Fuhrmann, Arnika. In the Mood for Texture: The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City. Duke University Press, 2026.
What does it mean to trace and historicize Bangkok as a “Chinese” city? Written at a time when Chinese Thai connections—rooted in nineteenth-century migration and colonial modernity—are subject to ruinous decay and waves of revival under the dual pressures of capitalist urban development and the geopolitical influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Arnika Fuhrmann’s In the Mood for Texture: The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City is a timely and visionary remapping of Chinese Thai history that puts “China,” “Southeast Asia,” and the conventional definitions of “regionalism” in flux.
Based on an original archive—ranging from the Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai’s utilization of Bangkok’s Chinese quarters in In the Mood for Love in Part I, to a tour of Bangkok’s hospitality venues that revive the aesthetics of colonial modernity in Part II, and a deft selection of contemporary Thai literature and films in Part III—Fuhrmann narrates a “dis-appearing” spatial history of Bangkok shaped by Chinese migration to Thailand. Following postcolonial studies scholar Ackbar Abbas’s influential theorization of Hong Kong as a “space of dis-appearance”—by which he means not the literal disappearance of Hong Kong culture at the cusp of the 1997 Handover, but rather a “negative hallucination,” or failing to recognize what is already there—Fuhrmann extends the inquiries into cultural identities under the conditions of (old and new) colonialism and imperialism in Hong Kong to Bangkok and Southeast Asia.
Retracing a modern transnationalism and urban cosmopolitanism that connected East Asia and Southeast Asia through port cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Bangkok, the book challenges the conventional method of area studies that divides cultures along the borderlines of modern nation-states. By asking what kinds of histories would be revealed if one followed the transregional network of (semi-)colonial port cities, one of the answers the book provides is the emergence of a “transregional personhood”—often gendered as “female”—that not only brings to light the process of female commodification and fetishization, but also the irreducible excesses of “transregional femininity” as a site for embodying a transnational and potentially oppositional plurality across borders.
Historicizing and theorizing the hypervisibility of “transregional femininity” as it appears in films, hospitality venues, and the transformation of Bangkok through urban development and financial capital, In the Mood for Texture is an unconventional gender history focused on “transregional Chinese femininity” as the interplay between reality and fantasy. Tracking the palimpsestic evolution of the “Modern Girl” from 1930s Shanghai, the fashion show of women’s cheongsam in Wong Kar-wai’s depiction of 1960s Hong Kong in In the Mood for Love, and the revival of early twentieth-century aesthetics of “colonial modernity” in Bangkok’s contemporary hospitality venues, the book argues that “femininity” can no longer be understood solely as a site of “recoding”—a concept introduced by historian Tani Barlow to describe the process of redefining “femininity” according to the demands of the superstructure. Rather, “femininity” needs also to be read for its multilayered excesses that are equipped with the potential to disrupt dominant assumptions about ethnicity and gender.
In Fuhrmann’s gender history, the socio-cultural fantasies of a “Chinese femininity” in “Southeast Asia”— “ornamentalized” according to the aesthetics and fashions of (semi-)colonial Asian port cities—complicate and extend the conventional approach to “orientalism” (premised on the power relations between the East and the West) and “self-orientalism” (that Rey Chow provocatively theorizes as the East’s return of the West’s gaze). Often mediated through gendered and racialized bodies, orientalism has created an array of representations of what race studies scholar Anne Cheng describes as “Asiatic femininity,” or “yellow femininity.” Parsing orientalism as the West’s feminizing invention of the “Orient” as ornaments, porcelain, and silk—in other words, thing-like objects—Cheng theorizes “yellow femininity” as synthetic personhood in a long genealogy of “not-yet or no-longer subjecthood” that is entangled in the history of thingness and objectification. Whereas Cheng’s Ornamentalism contends with power relations between the East and the West, In the Mood for Texture shifts focus to inter-Asia relations and the power dynamics between Southeast Asia and the newly expansionist PRC.
