SOMETIMES, THE PAST SPEAKS MORE PRESCIENTLY about the future than the present. The past is simpler and clearer than the present. Perhaps that's why novelists who write about the past are read so eagerly and profoundly. Two of the many novelists who have written about Thailand so compellingly are historical novelists who have written about the thirties and forties. These are two prize-winning novelists, "Botan," who writes about Chinese immigrants and ampoon Boonthawee, who writes about his childhood in the Northeast long ago The rhetorical device used by "Botan (pseudonym for Supha Lusiri) is that the book is based upon letters, intercepted by Thai police, from a new immigrant from China to his relatives back home from the 1940s to the 1970s. The premise of the book is in fact questionable, as the Thai police are said to have lacked the relevant linguistic expertise.The late 1940s were in fact the last time that immigration from China could proceed unfettered, as the conclusion of the China civil war in 1949 ended legal immigration. The hero of the book, Tan Suang U, began his life in Thailand working in the retail trade in Bangkok. He gradually prospered to the point where he became a shop owner, and married his former employer's daughter. He soon had several children, his favorite among whom was a daughter. The daughter ended u marrying a Thai man, and Suang U ended up living with them, making his peace with his adopted country. Letters from Thailand is an exceedingly good read, funny and perceptive. What makes it particularly memorable is that better than most academic efforts, it focuses on what is one of the central issues of modern Thai history. We are reminded that, only seventy years ago, Chinese constituted 12 percent of the population of Siam. An academic friend and I sometimes argue whether it will take another three generations, or only two, for there to be no Chinese left in Thailand. While many its neighboring countries have known bloody ethnic conflict in recent years, there has been virtually none in Thailand. I remember that, barely forty years ago, it was common to see people, particularly women, dressed in Chinese fashion, in what we would call black pajamas." Nowadays the "black pajamas" are gone, replaced by haute couture and pedal pushers and blue jeans. The shopkeepers in the Seven Eleven and the shopping center may be Chinese in their ancestry, but to look at them there would be few clues to that fact. Whatever the Thai society of the future may be, it will not be Chinese in culture, nor, in some important ways, will it be Thai. It will be a blend of numerous ingredients, including Chinese. One of those important ingredients is represented by the second of those novels, A Child of the Northeast. In this novel,Kampoon does not focus directly on any of the momentous changes of the past seventy years. Instead he zeroes in on what might objectively be one bad year in the 1930s in the life of a typical eight-year-old boy, Koon, living in what has invariably been termed the "impoverished" Northeast. It seems like the whole book takes us from one meal to another, through a very difficult year. Readers can be reminded here of what few of u know firsthand, what it is like to be hungry and poor. Viewed from outside, we might have expected the novel to depressing. It is not. It is amusing and uplifting. The translator, Susan Fulop Kepner, reminds us that the novel "is the simplest of tales, celebrating the most essential aspects of human life: survival, hope, loyalty and love." One cannot read A Child of the Northeast without gaining respect for the neglected farmers of the Northeast; and we learn that Kampoon's novel has gained a permanent place in consciousness of Thai. In the process, "Lao" of the Northeast have become an accepted part of the society, just as Lao food has become a popular part of the diet of many city-dwellers, and Northeastern migrants have become part of local society almost everywhere. The two novels mentioned here won major international awards at the two ends of the 1970s. Like other literary prize winners, they tell us something profoundly important about what has happened to the society that has come to appreciate way in which the become more inclusive-inclusive of Chinese inclusive of Northeasterners