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Adventures of a dangerous Thai woman: Huang rak haew luk (1949)

Luang Wichit Wathakan’s bestselling novel, Huang rak haew luk [Sea of love, chasm of death], addresses three major themes: modernity, nationalism and gender.¹ Prior to the novel’s publication in 1949, Luang Wichit was well-known both as the architect of modern Thai nationalism and, perhaps equally important, as the dramatist who popularised militant feminism. In his plays (1936–40), upper-class Thai women took up arms to fight alongside their men in wars of liberation.² Luang Wichit even made these women instigators of uprisings against foreign enemies who had subjugated the Thai. With Huang rak haew luk, however, Luang Wichit went beyond the notion of nationalistic militant feminism to break new ground: common and lower-class women offer a new, exciting and international model of the modern militant Thai woman.

But before examining this important novel, it is useful to review briefly Luang Wichit’s long career as a government official, diplomat, educator and writer. Born as Kimliang Watthanaparuda to a poor family in Uthaithani Province in 1898, Luang Wichit received a Buddhist education as a novice but was only briefly a monk.³ He exhibited early promise as a writer and thinker as a student at Wat Mahathat in Bangkok when he topped the nation in the fifth level Parian Pali examinations. Luang Wichit taught himself English and French, a feat that alarmed his superiors because monks were prohibited from learning foreign languages for fear that they would be exposed to insidious foreign ideas. After spending only two months as a monk, he left to join the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1918. Two years later, he won, through examination, a post to the Thai legation in France. There he continued his law and political science studies but he was transferred to London before he was able to finish them. During his six years in Europe, Luang Wichit became friendly with Pridi and Luang Phibun, the two leaders of the People’s Party that overthrew the absolute monarchy in 1932. He also married a French woman with whom he had two children, a fact that is not widely circulated.⁴ Prior to 1932, Luang Wichit carefully navigated a career in the bureaucracy and was somewhat neutral and apolitical. He did not join the People’s Party but later became the ideological architect for nation-building, especially in the Phibun and Sarit governments. He took his role as teacher and nation-builder seriously: all of his writing, including his plays and his novels, is overtly didactic.⁵

Although he was fascinated by modern ideas, Luang Wichit was able to promote the construction of the modern Thai state by exploiting its past. In spite of accusations that he took many liberties when writing Thai history, it is undeniable that Luang Wichit Wathakan left a lasting imprint on how Thais view their past and how that view has influenced their self-understanding. Luang Wichit was the ideologue behind the post-1932 nationalism campaign under the Phibun regime. He wrote academic texts, essays, speeches, plays, songs and official state proclamations that established new values for Thai society. Luang Wichit’s imaginative mind helped to promote a belief in the primacy of the state, the immutability of the Thai race, the necessity of militarism and the worship of historical personalities as national heroes and heroines. He was one of the first to insist that the word ‘Thai’ means ‘to be free’ or ‘independent’, and made sure that Thai heroes and heroines were only those who gave up their lives for the nation.

Luang Wichit was, however, selective in his choice of examples of the heroic deeds of past kings and the royals—the good royals such as Ramkhamhaeng and Naresuan who fought against foreign enemies to protect Thai independence. He believed that Sukhothai embodied the essence of ‘Thai’, an essence that became diluted and then polluted during the Ayuthaya period when the kings adopted Khmer forms of architecture and rituals. His didactic plays relied on national crises during the wars between Ayuthaya and Burma as settings. Because of his fascination with international politics, he also used his plays not just to promote nationalism, but to highlight other causes as well.⁶ He deviated from the example of Prince Damrong, the acknowledged father of Thai history, when he reinterpreted Thai history to include heroic deeds of the common folk. Perhaps most importantly, Luang Wichit concluded that common Thai men and women played important roles in protecting the nation.

As a playwright, Luang Wichit wrote 10 plays between 1936 and 1940. His efforts coincided with the intense promotion of Thai nationalism. What Wichit did was to emulate Rama VI’s attempt to use performance and theatre to establish a more cultured citizenry.⁷ As a concept, culture or watthanatham had been only introduced into the Thai discourse on modernity or khwam than samai in the 1930s. This discourse was also central to the fascist ideas of state and racial supremacy that were rampant in Europe. The refinement of culture was important to the Thai leadership. To escape the fate of its neighbours, the Thai should be seen by Western powers as a ‘civilised/modern’ people.⁸ Wichit’s early writings focused on ‘great men’, mostly Europeans, and how they became prominent as a way to demonstrate to his Thai readers how they could improve themselves: a civilised nation (prathet siwilai) could not be great unless its peoples were civilised. Nevertheless, the discourse here is not whether the Thai should emulate the West, but that certain achievements in science, technology, and culture, even though Western in form, are in fact indicators of modernity and high culture.

