GHOSTS OF SILOM

徐盈盈徐盈盈

Gravekeeper Aon guesses the ghosts left when the offices and condominiums came to Silom Road.

Uncle Aon, who grew up in a green lodge in the Hakka cemetery grounds, recalls a childhood peppered with tales of supernatural encounters: A rickshaw driver who picked up a passenger at the cemetery, drove halfway down the alley, and turned around to an empty seat. “You don’t hear stuff like that anymore,” he says. “The ghosts have probably been scared off by all the lights.”

The sprawling patchwork of Hakka, Hokkien, and Peranakan Chinese cemeteries built on the southern outskirts of Bangkok used to be known as the Alley of Graves. Today, rechristened Silom Alley 9, the hallowed grounds are gradually being swallowed up by the fast-developing commercial heart of Bangkok.

Twenty years ago, with the construction of the city’s Skytrain to nearby Chong Nonsi station, the government converted one rai (1,600 square meters) of the Hakka cemetery’s land to lay the tracks, shrinking it from about 400 to 200 graves. The Hakka Association, which administers the graveyard, helped families relocate their tombs to another cemetery in the outlying provinces, an hour’s drive out of the city.

The spike in the neighborhood’s real estate values, though, was irreversible. Once connected to the city’s ultramodern mass transit system, the hallmarks of modern convenience and lifestyle followed seamlessly. Silom Road now sports a 7-11 on every corner, a café-bar selling chia seed milkshakes, and even a Crossfit gym. “Before the Skytrain was built here, the price of land was 800,000 baht per wa [four square meters],” Uncle Aon estimates. “Now, it’s over 3 million.”

At the eastern edge of the cemetery, 77 floors of glass and steel soar above

stones carved with the ancestral towns of the deceased. Unveiled in 2016, the King Power Mahanakhon Tower contains hotels, offices, and 200 units of Ritz-carlton Residences priced up to 17 million USD per unit.

The Alley of Graves hosted active cemeteries until 1961, the year the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority banned burials within city limits. Now, completely encircled by buildings, Silom’s cemeteries see most of their traffic bound for the makeshift parking spaces near the gates. Uncle Aon wears a fanny pack to collect parking fees, maintaining a list of license plate numbers on a whiteboard; one of the overgrown tombs fronting a car bumper is dated “Year Five of the Republic of China,” or 1916.

These cemeteries accommodated a boom in Chinese migration to Thailand, then known as the Kingdom of Siam, in the 19th and 20th centuries. Driven to the southern seas by waves of famine and political turmoil, the desperate and adventurous traveled for seven days and seven nights by steamship to seek a new life. Conditions onboard were sometimes critical, with 4,000 crammed onto a ship meant for 1,000. The Chinese population in Siam jumped from 230,000 to 792,000 between 1825 and 1910.

Siam was considerably more welcoming to migrants than colonial Malaya and Indonesia, whose segregationist policies for the Chinese created a sharp sense of “otherness” that persists to this day. Siam’s Chinese enjoyed freedom of movement throughout the kingdom, and intermarried with locals at all social levels, from wage workers to royalty. Today, some estimates claim that 40 percent of Thai nationals have some Chinese blood.

Early Chinese migrants retained strong regional identities. The Hakka, Hokkien, Peranakan, Hailam, and Cantonese opened their own hometown associations, newspapers, and schools. However, in 1938, a rightwing government renamed Siam as Thailand, the “Land of Thais,” and passed policies to homogenize national identity. Newspapers were shuttered, school curriculums modified, and non-thai cultural activities restricted. Chinese surnames were embedded into Thai ones—tang became Sritangwatanakul, Lim became Limthongkul.

Despite lingering suspicions over their loyalties, many Thai-chinese rose to political and economic power. In the Hakka cemetery, Uncle Aon points out interred members of well-known Chinese-thai families who founded Bangkok Bank, the IT company Yip In Tsoi, and the handcrafted leather producer Sri Bhan Jacob.

The irony is that many assimilated so well into Thai society that their grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren no longer feel that they are Chinese at all. Many third, fourth, and fifth-generation descendants of immigrants are visibly and linguistically indistinguishable from their Thai peers, and feel no pressure to perpetuate Chinese traditions except at the behest of their families.

Sulak Sivaraksa, a Thai social critic, has written: “Siam is the only country where a Chinese can become king. It is also the only country where he loses his identity.”

