#ptp originals | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

telomeke · 1 year

Text

MOONLIGHT CHICKEN – WEN'S NAME AND ITS LINKS TO POLITICAL COLOR SYMBOLISM

The way Wen's name is represented on screen in Moonlight Chicken is really interesting.

It isn't a Thai name, and is more probably Chinese. However, the Chinese character or ideogram isn't shown to us anywhere, not even in the Cantonese or Mandarin subtitles – they just spell out Wen in letters of the Roman alphabet instead of using a Chinese character:

(above) Moonlight Chicken Ep.1 [4/4] 9.28

But it's possible to find out what it is in Chinese (kind of), and this is what I did.

(above) Moonlight Chicken Ep.5 [4/4] 14.21

Jim has Wen's name stored on his phone as เหวิน, and it's the same Thai word used for the Chinese Emperor Wen of Sui – and his name employs the character 文. This is a word that refers to language, culture, or writing. It can also mean formal, literary or gentle, and because of all this it has a scholarly vibe.

But Wen's name really takes on significance when we see how else it connects, and surprisingly one of the weightier evocations is political in nature. 👀 Take a look at how Wen's name is represented in his own phone:

(above) Moonlight Chicken Ep.5 [1I4] 16.20

The w and n are present, but what happened to the e? Wen calling himself wn doesn't quite make sense – unless it's being done for other reasons. And in fact, the abbreviation does begin to take on significance when we look at it another way.

Now there is one thing that Thai people sometimes do with the Roman alphabet – they play around with the visual similarity that some letters have to letters in the Thai abugida, using Roman letters to spell out Thai words for a bit of fun. (Director Aof introduced this to us with the Inwza of Pat's chat ID in Bad Buddy – see this post linked here for more explanation.)

There appears to be general concurrence that the Roman letters w and n somewhat resemble the Thai letters พ and ท respectively – so the wn in Wen's phone can also be rendered พท. Noting that Wen's formal first name – วงศกร or Wongsakorn – means ancestor according to some online dictionaries, I think Moonlight Chicken is telling us to look more closely at the predecessor of Wen's พท for deeper meaning.

An online search of พท brings up several results, of which the following two are the most interesting:

พ.ท. – an abbreviation for Lieutenant Colonel (พันโท, pronounced something like phan tho);

พท. – an abbreviation for Pheu Thai Party (พรรคเพื่อไทย).

Looking first at Lieutenant Colonel (พันโท), the first word พัน (phan) means a thousand, while the second word โท (tho) can mean (among other things) two, second or double. It's probably just a coincidence, but it nonetheless reads like a neat little tip of the hat to the drama A Tale of a Thousand Stars (ATOTS) – it's as though the words thousand and second are signaling that Moonlight Chicken is Thousand Stars Pt.2 (remembering that ATOTS was also helmed by Director Aof, and also starred Earth, Mix and Khaotung).

However, it's the second meaning of พท – an abbreviation of พรรคเพื่อไทย or Pheu Thai Party – that's really interesting, because its appearance onscreen looks like a purposeful decision colored with political impulses.

The Pheu Thai Party (PTP, sometimes also called PPT because, you know, Thai language) was the third incarnation of Thailand's ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra's original political party, after the first two were dissolved by the courts. (The first party, Thai Rak Thai, was founded in 1998 while PTP was founded in 2007, to give you an idea of the time period involved. This is around and after the time Jim and Jam ran away from the family farm, and so they would have been witness to the political drama with regard to this party, right up close in their cities.)

Before joining politics, Thaksin Shinawatra was in the police force, and attained the rank of – you guessed it – พ.ท. or Lieutenant Colonel (it was revoked later, after his fall from power). But he came from a family of businessmen, and had always been active in business.

Not to go too much more into detail (because I already have) the PTP and its previous versions rode into power in several elections on a platform of poverty eradication. Support from the rural poor was immense for them, especially because of welfare policies that the party introduced.

However, it was clear the party (in all its incarnations) was also on the side of big business, and once in power continued to engage in such. Opposition to Thaksin and his activities began to form, and came primarily from a coalition with a large base of support among the urban elite (intellectuals and the educated) and also royalists. They eventually formed a party to counter him formally, called the PAD.

The party espousing rights for the poor (while still affirmedly capitalist) was nicknamed the Red Shirts, while the party leveling charges of corruption against them, with the support of high-thinkers, intellectuals and royalists, became known as the Yellow Shirts. Protests would see throngs of supporters dressed (separately) in these two colors.

