Sightseeing - Hardcover

Lapcharoensap, Rattawut

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802117880 ISBN 13: 9780802117885

Publisher: Grove Press, 2004

Synopsis

Sightseeing is a debut written by a young, award-winning Thai-American writer. Set in contemporary Thailand, these stories are generous, radiant tales of family bonds, youthful romance, generational conflicts, and cultural shiftings beneath the glossy surface of a warm, Edenic setting. The stories in Sightseeing present a nation far removed from its exoticized stereotypes.
In the prizewinning opening story, "Farangs," the son of a beachside motel owner commits the cardinal sin of falling for a pretty tourist, and the confrontation that ensues between the native boy and the girl's American boyfriend culminates wondrously amid flying mangoes and Clint Eastwood - a pet pig - swimming out to sea. In "Sightseeing," the much-anticipated holiday of a young man about to leave for college and his loving and fiercely independent mother becomes a different kind of pilgrimage altogether when they are forced to confront the mother's impending blindness. The concluding novella, "Cockfighter," is "an astonishing coming-of-ager" (Kirkus Reviews), in which a young girl witnesses her proud father's valiant but foolhardy battle against a local delinquent whose family's vicious stranglehold on the villagers has passed down unchecked through generations.

About this title

Reviews

Just 25, born in Chicago and raised partly in Thailand, Lapcharoensap mines this dual cultural perspective effectively and memorably in Sightseeing. Critics agree that this new author, who has already won awards for some of these pieces, shows all signs of major literary talent, with a wisdom far beyond his years. A few reviewers found the stories of mixed quality, with occasional lapses of flat description, clichéd subject matter, or hit-you-over-the-head symbolic imagery. These missteps contrasted with the stellar achievement of “Cockfighters” and other standout pieces in the collection. One thing is certain: all the reviewers happily anticipate Lapcharoensap’s next publication, reportedly a novel.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Adult/High School–Seven short stories set in Thailand explore the intricacies of modern-day relationships. The overriding themes are not specific to that country, though: each tale focuses on family dynamics and dysfunction. The protagonists in five of the selections are male teens living in or around Bangkok. "Draft Day" addresses the question of loyalty as the narrator allows his parents to bribe an official to keep him from being conscripted. "Sightseeing" tells of a son whose mother is going blind and the ambivalence he feels about living his own life versus caring for her. The last two stories are also first-person narrations, but the voices are different. In "Don't Let Me Die in This Place," an elderly American tries to come to terms–albeit none too gracefully–with his relocation to Thailand to live with his son and Thai daughter-in-law and their "mongrel" children, and "Cockfighting" is told from the perspective of a teen who watches her father become so obsessed with raising roosters that he is blinded to the disintegration of his marriage. In each of the stories, Lapcharoensap offers readers a glimpse of Thailand that they will not find in guidebooks–not only the beauty of this country but also the grit, the overcrowding, and the poverty. More than that, however, he shows with rare wit and insight that coming of age in the world today is a bittersweet and complicated experience regardless of nationality.–Kim Dare, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The story that opens Rattawut Lapcharoensap's remarkable debut collection, Sightseeing, is at first glance about the ugly sprawl of America across the globe. A boy about 18, whose mother owns a hotel on an island resort in Thailand, watches "Rambo: First Blood Part II," calls his pet pig Clint Eastwood and falls in love with young American women on vacation, the "Farangs" of the story's title who keep breaking his heart. Another "farang" (foreigner) broke his mother's heart -- the boy's father, who stayed around for a few years after he was born, but who finally went home and never came back.

The story might become black-and-white in the hands of a lesser writer, a morality tale of America as evil empire, but Lapcharoensap's writing is much more colorful and human than that. The Americans are not redeemed, but they are complex. It was his father who bought him Clint Eastwood years before, after the narrator cried when he saw live piglets at a fresh market and connected them with the pigs he saw roasting outside resort restaurants. The story ends with his heart inevitably broken, and, yet, as he sits in a tree watching his latest American fling and her friends chase the pig in a game that turns ugly, and he begins pelting them with mangoes, there is regret mixed in with his sense of anger and justice -- he doesn't want it to end this way.

This regret -- at the world's ugliness, and the way in which we become wrapped up in that ugliness -- is present in many of the stories in Sightseeing. Almost all the narrators are people in their teens or early twenties who get a dose of the world's realities: a boy who looks back on a time before he and his brother abandoned his mother in "At the Café Lovely"; another, in "Draft Day," who uncomfortably watches his friend get drafted into the military, knowing that his own parents have pulled strings so he won't have to go. The naiveté of these young characters is part of the stories' power. You see human failings through their fresh eyes. Their vision of the world becomes tainted -- a reality the stories do not ignore. But our vision becomes clearer.

