 four o'clock clock on a given Monday. It's a little different than we normally do with reporting on Thailand and under energy. It's energy 808, cutting edge, but it's also Thailand. And we're calling this the Journalism Adventures of Hannah Beach. She's a New York Times reporter. She's reporting in Thailand about reporting in the time of COVID. Hi, Hannah. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you as well. Thanks for having me on. And full disclosure, Marco is related to Hannah. Another full disclosure is my niece's name is Hannah, so I feel a special affinity for you. And my niece is the daughter of Linda Greenhouse, who is my sister-in-law from the New York Times. Okay, Marco, welcome to the show. Where are you? You're in California now? The Democratic People's Republic of Santa Cruz, California by the sea. Okay. And Hannah, you have remarkably good reception for Bangkok, Thailand. That's terrific. Well, we'll see. It's the dry season, so the Monsons hopefully will not mess with the internet. So, Marco, the arrangement was that you would introduce your cousin. And I hope you do that now. Absolutely. Well, first I just want to say to Hannah and to you, Jay, and to everybody listening and watching, I'm just so incredibly pleased to be on with Hannah. This is something that I've been working on for a while to get Hannah on. I'm just so glad it's come to fruition. And Hannah and I go back a ways. I knew Hannah when we were both interested in things such as Find Waldo, remember Finding Waldo? And also our great affinity for the comic strip Tenta and Milu, which is a classic and people of the world over love Tenta and Milu. So Hannah was a lot younger then. I was a lot younger. Yeah. So were we all, Marco? How much time we got on this show? So were we all. Well, as long as it's going to take, Jay. And Hannah is the daughter of my uncle, Kai's Beach. Kai's was a Pulitzer Prize winning foreign correspondent reporting for major for decades. And Hannah is fathering, is fathering, is following in her father's footsteps and carving her own trail, blazing her own trail. And I just think so incredibly highly of Hannah and her family, her husband, two boys have had a chance to spend some time with them over the years. And yeah, I'm just so pleased, Hannah, that you're with us. And I read your writing whenever it comes out with great interest. And you're a heck of a reporter, a heck of a journalist. And I'm just so appreciative. So at least my first question. I'm working for a heck of a newspaper. And a heck of a newspaper. And it's newspaper in the world. And without the New York Times, I would not have gotten through the last four years. I'm telling you that now. A lot of people in that category, Jay, I agree. So my first question to you, Hannah, is what led you to kind of following the footsteps of your father? And yeah, just open with that. What called to you into this career? What was it about being a writer, being a reporter, and being a foreign correspondent? How did it play out in terms of bringing you to where you are now? Yeah, I, you know, I think a lot of people don't want to do what their parents did. And my father was a journalist. My mother actually was a journalist as well. She's Chinese. And was a reporter for the Yomei Shimbun, the largest Japanese daily. And I think for a long time, I didn't want to be a journalist because who wants to do what your parents do. And then I discovered along the way that there were two things that I really liked doing. One was traveling. And I had grown up moving around every few years. I lived in Hong Kong and Bangkok as a kid. And the other thing that I really liked to do was write. And I thought about Foreign Service, but I'm probably not diplomatic enough to be able to make that work. So I looked at journalism and I, in 1995, I started passing at resumes. It was shortly before the Hong Kong handover. And I got a job as an editorial assistant at Time Magazine's Hong Kong headquarters. And I made coffee for a while. I fact-checked stories. And then I eventually moved to Beijing as a China correspondent and spent a lot of time in and around China. And then in Southeast Asia, back to China, back to Southeast Asia. So that was sort of my career trajectory, which was sort of, I mean, I was incredibly lucky in that I was able to do what I love to do, which is to travel and to write. And to meet really interesting people. Is that it, Marco? Oh, I have lots of questions, of course, Jay. But I'm going to be a nice supply guide of my brother from a rather different mother and pass it over to you for a question or two, okay? He's trying to be nice today. What can I say? So I don't, you know, this is probably one of the most interesting beats in the world. But you have covered, I'm sure, historical things left and right. But you know, one of the things, one of the things that really stick on your mind in terms of the sea changes in Southeast Asia, the changes that are going on around you in Thailand and for that matter, Myanmar, what is your greatest interest in terms of picking stories that appeal to you as revealing the condition of that area to the world? Yeah, you know, the last four years have been a hyper news environment where there's just so much happening everywhere. And yes, there's a lot happening in Southeast Asia, but it's just, it's just been this kind of head spinning moment where their headlines everywhere. And I think what's sort of interesting to me is to look at the way in which the trends in Southeast Asia