Non Arkaraprasertkul

I was born on the first of November, 1981, a Sunday — and I know it was a Sunday because the calendar still says so, more than forty years on. The hospital was Phyathai, in the middle of Bangkok, close to where we lived then, near Siam Square.

The pictures of that baby do not look like me. A strange head shape. I have always quietly believed I turned out better-looking than I started. I do not remember being born, and I remember little of being small. The one memory that survived is a bad one: I got lost in a shopping mall — Pantip Plaza, on Petchaburi Road — and for a while no one found me. I still remember the inside of it, the columns I would later learn to call Doric and Ionic, everything too big, the acoustics wrong, the whole world moving around a child who could not find his mother. My mother and brother found me in the end. I think some part of me has been slightly braced for that moment ever since.

When I first described where we lived, I said “near Siam Paragon,” and that is wrong — a small error worth keeping, because it shows how memory reaches for the nearest landmark it can find. Siam Paragon did not exist in 1981. What stood on that ground then was the Siam Intercontinental, a hotel with a roof shaped like a hat, set in one of the largest gardens in central Bangkok. It opened in 1966 and came down in 2002; Paragon opened on the site in 2005. My mother took her dry cleaning there. We went to weddings there. The last thing I attended before they tore it down was an Australian student fair, around 2002. So when I say “near Siam Paragon,” what I mean is: near the place that is now Siam Paragon, which in my childhood was a hotel shaped like a hat.

I was born six years after my brother. That much I had from my mother and from everyone around me, and there is no one left to ask for more.

On recordThe first of November, 1981, was a Sunday — confirmed. The Siam Intercontinental stood on the Siam Paragon site from 1966 to 2002 — confirmed. Both hold.

My mother came from Sikhio, in Nakhon Ratchasima, up in the northeast, and that is where the family really begins. My great-grandparents kept a shop there — Suwan Panit, สุวรรณพานิช — selling ready-made clothes and cuts of fabric. Above the door was the Chinese name a trading house gives itself for luck: 發祥, the auspicious-beginnings house, the kind of name every Sino-Thai merchant family chose. The registration paper is dated 1969 — พ.ศ. ๒๕๑๒ in the Thai reckoning. When the record was first read, the year was misread; I corrected it. The paper says 1969.

That maternal line runs through my own name. I write myself Non C. Arkaraprasertkul, and the C is for Jamsuan — my mother’s family — carried quietly in the middle of a name that is otherwise all my father’s. I am, in a single initial, both sides at once.

Every summer, when school let out and there was no one at home to mind me, they sent me up to Sikhio, to my grandparents, into a house full of cousins — a whole generation of children raised a generation up, by their grandparents, while the parents worked in the city. I thought it was wonderful. I learned to eat the food I still love best: beef-ball noodles with ice water; iced coffee so dark it was almost bitter, then sweetened darker still. There was one television in the entire neighbourhood, so we gathered around it together. I have wondered since whether that — the shared screen, the bodies in one room — is simply something the children now will never have.

The Chinese thread ran quietly through all of it. My great-grandparents' generation kept their Chinese shop names and their Chinese festivals and managed the rest carefully, because the Thailand of those decades was not comfortable with its Chinese minority. Growing up I knew I was Chinese in ways that were rarely spoken aloud. I understood it better much later, when I found myself studying a Chinese city and realised I had been circling back to something I had been taught not to notice.

When I was two or three, the state drew a line through our row house. An expressway was to land there, and they cleared the houses by eminent domain. The expressway was never built — forty years on, it still has not been — and the condemned row houses are lived in now by migrant workers who somehow got the power and water connected, even an address. But the line on the map did its work all the same: it moved us out of downtown and into the suburb where I live to this day.

We could move because of my maternal grandmother. She was a Thai-Chinese woman from the countryside who never spent a thing on herself, and she had bought — quietly, years early — a plot of land in the suburbs, because she had decided that one day all her children would leave the rural town and settle in Bangkok, and they would need ground to stand on. She was right. We built our house on her land with the eminent-domain money; my uncle built his behind ours a few years later; my aunts built theirs behind his. Three houses on one plot — a compound — because one woman who owned almost nothing could see thirty years ahead.