I

ne of Pornchai Sereemongkonpol’s earliest and happiest memories was decorating his grandparents’ tombs with glitter and ribbons for Qingming.

A third-generation Thai of Teochew descent, Pornchai spent some of his childhood living in a shop-house on Charoenkrung Road, where his grandfather ran the family plastic business. The house, Pornchai joked, was “extra haunted.” In addition to a Buddhist shrine, the family had two red altars to Chinese deities. “I guess my mother was very busy, since she did both Buddhist and Chinese holidays,” he laughs.

For Chinese holidays, Pornchai’s mother would set an elaborate meal on the table with their best utensils. “She told me the empty chairs were for my grandparents, and it was like, okay.” After a while, the untouched dishes for the ancestors went back into the refrigerator, then back onto the table at dinner for the family to eat. “It was kind of weird,” Pornchai chuckles.

Now in his 30s, Pornchai still sweeps his grandparents’ graves every year with his family. To prepare, he visits old Chinese shops and laughs at the innovative paper offerings: Not just fake gold bars or bills with over a dozen zeroes, but also paper iphones, treadmills, and condos with live-in maids. He wonders whether the inflation is bad up there, or if his ancestors really need a gym in the afterlife.

“There are many shades of being Thai Chinese,” he explains. “The first ‘self ’ is being a son to my parents. But as I grow older, there is a second self who is curious, reads a lot, is always learning, and questions my beliefs and traditions.”

“I don’t think I would raise my kids the same way,” says Pornchai. “The objects and rituals aren’t what make you Chinese. It’s the attitude and values, like working hard, respecting your elders, and being a go-getter.”

A

When a video of Americans thronging a Los Angeles bakery for “White Rabbit Candy” ice cream surfaced on Chinese social media in March, few paid attention to cries of copyright infringement by the Chinese manufacturer of the iconic candy the dessert was based on.

Instead, the top comments on Weibo asked “When can we get this in China?”—with the consensus being that Shanghai-based Guan Sheng Yuan (GSY) Group deserved what it got for failing to properly capitalize on the popularity of their treat. In fact, in 2015, a Liaoning ice-cream maker had similarly pooh-poohed GSY’S objections to its bestselling line of creamsicles, which aped the White Rabbit name and iconic tri

color packaging, insisting they cannot copy a product that doesn’t exist. “If White Rabbit Candy thinks it’s copyright infringement, they can take us to court,” the ice cream’s distributor crowed to the Beijing Youth Daily

Since acquiring the White Rabbit brand in 1997, GSY had been slow to wake up to the cultural impact of the popular sweet until recently. To celebrate the candy’s 60th anniversary in February, official White Rabbit-brand gift boxes made an appearance at New York Fashion Week, and an exhibition of retro candy ads, photography, and licensed merchandize began touring China’s major cities, evoking the themes of childhood, family, and Chinese New Year that are intrinsically linked to the fortunes of the domestic candy market.

The earliest Chinese sweets were believed to have been made with malt sugar, with a passage in the 3,000-yearold Classic of Songs rhapsodizing the vegetables grown in the fertile Zhou dynasty soil as tasting “like malt.” Maltose was also behind one of China’s oldest candy-related rituals: The zao or guandong candy of the Kitchen God, whose cult had come into being by the third century CE. The Baopuzi, a Daoist scripture of that era, states that “on the night of the dark moon, the Kitchen God confesses the sins of people to the heavens,” giving rise to a custom where families left offerings of malt candy at this deity’s altar in order to sweeten his words (or stick his jaws together) before the Lunar New Year.

Cane sugar had arrived by the 4th century BCE, though it was initially processed into a syrup, and was not recorded in powdered form until the Eastern Han dynasty (25 – 220). This invention was responsible for another New Year delicacy, the candied fruit, and by the Tang dynasty (618 – 907), there were records describing workshops in today’s Sichuan which cooked the sugar itself into crystals to be consumed as a snack.

Handmade candy workshops continued to flourish into the Yuan dynasty (1206 – 1368), during which Marco Polo described the Khan as being particularly fond of candy from Longxi, today’s Fujian province. Emperors also had exclusive rights to another sugary delicacy—dragon’s beard candy, an allegedly 2,000-yearold treat made of hand-pulled strands of wispy maltose resembling its namesake.