Yet Lapcharoensap does not ignore the beauty that can be found in people, even in dire circumstances. A Bangkok boy in "Priscilla the Cambodian" makes friends with the girl of the title, a young refugee living in a shantytown nearby, which his father blames for their deteriorating neighborhood. Her teeth are capped with gold -- with bombs falling on Phnom Penh, her father, a dentist, had the family gold smelted and crowned each tooth. "When she smiled it sometimes looked like that little girl had swallowed the sun," Lapcharoensap writes. When the boy's father helps burn down the camp, Priscilla gives her ashamed friend a gift. A tooth is loose, and before he can stop her, she "was already working away at that incisor, wobbling it back and forth with a thumb and a forefinger, her face contorted in pain and concentration. . . . And then with a strong, vigorous gesture she got the tooth free at last. . . . 'And this is for you,' she said, wiping the tooth clean on her pants, handing me the thing." That beautiful gesture sticks in my mind more than the burning of her village.

As the stories progress, the similarities in people are as evident as their differences. The lovely title story -- about a mother visiting the sights of Thailand before she goes blind, and her son wondering how he can possibly pursue his plans to go away to university -- could be about any working-class parents intent on making their children's lives better than their own. As the resentment builds about the Cambodian shantytown where Priscilla lives, I am reminded of other immigrant groups who have been hated and blamed, and how sadly predictable is that human tendency to push down others when struggling yourself.

Perhaps Lapcharoensap's own background lends his stories this feeling -- he was born in Chicago, raised in Bangkok and studied in both Thailand and the United States. A new Bangkok housing development in one story feels at times like a working-class American suburb -- the boys ride their bikes, worry about whether they'll ever get any girls and say "awesome." By having them use the English word, rather than its Thai equivalent, Lapcharoensap collapses these worlds -- people speaking a different language aren't always as foreign as they seem.

Lapcharoensap's writing is both elegant and vivid. When occasionally his stories seem too perfectly sculpted, I wonder if the problem is reading too many at once. When I come back to them, their characters and images again seem alive.

As an epigraph, he uses this quote from a French history of Thailand, once called Siam, from the 17th century: "It is no wonder if the Siamese are not in any great care about their Subsistence, and if in the evening there is heard nothing but singing in their houses." Lapcharoensap shows how people of the world are most certainly in "great care about their Subsistence," but we hear the singing, too.

Reviewed by Carole Burns
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Starred Review. The Thailand of Westerners' dreams shares space with a Thailand plagued by social and economic inequality in this auspicious debut collection of seven plaintive and luminous stories. In the title tale—an exquisite meditation on human dependency—a son and his ailing mother must accept the dismal reality of her encroaching blindness and what it means for his plans to attend college away from home. In "Don't Let Me Die in This Place," the most exuberant of the stories, an ornery and uproarious widowed grandfather, recently crippled by a stroke, moves from Maryland to Bangkok to live with his son, Thai daughter-in-law and their two "mongrel children." "Farangs" and "At the Café Lovely" convincingly examine adolescent friendship and love, as does "Priscilla the Cambodian"—though when a refugee camp is torched by native Thai xenophobes, it veers toward the politically dark and ominous. Politics and fear also play a role in "Draft Day," a painfully grim story about two young male friends, one of whom avoids military conscription because of his privileged background, and "Cockfighter," the final and longest of the pieces, in which a berserk local thug rules a town through violence and corruption. Young or old, male or female, all of Lapcharoensap's spirited narrators are engaging and credible. Anger, humor and longing are neatly balanced in these richly nuanced, sharply revelatory tales.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

*Starred Review* Even the title of this debut short story collection by a young Thai American writer resonates on many wavelengths as Lapcharoensap considers the significance of seeing and being seen, of tourism and exile. Superbly well paced, nimble, vividly descriptive in their depictions of everything from the pollution-enhanced sunsets of Bangkok to body language, and many faceted in their dramatizations of fractured families, unheralded comings-of-age, and class and cultural conflicts, these tales of modern Thailand are fresh and captivating, funny and sad, and exceptionally astute. A young man whose Thai mother runs a beach hotel and whose American (call me "Sergeant") father is long gone has a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and a penchant for bikinied American tourists. A boy who looks to his moody older brother for love after their father was killed by a giant crate of wooden toys destined for America becomes ill when he eats his first hamburger. Two Thai boys befriend a courageous little Cambodian refugee named Priscilla (as in Presley). In each intriguing, ironic, and empathic story, Lapcharoensap tracks the unintended consequences of globalization and our strivings for self, survival, and love. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802117880
• ISBN 13: 9780802117885
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208