Thailand

Letters from Thailand

When the original Thai version of Letters from Thailand appeared in Bangkok in 1969, it was promptly awarded the SEATO Prize for Thai Literature. Thirteen years later, it was translated into English to reach a much wider readership. Today, the book is still considered one of Thailand’s most entertaining and enduring modern novels, and one of the few portrayals of the immigrant Chinese experience in urban Thailand.

Letters from Thailand is the story of Tan Suang U, a young man who leaves China to make his fortune in Thailand at the close of World War II, and ends up marrying, raising a family, and operating a successful business. The novel unfolds through his letters to his beloved mother in China.

In Tan Suang U’s lively account of his daily life in Bangkok’s bustling Chinatown, larger and deeper themes emerge: his determination to succeed at business in this strange new culture; his hopes for his family; his resentment at how easily his children embrace urban Thai culture at the expense of the Chinese heritage which he holds dear; his inability to understand or adopt Thai ways; and his growing alienation from a society that is changing too fast for him.

"The deft and at times hilarious comedy of these letters lies in the slow but relentless erosion of Tan Suang U's principles, under the balmy influence of a sunnier, lazier land." ―The NY Review of Books

"This is a fascinating book, and I heartily recommend it to all Westerners who know and love Thailand."―Bangkok Post Sunday Magazine

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The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth

Tuned to the rhythms of the soap operas that air on Thai television each night and written with the consuming intensity of a fever dream, this novel opens an insightful and truly compelling window into the Thai heart.

This is a melodrama about a ship-wrecked relationship.

Set in Thailand and traveling loosely over the 1980s and ‘90s, with mention of a political incident in 2010, this sad and beautiful book begins on the day Chareeya is born, the same day her mother discovers her father having an affair with a traditional Thai dancer. From that moment on, Chareeya’s life is bound to the weight of her parents’ disappointments.

She and her sister Chalika grow up in a lush, tranquil riverside town near the Thai capital of Bangkok, captivated by romance novels, classical music and games of make-believe. As children, the two develop a friendship with an orphaned boy, Pran. Over time these childhood friends find themselves lost between unrequited desires and fantastical dreams that are realer than their everyday lives. The culmination of the story comes as neither Chareeya, Chalika, nor Pran can exit safely from the intertwined labyrinth of their fates.

The author’s lyrical prose is enchanting: the book is filled with the colors, sounds and fragrances of Thailand. Her language has a hazy cinematic effect as characters maneuver through magical remembrances of events gone by, often failing to confront the problems in front of them.

Dangerous and irresistible, the story can be read either as a nod to old-fashioned Thai romances, or as a sophisticated, literary upgrade of the soap opera drama, or as a bitter commentary on the myths, smokescreens and delusions that seem to have disoriented the Thai people with many years’ heartbreak in attendance.

The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth won the 2015 S.E.A. Award, Southeast Asia’s most prestigious literary prize. It is now masterfully translated into English by Kong Rithdee, film critic and award-winning author in her own right.

(A special thank you to book club member, Jordi Valbuena for the suggestion.)

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Bright

When five-year-old Kampol is told by his father to sit in front of their run-down apartment building and await his return, the confused boy does as he’s told—he waits and waits and waits, until he realizes his father isn’t coming back anytime soon. Adopted by the community, Kampol is soon being raised by figures like Chong the shopkeeper, who rents out calls on his telephone and goes into debt extending his customers endless credit.

Dueling flea markets, a search for a ten-baht coin lost in the sands of a beach, pet crickets that get eaten for dinner, bouncy ball fads, and loneliness so merciless that it kills a boy’s appetite all combine into this first-ever novel by a Thai woman to appear in the U.S. Duanwad Pimwana’s urban, at times gritty vignettes are balanced with a folktale-like feel and a charmingly wry sense of humor. Together, they combine into the off-beat, satisfying, and sometimes magical coming-of-age story of an unforgettable young boy and the timeless legends, traditions, and personalities that go into his formation.

“Enchanting . . . [a] melancholy-tinged but still exuberant novel.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Bright is a wonderful introduction to a masterful contemporary Thai voice.” —Split Lip Reviews

“An authentic portrait of a working-class community in Thailand…Bright will prove to be seminal for Thailand’s place in the literary world.” —Prabda Yoon, author of Moving Parts

(Group read suggestion from Sue Attalla, book club moderator.)

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Four Reigns

Note: If this book is chosen for the group read, we’ll read it over 2 months since it is a longer read.