The book boldly theorizes a “trans-Asia,” or “trans-regional” Asian femininity that has become a site of contest between neoliberal capitalism and its dissents. As Fuhrmann argues, the revival of a transregional Chinese femininity in Thailand can be mapped along a spectrum of visibility bracketed by neoliberal commodification and consumer desires on the one hand, and an experimental platform of social plurality on the other. Through the transcendent and transgressive positionality of social plurality—creating a transregional personhood that “detemporalizes and deterritorializes identity” (157)—Fuhrmann expands the focus on femininity to unpack a range of trans-Asia socio-cultural phenomena that otherwise are not legible in a nation-centered framework.
To contextualize the emergence of trans-Asia imaginaries, the book begins with post-Handover Hong Kong cinema and Wong Kar-wai’s frenzied film In the Mood for Love (2000), where Hong Kong is connected to parts of Southeast Asia—Thailand, Cambodia, and Singapore—through the ruins of (semi-)colonialism and imperialism, or what Ann Laura Stoler calls “imperial debris.” Central to the book’s argument is the complexity of the “nostalgia” for colonial modernity that reanimates Southeast and East Asia as an integrated cultural and trading network. This nostalgia cannot be simply dismissed as neoliberal commodification. Rather, the book interprets the desire for alternative temporalities and a different spatial configuration for understanding Southeast Asia as a region as the result of an accumulation of discontents toward notions of “Chineseness” that become homogenized under the PRC’s national policies.
Methodologically, rather than combing through population statistics, Fuhrmann’s book centrally highlights “texture”—architecture, design, and women’s fashion—as the primary lens of sensing, feeling, and preserving history. Citing Eve Sedgwick, Fuhrmann highlights the haptic quality of texture—through which touch is performed visually, acoustically, or by other multi-sensorial extensions—as a channel of intersubjective communication and perception. Implicit in her methodology is the importance of the histories and memories that things, objects, and the built environments hold, for which the human subject only plays the agent of activation. The focus on “texture” and “touch” also experiments with assembling racial histories through the (re)built environments—e.g., Bangkok’s 1880s Customs House, Chinatown, and Lhong 1919—by asking how space produced lived histories, habitats, and gendered and racialized embodiments and relationalities that are important primary materials in compiling the history of racial formation. At a moment when Bangkok becomes a literal “city of disappearance” due to the speed of urban expansion, In the Mood for Texture is on the one hand a crucial archive that preserves the city’s Chinese pasts, and on the other hand, it is an “archaeology of the future,” as each chapter skillfully unpacks the desires and wishes for a Chinese Thai futurity that transcends the ethos of both the PRC and populist-authoritarian or military-led Thailand.
Chapter one, “City Connectivities,” locates the “mood for textures” by reconfiguring the link between Shanghai and Hong Kong; in tracing the aesthetics of colonial modernities in Bangkok, the chapter engages a close examination of the convergence of the three cities’ in Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love. Chapter 2 excavates Wong’s quest for the “textures” of a trans-Asia modernity in Southeast Asia through the film’s iconic displays of women’s cheongsams (qipao), cosmopolitan interiors, and an urban environment shaped by international trade. Here, Fuhrmann expands her research to Bangkok’s hospitality venues (hotels, bars, coffee shops) to tease out the far-reaching influence of the “Wong aesthetics” beyond this single film. Such remapping not only preserves the dis-appearing Chinese Thai histories in the city, as seen in the ruination and revival of historical sites such as the Customs House. More importantly, Fuhrmann illustrates—through interviews, textual analyses, and fieldwork—the limitations of reading In the Mood for Love and its atmospheric and architectural influence as the commodification of nostalgia. Rather, Wong’s film can be read as one iteration of an emergent sentiment for transregional connections that go beyond modern nationalism. Fuhrmann writes, “Viewing In the Mood for Love…. generates an understanding of Bangkok, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and other former treaty port cities as in principle united not only as Chinese locations but also as territories whose inhabitants still desire a different regional imaginary than one that succumbs to contemporary realpolitik” (68).