Luang Wichit’s first play was called Luk ratthathammanun [Children of the constitution]. The play was a box office disaster.⁹ Sensing, perhaps, that his audience was not ready for theatre based solely on modern, abstract themes, he wrote his first semi-historical drama, Lueat suphan [The blood of Suphan]. The play Lueat suphan boldly pairs a Burmese military officer with a local Thai woman as unlikely lovers. Tragically, both are killed during the Burmese occupation of Ayuthaya. The heroic deeds of Duangchan, the play’s heroine, also acknowledge the martial spirit of all Thai women. In the play, Duangchan in fact instigates the uprising against the Burmese invaders. Luang Wichit’s second play became an instant hit. Ticket sales allowed him to build a theatre and to buy sets and musical equipment. Recognising the importance of culture, Luang Wichit had accepted the directorship of the newly created department of culture. He also founded the School for Performing Arts. It taught the usual subjects but included music and theatre on top of regular schoolwork. Conveniently, students from the school performed Luang Wichit’s plays.¹⁰

Luang Wichit was also instrumental in influencing Thai historiography: female historical figures became accepted as national heroines. An obvious example is the somewhat controversial credit given to Thao Suranari.¹¹ He also wrote numerous nationalistic songs played over the radio, even though he did not know much about music. His plays and songs gave special emphasis to the heroism of common people, especially women, and the public readily embraced their ideas as historical truths.

Between 1939 and 1942, at the height of the nationalistic campaign, Luang Wichit chaired a committee that drafted the famous State Convention proclamations known as Ratthaniyom.¹² These proclamations changed the country’s name from ‘Siam’, which was based on Chinese, to the more modern ‘Thailand’; forced the public to salute the flag at eight o’clock every morning; to dress properly; to eat and exercise properly; and generally to behave as civilised people. The Ratthaniyom focused on ways to make Thailand a ‘modern’ state, one that must galvanise its citizens for war and colonial resistance. The Ratthaniyom campaign was reinforced by Luang Wichit’s plays emphasising the ideal characteristics necessary to build the modern nation. Many of these characteristics—daringness and bravery, compassion, love of honour, love of duty, self-control, and perseverance—were, in fact, borrowed from Inazo Nitobe’s Bushido, the Japanese code of the warrior.¹³

When the popularity of his plays declined in the late 1940s, Luang Wichit turned to writing novels as a way to reach the public.¹⁴ After becoming established as a novelist with Morasum haeng chiwit [A stormy life], he wrote his epic novel Huang rak haew luk.¹⁵ Here he projects his view of Thai women to a higher level. From being actors on the national and regional stage, Thai women are given new roles as important international actors. In this novel, Luang Wichit also blurs the lines of gender by showing how a Thai woman can be like a man and yet retain her femininity. As in his plays glorifying an imagined past, Huang rak haew luk allowed the Thai to imagine new categories of roles that they could dream about fulfilling some day.

Such possibilities are suggested by what Benedict Anderson has identified as ‘unbounded seriality’. Parochial and insular thinking could be replaced by new understanding of possible roles to play in real life that are open to the world and universal in application. For example, through exposure to modern print and performance media, people can begin to imagine that it is possible to assume new roles such as a Hollywood or local movie star, a national hero, a national heroine, a gun runner, a guerrilla fighter, a queen, or even a sophisticated international adventuress.¹⁶

Not surprisingly, Luang Wichit’s model of the modern Thai woman differs radically from previous role models. Traditionally, the possibilities for a Thai woman could be said to derive from traditional literary models: Sita in the Indian epic, the Ramayana (Ramakian), Nang Wanthong in Khun chang khun phaen, or Queen Jamathewi in Jamathewiwong. Surely, the idea of a traditional Thai woman as pha phap wai or a ‘neatly folded piece of cloth’, presumably to be unfolded by whoever becomes her husband, must come from aristocratic ideas based on Hindu Buddhist beliefs embodied, for example, by Sita, Rama’s consort in the Thai Ramakian. Scot Barmé has also argued that modern model of the Thai woman is found in the proto-feminist discourse around the mystical figure Nang Noppamas, a fictional character dating back to 13th-century Sukhothai. This yot ying or supreme woman, he concludes:

was said to have possessed a rare combination of qualities: an agreeable disposition, a lustrous golden complexion (to which her name refers), and above all a keen intelligence and an outstanding ability as both a scholar and poet.¹⁷

And, again according to Barmé, in 1905, Thianwan, a controversial Thai thinker, became the first Thai intellectual to dare to write about the role of women in modern Thailand.¹⁸ Thianwan argued that women should be allowed to get an education equal to men, and that they should be allowed to work and contribute to the economic wellbeing of the country. He concludes that the modern Thai woman is one who is educated, graceful, civilised, progressive and Western in orientation. Unfortunately, this view is incomplete.

