Asian gives West image of Thailand beyond beaches
Asian gives West image of Thailand beyond beaches
Peter Walker, Agence France-Presse
While modern Chinese writing has been in the global eye since Gao Xingjian won the 2000 Nobel Prize, and many South Asian authors are well-known, for most readers, Southeast Asia is an unknown literary world.
But Rattawut Lapcharoensap, a 25-year-old Thai-American author whose debut collection of short stories, Sightseeing, has gathered rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic, might be on the verge of changing that.
Born in Chicago but raised largely in Bangkok, and with an education that spanned both nations, Rattawut's collection -- hailed as "beautiful and haunting" by one U.S. reviewer -- was written in English but from a profoundly Thai point of view.
Rattawut, currently using a year-long paid fellowship at the University of East Anglia in England to work on his debut novel, professes happy surprise at the positive notices his work has received, given both the subject matter and the form.
"It is really, really nice to have any attention at all, especially as a writer of short stories," he told AFP.
"I kind of expected the reaction to be that the tree would fall in the forest and nobody at all would be listening."
Sightseeing carries the publisher's tagline The Beach bites back, a reference to the novel by Alex Garland about Western backpackers in Thailand, later made into a film in 2000 starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
Rattawut dismisses the slogan as "literary marketing", but admits that while he enjoyed The Beach as a novel, he was aware that its few Thai characters were little more than background chatter.
If Sightseeing has a riposte to this, it is in its first story, titled Farang, a derogatory Thai term for foreigners. Its narrator, a Thai youth living in an unnamed beach resort, whose American father has long fled, is scathing about the foreigners in his homeland.
"Americans are the fattest, the stingiest of the bunch," he complains.
"They may pretend to like pad thai or grilled prawns or the occasional curry, but twice a week they need their culinary comforts, their hamburgers and their pizzas. They're also the worst drunks. Never get too close to a drunk American."
The detail is damning -- the boy relates how he offered to correct the grammar on an English sign advertising elephants for hire, only to be told tourists found the mistake "charming".
Many of the stories deal with unsavory aspects of modern Thai life such as corruption and criminality.
Although the book has yet to be translated into Thai, some expatriate readers were worried about the portrayal of their homeland, Rattawut noted.
"There is no more fervently nationalistic community than an expat community," he said.
Although Southeast Asian authors are a rarity in English -- among of the very few known to readers is Indonesia's Pramoedya Ananta Toer -- Rattawut is keen not to be seen purely as a figurehead.
"The Thai setting for these stories is ultimately immaterial. Sightseeing is not mere reportage, but storytelling of the highest quality, profoundly human and universal," Britain's Guardian newspaper noted.
Rattawut was in England at the time of the story now most closely associated with Thailand for many Westerners -- the Dec. 26 tsunami.
More than 5,400 people died in the disaster in Thailand, about half of them foreign holidaymakers, something which focused a good deal of overseas attention on the country.
Rattawut's Thai-based family were visiting him in England at the time, but he confesses to watching footage of events at home with horrified fascination.
"There is no sense of distance like the distance you feel when that kind of catastrophe strikes when you are that far away," he said.
"The tsunami in Thailand was been presented as a kind of paradise lost. It makes me wonder if it ever was paradise."
pw/mkh/jmy AFPEntertainment-Thailand-US-Britain-literature AFP
GetAFP 2.10 -- MAY 11, 2005 10:24:41