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Not A Book Review

A long time ago, I promised to review Wave of Destruction: One Thai Village and its Battle with the Tsunami, by Erich Krauss (London: Vision Paperbacks, 2005). At this point I have accepted that I'm not ever going to post the long and careful review that I had once planned. But I did jot down a number of thoughts a while back, so let me put them down here.

Wave of Destruction is centered round the story of four Thai families from Baan Nam Khem, the village where my daughter is from.  It tells their lives before, during, and in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami.

 

Appreciations

I do have some criticisms of the book, so I should start by saying how much I appreciated it. 

• I appreciate that the author took the time to learn about this village that has become part of my life, and to tell the stories that usually are not told. The story of the tsunami in Thailand is, in the West, the story of European and American tourists, not the story of Thai people.  A quick googling will allow you to find more survival stories of European tourists than you can bear to read, but you are unlikely to find stories told by Thais.
• I appreciate that he has added to the record of first-hand catalogues of the tsunami. Krauss took the time to interview and befriend many Thai villagers, and for this he deserves much gratitude.  No matter how many stories I hear and read about the tsunami, the details of survivors’ stories are extraordinary.  It quite honestly remains beyond my imagining.
• I appreciate that the author has provided a record of my daughter’s town that otherwise would not exist, and that I can save for her.
• I appreciate the author’s personal generosity, as well.  He raised funds, arranged for the building of houses and boats, and dedicated himself to restoring the well-being of some of the tsunami’s victims.

Things I learned

• First, if the book is to be believed, corruption really was endemic in Baan Nam Khem, and started up again very shortly after the tsunami.  Houses were looted in the immediate aftermath. The village leader in Baan Nam Khem controlled the access to many of the donated goods and delivered them only to friends and family. It really is depressing how quickly the basest and greediest sides of humanity reasserted themselves, even following such an awful tragedy. (Incidentally, when we delivered goods after the tsunami, our group made a decision that we would always put goods directly into the hands of people; we would not hand them on for subsequent distribution.  Based on everything I have learned since, that was one of the smartest choices that we made.)
• Second, the misogyny and degree of patriarchy of rural Thai society is truly breathtaking.  I always knew that it was not a society that treated its women well, to put it mildly, but still.  I could fill pages with examples, but I’ll settle for one.  The background is that one of the individuals, Wichien, has become attracted to a young woman named Nang.  He does not know her, but he goes to sit daily in the restaurant where she works.

He hadn’t the slightest clue what to say to her, so he just sat there, staring at her.
… [H]e began to notice that she had attracted the attention of other men in town. While he sat in a corner of the restaurant, gazing over at her as she washed dishes and cleaned the counters, other suitors confidently approached her.  She would smile at bat her lashes at the men.  Finally Wichien couldn’t take it any more.  He got up from his seat in the corner and headed over to her, ready to give her a piece of his mind.  He would tell her that she wasn’t a nice girl like he’d thought. (pp. 9-10)
[…]
“So you want to have a husband to take you to bed,” he said. “Is that why you’re flirting with all these boys?”
This made Nang mad.  She wanted to shout: Who the hell are you, you’re not my husband.  You can’t be jealous of me.
“Yes, I want to have a husband,” she said.  She hadn’t actually given the matter much thought, but she knew it would get to him.
“Be careful,” he returned, pointing a finger at her. “I will kill you.” (pp.14-15)

        Reader, she married him.

• Third, without ever thinking very much about it, I had assumed that Ban Nam Khem had always been a fishing village.  There are many such villages up and down the coast, after all.  Turns out I was completely wrong.  Not so very long ago – within my own lifetime, Ban Nam Khem was a tin mining town.  In the 1970s and 1980s, the activity of the town centered around digging and separating tin from the earth.  Not only that, but it was a cowboy town – lawless and corrupt.  Krauss tells us that the police feared to go to Ban Nam Khem, and that it was a town filled with guns and brothels. The tin mines, incidentally, turned the town into even more of a death trap when the tsunami came.  Just inland in Ban Nam Khem, running parallel to the coast, are a series of lagoons that are the residue of the tin mining pits.  Because of these lakes, it was impossible to flee inland when the waves arrived.

Criticisms

My main criticisms of the book are as follows.

• First, it is one of those books that reproduces old old conversations verbatim, along with details that would have been long forgotten. 
• Second, the book is edited sloppily, both at the level of typos, and of internal consistency.  Dates do not match up well.  This is not oral history at a high level of scholarship.
• Third, the author simply reproduces his interviewees' stories in a way that seems very naïve.  You do not have to read far between the lines to realize that some of the characters are a long way from the angels.  Yet Krauss seems to buy into their stories completely uncritically.  For a while I thought he was consciously relying on the reader to fill in the blanks, but his afterword suggests that he fully believes their stories.  People I know in Baan Nam Khem have given me some rather different perspectives on those that Krauss writes about.  One of Krauss’s interviewees, a blind man named Puek, apparently received multiple houses and boats after the tsunami – and then refused to let others use them.  Another, Dang, was genuinely a heroine of resistance against a land grab by the Far East Corporation, but she has since apparently diverted substantial resources to her family.
• A fourth and closely related point is that Krauss's interviewees are always presented as being good and decent people, even when their actions as described in the book clearly speak otherwise.  Take Wichien, for example, who is actually one of the more sympathetic characters in the book.  He spent ten years poaching lobster in Burmese waters – poaching in the sense of stealing from lobster traps that had been set by others.  What does Krauss tell us about this? “Despite the money he earned, Wichien’s new profession bothered him morally.” (p. 44). And then when Wichien returns to his home after the tsunami, only to find it looted and defiled, we read: “Wichien took a seat.  Since getting shot in Burma, he had lived an honest life.” (p. 195) And thus is dismissed a decade of theft from others probably even poorer and more desperate than Wichien himself.

 

 

06/03/2008

Last Words

And with that, I am going to close this blog. Neung's life with us is now that of a normal kid going to school and doing normal kid things, and I sincerely hope that nothing is going to change that. I don't want this to turn into a parenting blog (and anyway, Joshua Gans does that much better). While there might still occasionally be things worth noting down here (for example, I did contemplate a post in January, following our trip to the Alps, entitled "How Hard Can It Be To Get Onto The Thai Winter Olympics Team Anyway?"), I no longer think it worth maintaining the blog for the sake of a post every few months.

More importantly, I am working on incorporating the material from this blog into a book that I am writing on the story of Neung. I thought about using this space to post occasional excerpts, but I don't want to get into that on a regular basis. Maybe sometime later I will come back and post some or all of that book, but you definitely shouldn't hold your breath.

If you are interested in giving me feedback on the manuscript when I finally complete a first draft, then send me an email at tsunami@ajkconsulting.com.

Thank you for reading.

06/03/2008

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