Although space will not permit any discussion of the relevance of traditional and classic literature in a debate on gender, it may be most helpful to say that the construction of the modern Thai female identity is a contestation and amalgamation of several ideal types and ‘possibilities’ suggested in popular plays, religious beliefs, traditional practices, lived experiences and works of fiction. Due to its popularity, Luang Wichit’s epic Huang rak haew luk figures prominently among the mid-20th-century literary works that focus on gender issues. And, although more studies will have to be conducted to fully assess its impact, there can be no doubt that this novel played a major role in helping construct a new and more modern model of Thai feminism.¹⁹

Observers of Thai society have marvelled at how the Thai female is such a multi-faceted being. She is described as the de facto head of the family, a businesswoman, a sweet, caring mother and wife (whose public demeanour downplays her sexuality), a day labourer, a beauty queen, a whore, a masseuse, a murderer, a nun, etc. In a recent study, the contemporary public image of Thai women has been essentialised to represent two opposite models that Rachel Harrison has called the ‘Madonna and the Whore’: whether a woman is good or bad depends on her relationship to the family as an institution.²⁰ One problem, of course, with dividing things into two is that it slights the undistributed middle. In this case, a glance at Thai tabloids will reveal yet another possibility, one we may call the ‘dangerous woman’.

Thai newspapers consistently exploit those who have lost their lives through love. Many of the headlines and front-page pictures show murder scenes where the victim is a male lover who has been shot. Other times, the reading public is treated to a picture of two lovers, dead by gunshot wounds, laying naked or semi-naked in bed. Another famous story that has been circulating among Thai males for several decades is the report of a woman who cut off her philandering husband’s genitals and fed them to her ducks. The story is still discussed with much nervous humour among young men, but there is also a warning side to that story. Thai women do in fact commit such acts, but theirs seem not to be merely crimes of passion, but crimes calculated to punish. Therefore, not only are Thai women represented as the mysterious exotic beauty found on tourism posters, or as sexual objects advertised in sex tour brochures in Europe and Japan, they are also represented in the popular press as dangerous lovers.

The evidence is clear that Luang Wichit deliberately set out to create this new role for Thai women. In his preface to the second printing, Luang Wichit asserts that the novel’s heroine Praphimphan represents the new Thai woman: her imaginary life of love, lust and murder provides lessons to the reading public about how women can overcome their adversaries.²¹ Indeed, the very structure of the novel divides neatly into three parts, each defined by Praphimphan’s age and the location of the plot. The first part is devoted to Praphimphan’s early adult life in Thailand, and her studying and vacationing in Europe. The middle is devoted to Praphimphan’s returning to Thailand, but with a twist: she remains on the periphery on the Malay border and, after committing still more crime, goes into exile to Africa and Arabia. The last part concerns her recovery from insanity, her homecoming and her death. Each of these three parts, moreover, has its own distinctive themes. What follows is a necessarily brief summary of the way Luang Wichit has interwoven these themes with the three narrative stages of Praphimphan’s life.

I

The story of Praphimphan’s early adult life prepares her for a future of international adventure and militant feminism. As the dutiful daughter of a retired, minor government employee whose wealth is dwindling fast, Praphimphan first leads a traditional life. She soon shows her independence, however, by secretly learning how to shoot her father’s pistol and then, wanting to revenge a prank played on her father, by challenging Thongthet, the son of a local notable, to a duel. He does not accept, but does fall in love with this daring woman. Throughout the novel, men fall for her female charms and her physical beauty. And, amidst these feminine characteristics, Praphimphan also exhibits masculine identification marks—she likes to shoot, to challenge her tormentors to duels; she enjoys drinking coffee (not done by Thai women at that time); and is unforgiving of those who have wronged her. She can be a nurturing woman with her friends, but a vengeful executioner of her enemies.

Refusing Thongthet’s suit, she then moves away from home and takes a job in a factory. Like her becoming a legal aide later, this is a new opportunity for her generation of women. After Thongthet again dupes her father, he visits her to ask her to marry him. Pretending to fall for him, Praphimphan lures him into her bedroom and shoots him three times. She then convinces the police that he tried to rape her. In a Hobbesian twist, the weaker sex can kill the stronger when the man is blinded by love or lust.

