A Life Beyond Boundaries Read Online Free PDF

anti-colonial armed struggle of 1945–49.
    So I decided to give Cornell a try, and Kennaway quickly secured me a post as a teaching assistant. I was just twenty-one years old.
    The trip to the United States was something special. Itook the huge liner Queen Mary, on one of her last five-day Atlantic crossings. On landing in New York, I took the train to Ithaca. It was early January 1958, and the town was waist-deep in snow.
    There is no need to recall all the good luck that befell me in the first twenty-one years of my life. My only real, though major, misfortune, was losing my poor father when he was only fifty-three years old, and I myself just nine. But there is perhaps a larger picture, to which I have alluded only in passing. I would be inclined to say that this picture had both geographical and temporal aspects.
    Geographically, I was being prepared (without realizing it) for a cosmopolitan and comparative outlook on life. On the brink of puberty I had already lived in Yunnan, California, Colorado, independent Ireland, and England. I had been raised by an Irish father, an English mother and a Vietnamese nurse. French was a (secret) family language; I had fallen in love with Latin; and my parents’ library contained books by Chinese, Japanese, French, Russian, Italian, American and German authors.
    There was also a useful feeling of being marginal. In California I was laughed at for my English accent, in Waterford for my American idioms, and in England for my Irishisms. One can read this negatively, as indicating a life without roots, without a firm identity. But one can also read it positively, by saying that I had multiple attachments, to Ireland, to England (in some ways), and, through literature and cinema, to many other places around the globe. Hence, later on, it was easy for me tobecome deeply attached, through language, to Indonesia, Siam and the Philippines.
    Although the Thai and Indonesian languages have no linkages and belong to quite different linguistic ancestries, both have long had a fatalistic image of a frog who lives all its life under half a coconut shell – commonly used as a bowl in these countries. Sitting quietly under the shell, before long the frog begins to feel that the coconut bowl encloses the entire universe. The moral judgement in the image is that the frog is narrow-minded, provincial, stay-at-home and self-satisfied for no good reason. For my part, I stayed nowhere long enough to settle down in one place, unlike the proverbial frog.
    I should explain here why I prefer to use ‘Siam’ rather than ‘Thailand’. The traditional name of the country was always Siam – which explains why (in English) we speak of ‘Siamese twins’ and ‘Siamese cats’. It was changed to ‘Thailand’ in the late 1930s by the nationalist military dictator Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram. After the end of the Second World War, civilians were briefly returned to power, and reintroduced ‘Siam’. In 1947, the military seized power again, and held it for the next twenty-five (Cold War) years. This time ‘Thailand’ was thoroughly institutionalized.
    Controversy over the name still continues. Critics of ‘Thailand’, mostly liberals and moderate leftists, dislike the identification of the land with the ‘Thai’, who are only one of the over fifty ethnic groups in the country, though the dominant one. They believe that the name encourages narrow-minded and repressive attitudes towardsminorities, especially the Malay Muslims in the far south. Those who dislike ‘Siam’ argue that it is too identified with the pre-modern, undemocratic, feudal era. I share the sentiment of the former critics and thus use ‘Siam’ as the country’s name, with some exceptions for well-established names of organizations.
    I grew up in a time when an older world was coming to an end. I took my fine, old-fashioned education for