fit into those larger themes, right, that are playing out globally. And one thing that you can certainly look at is the rise of populism, the rise of nationalist leaders, we see that in the United States, we see that in the UK, we see that in the Philippines, in Myanmar. To a certain extent, we see that in Thailand as well. And so sort of seeing the way in which Southeast Asia fits into the kind of slipstream of history is something that I find personally interesting. In terms of specific stories, I started, I moved back to Southeast Asia to Bangkok in August of 2017. And at the end of the month, the programs by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya started, I mean, they've been going on for decades. But the worst outbreak of violence which the US has deemed ethnic cleansing started in late August and then through into September. And I've been covering Myanmar for a while. And so I knew that this was something bad and this was something big. And I went with a photographer to Bangladesh right across the border from Myanmar, from Rakhine State in Western Myanmar, and just watched this stream of Rohingya coming over the border through incredibly mountainous forbidding terrain or coming through water. A lot of people drowned. A lot of people didn't make it. So that particular story as a humanitarian crisis, as an ethnic crisis, as sort of an example of the way in which our hopes that democracy as this grand ideology would take precedence over very complicated local ethnic issues. I think it was kind of a reality check because Myanmar had gone from this military dictatorship to a country that was being led by as a civilian leader by a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Dhal Sasuqi. And I think that it turned out to be more complicated than this kind of wonderful heroine story that we that we believed in. So that in terms of kind of the visceral impact and also sort of showing the way in which historical trends are playing out in Southeast Asia. I think that was the real big one for me over the past three years. Americans don't really follow that in any detail. So it's great to have you as a resource to appreciate it. But at the same time, a couple of thoughts. One is is there ever a chance in this world, at least in our lifetimes, that Southeast Asia will come together, that it will have a greater notable collaboration among those countries, more trade arrangements, more interaction, political and social interaction between all the countries in Southeast Asia? Or is that a pipe train? Well, I think, you know, ASEAN, which is the Association of Southeast Asian States Nations, is a pretty toothless organization. But the fact of the matter is that trade in the region is growing by leaps and bounds. Trade with the United States, trade with China. It's this area is extraordinarily integrated within the global economy, you know, from from manufacturing auto manufacturing to semiconductors to services to tourism, which of course has been taken a pretty heavy hit with with the pandemic. But overall, the area is extraordinarily integrated within the global economy. But the thing is that Southeast Asia as a concept is something that I'm not even sure that Southeast Asians themselves think is something that that should be something that should be an entity because, you know, you compare Indonesia, you know, 250, 60, 70 million people, Muslim majority democracy, you have Cambodia, small, Buddhist majority country, you have the Philippines, which is a majority Catholic, Christian archipelago, you know, to the northeast in the region, you know, what ties this region together. And it's it's one of the things, you know, my title technically is Southeast Asian Bureau Chief. And it's hard sometimes to say what ties this region together. And I'm not sure that anything really should tie the region together, because it is so linguistically, culturally, faith wise, diverse. Well, let me offer a thought to you then in that regard. China, China, you know, is the is the cap of all of this. They all think about China every day. What will China do now? What effect will China have on us? What kind of strange things they got? China has up its sleeve. What kind of terrible things in Hong Kong? I mean, people must think about it that all the time. And I would imagine that bonds them together, worrying about China. No, I think you're right to a certain extent. Southeast Asia, in many ways, is akin to the Caribbean for the United States with the Monroe Doctrine, right? You know, it's it's China's backyard. China from kind of con times onwards has has moved forth. It colonized Vietnam for a millennium. Its imprint in Southeast Asia is very, very strong. And certainly economically, when first when the Soviet Union withdrew, and then when the United States over the decades has sort of withdrawn from the region into a certain extent, particularly over the past four years, there has been the sense that China is the one that has the money. It's the one that comes in with investment and promises of of soft loans. But the reality of it, of course, is more complicated, as we know. And that's another line of coverage that I've been focusing on quite a bit is sort of China's impact on the region, whether it's environmental, with natural resources, whether it's political, the perils of debt trap diplomacy, and all of these things are connected to China. But I would also say that this is something that European colonial powers did to Southeast Asia for a long time. It's something that