Once more working as a housekeeper, Praphimphan must look after a family friend, Manote, who is recovering his health. While studying herbal medicine with Dr Gautier, a French doctor in Vietnam, Manote had fallen in love with Waenfa, the lovely daughter of another French doctor and his Laotian wife. Unfortunately for their love affair, Waenfa had ingested so much poison during her father’s medical experiments that she could not be his wife. When Manote kisses her anyway, he promptly falls into a coma. Here, Luang Wichit has created a female figure that is in all senses ‘poisonous’. The story of Manote and Waenfa describes the tension between love and passion, beauty and poison, modern and traditional medicine, and even Thailand and colonialism. Underlining this theme of the novel, Dr Gautier warns Manote about women:

All women are poisonous … They only differ in the kinds of poison they possess. Some are so poisonous that they kill us; some make us bankrupt; others make us their love slaves who can never be redeemed. Don’t forget that the sea of love is the deep chasm of death. If you slip and fall you will not survive.²²

One can equally argue that Waenfa is an expression of a longstanding misogynistic view of women as polluting and negating man’s inner strength. The Buddhist legend of Queen Jamathewi, written in 1570, telling the story of the founding of Lamphun in the 11th century is a good case in point. Queen Jamathewi promised to marry a powerful suitor if he succeeded in throwing his spear from a mountain top into her city. In one version of the story, the Queen tricked her suitor into wearing a hat she had given him smeared with her menstrual blood. The unclean blood drained the prince’s power and his spear fell short of its target. Menstrual blood is seen as unclean and debilitating by Thai men, even in modern Thailand.

Praphimphan promptly extends this theme by telling Manote that she is more dangerous than the poisonous Waenfa because she was willing to kill—and, indeed, she already had killed a man. It would be easy to kill someone she loves if that person betrays her love, she warns him:

Because I have never loved, love is sacred to me and must be worshipped. Before I admit to loving someone, I must think and rethink carefully. If I utter my love, I want that person to know that this is a grave matter. And the person whose love I accept will be courting danger.²³

In a concession to tradition, however, Luang Wichit has their respective parents forbid their marriage and arrange a marriage for each of them. Defiantly, the two lovers vow to keep loving each other despite their spouses: status and ‘face’, while still dominant in modern, democratic Thailand, can be ignored and subverted. However, Manote would become Praphimphan’s second victim. After luring him into her bedroom while her husband was away, she shoots him for not upholding his end of their bargain.²⁴

In a reverie later in the novel, we learn that just before Praphimphan decides to move with her father to live in the southern part of Thailand, a backwater, she disguises herself, lures her husband into a dark alley and executes him with her pistol. By the age of 22, Praphimphan has become a dangerous woman: of the four men who have loved her, she has killed three. She even confesses humorously to her lawyer, Atthapphit, one of the four men who is in love with her, that she has learned to be economical and not use more than two shots to kill her latest victim. She had emptied her gun when she shot her lover, Manote.

Instead of staying in the south of Thailand, her father tells her that he has received a large sum of money from Thaimchan and is taking Praphimphan to Europe to continue her studies.²⁵ In Singapore, Praphimphan encounters a 19-year-old Thai woman, Waewta, who asks to become her servant. Telling Praphimphan her life story, Waewta reveals that she is a poor villager who made a living selling seaweed, and that she, too, has been involved in a murder. Waewta is thus a younger version of Praphimphan. Together, they go off to explore Europe as a pair of kindred souls.²⁶

The two women go off to study in Europe, something that had been nearly exclusively the prerogative of Thai men. That tradition continues, for their male friend Songwut accompanies them, but their journey clearly represents modern female emancipation. What this emancipation consists of is rather less clear, however: Luang Wichit is vague about their course of study. It is almost as though the Thai women are in Europe to learn English and to see the world. The experience was a kind of ‘finishing school’ for them.

Songwut’s role is also representative: he shows that the Thai are the equal of Europeans. Far from being unmistakably Thai, he is assumed to be a Persian prince! He is tall, smart, plays tennis well and is a superb dancer. Most importantly, he is a good speaker of English. He even has a brief affair with an older woman, a wayward Countess.

Perhaps because this ‘prince’ is so sympathique, the Countess unburdens herself on the nature of women, suggesting that pronouncements about gender are universal and not just Thai or European. The Countess makes a series of observations about the nature of women and their relationship to men, especially husbands. She says emphatically that women are by nature verbal beings who need to have a good and sympathetic listener. Women do not want to be alone but want to be loved and appreciated. At one point she says:

Women do not want anything more than to be considered human beings. Women do not want equal rights to men. All they ask is to be allowed to have a life and the right to think for themselves.²⁷

She laments the fact that women are treated like pets and that men think that all they have to do is to provide women with a nice house, with food, money and clothing. Women are expected to act like song birds in a gilded cage and never to escape into the wider world to enjoy themselves. But most women end up sacrificing their bodies out of duty to their husbands, which is no different than being raped. Men should not be so cruel. Husbands and wives should be friends and equal partners, and it is the duty of husbands to listen to what their wives have to say. If not, wives would seek friendship elsewhere. It is important to listen to women who are, by nature, worriers. Men think logically in terms of cause and effect, but women act on instinct without concern for consequences. Women are not rational beings but emotional ones. However, it is most important for men to forgive women for what appears to be irrational.²⁸ Traditional (if not, perhaps, universal) as these assertions are, they have almost nothing to do with the way Praphimphan acts in this novel. They instead serve as a muted counterpoint, implicitly contrasting the traditionally passive role of Thai women with the far more compelling actions of Praphimphan.

