Storytelling subtle in ‘Sightseeing’
Southeast Asians are different from you and me – unless, that is, you happen to be Southeast Asian.
You might have noticed that in recent news stories from Thailand, to cite just one place slammed by the tsunamis. Comments from Thais interviewed rarely exceeded a single sentence. Hardly a quote projected complex insight about the disaster, let alone dark anger or sarcastic pain.
Is that because Thais don’t think elaborate thoughts? Is it because our foreign correspondents, famous (unlike many European and Asian correspondents) for rarely speaking the languages of countries they cover, lack confidence in quotes understood only through translation?
Issues for a philosophy of journalism seminar, perhaps. In the meantime, consider an antidote: “Sightseeing” by Rattawut Lapcharoensap.
An uncannily smooth Thai American writer born in Chicago and raised in Bangkok, Lapcharoensap could not have known that his literary boat would be lifted to wide reviews by the tidal waves that killed so many countrymen and destroyed his aunt’s beach hotel (the inspiration for one in this collection’s opening tale).
But to read his seven subtle and tone-perfect stories set in Thailand, laced with everything from snarky teenage patter to rat-a-tat reprimands from a caustic mom, is to absorb Thai humanity more strongly than stick-figure reporting permits. It’s to think not, “It could have happened here,” but that, in the one great human tribe, “It did happen here.”
The author establishes his control straight off in “Farangs” (Thai for “foreigners”), the opening piece about a half-Thai, half-American teenager with a pet pig named Clint Eastwood. The young man lives at his mother’s beachside hotel and keeps falling in love with foreign girls.
Every August, Mom wearies of farangs: “You give them history, temples, pagodas, traditional dance, floating markets, seafood curry, tapioca desserts, silk-weaving cooperatives, but all they really want is to ride some hulking gray beast like a bunch of wildmen and to pant over girls and to lie there half-dead getting skin cancer on the beach.”
Uncle Mongkhon, who runs an elephant-trekking business, drips similar vinegar. When his nephew’s sexy American pal shows up in her bikini to ride an elephant, he snipes: “What if I went to her country and rode a bald eagle in my underwear, huh? How would she like it?”
The plot is simple: Boy meets farang girl, wins farang girl, then loses farang girl when vulgar American boyfriend shows up. But Lapcharoensap maneuvers us on and off the beach as deftly as he guides us elsewhere.
In “At the Cafe Lovely,” he captures the constantly shifting dynamic between a little brother and a big brother amid a coming-of-age nightlife full of prostitutes and glue sniffing. “Draft Day” documents the corrupt process of Thai teenagers facing military service, well aware that favoritism warps the system. (“Just another day in the Kingdom of Thailand,” the narrator sighs at one point.)
“Sightseeing,” Lapcharoensap’s masterful title story, accompanies a young man on a pre-college holiday to the Andaman Islands with his increasingly blind mother. Read after recent events, her plea not to be babied – “I’m not dying here … I’m just going blind” – takes on an eerie poignancy.
All the remaining stories – “Priscilla the Cambodian,” about a plucky refugee girl teased by Thai youngsters; “Don’t Let Me Die in This Place,” with its disgruntled and disabled American father enduring a visit to his expatriate son; and “Cockfighter,” in which a Thai teenager endures her father’s abuse by neighborhood toughs – display Lapcharoensap’s unexpected maturity.
Some may question the authenticity of “Sightseeing,” unnerved by glibness that can sound more Chicago – or Santa Monica – than Bangkok.
Not this reader. A memory returns of giving a talk on existentialism at Bangkok’s Chulagonkorn University. After it, a Thai student approached to ask a question.
“Isn’t existentialism,” he began with a grin, “like, so yesterday?”