In person, Thai-American writer Rattawut Lapcharoensap goes by the letter "A" -- not, as one might suspect, as a literary gimmick, or because his name may be laborious for some to pronounce, but because it's the childhood nickname his mother gave him. "A" or something phonetically similar, means peek-a-boo in Thai, so perhaps it's fitting then that his debut work of fiction, a collection of short stories, Sightseeing, offers new glances, sometimes playful, often poignant, always revelatory, at life in contemporary Thailand.
The seven stories in Sightseeing are told mainly through the eyes of children, and Lapcharoensap's narrators watch TV, swear, practise stunts on their bikes, worry that their clothes aren't the right name brands and generally grow up much the same as children do anywhere, except in this world, a steady stream of tourists and the implicit clash and re-examination of cultural differences they bring along with their dollars is as much a part of the landscape as a pagoda. The title story follows a son and his mother who is in the beginning stage of blindness, as they take a trip through their own country that makes themselves tourists in their own land. But as vision, both literally and metaphorically, fades, a new reality takes shape.
While writing, Lapcharoensap says his first concern was to create "rollicking good stories," ones that captured a side of Thailand that he hadn't seen in literature before and that might appeal to him to read. But he also wanted to tackle the issue of the tendency to portray foreign cultures in exotic ways.
"I think one of the reflexes people have, and I certainly have it as well as a writer in English, is to exoticize a foreign country when you're writing about it, be it France or Spain or Japan or Thailand, and I think that's one of the hazards of writing about a culture and a history that is seemingly so vastly different from the cultural and historical position in which you're writing from," he said during a phone interview from Iowa, the fifth stop of his 20-city book tour of North America.
"It was a deliberate choice on my part to try to de-exoticize these characters, because of that reflex. I really didn't want my characters to speak in aphorisms, I really wanted to get a sense of people in Thailand as people, rather as characters in a kung fu movie -- although don't get me wrong, I love kung-fu movies," he said.
Lapcharoensap has the unusual position of being able to write from the perspective of both cultures, his life to now fluctuating between the United States and Thailand. He was born in Chicago in 1979 to Thai parents enrolled at the university there. He spent the first years of his life in the United States, speaking English at home.
When he was 3, his family, pursuing academic work, moved back to Thailand. The Lapcharoensaps moved back to the United States in 1987 for another four years before returning to Thailand again.
"One of the strange things that always happened when we moved was that there was always this seismic shift in our class status," Lapcharoensap said. "In the States, during our trip from '87 to '91, my parents would be service-industry workers, sometimes legally and sometimes illegally. But when we went back to Thailand, we were middle-class intellectuals, and it made me painfully aware of how contingent social class could be."
After finishing high school in Thailand, Lapcharoensap moved to the United States, completed an American high-school degree as well and then enrolled at Cornell University, earning a bachelor's degree in Asian-American literature. It was there that his appetite for reading led to a hunger to write to express himself.
"Reading Asian-American writing was a real revelation for me," Lapcharoensap says. "They spoke to me in the sense of a condition I was familiar with, the sense of being caught between two worlds, of moving between two cultures. [Latin-American writer]Junot Diaz said something once that was really funny, and really correct: The immigrant story is a bit like a science-fiction story, in that people move between two completely different planets sometimes. That's certainly the way I felt."
After graduation, Lapcharoensap spent 1½ years toiling at odd jobs, everything from making espressos at a coffee bar to selling used books on the street, before he headed to the University of Michigan to earn a master of fine arts degree in creative writing. The year after that he taught writing courses at the university, getting a handful of his short stories published in magazines such as Granta and Zoetrope and eventually landing a publisher for his collection. Fluent in both English and Thai, the author wrote Sightseeing in English, and is at work on a Thai translation. The book has sold in nine countries so far, although it has not yet secured a distribution deal in Thailand.
He says he feels a sense of belonging based on wherever he happens to be making his home rather than a particular country. At the moment, home is in Britain, in Norwich, where he is working on a novel thanks to a fellowship at the University of East Anglia. Still, Lapcharoensap is very cautious about using the word cosmopolitan to describe himself.
"I'm always a little suspicious of folks who claim a kind of nationlessness, and celebrate it, simply because there are a lot of people who are nationless and suffering in very serious ways. My rootlessness is a rootlessness of privilege and choice," he says. "However, I do feel a little displaced wherever I go. But I don't think it's a result of my geographical upbringing. In this day and age, a lot of people don't have to move to feel torn between different types of cultures and cultural demands."
Of course, his rootlessness may make the monster book tour his publisher has planned for him seem like just another displaced day in Lapcharoensap's life, but he's actually finding the experience surreal. Meeting readers has been gratifying, and the press attention has been astonishing: Major U.S. media such as The Washington Post and The New York Times lavished praise on his book as they marvelled at his young age. Meanwhile, one of the hotel rooms Lapcharoensap was lodged in was actually twice as large as the apartment he wrote his book in, he notes wryly. And there are some "where am I?" moments.
"It's a little unfathomable, actually," he says with a charmingly embarrassed laugh. "One night at the airport, I had just woken up and I had to ask the person where I was because I thought I was in the wrong city. But it's been really nice and I have been enjoying it."
Rattawut Lapcharoensap appears on Saturday at Bolen Books in Victoria; at the Grant Avenue McNally Robinson in Winnipeg on Tuesday; at the International Readings series at Toronto's Harbourfront Centre on Wednesday and at Paragraphe Books in Montreal on Feb. 26. For information about readings, contact the appropriate venue.