Questioning the Family in an Aging Authoritarian Society: HRH Maha Chakri Sirindhorn’s Translations of 6 Chinese Feminist Authors, 2013–2016

• In Event: 162. Haunting Femininity and Postcolonial Imaginations

Abstract

In post-Cold War Thailand, feminist literature is a genre that has failed miserably to take off. Leading literary figures in the depressingly limited circle of women’s novels are almost without exception right-wing conservatives. The progressive left appeared to have failed monumentally in establishing any sort of feminist narrative to profess as its own. Even among the vast body of translated Chinese socialist literature the Thai left had produced since the earliest decades of the 20th century, hardly any significant pieces of women’s literature could be found. Then, in the midst of increasingly conservative gender politics under the military dictatorship, comes a cluster of radically feminist fictional works translated from Chinese by none other than HRH Maha Chakri Sirindhorn. These works pose radical questions towards the traditional family system and the heteronormative romantic ideals of marriage. Despite the rising anxiety of the ruling elite concerning Thailand’s unavoidable shift towards the aging society, these novels question the virtues of marriage and the injustice women suffer from succumbing to the social norms of becoming wives and mothers. They are among the most radically feminist narratives to appear in the Thai language. Yet, due to the highly established position of the translator, the feminist messages in these works have been almost completely muted. They are presented and marketed instead as brilliant linguistic crafts of the master translator and as further evidences of the harmoniously successful cultural diplomacy between the authoritarian Thai state and the increasing hegemonic People’s Republic of China.

Author

• Wasana Wongsurawat, Chulalongkorn University