冷戰時代下的僑批：從《來自泰國的信》談起

Letters from Thailand and Qiaopi Letters from Thailand and Qiaopi in the Age of Cold War

這篇論文欲了解，泰國作家Botan的書信體小說《來自泰國的信》（Letters from Thailand, 1969）裡，主角所書寫的僑批先後落入前共產黨黨員及泰國警政署長手中，所影射的政治和歷史脈絡。前人研究多著重在《來自泰國的信》中華人與泰人的身分認同，而我認為這本小說透過僑批這種傳統上不著重在政治批評的文類，記錄了冷戰對於個人的影響以及美（泰國為一部分）、蘇（小說中由1961年前的中共作為代表）兩大陣營的緊張關係。更精確來說，這本小說描繪泰國如何在政治、文化和經濟等層面受到美國和西方影響，以及小說中的書信如何在兩大陣營中透過信差、審查員、翻譯和編纂者之間傳遞，並彰顯僑批傳遞過程的危脆。由於相關研究少以英文出版，且Rachel Bower亦主張需要對非英語文學中的書信體進行更多研究，本文期望能讓英語學界關注到僑批及其再現，也為二十世紀書信體復興之研究拋磚引玉。

This article begins with a question about the political and historical contexts of the seizure of ninety-six remittance letters (qiaopi僑批), first by the communist defector Li Buan Sun and subsequently by the Thai Police General Sala Sinthuthawat, in Botan’s bestselling novel, Letters from Thailand (1969). While most critical attention has been devoted to the representations of Chinese and Thai identities in Letters from Thailand, I argue that this novel, through qiaopi, a genre that is traditionally not concerned with political events, registers the impact of the Cold War on a personal level. More generally, the novel inscribes the tensions between the U.S.-led Western bloc—of which Thailand was a part—and the Soviet-led Eastern bloc—represented by China before it left the bloc in 1961. The novel does so by foregrounding various American and more generally Western influences on Thai politics, culture, and the economy. Botan moreover dramatizes the letters’precarious transmission between the blocs, a complex process that involves carriers, censors, translators, and editors. Rachel Bower has pointed out that more research needs to be done on non-Anglophone epistolarity, but most studies of qiaopi and its representations have appeared in Chinese and thus have been inaccessible to scholars of English. In turn, by analyzing Botan’s representation of qiaopi in the Cold War, this essay participates in a recent scholarly trend that seeks to bring non-Anglophone epistolarity and its twentieth-century revival to light.