The suburb was called Nam Sai, clear water, and we lived down a soi, an alley, where everyone was a friend. After school I would drop my bag, change, and go out: football in the field, secret forts built from whatever grew there, other people’s dogs, comic books traded back and forth. At the shop I could buy three sweets for one baht. They are two baht each now — the only inflation a child ever measures. The single time my mother struck me with a stick was the day I had so much fun I left the house key at one of those shops.

I read everything, and drew my own comics — I made a Dragon Ball of my own and called it Dragon Wall, for no reason except that it sounded right. On weekends my parents had the Bangkok Post delivered, and I would pull out the Sunday comics — Garfield, Archie — and read English without quite knowing I was learning it. In secondary school my mother sent me, once a week, to a Mr. Herb, an American who had simply stayed on in Thailand, to learn English by talking. What he taught me was not grammar. He taught me not to be afraid of foreigners — to use my hands, my face, whatever I had, to make myself understood.

And every afternoon at four, home from school, I watched a serial out of Hong Kong dubbed into Thai — The Bund, set in old Shanghai. I had no idea then that I would travel to Shanghai twenty-some years later, or that I would make it the subject of my doctorate. But that is where it began: a suburban Thai boy in front of the only television, watching a city he would one day spend years explaining.

On recordA central-Bangkok expressway planned in the 1980s and left unbuilt is consistent with the documented history of the city’s expropriations. The rest of this chapter is family memory; there is no register for it, and I have not pretended otherwise.

My mother is a small, graceful woman, and I should admit the obvious bias: she is my standard of beauty because she is the first face I knew. I came from her body; I was held and fed and warmed by her; of course I think her beautiful. She worked at the headquarters of Krung Thai Bank, and could take the bus to it from the row house. I have loved her without condition my whole life.

My father, Kongkiet Arkaraprasertkul, was a civil servant — and not a minor one. He rose to deputy director-general of the Department of Local Administration, in the Ministry of the Interior, and then to Governor of Buriram. The cars improved with each title; the last, when he was deputy director-general, was an enormous Nissan that drank petrol, and he had earned it.

As a child I thought he was forever coming between my mother and me — taking her attention, separating us — and I did not much like him for it. It took me years to understand that he loved me without quite knowing how to say so. He would drive me anywhere. Whatever I wanted, he simply got. He looked serious all the time, and then, every so often, he would take me out for Isan food and let me tell him stories, which I have always loved to do and which he always loved to hear.

There was a nanny too, in the downtown years — Boun Som. And there was a wall, a white wall my father wanted kept white, that I covered at about two years old in a complete Jackson Pollock. I was not scolded. They photographed me in front of it. I would like to find that picture.

The name Arkaraprasertkul is not ancient. My paternal grandfather assembled it — went through a dictionary looking for words he liked and put them together — during the period when the Thai government required Chinese families to take Thai surnames in order to register their children for school. An act of translation, performed once, under some pressure, by a man I never met. The name has carried the family ever since. I carry it. It is long, uncommon, and heavy in its way. Inside it, invisible to anyone who does not know the story, is where we came from.

I want to be honest about school, because the honest version is not the one we tell. In the Thailand of the 1980s and 90s, the first bully a child met was not another child. It was the teacher. The teacher held the stick, and the parents had handed over the right to use it — they outsourced the violence so they could remain the gentle ones at home. I was punished a great deal, by teachers who did not like my questions, did not like my curiosity, did not like that I arrived at the same answers by a different road. And once a teacher made his dislike plain, the class took it as permission, and the rest followed.

I stuttered as a child. I still do, a little, when I am excited — though less and less, now that I speak for a living, a couple of hundred times a year. I used to think confidence was something you decided to have. I think now it is something you build, by practice, the way you build anything else.