the United States, you know, the United States colonized the Philippines. So it's a none of us have clean hands when it comes to coming to the region and and wanting natural resources and imposing our political will. Yeah, that's very interesting. This is my my last question before Marco gets a chance again. But the United States, you know, two hours ago, we had a show with a retired three star general American general who has spent a lot of time in Vietnam. And he was, you know, remarking on the success that the U.S. has had in its foreign policy with Vietnam. We are very close to Vietnam. It's interesting how the common the common bond is the war. And yet it brings us together. There's really no entity. They want to trade. They want to they want as much U.S. as they can get. It's sort of out of Miss Saigon, where you where you hug the Cadillac, you know, they're very successful. And the relationship to U.S. with Vietnam is very successful. And I just wonder whether it is as successful in these other countries in Southeast Asia. I mean, do does the United States have the same kind of relationship with these other countries as it does ostensibly with Vietnam? I think it goes country by country. Generally speaking, ASEAN countries like it when the U.S. shows up. And when under under George W. Bush, when under President Trump, when the U.S. didn't show up to big ASEAN conferences or to APEC conferences, Southeast Asian countries were upset. You know, it's a loss of face. It means that the United States is not taking these countries seriously. As regards to Vietnam, when you talk to Vietnamese senior officials, they will say, look, the American War, as they call the Vietnam War, the American War was a few years long. We were colonized by China for millennium. The French were there for a fair amount of time as well. Vietnam is very well geared to trying to fend off people who come in and try to do things. And the United States was sort of the least of it. What I would say about Vietnam is, yes, absolutely Vietnam is in terms of trade, even in terms of defense, because Vietnam sees ultimately its foe as China and not necessarily United States. And your enemy's enemy becomes your friend. So that's why the United States plays an important role. But in terms of human rights abuses, in terms of an authoritarian government that is locking up its people, that is trying to meddle with freedom on Facebook, on censorship issues, the Vietnamese government has been following the China playbook. And the United States has not really called them on that as much as one might expect. So yes, things are going swimmingly from a trade perspective. In terms of democratic ideals that the United States purports to espouse, we are not defending those with great vociferousness in Vietnam. Very, very interesting to talk to you. But at this point, I have to say, Marco, you're witness. Thank you. Thank you, Your Honor. Yeah, interesting. There's so many interesting places we can go right now. But of the five countries in the world that are ruled by a ruling dominant communist party, three of them are in Asia, Southeast Asia, that's the People's Republic of China, Vietnam, and the Laos, PDR, the other two being Cuba, and the North Korea. So I wanted to point out as well that there's a number of really good new books that come out on the subject, looking at Southeast Asia as a separate entity, as a conglomeration of states in the same region, and the relationship with China. A book each by two, David, I'll call them, David Lampton, who is a longtime American academic and very, very good as far as I believe, and David Shambop, both come up with new books. And another one is Sebastian Strangio's book. He got his start at the Pernampan Post of all places in Cambodia. And there's a tremendous amount of interesting stuff that these two scholars and collaborators and then a Sebastian have come up with. So anybody who's interested in this region, from a political, economic, strategic user, excellent, excellent resources. So maybe scroll down a little bit or narrow down to Thailand, because of course, Ann has been there for the past several years, and I've been reading your stuff, you know, with great interest. And I wanted to get your take Hannah in terms of and where things stand with this, the protest movement, for lack of a better way of describing it, which from your writing and from others, some of the protesters are going further than any protesters have gone before in terms of actually questioning the monarchy, which is, you know, a big red line. So where are things right now with this movement vis-à-vis the government and the Prime Minister and former general who took power in a coup over the last Shinoat, right? Where are things right now? Things are right now in a bit of a pause. So the protesters have said that they will pause until the new year and then come back stronger than ever. But that doesn't mean that the movement is going away. And I think something fundamentally has changed in Thailand. You know, we've been spared COVID, which has been wonderful. Instead, we've had this kind of political shock in the country. And one of the things about, one of the stereotypes of Thailand is that it's, you know, the land of smiles and everybody's, you know, maybe it's kind of a parallel with the way that people sort of look at Hawaii, you know, it's just sunny and wonderful and smiley. And in fact, the hierarchies in the country, the ability of the political elite to really cling on to power and