| Beijing | Music | 00:00 |
| Sirin walks in Beijing | PAUL LOCKYER: How Thailand's Sirin Phathanothai ended up in Beijing at the age of eight | 00:06 |
| Photo. Sirin as girl | is a story in itself. Quite apart from the struggle she then faced | 00:11 |
| Archival. Beijing | to try to survive the political turmoil which engulfed China. SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: At the time, |
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| Sirin. Super: | in early ‘50s, I think ’China was a very, very dangerous word to pronounce in Thailand. | 00:25 |
| Archival. Army parade. Beijing | Then, it represented horror and illegal and, you know. LEO HORN, SON: It's hard to put myself in my mother's shoes and for me it's very difficult to | 00:32 |
| Leo. Super: | fathom what it must've been like to be sent away from the family and to grow up in very different surroundings. | 00:47 |
| Bangkok | Music | 00:54 |
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| PAUL LOCKYER: It was certainly a radical change for a young girl plucked out of Bangkok in the 1950s. | 01:01 |
| Photo. Sirin as girl/ Father | Sirin was born to one of Thailand's leading political families. Her father Sang Phathanothai was a chief adviser to the Prime Minister of the day. Both men shared | 01:07 |
| Archival. Rally. | deep concerns about China's emerging power and the need to forge ties with Beijing, even though it was illegal to do so. | 01:18 |
| Leo. Super: | LEO HORN, SON: The belief that China would have to open to the world and that China would become a force to be reckoned with on the international stage. | 01:29 |
| Archival. Zhou Enlai and Mao | PAUL LOCKYER: Covert contact was made through diplomatic channels with Premier Zhou Enlai, the second most powerful man in China after Chairman Mao Zedong. A secret treaty of friendship was drawn up, | 01:37 |
| Family photos | but Sirin's father wanted to make a more tangible sign of goodwill. He decided to send Sirin and her older brother Warnwai to China to be raised by Zhou Enlai -- a human pledge of friendship more in keeping with medieval practices. | 01:49 |
| Sirin. Super: | SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: One of the Chinese tradition to pay homage, to show trust, to the other nation. At the time I think there was not any other possibility to establish the kind of link with China. | 02:07 |
| Leo. Super: | LEO HORN, SON: Basically to grow up and learn the ways of the grander and greater kingdom. | 02:27 |
| Joe. Super: | JOE HORN, SON: I think the hardest thing is how he managed to convince my grandmother, "Honey, we're going to send two of our kids to China". That's like the equivalent of saying we're going to send our kids to North Korea or to Burma for a couple of years, not long. | 02:32 |
| Frames photos. Sirin and Warnwai | Music | 02:44 |
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| PAUL LOCKYER: Sirin gave little thought to the destination. She was simply excited about the journey she was to undertake. | 02:47 |
| Photos. Sirin as girl | SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: I would've been the first girl in my class to get on the plane there and come back. And I just thought I would cut a very nice figure among my friends. I thought I would go | 02:55 |
| Sirin | for a nice holiday for a week or so, and so we didn't say goodbye to any friends or school, we just left. | 03:08 |
| Archival. Beijing 1950s | PAUL LOCKYER: Sirin was disturbed by what she found in Beijing -- a poverty stricken city in the first stages of communist reconstruction efforts. | 03:18 |
| Photo. Sirin and Zhou Enlai | Premier Zhou Enlai assured her and her brother they would be well cared for. Sirin still believed that she and Warnwai would soon be heading home. But the short adventure | 03:32 |
| Photo. Sirin and Warnwai | was to turn into a 13-year stay during the most turbulent years of Chairman Mao's rule. Sirin, like so many others, was caught up in the Cultural Revolution, vilified and persecuted by a rampaging Red Guard. | 03:43 |
| Archival. Rally | Music | 03:57 |
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| SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: I think the country was in such a turmoil, you know, and the change was so fast, I think even Zhou Enlai | 04:03 |
| Sirin | himself could not have foreseen it. | 04:13 |
| Archival. Red guards replace street signs/ Rallies | PAUL LOCKYER: Terror gripped the nation as purge upon purge was unleashed against perceived enemies of the State, especially intellectuals and the privileged. The fading political slogans which once generated the violence can still be found daubed on the walls of alleyways in the back streets of Beijing. | 04:16 |
| Photo. Sirin and Warnwai | PAUL LOCKYER: Sirin and her brother, now teenagers, were targeted as part of the privileged classes. Their guardian, Zhou Enlai, had his own problems. | 04:38 |
| Sirin | SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: He himself was in great trouble. | 04:48 |
| Archival. Zhou Enlai and Mao at mass gathering | PAUL LOCKYER: As Zhou Enlai battled for his political life, Sirin was not only forced to confess to capitalist crimes against the state, but was made to denounce her brother as a counter revolutionary. SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: I read, and my brother was sitting | 04:53 |
| Sirin. Super: | next to me, and then after I finished reading the Red Guard came in reading the sentence and the soldiers came and dragged him away and I just fainted. | 05:05 |
| Photo. Sirin and Warnwai | PAUL LOCKYER: Warnwai was expelled from China, but the saga was just beginning for Sirin. | 05:26 |
| Photo. Sirin as young woman | Next she was forced to denounce her father on Radio Peking. SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: The thing was, I couldn't forgive myself. | 05:32 |
| Sirin | I was in a big mess for many years, because I had to try and understand myself. I had to blame somebody, so I blamed my father, why he ever wanted to send a little girl to China. | 05:38 |
| Archival. Trucks on bridge | PAUL LOCKYER: To escape persecution in Beijing, Sirin, with Zhou Enlai's help, changed her name and went to work with the People's Liberation Army in the countryside. | 05:57 |
| Archival. Pamphlet distribution/ Into countryside | SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: It was very frightening. I think so frightening that I lost my memory for three years. From the time when I was sent to the countryside the situation there must have been very, very harsh. I was probably close | 06:08 |