What I built was a way out: basketball. I worked out that a shooting guard need only do one thing well — find the spot where no one can block you, and put the ball through the hoop from there. So I practised the one thing until it was reliable, and I found, in the team, a set of people I could belong to. That is more or less how I have solved most things since.

It was, I should admit, the era when Thai people did not much like being Thai — when the whole ambition of a clever young person was to get out. I felt it too. I thought the country backward and slow, and I wanted to leave it. I have since changed my mind about nearly all of that, but I will not pretend I did not feel it then.

The clearest I ever saw my father was abroad.

In the autumn of 2006 I had just finished my first year at MIT, and a small travel grant — a thousand dollars — took me to Japan for a workshop on modern Asian architecture. My father happened to be in Japan at the same time, on a study visit; he had just been told he would be made Governor of Buriram. I went to find him. After a long night out with a senior from college, I was dropped at the hotel where he was meant to be staying — except he was in another hotel, an hour away by train, in Chiba. So I took the train, and got there, and the first thing I did when I saw him was put my arms around him. That was twenty years ago now.

I told this story at first as October. Then I looked at the photographs, and the stamp said the third of November. So it was November — which means my father could not yet have taken up the governorship, because governors begin on the first of October; his must have been one of those out-of-season appointments, which is exactly why he was free to travel. The photograph corrected me, and then explained itself.

We travelled together a few days. He did not eat fish, but he would sit in a sushi restaurant and watch me eat tuna, because I love tuna. On that trip I also met, near midnight, the architect Kengo Kuma — who, it turned out, had been funded years earlier by the same foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, that was funding me through MIT. The whole thing closed into a loop: the money that had made me had made him, and there we were. He is one of the most famous architects in the world now. He designs half of Japan.

But the journey that made me was earlier, and humbler. When I was eleven or twelve, my father organised our first trip away from home — to Malaysia, by sleeper train, out of Hua Lamphong station, down through Hat Yai to Padang Besar and across the border. I do not remember whether we reached Kuala Lumpur. I remember the slowness, the talking, sleeping while the country moved past, and a market in Hat Yai so full of electronics I could not pull myself away. My father should have known then that I loved machines. He did not, and so I became an architect. I have decided not to count that as a loss.

He taught me to drive — in Sa Kaeo, in 1999, where he was vice-governor, in the back of a pickup with three other young men taking turns, no seatbelts, a rolling nineteen-nineties. And he stood beside me through the worst humiliation of my early life: my undergraduate thesis at KMITL, into which I had put real research, was given a B by a committee that preferred neater models and prettier boards. People mocked the work; I took my models home before they could be wrecked. My father told me not to worry so much.

I look like him. He never weighed more than fifty kilograms; his waist was twenty-eight inches his whole life; I was as thin as he had been, and I have his build. The one time he said it plainly was in Singapore, at a planning congress, where I led our group and translated the whole proceedings, Thai into English and back, in the fluent technical language of his own profession. He came to me afterward and said, “That was really good, son.” I felt it. That was the day I knew.

The road out went the long way.

Between nineteen ninety-eight and two thousand and four I was at a technical college in Bangkok — King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, an architecture programme — and for six years I spent as much time as I could in the library. The teachers shouted at students who asked too many questions; I asked too many questions; the library did not shout. I wrote to professors at MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley asking for their reading lists, and I read what they recommended. The librarians extended my hours and let me check out more than the rules allowed. I put in more than three thousand hours in those stacks over six years, reading what a graduate education would have assigned me without the graduate education to assign it. Nobody had asked me to do this. Nobody knew I was doing it.

At nineteen I dropped a year of college, decided I was not good enough that year, and went on an exchange — the American Field Service — to Oklahoma City. My host was Victor Wong, who had gone to Dartmouth; he took me to Boston in the spring to meet his Cantonese family and their clever cousins. We visited Cambridge — MIT, Harvard, the Charles River. I met an engineering student, a Chinese-American named Billie, who was great at programming and who seemed entirely at home in a place I had only read about. I was not at home anywhere yet. In the slow, phoneless late nineties, in a bar one evening, talking, I fell in love with the idea of Boston. I did not know I would spend ten years of my life there, or that I had just seen the city where I would end up.