This first part of the novel ends with a transition that frees Songwut from his sworn obligation to Praphimphan. After failing to win Praphimphan, Songwut falls in love with a half-German Gypsy, Salome, who is soon given a new Thai name, Khomkham (‘Sharp and witty’). In short order, she finds a Thai-language text in Rome and learns the language. Luang Wichit’s Thai readers, of course, had no idea that this is preposterous; they presumably believed that Thailand must be an important country and that foreigners would want to study Thai. By this device, Luang Wichit raised Thai to the level of French, Spanish, German and English. By learning the language of her new lover, Khomkham leaves behind her identity of Salome and becomes Thai. Believing that her husband still loved Praphimphan, she runs away, becomes sick and dies. Her ‘death’—by leaping into a gorge in the mountains—and ‘resurrection’—once she knows that Songwut loves her, she comes back to life—is symbolic: she dies a Gypsy and is reborn a Thai.²⁹ Later, she even teaches her son Thai, a point the more telling because there is no real need to do so: she has left her Thai husband and has been reunited with her German father and they are living in South Africa. A woman can become Thai, but, as we shall notice later, a man cannot.

II

The middle of the novel concerns Praphimphan’s returning to Thailand to live in a village near the Malay border and, after she commits still more crimes, her going into exile to Africa and Arabia. While living in the south in Waewta’s village and learning to become a writer, her father tries to make her marry her first cousin, Chuwong, who had recently divorced. Instead of doing so, Praphimphan befriends his ex-wife, Phuangrak, and they become good friends. Their friendship confirms the idea of female solidarity, especially among Thai women. When Phuangrak asks her if she can tell Praphimphan her life story when they first met, for example, Praphimphan answers:

Thais do not have to stand on ceremony like the farang Westerners, we are friends belonging to the same race and same nation [phuen ruam chat ruam prathet]. Also as friends of the same gender [phuen ruam phet], we can easily get to know each other.³⁰

This particular episode confirms Luang Wichit’s intention of creating gender solidarity among Thai women, and that this new solidarity should liberate women from the traditional self-identity that is tied to the family and to the male; now she can, as a separate entity, bond with other females.

Being liberated, however, does not mean that the traditional concern for the family is altered. As Songwut had earlier reconciled the estranged Countess and Count, so here Praphimphan reconciles Phuangrak with her divorced husband. Luang Wichit still believed that the family is important and should be kept together, even in the face of the new tensions created by modernity.³¹

Set off against this reconciliation is the adultery of Waewta, married now to Khwan, the local farmer whose father she murdered before setting off to study in Europe. Despite being warned by Praphimphan, Waewta begins an affair with Sirisin, a friend of Songwut’s who has just returned from Europe, where he had received a doctorate in economics. Six days later, Sirisin is dead, killed by the jealous husband. Reprimanding Khwan for spying on his wife (but not, incidentally, for murdering her lover), Praphimphan reunites Khwan and Waewta, persuading them to promise that they will remain faithful to each other. This is the third time in the novel that a family is kept together or brought back together.

Unfortunately, the police correctly suspect that Praphimphan has murdered Khwan’s chauffeur, his accomplice in the murder of Sirisin, so Praphimphan must flee Thailand yet again. Sailing solo east towards the Nicobar Islands, she encounters a storm. Lashing herself to the mast as the storms engulfs her small sailboat, she loses consciousness.

When she comes to, she finds herself in a large ship owned and captained by a nationalist, Supharat, a Mon-Malay gun runner from Tavoy, once claimed by Thailand. He told her he had seen her in Europe but was unable to introduce himself: he felt that, as a British colonial subject, he would be shunned by Asians who came from independent countries.³² Praphimphan, of course, promptly replies that this distinction means nothing to her. Fellow Asians and nationalists are natural friends to the Thai whose country has never been colonised.