During the Ming dynasty (1368 – 1644), China’s disparate candymaking traditions coalesced in the rise of the “prosperity box” (全盒), an octagonal dish containing watermelon seeds, dried fruits, and various sugary treats to be offered to guests who would visit the family each day of the festival. Each item in the box—from candied orange to candied water chestnut to candied wintermelon—was homophonous of a different type of plenty for the new year, most pertaining to riches and descendants. The sweet taste was supposed to herald happiness to come, hence the other use of sugary treats as a traditional wedding favor.

In the difficult early decades of the PRC, the New Year candy took on new significance as a rare treat in a time of deprivation, and generations grew up with memories of counting down to the only days of the year when they were allowed to eat sweets (aside from the occasional wedding).

In 1959, Shanghai’s ABC Candy factory, which had been nationalized earlier in the decade, began rebranding its signature “milk candies” under the name White Rabbit to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the PRC’S founding. A toffee (supposedly based on a British recipe) made with imported milk powder and caramelized white sugar, White Rabbits were hand-made at the time, and standing in long lines was required to obtain a half-kilogram of the maximum 800 kilograms that the Shanghai factory could produce per day.

“Lots of people from out-of-province used connections to get the product in Shanghai,” Lu Xiuqin, an exworker, recalled to Shanghai’s Xinmin Evening News. “There wasn’t a single

White Rabbit manufactured that wasn’t sold.” (The treat was also presented by Premier Zhou Enlai to US President Richard Nixon on the latter’s visit in 1972).

The 1960s saw a rise in the mechanized production of hard candies, or tangguo (糖果), based mostly around the Yangtze River Delta. “Every year, my mother would have colleagues who’d go on work trips to Shanghai, and everyone would ask them to bring candy back,” Liu Yijiang, a native of Nanchang in southeastern China’s Jiangxi province, who is in his 50s, tells TWOC. “We were envious of kids with relatives in Shanghai who could get these treats easily.”

Other popular candies in the preReform era included salted plums, fruit-flavored tangguo and jellies, “sorghum” maltose jellies produced in Shandong, and “crispy candy” (酥心糖), featuring a flaky texture surrounding a hard center. These treats were sold by weight, with buyers often bringing up empty soy sauce containers to fill before the New Year—a task not usually entrusted to the children. “I would try to sneak the crispy candy meant for the guests, but I was always caught, because I would choke on the peanut dust coating it,” Liu recalls, laughing.

Branded candy saw a golden age after Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour in the early 90s, with the rise of brands like Jin Si Hou and Hsu Fu Chi, which manufactured chocolates and crispy candy respectively; the use of imported ingredients; and the arrival of Italian toffee-maker Alpenliebe in China in 1994. A growing trend in elaborate weddings also helped—according to Hsu Fu Chi, wedding candy accounted for as much as 70 percent of the domestic market in 2014.

Yet China’s candy consumption has never exceeded a tenth of the per-capita rate of developed countries, or a third the international average, according to the China National Food Industry Association. Moreover, the market has been contracting since 2015. While some suggest that Chinese simply have a traditional aversion for overly sweet foods, the China Council for Brand Development blames candy manufacturers for not developing new products, instead producing the same festive treats year after year—and relying on cheap prices to compete in the bulk market, while losing to more recognizable foreign brands preferred by millennial newlyweds.

Today, White Rabbit appears the best hope for Chinese candy to produce an icon of its own. As the recipe and even the packaging have remained mostly unchanged over the decades it enjoys nostalgic value not only within China, but among the diaspora. Licensed products, ranging from limited edition White Rabbit lattes at Pacific Coffee in 2017 to White Rabbit lip balm in 2018, are popular; the latter sold out of all 920 pieces within 30 seconds of going online on GSY’S Tmall store.

Yet even White Rabbit seems to prefer symbolism over its actual product. Before the 60 Year Anniversary Exhibition’s recent opening in Guangzhou, GSY’S Wechat account published a preview featuring White Rabbit-themed pillows, pencil cases, tote bags, and rabbit toys in claw machines; seemingly the only pictures missing were of the candy itself.

As chairman of the PAG Group, a Hong Kongbased private equity firm managing assets of over 30 billion USD, Shan Weijian’s present life is a far cry from his former job as a brick-maker in the Gobi Desert—and a subway construction

worker, farmer, mason, electrician, and barefoot doctor during China’s turbulent 1960s and 70s.

These latter experiences are the focus of Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America, published in February. In the Beijing native’s recollections of his life, the seeds of his meteoric rise in the global business world, as well as the lauded financial career in both the US and China, are said to have been planted in the unforgiving Gobi soils during the most economically disruptive years of revolution.