Whereas Part I explores the circulation and revival of the aesthetics of colonial modernities across three “Chinese” cities, Part II contours the history of Bangkok as a Chinese city. Illustrating the changing perception of the “Chinese”—from a migrant population of laborers that endured anti-Chinese policies to a newly desirable ethnic identity—Fuhrmann draws out dialect cultures and neighborhood projects meant to distinguish and preserve the remnants of Chinese Thai migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Zeroing in on Bangkok’s vanishing Chinatown, Chapter 3 touches on key sites of architecture, such as the Chinatown Gate, the Yaowarat Heritage Center, and the Berlin Museum, that play prominent roles in mediating Chinese history in Thailand. Cautioning against the conflation of Chinese Thai history and the PRC’s narrative of modern history, the chapter visits Chinese heritage sites such as Lhong 1919 that invoke the early twentieth-century treaty port culture to tease out the complex sensory landscape of revival, from commodification to cultural preservation.
Shifting focus to a transgenerational memory that contests the official Thai narratives of Chinese migration (mediated through the Yaowarat Heritage Center), Chapter 4 centers on the 2019 film Happy Old Year, or How to Dump(directed by Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit). By pairing the film with historical sites in the city that are part of an urban revival movement, including the FooJohn Building, As Is Café, and Mother Roaster, Fuhrmann teases out a family’s nuanced struggles with managing the spatial memories of being Chinese in Bangkok. In the film, the protagonist Jean—a Sweden-trained architect undertaking a renovation project on her family’s cluttered music school—finds her minimalist style coming into conflict with the family house’s transgenerational histories and Bangkok’s Chinese pasts. Pairing two nearly forgotten race riots with revived hospitality sites near the riot scenes—the 1945 Yaowarat and 1974 Phlapphla Chai incidents—the chapter recalls the city’s anti-Chinese tenor and the politics of remembering and forgetting through the film’s theme of generational memories.
Extending the politics of remembering and reviving Bangkok’s Chinese history, Part III is comprised of two chapters that rethink “region” from the vantage point of “Southeast Asia.” Featuring the work of the Thai novelist Veeraporn Nitiprapha, such as Memories of the Memories of the Black Rose Cat (originally published in Thai in 2016), Chapter 5 is a soft rebuttal of the framework of “Chinese diaspora” that conventionally centers China as the primary site of origin and belonging. In the novelist’s chronicle of a Chinese Thai family history spanning three generations who experienced China’s Cultural Revolution transnationally, “China” is far from a space of homecoming. Through the novel’s focus on transregional displacement, Southeast Asia serves as a vantage point for narrating the “decentering” of China.
Ending the book with the 2017 heist thriller film Bad Genius (directed by Nattawut Poonpiriya), Chapter 6 expands the critique of “Chinese diaspora” with ruminations on the applicability of the “Sinophone”—the study of Sinitic languages and cultures around the world—as a framework for Chinese Thai histories of Southeast Asia. Through the film’s main female protagonist Lynn, a high school student with an implied Chinese heritage who orchestrates a multinational cheating operation, Fuhrmann highlights the limitations of the Sinophone, as the chapter thinks through a “Chineseness without (much) Chinese language.” In comparison to the textual readings in Part I and the architectural readings in Part II, Part III’s selection of contemporary Thai literature and film homes in on the articulations of Chinese Thai perspectives that challenge “nation” and “language” as the primary sites of identity formation.