When they go ashore in Tavoy after the weapons are unloaded, Praphimphan and Supharat are quickly spotted by the police. Rather than surrender, they fire back as they make their escape by boat. This action resonates with Luang Wichit’s earlier plays in which Thai women take up the sword to fight against foreign oppressors. Here, of course, swords are replaced by pistols, a modern weapon. Although Supharat is a ‘good’ nationalist, he is not Thai, a factor that weighs with Praphimphan when he too falls in love with her. In contrast to Khomkham, a woman who became ‘Thai’ because she learned to speak Thai and her son spoke Thai, the best that Supharat can be is someone who can act like a Thai. As a man, he cannot become Thai.³³

Praphimphan and Supharat make good their escape, landing in Africa, where they are greeted by Songwut and Khomkham, now reunited.³⁴ After Supharat departs for Lorenzo Marguez, Praphimphan meets a good friend of Songwut, an Arab named Muni (a word similar to the Thai for ‘sage’ or ‘monk’). He, too, is a nationalist fighting the authorities. After the (predictable) running gun battle, Praphimphan and Muni escape to a hidden valley, where they take control of the tiny kingdom of Senabad. The new queen of this kingdom is none other than Waenfa, the poisonous woman (in a wonderful moment, Waenfa’s worthiness is revealed during the coronation ceremony when a poisonous snake bites her, and it dies). Praphimphan, the poisonous woman by choice, and Waenfa, the poisonous woman by nature, soon become good friends.

Praphimphan is in her element in this part of the novel: she not only is still the dangerous pistolera but the power behind the throne. The monarchy is indeed benevolent. The new rulers proceed to find ways to systematically exploit the valley’s natural resources, such as gold and diamonds. New houses and roads are built for the people. To help with the mining and the extraction of gold and diamond, Praphimphan brings in Songwut, Khomkham and her father, who is an expert on diamond mines. They are soon joined by Supharat. Praphimphan also learns that her protégé Waewta had divorced her jealous husband Khwan. She, too, shows up in Senabad. In effect, Praphimphan has her whole ‘gang’ with her for this adventure. Waewta shows up with a writer by the name of Niphon. Niphon was educated in France and England. He had heard of Praphimphan and wanted to write about her adventures. No sooner has he met her than he, too, falls under her spell.

In this section, Luang Wichit’s imagination takes flight. He writes about how a new dynasty is formed—rituals, myths and violence. It is not clear whether he is a royalist or a democrat. Although Luang Wichit has just created a new state from scratch, this state is a monarchy in which everyone speaks to the queen in the Thai sacred royal language. But Waewta is not even Thai; she is half Lao and half French. Nevertheless, this section also shows Luang Wichit’s progressive thinking: a woman can be queen, which thereby questions whether gender should be an issue in Thai palatine law governing succession to the throne. The author also justifies exploitation by the state and its new rulers. He suggests that no new dynasty or regime can function if it does not engage in some sort of plunder that would fill the coffers of the new regime; he also suggests the ruler should also keep some of the new-found wealth. Money is needed for government or for the consolidation of a new leadership.

Such pragmatism seems to have been carried out by Thai political leaders like Police General Phao Sriyanon and Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat in the mid-1950s. The former traded in opium, while his rival skimmed money from the Lottery Bureau.³⁵ Luang Wichit also writes about different forms of succession in this section—usurpation of the throne through force, coup d’état by a military group, and the assumption of political leadership through the invocation of god’s will. Each new dynasty must amass as much wealth as possible not just for itself, but so that its friends and family will also be rich so that they can help the people. In the mythical kingdom of Senabad, Waewta was at first reluctant to do this, but Praphimphan insisted that it was fine because, unlike other dynasties, the new ruler did not make the people slaves, and thus what they were doing was for the good of the people. Such ideas reflect the paternalism so common in many of Luang Wichit’s political writings.

Luang Wichit also includes international politics in the novel. Implausible as it may seem, Praphimphan and Muni travel to Geneva to a meeting of the League of Nations to lobby for recognition of the small kingdom and its new queen. This attempt, of course, fails because, with only 300 people, their principality was much smaller than others such as Luxembourg, Monaco or Liechtenstein. More importantly, the proposed kingdom is located in the territory of a major colonial power. To make his readers think that Thailand was an important international player, Luang Wichit gives the Thai ambassador more international clout than is plausible. But the story highlights the author’s fascination with diplomacy and Thailand’s role in international politics.

Muni eventually convinces Praphimphan to love him, but she cannot agree to marry him: he is not Thai, and, as a male, he could never become Thai. Only the male blood line is important to the determination of race. The female can be Thai because she will give birth to children who are Thai through the blood of their father (jus sanguini). Always the dangerous woman, Praphimphan unintentionally kills Muni while she is asleep: dreaming she was being assaulted by Thongthet, the first man she shot, she takes out her pistol and shoots him in the chest, only to awaken and find that she has shot Muni instead.

This deadly accident is soon followed by the apparition of her father’s spirit, a sign to her that he has died, and Praphimphan suffers a nervous breakdown.