A detour into an explanation of the colors is in order here. As mentioned before in my write-up on Wen's friend Gong (linked here), in Thailand the color yellow can sometimes be seen as suggesting links to higher authority and the wisdom of greater experience. Shades of it (ranging to darker tones of mustard, even with nuances of rust) are reminiscent of the saffron robes worn by Buddhist monks respected for their piety and wisdom. And yellow is also the color associated with the current king as well as his father King Bhumibol Adulyadej before him – and we need to bear in mind that the majority of Thais absolutely revere the king, with him being seen as an incarnation of God in all his wisdom.

Director Aof has riffed on this significance of the color yellow before, in Bad Buddy Ep.12, when Korn comments on how much ex-bad boy Wai was reformed and religious:

(above) Bad Buddy Ep.12 [1I4] 5.32

In the scene above, Director Aof showed that Wai's rehabilitation was complete by dressing him in yellow, even as the dialogue made references to religion, good manners, temples and (Buddhist) donations. The choice of color was absolutely intentional – they actually dressed Wai in a woman's shirt (you can tell from the way the shirt placket overlaps right over left), and they did this not to suggest he'd been emasculated, but because the color was just what they needed for the character in this scene (suggesting his pivot to a life more monastic and respectful). So the choice of the color yellow (with all its connotations of religiosity and reform) took precedence over any ideas about gendering, which kind of fits nicely with other themes in Bad Buddy too.

As for the color red, its symbolism on the Thai flag is that it represents the land, its lifeblood (the people) and also blood spilled to maintain the country's independence. And these are concepts clearly laden with passionate emotion.

Although Thailand's population is now slightly more than 52% urban, it was still majority rural at the time before and during Thaksin's premiership (and rural populations were almost always poorer than urban ones). The idea of urban Thailand as having rural underpinnings was prevalent, and the Red Shirts capitalized on this – if the color red symbolized the land and its people, people working the land would surely be the best example of this lifeblood.

So what the Red Shirts did was to appeal emotionally to the rural populace, that had long felt ignored, and spoke to their sense of marginalization with handouts and welfare, and made them feel that they were finally being seen. Thus the color red came to be associated with championing the cause of the (rural) poor during those times, along with the heated emotions that were being stirred up in this segment of the population in support of the party.

With regard to the Red Shirts and the Yellow Shirts – I'm not at all taking sides or writing about who was right and who was wrong. But because of what these colors mean in Thailand (and especially during the era of the Red and Yellow Shirts referenced by Wen's name), I think in Moonlight Chicken the colors yellow and red speak of the dichotomy between living your life based on rational thought, as opposed to emotional reaction (the age-old conflict of head v. heart). And the connection that the color red also has to socio-economic class struggles in Thaksin-era Thailand also resonates around Jim, Wen and the diner in particular (noting that the heyday of the Red Shirts was also the same time that Jim was beginning his new life in the city).

I don’t really do wardrobe color analysis (please visit @respectthepetty's archive linked here for stuff that's much more in-depth and wide-ranging across many different shows 👍). But I'll take a stab at it for this aspect of Moonlight Chicken, painting only with the very broadest of brushstrokes (noting that you can't apply the color palette too strictly anyway, because it'll make the characters look like they're in uniform and the whole effect will turn cartoony).

In Moonlight Chicken I think the color red (echoing the cause of the Red Shirts) does represent the downtrodden and their struggle to survive. Jim's diner has red aprons, and we see a lot of red on Jim, Saleng and Li Ming – they're quite clearly represented as the underclass.

Wen having wn or พท on his phone to refer to himself may be a sign that he aligned himself with the Red Shirts' point of view, at least at the beginning and with regard to the underprivileged. From Ep.2 onwards, we see Wen's wardrobe starting to take on more red even as he starts to feel increasing empathy for Jim and Jim's found family, especially when he begins helping out as temp staff at the diner. (This parallels how the PTP, that shares the พท on Wen's mobile phone, was also identified with the Red Shirts and fighting for the poor).

But red is also the color that we see Jim's money-grubbing landlord representative wearing in Ep.3 [2/4], even as his bike is yellow:

(above left) Moonlight Chicken Ep.3 [2/4] 2.26; (above right) Moonlight Chicken Ep.3 [2/4] 0.57

Meanwhile, Wen also works with the Marina Development that threatens the diner (and this organization is symbolic of big business, just like the party associated with the Red Shirts also had similar interests). When they show us Wen's first in-office meeting (that we get to see), he's still in red but he's also cloaked it with a neutral (indicating that his loyalties may be divided):

(above) Moonlight Chicken Ep.3 [1I4] 1.42

So I think the color red in Moonlight Chicken not only symbolizes the oppressed, but also the systems oppressing them. It may be associated with the poor and their lot in life, but it may also be appropriated by those with less-charitable intentions. When applied to Jim's landlord representative, who's using both yellow and red, we can't see where his true loyalties lie, and the colors serve to illustrate his basic untrustworthiness.