Shaped by feminist historian Tani Barlow’s framework of colonial modernity and the history of “femininity” as a site of social inscription, In the Mood for Texture is at heart a gender history of the feminine mediation of Chineseness in Thailand. Although “femininity” figures prominently as the cultural site where concepts of “Chineseness,” “transnationality,” “plurality,” and “difference” are negotiated and mediated—producing a “trans-Asianness” that pushes back against China-centrism and Southeast Asian nationalism—the book could draw from a more nuanced understanding of the “Sinophone” by recalling the wider range of methodologies of Sinophone studies, such as “minor transnationalism,” “against diaspora,” “transculturation,” and the “creolization of theory.” Emphasizing relational, reciprocal, and intersectional approaches to the historical realities of imperialism and colonialism that de-center the conventional focus on Euro-American empires, Sinophone studies has produced a range of analytical lenses based on the historical and regional specificities of Asia. Put another way, there are more synergies between the book’s careful parsing of a transregional inter-Asia perspective and the Sinophone framework that are better shown than acknowledged.
One example relates to recent interests in Sinophone studies to address the limitation of defining the Sinophone solely through (Sinitic) languages. By locating “Sinophone articulations” in a wide range of disciplines, media, and technologies of expression, new research in Sinophone studies has shown the histories of differences that pluralize “Chineseness” through visual culture, oral history, ethnomusicology, performance, and affect studies. As Fuhrmann’s book provocatively illustrates—through the dis-appearing Chinese quarters of Bangkok and their preservation and revival—the “lived environments,” including architecture, urban rhythm, and infrastructure (such as ports), play a central role in inscribing, creating, and transmitting (old and new) spatial memories and histories across multiple generations. Through Fuhrmann’s elegant reading of contemporary Thai film and literature, Part III congeals the articulation of “transregional Chineseness without China” and a plural personhood not reducible to one location, language, or nationality. The transregional personhood is the result of a long genealogy of transgenerational spatial histories—namely, the haptic memories of transregional Chineseness embedded in the city’s immersive textures. For these reasons, the book offers an important method for illustrating racial history outside a linguistic framework and could be brought into closer dialogue with transmedia Sinophone studies.
In the Mood for Texture pioneers an experiential “psychogeography” of Bangkok—the power of urban environments and geographical locations to shape human behaviors and social norms—as a method of retracing modern regional racial formations. The book opens a new pathway for the study of race in Asia by de-emphasizing dialects, linguistic policies, statistics, education and class, and other conventional means of understanding the history of migration and race. The multiple iterations of “trans-” (transregional and transgenerational) in Chinese Thai history have left behind concrete materialities in the city, requiring different sensing capacities to decode Bangkok as a Chinese city. Thinking through design practices in hospitality venues as well as in film and literature, the book is a nuanced study of howBangkok as a transregional and transgenerational Chinese city is imagined, revived, and lived. As “Chineseness” is incrementally made into a homogenous category under new national policies of the PRC in recent decades, the book attests to a unique iteration of “minor transnationalism”—formed through port cities and the cultures of colonial modernity in Southeast Asia—where the dream for a different Asian cosmopolitanism unfolds.
References
Abbas, Ackbar. Hong Kong: Culture and Politics of Disappearance. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Barlow, Tani E. “Femininity.” The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, edited by Akira Iriye and Pierre-yves Saunier, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 388-92.
Cheng, Anne Anlin. Ornamentalism. Oxford University Press, 2019.
Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. Columbia University Press, 1995.
Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih, editors. The Creolization of Theory. Duke University Press, 2011.
Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih, editors. Minor Transnationalism. Duke University Press, 2005.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press, 2003.
Shih, Shu-mei. “Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production.” Global Chinese Literature: Critical Essays, edited by Jing Tsu and David Der-wei Wang, Brill, 2010, pp. 29-48.
Shih, Shu-mei. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations Across the Pacific. University of California Press, 2007.
Stoler, Ann Laura, editor. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Duke University Press, 2013.
Erin Y. Huang is Associate Professor of Inter-Asia, Sinophone, and gender and sexuality studies in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility. Her current book project, Ocean Worlds: Transpacific Worldmaking Across Sensorial Oceans, is the recipient of a SSHRC Insight Grant (2025-2030), and focuses on American, Chinese, and Taiwanese military and surveillance visual and literary cultures in the Arctic Ocean, the Taiwan Strait, and the South China Sea.