ABSTRACT
Botans Letters from Thailand is a fictionalized account of a much more recent episode in the history of ethnic Chinese immigration to and then slow settlement in Thailand. Published in 1969, this epistolary novel was awarded the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) international prize for literature in 1970. The story is told through a series of letters written between 1945 and 1966 by a new Chinese arrival in Thailand back to his mother, who remained behind in China. In his letters, the protagonist, Tan Suang U, describes the process by which he begins to settle into his new life in Thailand. He writes of the many challenges that he faces in the course of a difficult journey of adaptation, one in which he slowly becomes assimilated to elements of Thai culture and society, even as he retained significant elements of his own Chinese identity. The two letters below illustrate precisely this tension between assimilating and maintaining an ethnic identity.