Four Reigns (Si Phaendin), M.R. Kukrit’s longest and best-known novel, is the rich and entertaining story of the life of Phloi and her family, both inside and outside palace walls. The story unfolds during the reign of King Chulalongkorn (King Rama V) in the closing years of the 1800s, ending in the mid 1940s with the death of his grandson, King Ananda Mahidol (King Rama VIII). Over a span of four reigns, we see the lives of minor courtiers under the absolute monarchy and watch the huge social and political changes that Thailand experienced as it opened itself up to international contact. We follow the characters against the historical backdrops of the 1932 revolution, the new constitutional monarchy, the growing Japanese presence in Thailand, the outbreak of World War II, and the Allied bombing raids on Bangkok. Through the lives and relationships of Phloi and her husband and children, we experience modern Thai history in an intimate and personal way, garnering new insights into the sensibilities of an era.

Four Reigns was originally written in 1953 as a newspaper serial in the Thai daily, Siam Rath.

"Kukrit, famous as a journalist, wit, connoisseur of the arts, and, for much of his life, a politician, and once the prime minister. . . is also a world-class writer, equipped with imagination, humor, narrative skill, and keen understanding of human nature." ―The NY Review of Books

(A special thank you to book club member, Beth Cummings for the suggestion.)

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Moving Parts

Winner, English PEN Translates Award

Selected by Asymptote for September World Book Club

Surreal and puncturing short stories from the Thai master of the form.

In a pink-walled motel, a teenage prostitute brings a grown man to tears. A love-struck young boy holds the dismembered hand of his crush, only to find himself the object of a complex ménage à trois. A naked body falls from the window of a twenty-story building, while two female office-workers offer each other consolation in the elevator…

In these wry and unsettling stories, Prabda Yoon once again illuminates something of the strangeness of modern cultural life in Bangkok. Disarming the reader with surprising charm, intensity and delicious horror, he explores what it means to have a body, and to interact with those of others.

“Sleek, supple and soaring – in this extraordinary translation, Prabda Yoon’s stories command your attention” — Eley Williams

“[Moving Parts] finds truth at the intersection of the absurd and the morbid” — Asymptote

“Scrappy, playful and morbid…. [Moving Parts] is a brilliant, surreal portrait of the Thai capital…: an alienated city with a cartoon-creepy vibe, shiny and dilapidated.” — White Review

“In Moving Parts, Prabda Yoon has created an essential imaginary of the twenty-first century metropolis; drily funny and deeply felt, vivid and vertiginous.” — David Hayden

“Yoon’s masterful stories unfold the drama of modern life, with all the stylistic resonances of the miraculous.” — Eka Kurniawan

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Welcome Me to the Kingdom

NY Times Editors’ Choice & Longlisted for the Pen/Robert W. Bingham Prize

An immersive debut set across the temples, slums, and gated estates of late-twentieth century Bangkok, telling the story of three families striving to control their destinies in a merciless, sometimes brutally violent, metropolis.

We came with the drought. From the window of the train, the rich brown of the Chao Phraya River marked the turn from the northeast into the central plains. We came for Bangkok on the delta. The thin tributaries that laced the provinces found full current at the capital. And in the city, we’d heard, the wealth was wide and deep.

In 1980, young lovers Pea and Nam arrive in Bangkok in search of a life, and a world, beyond Thailand’s rural outskirts. Thirty days, they promise each other. Thirty days for Pea to find work, for him to put aside his violent and unstable past and take root in this strange new land. But Bangkok does not want for male laborers, especially teenage boys with thick provincial accents, and when time finally runs out on their promise, it’s Nam who ultimately adapts to the capital’s ruthless logic and survives.

Spanning decades and perspectives, seamlessly shifting between the absurd and the tenderhearted, the interwoven stories of Welcome Me to the Kingdom introduce three families—Nam, her American husband, Rick, and their daughter, Lara; Vitat, a Thai Elvis impersonator, and his only daughter, Pinky; and Tintin and Benz, orphans who have adopted each other as brothers—who employ various schemes to lie, betray, and seduce their way to the “good life.”

These disparate citizens of Bangkok orbit each other over the next three decades—sometimes violently, passionately colliding. Through skin-whitening routines, cult conversion, gambling, and sex work, the collection’s characters look for reinvention in a city buckling under the weight of its own modernity.

Wildly imaginative and ambitious, Mai Nardone’s stories reveal the growing discrepancy between Bangkok’s smiling self-image and its ugly underbelly, and, in the process, offer a striking portrait of a city unmade by the whims of global capitalism, in a kingdom caught between this world and the next.

“An honest, crystalline depiction of what urbanization has done to complicate and erode human life. Bangkok is the true star here, a modern city at the center of a tale as old as civilization itself. Every brightly lit kingdom has an underbelly.” —NY Times Book Review

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