The order of what came after is genuinely tangled, and I would rather tell it tangled than tidy it into a lie. There was a Fulbright that took me to MIT for a master’s in the history and theory of architecture, where Stanford Anderson was my advisor and taught me that good writing is clear writing — a lesson I have kept and will keep. He died in January of 2016. My thesis there argued something I still believe: that tall buildings are not only what economics makes necessary but what culture makes desirable — that the towers of 1920s Shanghai, the Bund I had watched as a child, went up before the economic need to go up arrived, because height has a psychological power of its own.

There was Oxford, on a Harvard-Yenching grant. And there was Harvard itself — a doctorate in anthropology, under Michael Herzfeld, whose prose I have never enjoyed and whose mind taught me a great deal regardless, and who got me in. The programme took two percent. I know exactly how I got into the two percent: I wrote about love hotels, and I cited Herzfeld’s idea of “crypto-colonialism,” because it fit a concept of my own I had named “crypto-urbanism”; and I cited Theodore Bestor’s Neighborhood Tokyo, because I needed Bestor to like me as well as Herzfeld — two names, two signatures. It worked. I will not pretend it was only merit. It was merit, and knowing how the door actually opens.

I became a professor straight out, with none of the usual year in the wilderness between — which is rare; and once I understood it was rare, it became difficult ever to be ordinary again.

On recordThe Harvard doctorate, the MIT master’s, the Oxford degree, the Fulbright, and the Harvard-Yenching grant are all things the public record can confirm, and does. The exact order in which they overlapped is the one thing memory keeps slightly tangled — and it is left tangled here, on purpose.

Everyone died in 2010.

My maternal grandfather — Agong — went first, at the start of the year. I heard it at the Stanford bookstore, where I was waiting for a girl named Laura to have lunch, in the quiet of an off-semester campus. I had been about to buy a backpack, and I bought it, and I am still using it; my father liked it too. When a strap broke I wrote to complain and they replaced the whole thing for nothing, and that is the day I learned to expect good companies to stand behind what they make. I remember the entire universe of that moment — which is, I think, how a memory palace is built.

My grandmother — Ama — followed not long after.

And my father died in September, on the first day of my first class at Harvard. I was, that week, as happy as I had ever been: at the top of everything I had worked for, with a girlfriend, losing my hair and no longer caring. Then the call came. I found a Lenovo ThinkPad he had bought me after my last one was stolen in Oxford, searched for a flight, reached an agent at last, and flew home on Korean Air to the funeral. I helped my mother for two weeks, and went back to Boston to study.

He had, before he died, done the largest thing anyone has ever done for me. I had won a research award at Thammasat — the youngest ever to win it — and the grant that came with it had quietly tied me down: serve the university four years, or repay three times what I had taken. The two years at MIT counted against me. The bill, in the end, was three million baht, which twenty years ago was a great deal of money. My father paid it. He loved me enough to buy my freedom and let me go.

So this is what I have done ever since, from my first salary until now: I send all of it to my mother. Every month, from wherever I have been — Harvard, Shanghai, Bangkok — I have transferred what I could to her, as a way of paying my father back. The debt cannot be settled; he is gone. I keep paying it anyway. The point was never the money. The point is that the chain has never once been broken.

On recordMy mother is alive. Three deaths fell in 2010 — Agong, then Ama, then my father, in September. I have set the order down carefully, because for a long time I told it wrong.

The hardest years came later, and I misjudged them completely while I was inside them.

Between roughly 2016 and 2019 I was alone and in trouble — a university post that did not fit, a fight ugly enough that a union had to step in, a stint at IDEO in Shanghai that proved hollow, a job in Sydney taken only because Singapore had turned me down. I flew three hundred thousand kilometres in a single year.

