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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.
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Sightseeing This book is in very good condition and will be shipped within 24 hours of ordering. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. Money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. See all our books here, order more than 1 book and get discounted shipping. Seller Inventory # 7719-9781843543718
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. This book is in very good condition and will be shipped within 24 hours of ordering. The cover may have some limited signs of wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. Money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. See all our books here, order more than 1 book and get discounted shipping. Seller Inventory # 6545-9781843543718
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Good. 1st Edition. Published by Atlantic Books of London in 2005. Hardcover. 1st edition, 1st impression. See inside number sequence "9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1." Book condition: Good. Grey cloth boards with gilt titles to spine. Inside pages are in good order. Dust Jacket condition: Good. Price unclipped. See photograph. Dims: 185mm x 135mm x 36mm. 224 pages. Seller Inventory # 004079
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