Who is Chang Noi? [Part 1]

If you are a regular reader of the Nation's opinion pages, you may have noticed an regular columnist who goes by the psuedonym 'Chang Noi'.

I'm a big fan of his - to my mind, he's probably the best columnist writing in English about Thailand. Big names from the Nation stable like Sutthichai Yoon, Thepachai Yong or Pana Janviroj do regularly contribute hard-hitting editorials, but I say that none of them do so with the style and panache of Chang Noi.

A big contrast is that Chang Noi actually has a sense of humour. It can be at times playful and irreverent. See this piece he devoted to "The 'un-Thai' nipple crisis" (our version of Janet Jackson's Nipplegate last Superbowl):

The fashion show was meant to be spectacular, and the dress designed to be daring. That one of Methinee Luk-Ket’s breasts slipped out was, well, simple physics. The photographers did their job: they snapped it. The sensationalist press did its job: it sensationalised it. Now the Ministry of Culture wants to send police to fashion shows and tighten up legislation to prevent repetition of such “un-Thai” behaviour.

Or occasionally he lets lose with the big satire. See "The thoughts of Chairman Maew" and its sequals - "The thoughts of Chairman Maew, II" and "Chairman Maew's thoughts for 2005".

Even more, I love it when he gets 'serious' goes for some deep analysis. While the Nation editors I can imagine are knee-deep in the nitty-gritty their newspaper operations, with news stories coming in left and right, Chang Noi takes a step back and give you some perspective that certainly gives you new way of looking at things.

I like this article on Tak Bai, "Explaining Thailand to the world". To illustrate the nuances of how others outside Thailand perceive Tak Bai, Chang Noi sets up the piece with this:

Around New Year, Chang Noi watched one of the video CDs of the Tak Bai incident. The showing took place outside Thailand, with an audience of teachers and students mostly from Asian countries ranging from India to Japan...

At the end of the one-hour showing, there was first a stunned silence, and then a lively discussion. Thai and non-Thai, Muslim and non-Muslim, all had something to say.

The reactions he recounts to us are very understandable and all together though-provoking. At on point in the video showing, some non-Thais in audience was at a lost on what the military officers were intructing the prisoners to do:

What was going on? Thai members of the audience had to explain. The instructor was organizing them to sing a kindergarten song about elephants. “Elephant, elephant, elephant; have you even seen an elephant?” There was another stunned silence. An East Asian member of the audience then began to think aloud. So first we saw the security forces treating people like animals, then treating those who were lucky enough to survive like infants. Do the Thai security forces think that people in their country’s far south are infants and animals? If so, does that explain why the situation has become so bad?

So that was good, ha? You can try some more selected articles here:

• "Southern conflict marked by a profound sense of history"
• "Beating a beauty for entertainment"
• "The culture of PM Thaksin"

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All this leads to back to the title of this post - now that you know who Chang Noi is, who really is Chang Noi? I've wondered for the longest time who's the person behind the psuedonym.

To be continued...