Teak Tales: Noticing the Non-Humans in Thai Fiction

Thailand’s teak logging industry is deeply entangled with the Western colonial project of resource extraction. While teak trees have maintained a modest presence in the nation’s literary landscape, they are addressed in detail within recent global anglophone fiction. Comparing Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain (2019) and Ron Emmons’s Teak Lord (2022) through narratology and Anna Tsing’s ecological concepts of the ‘Arts of Noticing’ (2015) and ‘tales of progress’, this study examines how a novel’s structural choices dictate non-human agency. Analysis reveals that Teak Lord conforms to conventional realist mechanics, treating the forest as a passive commodity within a progress narrative. On the contrary, Bangkok Wakes to Rain disrupts this trope through anachronistic sequentiality, first-person immediacy and spectral agency. This structural analysis demonstrates the necessity of close reading in ecocriticism, showing how narrative structure is essential to expose the modern human conceit and the entanglement between human ambition and the non-human world.