Diasporic Tales: female voices from a far Faraway Land (Part 2)

[Gouache on paper, digital comic strips]

According to the research, 70% of Thai people who migrated to the UK are women, most likely working-class women (pink/blue-collar workers, skilled laborers). I have asked around 15 women who have moved to and lived in the UK for more than 10 years – specifically, those who moved here not to study or get an office job – about why and how they migrated. All of them said in the same way that they got married to British guys before coming here.

Thus, I have conducted in-depth interviews with 3 women: two from a massage shop that I’m working with, and another from a Thai-UK Facebook group. The interviews provide rich information on the socioeconomic and geopolitical factors that push them away from their hometown, struggles, stigmatizations, and the concept of relationships. This reflects the socio-economic and geopolitical problems of Thailand or even SEA, how the country failed to decentralize and give citizens a good living quality. This pushes female citizens, who in a way are already a second-class citizen, to go out to seek new opportunities that their country couldn’t offer.

On the other hand, this also reflects how “Asian women figure'' is being commodified in the patriarchal capitalist world. Not including the fact that “marriage” has been treated as their “bargaining power” to trade with “freedom”, which can sometimes turn out to be an extremely risky path.

For this project, I’m taking you into the stories of these women through my exploration of visual storytelling, using different creative responses to the stories of different women, aiming to shine a light on their stories, exploring visual storytelling using different mediums. The project is divided into two parts, and this is the first part of the experiment.

For this second part, Thai local elements and beliefs are incorporated into the work, as “Thainess” has been observed to be a big part of their far-from-home lives, while surrealistic visuals are used to reflect their transnational experiences together with quotes from the women.

Panita [She/Her]
is a Thai visual communication designer based in London, currently an MA Visual Communication student at Royal College of Art. Her works revolve around socio-politics, culture, intersectional feminism, individual stories, history, and memories. Her methodology is a combination of storytelling and mixed media. She is currently exploring the possibility of surrealistic visuals to convey the hidden emotions and conversations between time-space, human-object, and the lost archives.