Stan Sesser, 6 April 1943 – 27 January 2025, RIP

The Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand extends its deepest condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of Stan Sesser, a veteran Southeast Asia correspondent and author.

Seth Mydans writes: Stan Sesser, a long-time Asia correspondent for The New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal (also the Asian Wall Street Journal), has died at the age of 81 in New York after a 15-year battle with a form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a motor neurone disease.

As the Southeast Asia correspondent for the New Yorker from 1989 to 1994, he made an early foray into Laos when it was mostly closed to outsiders, and also wrote about Cambodia, Singapore, Burma and Borneo. The long-form reportage was collected in his book, "The Lands of Charm and Cruelty: Travels in Southeast Asia."

Reviewing the book, Tom Goldstein, dean of the graduate school of journalism at Berkeley, called it "foreign correspondence at its finest." The Cambodia scholar Ben Kiernan called Stan "one of the keenest and liveliest observers of Southeast Asia."For the journal, Stan wrote lifestyle features that ranged from finding the world's most fiery chilli peppers in Assam, to sampling what he called "the best peach on earth" in Langshan, China, to telling the stories of accomplished, eligible Western women who could not find a date in Bangkok.

Much of his writing for the Journal focused on food and restaurants throughout Asia. He had begun his career as a restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s, chronicling the emergence of California cuisine and giving a high profile to one of its pioneers, Alice Waters.

The celebrity chef Ken Hom, who knew him at the time, said: "Stan was influential in spreading the word about what was going on in the Bay Area, and he should be honored for that. He was a great writer, and when you read his pieces, you almost salivated."

For the last 15 years of his life, Stan suffered the progressive paralysis of ALS, attended by his husband, Prasong Kittinanthachai, known as Yai, a Thai professor of philosophy at Ramkhamhaeng University. Until the end, Stan was determined to hold out until a cure was found.

And in the meantime, he was committed to living life as fully as he could, attending opera at the Met and dining in the best restaurants of New York and Bangkok, where he also had an apartment, as Yai trundled him around those cities in his wheelchair. They were together for nearly 25 years.

Stan was a wine connoisseur with his own cellar who on special occasions, brought his own bottles to restaurant dinners, an art collector and a patron of the arts who endowed a graduation prize at the Manhattan School of Music, the Stan Sesser Career Award in Voice, mainly for students of opera. In addition to his husband, Stan is survived by his daughter, Sasha Sesser-Ginzburg, and her mother, Abby Ginzburg.