone to locum as teachers (despite their heavy other commitments). so if you want a medical degree but don’t make the cut into a public or one of the better private universities, there are many others that will take your ringgit. The same surgeon wondered how these future doctors could make the cut?
– I think the problem lies with money and the ease in accreditation.

New Mandala and FACT as well, please continue with your endeavors for truth

Knowles… those are not gifts, those are rights. Tarrin has hit the nail on the head.

Just to clarify. You wrote: “This is not to suggest that Bumiputera graduates are not competent but merely to highlight that a large majority of them – 90% – have difficulty finding employment”. I guess here is a misunderstanding. Not 90% of graduates are unemployed, but rather 90% of the unemployed graduates are Bumiputra, which is a bit different.
It would be nice to have a break down of unemployed graduates by subject of study. Perhaps those subjects that are particularly rewarding and interesting for Bumi. students are not those where jobs are easily found. I remember that Dr. M. pointed out that the Bumi-students tend to study the wrong subjects namely Malay- and Islamic studies. In fact, in these subjects the need of industries tends to be limited.
One reason why Indian and Chinese are less unemployed in absolute numbers could very well be that due to quota regulations the number of students finishing with a degree is substantially lower.

What about gifts like a fair election, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, no double standard, no corruption, no propaganda and many others lies that the Thais have to cope with for many years.

I wonder if the embassy staff in Yarralumla have read this cable. I wonder if they’re wondering how they should defend the actors observed by Ambassador Boyce despite knowing that nobody will dare (bother) question them about it.

Tarrin, # 61

With the bread-wielding reds you gave in your link, the big question is whether Prayuth dares to stage a coup (against own puppet named Abhisit) in the near future. Of course, the timing and excuses are perfect for a coup: repeated clashes with Cambodia, yellow shirts PAD threaten to march and seize still-undisclosed govt offices on the 11th, and reds will also gather on the 13th and 19th.

The main difference with the 2006 coup is that this time, a coup will be the laughing stock of everyone in the country and the world.

NM readers might like to view the promotional video for Prachawiwat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcDc-7_wWNU&feature=player_embedded

Both public and private universities and colleges have the same problems of quality, but the real problem is the altitude of the Bumiputra graduates with regards to employment. The same altitude reside in the minds of non malay graduates. – a desire for blue ribbon jobs.

The poor salary scale in Malaysia does not help. Salaries basically have stagnated since the 1990s. Family support structure in Malaysia, as in many asian countries also contribute to this. Malays and non malays unemployed grads alike, live off their parents (mostly)

Anecdotes;

Unemployment

Nephew of a friend (Chinese) graduated from Oz and returned to Malaysia (Klang Valley) and was unemployed for more than 6 months. Got a job for him as an engineer in a mutual friend’s factory in Melaka. Sorry do not want the job. Reason – too far from home. Kid expect to drive from home to another state to work every day! It is just an exceuse, he has only applied to work at MNCs and GLCs and is just not interested in smaller outfit. Meanwhile, living off parents.

Quality

My own nephew, graduated with engineering degree from Monash – Kuala Lumpur branch campus – a year+ ago. Results are only average, but was employed by Monash as a tutor. Now he is a working happily as lecturer in Monash (promoted)! Now tell me – what is he teaching the new students? What is he bringing to the table? A half ass student, pass, then start teaching new students immediately. AND that is Monash!

There is simply no control over quality of tertiary education in Malaysia. It goes for public and private universities. At least in public universities, there is a minimum qualification needed to be a lecturer!