A drama with a message (or two)

25 December 2000

Channel 7’s current hit drama has a stunning hero: the pigtails. These are not the neat schoolgirl type or the yuppie rat-tail. They are bulky, black, long, glossy, resplendent hanks of hair. Their owners stroke them lovingly, and loop them round their necks. They hang down to the waist, and jump out of the screen.

Seven years ago, Lord lai mangkorn (Through the dragon’s pattern) was the first TV drama themed on the history of the Chinese in Thailand. It told the story of migrants who arrived in the 1940s and founded the great commercial families of the last half century. It was a popular hit and cultural event. It said: these are the people who made modern Bangkok. It broke lots of taboos. It challenged the schoolbook version of modern history.

It also founded a genre. Many other dramas followed. Some burrowed further into the experience of the immigrant pioneers. Mongkut dok som (the orange flower crown) was set inside a gloomy mansion populated by a Chinese patriarch and his five wives in various stages of psychological disintegration. Hong neua mangkorn (swan over dragon) borrowed a classic mafia story to show a Chinese dynasty grappling with the pressures of modernisation. Recently Chao sua noi (little boss) featured a daughter raised as a boy to fulfil the patriarch’s need for a male heir, prompting hilarious scenes of sexual confusion. Some looked at the continuing links between families in Bangkok and their relations in China.

These broke more taboos. They blazed the title in oversize Chinese characters. Some actors spoke in Chinese with no subtitling, assuming the audience would understand. The dramas were set almost entirely within a Chinese society, as if Bangkok had floated loose and come to rest on the South China coast. They had a distinctive style: living rooms full of heavy wooden furniture; the dark stairwells of the upright mansions in Bangkok’s old Chinatown; the baroque suburban palaces of the boom; and a dialect of Chinese-Thai. Some actors made their careers playing the genre’s stock characters—stern patriarch, sad traditional wife, industrious son, dutiful daughter, dragon granny, and slightly batty housemaid.

But this new drama is different from earlier versions. It is set a century ago when Siam forced the immigrant Chinese to make a stark decision about their identity. They could stay Chinese and pay a head-tax. Or become Thai and risk being conscripted for military service. The choice was part economics: conscription interfered with business. And part cultural identity: many of the immigrants were sympathetic to the Chinese nationalist movement. The pigtail was the visual symbol of this decision. If you stayed Chinese, you kept it. If you changed, you cut it off.

The lead actor, Sanya Khunakorn, is one of the most familiar faces on TV (dramas, talk shows, mobile phone ads, beer ads). But the dress, setting and especially the pigtail transform him from year-2000 Bangkok yuppie to a lad just off the Swatow steamer. The immaculate period setting of the drama reinforces this distance. Everything takes place in a world of old warehouses, wooden jetties, narrow lanes, smoky opium dens and secret society halls. The drama highlights how much has changed, how much has been lost. It excavates a visual heritage.

It is now half a century since the last trickle of Chinese migration into Thailand. Over the last decade, there has been a movement to revive and retain the heritage. Visits to China have become popular. Chinese language education has boomed. Authors like Chitra Konantakiet have sold thousands of books reeducating people about Chinese customs, gods, philosophies and festivities. The experience of the Chinese is still absent from the official national story. But that hardly matters in an age of public media. In the past, culture was passed down through the family line. Now it is transmitted through the printed page and the crystal screen.

This drama’s message is different too. Lord lai mangkorn appeared at the peak of the boom. It was part of the swagger that went with business success. But since then the financial crash (the “crisis of Yaowarat capital”) has wiped out many of the families whose stories it synthesised. This new drama has a harsher message.

From the moment the hero starts humping rice sacks, he is desperate to get ahead. At first he is nervous about becoming rich by cheating Thai peasants, and determined to stay faithful to his sweetheart back home. He works hard, but that is not enough to get a foothold on the ladder of merchant success. So he steals from his patron to get the seed capital. Soon he has to kill the patron to protect himself, starting a spiral of bloody violence which engulfs the cast. He abandons his original sweetheart, and becomes expert in fleecing peasants. All the women around him suffer—dead, damaged, diseased or ditched. It is a story about the immigrant’s dilemma (how to succeed with nothing) but also about a fatal flaw and its moral consequences. The original novel was called Angyi (secret society). But the TV version has substituted something more sweeping—Chat mangkorn, probably best translated as The Dragon’s Descendants, but maybe The Dragon Nation.

Amid the post-crisis debris of Thai-Chinese business, this tale has a moral. But coming in the heat of election fever, maybe it has another message too. Which politician is presenting himself as someone who has worked exceptionally hard to raise himself from modest origins to spectacular wealth? Who is suspected of buying access to hugely profitable monopolies, plunging into dirty land deals, using insider information to make foreign exchange killings, evading tax, and ignoring rules on share transfers and asset disclosures? Who is shoving forward every female member of his entourage (wife, maid, secretary) in desperate personal defence? Who, in short, seems to have a fatal flaw which leads him to ignore the ethical implications of any deal which makes huge profits? Now, just for fun, close your eyes and imagine him with a long glossy pigtail.