Jaidee remembers meeting and courting his wife. Then he goes to the Ministry to make an apology for being a thieving, destructive jackass. The punishment is harsher than I expected but actually more in line with real-life consequences. He did, after all, accept bribes (even if he didn't keep his end of the bargain) and destroy private property. (He also beats private citizens up.) Most of the cargo he torched was legit. He's sentenced to nine years doing penance as a monk while his children are relegated to Ministry care.
The most appalling facet of his public apology? Foreigners are present.
"Foreigners inside the Ministry compound. Traders and factory owners and Japanese, sunburned sweating stinking creatures, invading the Ministry's most sacred place." P.142.
The horrors! And yet I really think we're supposed to like this guy. Honestly, I see what he's trying to do but when it's offensive with one set of races it doesn't magically become okay when you flip things. At least I hope he's trying something that intelligent rather than trying to accurately portray Thai people because that would just be offensive. I mean it's already offensive but...Let's move on.
Chapter 14:
The aftermath of Jaidee's demotion from Anderson's POV. The foreigners who lost cargo have been paid reparations and one of them acts like a drunk idiot. Anderson talks with Carlyle and meets with Trade Minister Akkarat. Akkarat has a rivalry with Jaidee's boss, Pracha. Anderson and Akkarat talk about a possible deal: support from Anderson's company in exchange for samples from Thailand's genetic seed bank.
"Your people have tried to destroy mine for the last five hundred years."
"Ever since your first missionaries landed on our shores, you have always sought to destroy us. During the old Expansion your kind tried to take every part of us. Chopping off the arms and legs of our country...With the Contraction, your worshipped global economy left us starving and over-specialized." P.150.
Somebody, either Akkarat or Paulie, has a very tenuous grasp on history and logic. This is just...silly. He's conflating Americans with all Westerners which is a very simplistic and unfair way of viewing things. Not all Americans have a white, Christian, European background and we certainly have nothing to do with anything that the Europeans did. Also, I missed the part where our country has done bad things to Thailand or forced them to specialize. Agency, remember? God forbid countries be held accountable for their own decisions. I mean, somebody pull out the tiny violin. And again, the imputation that free trade is evil. WTF?
Okay. I also read Andrea Camillieri's The Snack Thief. Montalbano gets a case where a man is knifed in the elevator of his apartment and this leads him to a shooting on a fishing boat, a Tunisian cleaning woman and her four year old son. The plot was a bit confusing but at the end there's one of those "Let me sum up" speeches which helps immensely.
Right now I'm reading Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas. I read The Chalk Circle Man and enjoyed it once I realized it was almost a parody of police procedurals. The main character Adamsberg relies more on intuition than interviews or forensics. He lets others handle that. There is much more philosophizing and musing on the meaning of life and things but it's engrossing all the same. In both books the crime starts with odd but non-criminal things that disturb Adamsberg enough to look into them. Inevitably they both turn into something deadly. The book I'm reading now has a guy pretending he's releasing the plague on Paris, complete with disturbing messages and preventative symbols painted on doors.
It's a good thing that Vargas was on my list of authors to read before I read Patrick Anderson's review of her most recent book to be translated into English. Here's what he said: "Although Vargas is hugely popular in Europe, she remains largely unknown in the United States, a discrepancy I must attribute to the high degree of intelligence, sophistication and perversity that informs her fiction."
Lines like this reveal a hell of a lot more about the people who write them than about the subject of the sentence. Pat is either trying to shame people into reading the book by telling them they're too dumb to like it or he's congratulating himself and others who already read the books for being smart enough to appreciate them. The first isn't going to work. I don't know why critics seem to think that telling people they're stupid heathens will get them to read things the critics like but it doesn't allow for personal taste. "You don't like it? Well, I guess you just didn't understand." *Sigh* I encountered this attitude so much during the time I worked in the museum that I'm immune to it now. It's silly and childish. There's a difference between understanding something and liking it. If someone doesn't like something you enjoy it isn't a personal attack on you. And really, you don't need other people's confirmation that a book or work of art really is good before you enjoy it. Telling people they aren't intelligent if they don't like something is mean-spirited.
The second reason he could have included that sentence can be summed up by a line from The Princess Bride: "Yes, you're very smart, now shut up."
(I was always amused when tourists would ask me if I "got" Mark Rothko. What they were really asking me was, "Is it all right if I don't like Rothko?" I would explain Rothko's color fields as best I could with the disclaimer that I don't personally like them. People sometimes need reassurance that they aren't philistines if they don't like something considered great. Acting all snobbish about it will just push people away since they won't want to reveal themselves to disdain and then they have no incentive to learn anything new since the work will just bring feelings of shame and embarrassment.)
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