III

When Praphimphan returns to consciousness, it is four years later, and she is in Austria. She, too, has been reborn: during her sleep, none other than Dr Freud has administered a drug to her; she tells him all, and she wakes up cured from her mental agony. Interestingly, her behaviour does not alter: a nurse who has been cruel to her is found dead in a bathtub, and the circumstances strongly suggest that Praphimphan drowned her. She is also still eager to help others in illegal and even immoral acts that mete out justice to those who have wronged her or those close to her.³⁶

She finally decides to marry, but her choice falls not on a virile male like Supharat or Muni but on a struggling writer, Niphon. The pen may well be mightier than the sword, but Niphon’s proposal is not even romantic: he wants to be a great writer and make the world recognise the beauty of Thai literature, and since every man must have a good woman behind him, he asks her to be this woman. A good union, he says, would be the union of two good friends.

Characteristically, Praphimphan responds to Niphon’s letter by asking practical questions, as well. She wonders why he would want to marry a middle-aged woman who is 33 years old, a woman who has been with two men, whose name is on the lips of tens and hundreds of thousands of people, and someone who has once lost her mind. She warns Niphon that at 33, it may be difficult for her to give him children, and that perhaps her insanity could be passed on to their children.

Again, in an inversion of conventional right and wrong, the author makes Niphon praise Praphimphan for setting a good example for other women, for representing the model woman. Niphon tells Praphimphan that:

on face value, your life may appear to be difficult and soiled as you say. But if we were to examine it closely, having had two husbands is not that unusual for women. And after your divorce these past ten years, you have preserved your dignity and have not strayed. The other things that you did, even though they were evil, were acts that were to seek justice for yourself and for others. Your life is a life of struggle worthy of praise. Praphimphan is a name that is on the lips of tens and hundreds of thousands of people. But they do not speak of your name in negative ways. They see Praphimphan as the model woman. Heaven has created you to become a model for all women, an example of how women should face life.³⁷

Luang Wichit’s aim to present a radical model of the modern Thai woman could scarcely be more explicit.

After their wedding, Praphimphan allows Niphon to embrace her. She even turns her cheek to let him kiss her and allows him to kiss her passionately on the lips. She feels the ‘venom of love’ (phit rak) enter her body and thinks about the venom of death that coursed through Waenfa’s veins. Love can be so sweet and so deadly. In the end, succumbing to the occasion, she implores Niphon:

kiss me, make love to me. Your kiss will erase the fact that I have been kissed before. Embrace me tightly so I can forget past embraces. Caress me all over so I can cleanse my body of past blemishes. What remains is my pure self that belongs only to you.³⁸

What Freud could not do, the writer-lover-husband Niphon can: she is now purified, cleansed by transcendent love.³⁹

But, in almost karmic retribution, her husband comes down with incurable tuberculosis and, tragically, their daughter is born deaf. Niphon hangs himself out of grief. Praphimphan soon sinks into another depression. She laments that the life of a girl or woman is represented by the dismissive saying di mueankan or ‘that’s alright’—an acknowledgement that is really a sign of resignation or acceptance of one’s fate. The birth of a deaf daughter was only di mueankan. This remark was what Rama VI said on his death bed when he was shown his only child. His only words after learning that he had sired a daughter was di mueankan. Such is the fate of traditional girls and of women.

In an effort to find the blossom of the toey plant to cure her daughter’s deafness, Praphimphan and Waenfa embark on a Thelma and Louise adventure. The two women proceed to paddle a small canoe down the Danube in an expedition to search for the elusive plant.⁴⁰ There, some men also prospecting for medicinal plants make the mistake of trying to scare them away. Praphimphan promptly shoots two of them in the leg, after which the men tell her where the plant can be found. Their adventurous trip is exhilarating, liberating and empowering.

When the two women reach Hungary, immigration officers ask about their nationality. Waewta endears herself to Praphimphan when she tells the officers that she is ‘Thai’ and not ‘Laotian’. This assertion reflects the author’s Pan-Thai aspirations that emerged prior to the Second World War. It also emphasises the author’s jingoism: being Thai is better than being Laotian, an inferior people and nation. It is also interesting that the author asserts that Hungarians consider themselves Asian—pushing the scope of Pan-Asianism rather dramatically. Luang Wichit describes how happy the immigration officers were to meet the two Thai women who were fellow ‘Asians’.

After discovering the herb and curing her daughter’s deafness, Praphimphan decides to return to Thailand to make peace with her enemies and to cremate her father—very Buddhist motivations. She cremates her father, but she fails to placate the nephew of her godparents and his greedy wife. They betray her to the authorities who come to arrest her for the murder of Khwan’s chauffeur. Instead of giving up, or allowing Khwan to take the blame for the murder, Praphimphan becomes once more the dangerous woman: she sneaks out of her hideout and murders her two tormentors. In the ensuing gun battle, she is taken out in the style of Bonnie and Clyde, Khwan dead at her side.