Part of that mileage landed me in Kraków — a visiting professorship at the Oriental Institute of Jagiellonian University, brokered by a colleague named Garcia from the president's discretionary fund, the kind of arrangement that sounds improbable until it arrives and then simply does. There was Christopher from America, Akeen from the Netherlands, Max from Latvia, Garcia at the centre. I dated a woman named Martina and chose not to continue; I cannot say clearly even now why. There is a photograph from a house party that year — a room full of people all passing through — and the man in it is recognisably me, though only just. The leaving I have never properly explained is the one from Sydney, which set the whole period in motion. I know the facts of it. The reason is still on its way back to me.

I thought those years the worst of my life. I know now they were the best — that I was learning Europe, collecting the stories that make people want to know me, becoming the person who could tell them. I simply could not see it from the inside. I have stopped trusting the verdict I arrive at while still inside a bad year. The verdict always reverses, on a delay I cannot feel.

There was a dog through some of this — Paolo, a pug, given to me when I finished at MIT and named after the Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, whose work I happened to be reviewing at the time. My father loved him and fed him all the wrong things. Paolo died in 2013, five years old, while I was in New York; my brother told me. He had kept waiting for my father, who was already gone, without knowing it. I have two dogs now — Mali and Expo, Thai dogs, built for the weather, healthy and loud — and they sleep in my room. I will not keep a dog that has to live in air-conditioning again. It is not fair to the dog.

And here is where it comes out. For a long time I believed my parents’ one real failure was that they had not seen, early enough, what I was — that if they had, I would have gone to Harvard at eighteen and been running a lab by thirty. My mother told me, plainly, that she never once saw me study. She was right; I did not. I have never understood studying as repetition. You learn a thing or you do not; once it is in, it is in. That is simply how my mind works, and it cost me her belief for years, and a B that should have been an A, and a long detour through being underestimated.

I have my health. I have no trouble with money. I do not want for anything anymore — not better food, not anything. If I died today I would say I had made it: MIT, Oxford, Harvard, a good life, and the rare contentment of a man who has stopped needing more. It could have been smoother. It could have hurt less. But then it would not have built this particular person — and this is the one I have.

In May of 2026 I built a dashboard on my phone during a BTS ride to a meeting. By the time I arrived there was something to show: a Control Tower for Chulalongkorn University, real data, real infrastructure, assembled in transit. I have learned that what can be demonstrated from a stranger's phone is real in the only way that matters; what cannot be is not yet finished. I do not do localhost anymore. Everything I build is live before I have decided whether it is done — because that is the only reliable way to decide.

The meeting was with Associate Professor Manoj Lohatepanont, Vice-Rector for the university's academic-zone property and the caretaker of its new AI Office. He gave me forty-five minutes and, by the end, offered me the directorship. I asked for Practitioner-in-Residence instead — same work, less title. I have learned not to commit before I understand what I am committing to.

What I did not say — because I did not work it out until I was back on the street — was that Manoj Lohatepanont had given a Fulbright talk to a Bangkok teenager, twenty years before, that had helped point him toward MIT. The Bangkok teenager was me. The same man who aimed me had, after forty-five minutes of live demonstration, offered me back a door. The arc is closed. I had not noticed it forming.

A few days earlier I had told the Mayor of Chonburi, in front of his entire cabinet, that I had guessed at forty percent of what his city needed and did not yet know the other sixty. The room went quiet for a moment. That honesty is the product of the whole journey — you can only say I don't know with confidence once you have accumulated enough to know what you are uncertain about. The sixty percent is now the part I find most interesting.

I started writing this biography one question a day, on the theory that what is worth keeping is worth setting in order before it slips. The hundred days are not yet complete. But I have already learned what I most needed to: that the verdict I arrive at while still inside a year is the least reliable verdict I have. The verdict always reverses. On a delay I cannot feel coming — but know, now, is on its way.