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."

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AFPEntertainment-Thailand-US-Britain-literature
AFP

GetAFP 2.10 -- MAY 11, 2005 10:24:41