So, in the end, Praphimphan cannot escape punishment from the law and dies a violent death. But before the final shootout, it is still unclear whether she will surrender or resist. Her fate is finally sealed when she becomes wounded. Praphimphan reacts in an uncharacteristically non-feminine way. She calls out to Khwan, probably loud enough for the police to hear, that, as a wounded sua (literally ‘tiger’, but in this usage it refers to men who are hardened bandits or outlaws), (s)he must fight to the death. Two questions are raised here: ‘Why must a woman be militant and dangerous in modern society?’ and ‘why is she breaking the law often and with impunity?’

Given the framework of Thai nationalism and its wars of liberation, Luang Wichit was able to justify the militant feminism that was incorporated into his nationalistic dramas. In those plays, he portrayed Thai women as wives whose loyalty extended beyond domesticity to serving their husbands in war by fighting alongside them. A popular reference to Thai women as the rear legs to the man’s front legs of the elephant evokes images of elephants in war time, and the secondary role of women. Nevertheless, Thai historiography, and especially that of Luang Wichit, makes ‘space’ for women in the national narrative. But in Huang rak haew luk, the martial characteristic of Thai women takes on a different trajectory. Leaving Thailand, both voluntarily and involuntarily, symbolises a separation from the state, a liberation of women from traditional roles. Praphimphan, like other Thai heroines before her, fights alongside freedom fighters but, in this case, without explicitly defining that fight in the framework of Thai nationalism. The modern Thai woman has become a free agent who can fight for her own causes.

Luang Wichit also seems to suggest that, in entering the modern society, women have to be vigilant in protecting themselves, even if it meant breaking the law. In the novel, Praphimphan and the other women (and here the author includes Western women to emphasise the universality of their cause) take the law into their own hands to punish predatory men, men who have humiliated them, and men who have not honoured their words. It is as if to say modern society lacks the mechanisms to protect women after the erosion of traditional norms of gender relations that afforded more respect to women as idealised mothers, sisters and wives.

The author’s disdain or distrust of the legal system pervades this novel. From the first episode to the last, Luang Wichit depicts the law in a bad light. The story begins with the revelation that Atthapphit had concealed incriminating evidence that would have convicted Praphimphan for murder. The novel also describes how Songwut, also another lawyer, used blackmail against his own client to help his father-in-law win back a diamond mine in South Africa. In another example, Praphimphan advises her landlord not to trust the law and lawyers but that they should mete out their own punishment for the man who had raped the landlord’s daughter. And finally, on her last trip to Thailand, Praphimphan accidentally bumps into the district officer, now a provincial governor, who, many years ago, had led the police to apprehend her for killing Khwan’s driver. Instead of informing the police, the governor carries on a friendly chat with Praphimphan and even light-heartedly asks her not to commit murder again. As a man, he, too, admires the dangerous woman. But the law does not make room for personal admiration or judgements of morality. This negative opinion of the legal system is most likely the result of Luang Wichit’s own experience with the legal system. Perhaps he was still smarting from what, to him, must have been an unjust trial for war crimes. His only mistake was that he had picked the wrong side to win the Second World War.

Therefore, instead of treating Praphimphan like a dangerous criminal finally brought to justice, Luang Wichit uses her eulogy to valorise her as a woman of the people, a woman who was compassionate but was dealt a bad hand. Recalling Niphon’s characterisation of Praphimphan as the model woman, Atthapphit’s eulogy embeds within the novel itself the unbounded seriality of the dangerous woman:

Praphimphan belongs to you. She served you and the public by being the exemplar of a person who struggled with life. Her fight began when she took her first step and she fought until her last breath. Praphimphan is not a mean-spirited woman. In fact, she is a person with a good heart who is always ready to make sacrifices for her friends. She is loyal and grateful to those who helped her, but she is vengeful when she is crossed. She stood for justice and would not harm anyone who did not strike at her first. Even though the curtain that falls on the drama of her life is black, the color of mourning and grief, her shining name will remain forever on the lips of tens of thousands of people. And if one were to write about her life, it would take thousands of pages to do it justice.⁴¹

Of course, Luang Wichit has indeed taken over 1,000 pages to do her life justice. Praphimphan is the model of the modern Thai female who, while assenting to the traditional view of the female as one that must be protected and forgiven by the male, is also ready to punish those who are unkind to her or who do not keep their promises of love. She values the family, male fidelity, female friendship, and bravery. She is a leader, a world traveller, a freedom fighter, a founder of a nation, a soldier, an obedient daughter, a passionate lover, a wife, a loyal friend, a patron, a feminist and an executioner. Interweaving the themes of modernity, femininity, violence and nationalism on an international scale, Luang Wichit Wathakan glorifies in Huang rak haew luk a new role for the modern Thai woman. Neither good nor bad, Madonna nor whore, hers is a role of nearly boundless possibilities: the dangerous woman.

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