The book begins with a detailed account of how Shan, the child of government officials and star elementary-school student, becomes a farm laborer in Inner Mongolia’s Construction Army Corps, charged with the near-impossible task of growing crops in the desert.

In the process, there are descriptions of the young Shan watching his neighbors participate in the ecologically devastating anti-sparrows campaign, his family throwing away their goldfish out of fear that it would be considered bourgeois, and the makeshift underground air-raid shelters Shan builds with his platoon for a Soviet attack that never comes.

The reader witnesses the author’s personal growth as he becomes

increasingly disillusioned with the violent “struggle sessions” during the Cultural Revolution. However, compared with the typical tearjerking memoir of the era in the West, or the traumatic “scar literature” genre of 1970s China, Shan’s anecdotes are often more amusing than melodramatic, written in a methodical, no-frills prose that almost unintentionally highlights the absurdities of his situation. In one chapter, Shan’s platoon harvests a remote potato field, only for most of the produce to freeze and rot waiting for to be picked up by horse-drawn wagons (his platoon leader ironically remarks that the best way to preserve the potatoes would be to rebury them).

Later, having produced a mere fraction of the grain that a dozen farmers had harvested the previous year, the leader tells his 300 workers that “It was worth it if you considered that we were making ourselves socialist new men.”

Nevertheless, the harshness of Shan’s experiences can be at times difficult to read, especially the constant lack of food that vividly describes. One incident relates to the platoon stealing food from the villagers that they were supposed to be learning from.

The last quarter of the book charts Shan’s rise through the World Bank and US academia, told in chapters that begin with a quick summary of the domestic and foreign politics at certain points in his career. Bridging these two epochs are Shan’s descriptions of how, while in the Gobi, he devoured every textbook he could get his hands on.

These, the author claims, were the beginnings of his journey to eventually becoming one of the first Chinese students to study in the US after 1978’s reforms, earning his PHD at Berkeley under the supervision of future Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen (who also wrote the foreword of his memoir), before becoming assistant professor at Wharton Business School. His professional achievements since then have included landmark acquisitions of Korea First Bank and Shenzhen Development Bank.

Shan tells TWOC that the book aims to give voice to what he calls China’s “lost generation,” arguing, “Most people my age are not able to write down their stories, after being denied education for a decade. The number who can tell their stories in English is even fewer.”

Dozens of better-known memoirs about the Cultural Revolution contradict this statement, though Shan’s may indeed be the first from the financial world—and his unemotional, fact-based narrative reads almost like a business assessment of the era (indeed, some of the anecdotes are on the lengthy side, and the Asian Review of Books somewhat dubiously praised the book as “one of the most detailed” accounts of the Cultural Revolution).

To make the memoir even more accessible to his Western business associates, Shan incorporates plenty of dates and figures into his retelling of the events, and does not shy away from sensitive political topics. He does stay away from critiquing the current leadership, though denies there is anything political about this choice. “I chose this story about the Gobi because I feel as if this part of history is the most important time in my life,” he tells TWOC.

Instead, Shan presents his book as an alternative way that someone from his generation could come to terms with the Cultural Revolution, or even grow positively and learn from the experience. This is in contrast to many of his peers who were forced to “give up studying” during their equivalent of his Gobi years. “You see that a lot of them have lived in poverty ever since the Cultural Revolution,” he says, believing that most of his generation has not acquired “the knowledge or the skills to make a living in China’s reformed economy.”

Shan remains close with his fellow platoon members, many of whom now reside in Beijing, but notes that there is a divide. “When we are together, we just laugh as we reminisce about the past,” he smiles. “We rarely talk about what we are doing now. My world and theirs have become so different.” In the Gobi, he reminisces, “There weren’t many opportunities to think or plan about your future; you just did as you were told.”

The book’s epilogue has Shan returning to the Gobi in 2005 on a business trip, where he seeks out old haunts that purportedly “look the exact same as [they] did during the Cultural Revolution,” in spite of decades of economic development. Even in today’s China, reminders of the Cultural Revolution has remained potent for the generation that lived it—and so, apparently, has their desire to continue reliving the era in print.

SHAN’S ANECDOTES ARE MORE AMUSING THAN MELODRAMATIC, WRITTEN IN A NO-FRILLS PROSE THAT ALMOST UNINTENTIONALLY HIGHLIGHTS THE ABSURDITIES OF HIS SITUATION