| Sirin | to death somewhere and Zhou Enlai sent somebody again to see me and brought me back to Beijing and put me in hospital, and then again I had to run somewhere, so he put me into a factory. So I was a textile worker for over a year. | 06:29 |
| Leo. Super: | LEO HORN, SON: I think that would've been really awful to almost overnight go from a situation of being in the privileged care of the state, to being very much left to your own devices, with no protection and no certainty about what would happen the next day. | 06:54 |
| Sirin, Libbet and Leo look at photo | SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: Leo was eight months I think and it was on top of his shoulders. | 07:011 |
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| PAUL LOCKYER: Sirin's son, Leo Horn, is soon to marry an Australian girl, Libbet Loughnan from Geelong, who is trying to absorb the remarkable family story. | 07:20 |
| Libbet. Super: | LIBBET: Just don't feel that I comprehend it very well at all, because it's just very unique. | 07:31 |
| Photos. Sirin with young sons | Music | 07:37 |
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| PAUL LOCKYER: Neither Leo, nor his older brother Joe, know the full extent of the suffering their mother endured during the tumult. JOE HORN, SON: I think the Cultural Revolution | 07:44 |
| Joe. Super: | years must've been very, very tough. We never talk about it, she never talks about it. | 07:53 |
| Sirin walks under parasol | PAUL LOCKYER: It was only after Sirin met a British university student in Beijing, who promised to help to get her out, that her world began to change. | 07:58 |
| Archival. Zhou Enlai and Mao | Premier Zhou Enlai, who had weathered the worst of the political storm, urged her to leave as soon as possible. SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: When I said to him I wanted to go to | 08:09 |
| Sirin | England he said "Just leave, never mind whether you like this man or not, just go". (Laughs) And that was the time when he made me a travel document to the British Government because I had no passport. Nothing, I was Stateless. | 08:19 |
| Sirin looks through photo album | PAUL LOCKYER: Sirin was married within a week of arriving in Britain, proclaiming that she was an orphan, believing she would be forever distanced from the family she had denounced. | 08:41 |
| Sirin | SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: From my point of view, I didn't dare contacting the family. I was all in the wrong. So I was ashamed. I would not have the courage to contact them. You know, my mother thought I died. Everybody thought I was dead. | 08:54 |
| Bangkok | Music | 09:10 |
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| PAUL LOCKYER: But word filtered back to Bangkok from China that Sirin may have escaped to Europe. Exhaustive efforts | 09:14 |
| Photo. Sirin as young woman | were made by the family to try to trace her. SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: Father made two trips to England, to London, couldn't get me. PAUL LOCKYER: It took five years to find her. | 09:21 |
| Sirin. Super: | SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: Fantastic moment. Because my parents called me, and that was the first time I realised that we are a great family. No blame or shame from the family. The family was looking forward to have me back, and to be with me. | 09:34 |
| Joe. Super: | JOE HORN: We're a political family. People understand circumstances like this, and there was this trust and understanding between them that everyone would understand what my mother's situation was and how she reacted. | 09:56 |
| Sirin | SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: Just enough to embrace each other, very, very, very long. There was no tears, there was nothing, there was just happiness. | 10:10 |
| Leo. Super: | LEO HORN, SON: When I was very young my mother took us, my brother and I, took us back to Thailand to spend time with the family, and we actually lived in the family compound with grandfather, my mother's father and mother, and I think that was a very special time for my mother. | 10:20 |
| Sirin looks through photo album | PAUL LOCKYER: For the first time, Sirin was able to reconcile the lingering differences with her father. SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: And I said why did you send us there? He said | 10:38 |
| Sirin | sending “You away was like cutting a piece of flesh from my heart!” | 10:50 |
| Sirin at home. Greets Leo | Music | 10:56 |
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| PAUL LOCKYER: Sirin's marriage broke up, but she remains close to her two sons who are now building their lives between Bangkok and Beijing. Incredibly, so is their mother. | 11:01 |
| Archival. Ping pong game | As ping pong diplomacy was opening doors to the United States in the 1970s, Sirin summoned up the courage to return to the country she had fled in fear. | 11:16 |
| Photos. Sirin envoy career | She was fulfilling her father's dream, working as an envoy for Thailand to help build bridges to China. The circle was complete as she met China's foreign policy reformer, her former guardian, Premier Zhou Enlai. | 11:26 |
| Sirin | SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: All my thought, my thinking of today, and my existence, has had a lot of influence by this great man and I couldn't be more grateful. | 11:42 |
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| I think he was in the end my father, the father that I did not have. | 11:53 |
| Sirin reads | PAUL LOCKYER: Sirin harbours no regrets from the lost years of suffering alone behind the bamboo curtain. Quite to the contrary. | 12:00 |
| Sirin | SIRIN PHATHANOTHAI: So I think I was fortunate in that to see the beginning of a big change of a nation. | 12:09 |
| Sirin reads in garden | LEO HORN: I guess the legacy lives on but on an emotional | 12:18 |
| Leo | Level there's very little we talk about that period. | 12:19 |
| Sirin’s garden | JOE HORN: I absolutely think how extraordinary, you know. Times like this we no one would ever contemplate similar diplomatic | 12:26 |
| Joe | moves as my grandfather did back then, as my uncle, my mother undertook in the ‘50s at the heart of the Cold War. | 12:33 |
| Sirin reads in garden | Music | 12:42 |
| Credits: | Reporter: PAUL LOCKYER | 12:51 |