resources. And also, this is, despite being a middle income country, is one of the countries with the widest wealth gap between rich and poor. And so there's a really big difference between being in Bangkok with the air conditioned malls and, you know, the fancy Christmas music that I heard yesterday when I went to the mall. And people who live in the populace northeast who are rice farmers, who are watching the price of rice go down, there's a drought, the environmental problems caused partly by damming of the of the Mekong up in China. And these two populaces in Thailand are kind of diametrically opposed. And the larger population that feels like this concentration of wealth in in Bangkok, and particularly among the elite backed by a government, which is military dominated, and backed behind that by the monarchy, which is the one of the richest, if not the richest monarchy in the world, is not something that that should stand. And Thailand has been for a long time now bound by very strict les majesté laws, which basically preclude any criticism of the immediate members of the royal family. And it was just a, you know, it was a taboo. And in Thailand, for 70 years was ruled by the world's longest reigning monarch, King Phu Mi Puan. And he died in 2016. And, you know, from from there, the new king is somebody who is not as beloved as his father. And in fact, is somebody who is in many, many parts of Thailand is not respected. And he spends most of his time living in Germany. And he has a very colorful personal life. He's been married four times. His first wife was his first cousin. His second wife was his mistress for a long time. His third wife was then she was purged a few years ago. And his fourth wife became his fourth wife and now the queen a couple days before he was, he went through his official coronation. And most of the time, they live in Europe and rarely come back to Thailand, although he is in Thailand at the moment. And I think people in Thailand just thought that's kind of weird that our King, who is protected by all these last Majesty laws, is not actually living in the country that he is reigning over. And the Crown Property Bureau, which controls a lot of the palace's wealth, owns some of the most splendid land and resources in the country. And so it's sort of another example of the concentration of wealth in the country. And young people in particular thought we don't really like this. We don't think this is right. But interestingly that the student protests which began earlier this year and then got kind of, they went quiet for a bit because of COVID and then came back as a country emerged from lockdown over the summer, they started not with issues of the monarchy, they started with school rules. So in Thai schools, you're supposed to wear, in some schools, your hair is supposed to be a certain length. As a girl, it's not supposed to be no longer been here. You're supposed to wear down to underwear. You're not supposed to have underwear that shows through your white shirt. It's very demure. And the kind of rules in school, you're supposed to prostrate yourself sometimes in front of teachers. You stand up and pay obeisance to the royal anthem. All of these things, kids said, no, this isn't really indicative of modern Thailand. And these are kind of artifacts of a kind of an absolute monarchy or even a militarized society that Thailand is currently. And people said, we kind of not for this. And students stood up for this. And that then kind of snowballed and started taking in other issues, whether it's LGBTQ rights, labor unions, women's rights, and then the issue, the untouchable, so-called untouchable issue of the monarchy. And all that got kind of wrapped together. And in the beginning of the summer, there were these really sort of fun protests rallies in which you'd have different speakers getting up and talking about their causes. It has now shifted. And the more the momentum is focused on the specific issue of the monarchy. And that's sort of where we are right now. And it's really uncharted territory for Thailand. And Hannah, where did this come from? Where did the Hunger Games salute? Do you know where the origin of that is that kind of got adopted by the movement? Yeah. So the movement has been very good on social media. And it's been very good at taking different kind of cultural memes, whether it's the Hunger Games salute, which is kind of the salute of defiance, right? You know, this thing. Or taking Japanese anime characters. Harry Potter was brought in for a while. So a lot of people dressed up as wizards. And it was fun. And it made it, Thailand has a history of brutally crushing protest movements, right? You know, as recently as 2010, dozens of people were killed on the streets of the Bangkok by Thai security forces. And so the idea of a student showing up dressed as Harry Potter or flashing the Hunger Games salute or dressed as, you know, Totoro Japanese anime, it kind of, it made it cute and fun. And it added a lot of, it made it harder, I think, for people to imagine a crackdown. You know, would you really shoot down somebody who's dressed as a muggle? I don't know. It sounds like Thailand is in a kind of transition. And it's moving to another place. And the old, the old arrangement is really not sustainable anymore. Do you agree? And where do you think it's moving to? I have no idea where it's moving to. I think there is certainly there is dissatisfaction with the old political elite. And what's striking about these protests, compared to