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3. From the Classrooms to the Rice Fields
- University of Wisconsin Press
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81 1974,1975,those were good years.It was my second year of university,but I rarely sat in a classroom. I spent all my time out in the villages, living and learning with the farmers. M., a former Chiang Mai University student, on how her life changed after 14 October 1973 During the three years before the 6 October 1976 massacre,M.was one of thousands of people whose life became oriented around political action and work for justice. One very wet afternoon in the middle of the rainy season we met to drink glass after glass of tea and talk about her experience as a student activist in Chiang Mai. We sat on the porch of a house that once belonged to another woman who cared about justice, Ajarn (Professor) Angun Malik. Ajarn Angun taught in the Faculty of Humanities at CMU from 1968 to 1977. Through her example and her actions, she offered material support and many other kinds of encouragement to student and farmer activists. In 1974, she opened her house and garden, Suan Anya, to the farmers of the newly formed FFT and the students of the Farmer Project, who worked with the FFT. When a house occupied by members of the Farmer Project was raided and students and farmers were arrested on alleged possession of weapons and seditious documents in May 1976, Ajarn Angun put up the title for Suan Anya as bond for their release. When she died in 1991, she left Suan Anya to her former students. M. studied with Ajarn Angun between 1974 and 1976 and later became the caretaker of Suan Anya. M.was born into a farming family in Khon Kaen in northeastern Thailand. In the early 1970s, she was sent to live with her aunt in Bangkok to complete secondary school. She lived in Thonburi, on the opposite side of the Chao From the Classrooms to the Rice Fields 82 . From the Classrooms to the Rice Fields Phraya River from Thammasat University. When we met, she gave me a copy of a mimeographed essay she wrote on the twentieth anniversary of the 6 October 1976 massacre.The essay located the beginning of her political consciousness with the events of 14 October 1973. Led by a friend from school, on 13 October, she joined a group of forty to fifty secondary students who began walking from their school at Wat Suwannaram, in Bangkok Noi.They crossed the railway tracks and Pinklao Bridge before joining the demonstration at Thammasat University. Her group marched with university students and citizens from Ratchadamnoen Avenue to Chitralada Palace. In the early morning of 14 October 1973, before state forces attacked the demonstrators, she hopped on a bus to go home to take a shower. She planned to return to the protest in a few hours.A few minutes after boarding the bus,she heard gunshots.When she arrived at her aunt’s apartment near Siriraj Hospital, she listened to the news and knew that there was fighting between protestors and police and soldiers, close to where she had been a few hours ago. Over the next days, she learned of the injuries and deaths. M. finished secondary school in early 1974. At that point, she chose to leave Bangkok and go north to continue her education at CMU. She entered the Faculty of Humanities and majored in English. She chose English because she liked languages and literature. When I asked her which authors were most influential in her life at that time, she immediately cited Kulap Saipradit and Jit Phumisak. She remembered that she was frequently late to the meetings of the Women’s Group, which she described as “like an early feminist group,” during her first year because she often went to the Huay Kaew waterfall near the CMU campus to read Kulap’s novels after classes ended for the day. She laughed as she relayed the story to me—she grew so absorbed in his writing about a possible socialist future that she forgot the time and was late to the feminist meetings about injustice in the present. Yet as M. narrated it, by far the most important and influential (for the rest of her life) experience during her years at CMU was her involvement with the Farmer Project (Khrongkan Chao Na).The Farmer Project was a group of high school and university students who worked in alliance with the FFT in Chiang Mai, Lamphun, and Lampang provinces. After...