In these two examples (Jim's troubles with the landlord and the Marina Development) we are reminded of how the party of the Red Shirts, the PTP, may have been helping the poor with handouts (appealing to their emotions in exchange for votes), but it was also on the side of big business, and engaging in mega-business dealings that would line its own coffers (that might or might not be channeled back to help the poor – I have no idea as to their actual plans).

The Yellow Shirts certainly didn't think this was right though, and charges of corruption were leveled against Thaksin and his party, eventually leading to his political demise.

But in Moonlight Chicken, what we see as the series progresses is Wen beginning to wear more and more yellow even as he's drawn in closer to Jim's circle. This to me signals that he's applying more reasoned thought on how to resolve his divided loyalties (keeping in mind the monastic/intellectual/royal significance of the color yellow, and the scholarly connotations of his name 文).

The following outfit paints a picture of Wen's journey (and it's the same one that he wears when we get a first glimpse at the wn on his phone):

(above) Moonlight Chicken Ep.5 [1I4] 12.36

The color red is still predominant, but we're also seeing pale apricot and saffron orange (of the same family as the colors of monks' robes) starting to creep in. (The blue can also be read as a reference to the revered monarchy by the way; it's not just the yellow that suggests this – the color blue also represents the royal family on the Thai flag). The red reflects Wen's heartfelt care and concern for the struggles of the diner and its people (echoing the mission of the Red Shirts), but the increasing amount of yellow (and related hues) also shows how he's starting his journey to reason with his head (echoing the elite, high-thinking origins of the Yellow Shirts), and not just blindly following the dictates of his heart.

Significantly, the scene that follows also parallels this, in the flashback of Wen (in yellow ochre) proffering wise words of advice to Jim (applying rational logic to matters of the heart):

(above) Moonlight Chicken Ep.5 [1I4] 17.32

I wouldn't have been reading so much into the significance of the wn on Wen's phone and all the political backstory with the colors, except that Wen himself actually makes a comment regarding politics later on, casting himself in the role of a politician:

(above) Moonlight Chicken Ep.7 [2/4] 8.04

This moment is Director Aof taking the opportunity to make a statement about LGBTQ+ rights by having Wen, in Buddhist-robe saffron, hand Jim a mug with "Love is Love" in rainbow colors while they talk about queer struggles and the unavailability of same-sex marriage in Thailand. But at the same time, it also underscores Wen's connection to politics and the significance of the colors he wears. 👍

Interestingly, from time to time we also see Jim wearing versions of yellow (shading into other tones like orange and ochre), even as his wardrobe retains touches of the red that signals his underprivileged socio-economic class. I think this parallels his journey to realizing his best life using reason and logic, an enlightenment of sorts, rather than relying on the prejudices and received wisdom he's stored in his heart (inherited from generations before him) or the emotions that plagued him after Beam's passing.

And the culmination of this is when he allows Li Ming his freedom, and also relinquishes the diner for a food truck (which in a sense allows him freedom too). This is given a shout-out in Ep.8 [3I4], when he doffs his red apron and passes it to Saleng (symbolically giving up the weight of his emotional decision-making, that tied him to a life of poverty) while still wearing a saffron top (symbolizing the rationalized decisions that got him to a new, unburdened life):

(above) Moonlight Chicken Ep.8 [3I4] 7.45

And the parallel journey for Wen is when he finally, rationally, makes a clean and solid break with Alan, no longer hanging onto the past out of sense of obligation to Alan's feelings, or misplaced compassion after his accident. (Wen overstaying where he shouldn't, because of the emotional pull that he feels, is actually foreshadowed way back in Ep.1 [2/4], when he dawdles in Jim's home the morning after their one-night stand. 👍)

By Ep.8 [4/4], we see that both Jim and Wen found a way to accommodate the dichotomy of head versus heart in their lives, using sensible logic to address their own needs, and the needs of their loved ones, rather than relying only on the instinctive tugging of their hearts – a battle that they ultimately won, that was symbolized by the yellow and red that they wear, and that was first signaled to us via the innocuous wn or พท representing Wen's name in his mobile phone. 💖

#moonlight chicken #moonlight chicken names #moonlight chicken colors #jim jaruek #wen wongsakorn #moonlight chicken yellow and red

115 notes · View notes