Scheming for the Good Life in Bangkok (Book review/interview)

Thailand is Cambodia's neighbor to the West, and this forum is dedicated to Thai news, stories, reviews, blogs, videos, Thai people and anything else related to the country. A lot of expats have both lived and worked in Cambodia and Thailand, and this area is a place to discuss all aspects of life in Thailand and what's going on there. Most topics are about Bangkok and Pattaya because of their larger populations of expatriates and tourists in those cities, but this is for all things Thai.
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Kung-fu Hillbilly
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Scheming for the Good Life in Bangkok (Book review/interview)

Post by Kung-fu Hillbilly »

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FEB 15, 2023
SUNISA MANNING



.... and there’s the stigma because of sex tourism, like: Okay, well, your dad is white and your mom is Thai. What does that imply about your background?


Mai Nardone’s dazzling linked story collection’s Welcome Me to the Kingdom exposes the raw wounds beneath the sparkle of Bangkok, his hometown and the original playboy city. Gamblers, bar girls, street kids, sexpats, models, and the model-adjacent populate this stunning debut. Funny, moving, and evocative of the grit of survival without the sheen of the exotic, the characters climb the rungs of a hierarchy they can’t seem to win.

I think a lot of mixed race Thai kids growing up in Thailand go through that, as well as trying to process… again, being in the backseat looking up at these sex parlors going by.

There is the familiar kind of story of foreigners coming to Thailand and marrying Thai women. One of the three arcs of the book is a family of a mixed-race daughter with a white American father and a Thai mother. The father in that context does come over with this presumption, coming out of another marriage, that he will find a Thai girl at a bar.

Basically wherever sex does come up in the story collection, it’s transactional, and it often occurs between people of different hierarchies. Those inequalities are what I’m playing with throughout the collection. In fact, the only time that there is a sexual moment where it’s not fraught in that way is between two men who are of equal station. Both of them really have nothing. That’s the only moment where the characters are allowed to have a sexual experience that isn’t fraught with the baggage of Thailand’s reputation.

It’s a foreigner, usually white foreigner, coming to Thailand and Thailand is the exotic place. Part of the exoticism is also the sense of peril right? Thailand is dangerous in some ways, and maybe foreigners are being swindled out of their money. You can’t rely on the Thais. Along with those books, in the larger Western, English language imagination, Thailand exists as The Hangover or The Beach or Only God Forgives.

The other part of it is to try and show that actually it’s impossible to grow up in Thailand and not have this in your peripheral vision. Even though it’s known as a sex tourism destination, a lot of the ahb-ohb-nuat massage parlors are actually geared towards Thais. It’s the one thing that you see in every province, in every town– you see your karaoke places, you see your sex parlors.

Sunisa Manning is the Thai and American author of the novel A Good True Thai, which was a finalist for the Epigram Books Prize. It was published in 2020 and went into a second printing in 2021. She lives in Philadelphia.

full.https://electricliterature.com/welcome- ... i-nardone/
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Re: Scheming for the Good Life in Bangkok (Book review/interview)

Post by Alex »

Despairing of prostitution while growing up in Bangkok is a lot like despairing of Catholicism while growing up in Bavaria. Both makes for riveting books, apparently.
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