a couple movements earlier this century, is that you have a lot of upper middle class people protesting. You know, so they are, they're kind of the beneficiaries of this system. And yet even they are saying, you know, enough is enough. Where it's going, I don't, you know, it's very, very hard to say. I mean, the political elite has benefited for so long from a very unfair playing field. And they are not going to give that up without a fight. So I think as cute as the protesters are with their Harry Potter stuff, I don't think that precludes a crackdown. And I don't think it precludes a coup. I mean, Thailand is a country that has had around a dozen successful coups and a bunch more that were unsuccessful. So there is, even though the current leader, prime minister of the country, is the guy who led the former coup, it's possible that there could be a counter coup. That's from the Thai old guard. This reminds me of that line out of the marathon man with Dustin Hoffman. Is it safe? Is it safe for you? Is it safe in the time of COVID? Will it be safe? Will there be, you know, my wife and I traveled to Thailand 10 years ago and they were having a protest and it was so fun. It was so cute. No one felt that it would be, it would ever go out of the boundaries in which it was happening. Now I wonder about that. So is it safe? You know, during the last major crackdown in 2010, I had two small kids, you know, one was a baby, one was a toddler and they, we put them down for a nap and my husband and I decided we knew that the crackdown was probably coming. And so we went out to the protests and we got, we sort of got caught in something a little bit iffy. We were on an underpass and there was a, there was a row of APCs coming one way, there were snipers coming the other way and the Red Cross was trucking out people who'd gotten shot and killed and we were kind of trapped in this slightly uncomfortable situation and we were hiding behind a parked vehicle and we sort of went around the vehicle and realized that no angle was particularly safe. And at a certain point we thought we just have to, you know, raise our arms out, arms up, you know, in this kind of surrender mode and walk across this empty road and hope to hell that snipers wouldn't shoot us. And so we kind of girded ourselves and this woman, the protester, grabbed my arm and I think grabbed my husband's arm and just kind of walked us out of there and we didn't obviously didn't get shot. Two blocks away or maybe even a block away, there was a woman who was selling coconut ice cream and life was completely back to normal, you know, and we've gone through this kind of existential moment of seeing people shot and killed and then it's just, you know, it's just Thai life. So I think, you know, to your point of everything seeming fine and cute, yes, until it's not. And it shows a kind of bifurcation of Thai society in which something terrible can happen on one block and on the next block coconut ice cream is being sold. Having said that, I think that what's happening in Thailand now is broader based. And I think it really has kind of, even though shopping malls can continue and there can be, you know, fancy watch options and luxury necklaces and all that, I think that there is a sense that things have to change somehow. Well, things are changing here on Think Tech. We're almost out of time. That's a change. So I'm going to leave it to Marco to, I love doing this to you, Marco, to summarize the essence of our discussion today with Hannah and try to present to the people what they should carry away from it. The only thing they should carry away is gratitude and thanks for kind of being with us. And they should carry away a feeling of anticipation and enthusiasm for the next time that we can have Hannah back because there's so much more. And Hannah actually interviewed Aung San Suu Kyi at some point long ago, right, Hannah? And I'd love to hear your take on the ladies fall from grace as well as you took a flight in an Air Force recon plane over the South China Sea, which was quite a ways in coming in terms of getting official approval and hearing the chatter from the Chinese ground controllers. So I mean, we barely scratched the surface. So let's, Jay, let's make a pact between you and I that we will most definitely ask Hannah to come back soon. Yes. And let me add to that, Hannah, you know, I don't know if you think of it in these terms, but you in the New York Times, you are our agents, our eyes, our ears. You are our sensories. And what you see and learn and write about is for all of us. It is possibly one of the greatest information services, I mean, service to the public that exists in the world today. I hope you appreciate that we appreciate you. Oh, thank you. It's the New York Times is one of the few publications that has people in Southeast Asia. And I feel extraordinarily lucky to be able to cover the region, even if I don't think it's here in region. It's a fascinating region. And there's so much going on. And, you know, to be able to write kind of nerdy stories about about political movements in Indonesia or Chinese investment in Cambodia and have have a newspaper run those stores and be interested is a gift. Okay, we'd like to do it again. There's so much more to cover to discuss. And for now, all I can say, correct me if I'm wrong, but I would say to you, Namaste, is that the right thing? Thank you very much. I hope we meet again soon. Thank you so much. Thank you, Marco. Great discussion. Nice family. Aloha. Bye bye.