It has taken almost six decades of friendship between Jeffery and me to finally produce a book together. It has also taken us almost six decades of living in Southeast Asia to get under its skin.
Southeast Asia is, in civilizational terms, the most diverse corner of planet Earth. No other region even comes close. Hence, it is a difficult region to understand and describe well. Fortunately, Jeffery and I have had the good fortune of getting to know several Southeast Asian societies well.
We were born and brought up in Singapore, a Chinese-majority state. We got to know each other as children as we lived in the poor neighbourhood of Onan Road. Jeffery is ethnically Chinese (of Hokkien/Hakka descent). I am Indian (of Sindhi descent). Yet, in school both of us learned Malay—the language of a plurality of Southeast Asia.
Both of us studied philosophy in NUS. Then our paths diverged. Jeffery went on to obtain a master’s degree in Southeast Asian studies in 1982 from Cornell University, where he met several eminent Southeast Asian scholars, including George Kahin and Ben Anderson. In Cornell, Jeffery also met his Thai wife, Pimpraphai Bisalputra. He has been living in Bangkok since the early 1980s and speaks Thai fluently. Pim and Jeff have produced two excellent books on Thailand: one on Thai Bencharong pottery1 and the other on the Thai Chinese.2
Jeffery has also gotten to know Indonesia well. When he worked for the Quakers, he got to know several Indonesian leaders, including the late Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid (affectionately known as Gus Dur). Indeed, Gus Dur used Jeffery as a special envoy to develop close links with Thailand when he was president.
Jeffery also got to know ordinary folk well. Once, when he was visiting a poor Lao village, the villagers felt that Jeffery deserved a special treat as a VIP visitor. Hence, they vigorously thrashed the earth mounds in the rice fields to get the rats to jump out. When the rats did so, they were bludgeoned by the villagers. Jeffery was then given a royal feast with rat meat as the dish of honour. I have not had this experience.
But I have lived in other Southeast Asian societies. I lived for a year in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, from July 1973 to June 1974. As far as I can recall, the city, which was under siege from the Khmer Rouge, was shelled every day while I was there. Sadly, the Khmer Rouge took over nine months after I left. I lost many friends to the Cambodian killing fields. From 1976 to 1979, I served as the deputy chief of mission in the Singapore High Commission in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I learned at first hand that the bitterness of the separation between Malaysia and Singapore in 1965 had still not evaporated.
Both Jeffery and I have therefore experienced the turbulence of Southeast Asia in the second half of the 20th century. We can speak with great confidence about the “miracle” ASEAN has brought to Southeast Asia, because we know how different the outcomes could have been for several Southeast Asian societies in the absence of ASEAN. Many American social scientists on Southeast Asia who seem to rely primarily on New York Times press clippings for raw information on the region do not really understand well the societies of Southeast Asia.
This is what has motivated us to produce this book together. We hope that it captures our years of study and close understanding of Southeast Asia. We also hope that the lessons from Southeast Asia’s exceptional success will be shared and emulated in other corners of the world. A world in which other developing regions emulate Southeast Asia’s success in producing peace and prosperity will be a happy world.
Kishore Mahbubani