{"id":1265,"date":"2024-03-04T11:00:36","date_gmt":"2024-03-04T11:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/?p=1265"},"modified":"2025-01-23T11:26:51","modified_gmt":"2025-01-23T11:26:51","slug":"1265-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/1265-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Revisiting Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s Sightseeing: Timeless Charm, Cultural Subversion"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Enter the world of Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s “Sightseeing” through Alistair Daniel’s insightful biography. Lapcharoensap’s debut collection, born from his upbringing in Thailand and Chicago, challenges Western perceptions with its nuanced portrayal of life in Bangkok’s margins. Daniel’s exploration unveils the enduring relevance of Lapcharoensap’s work, making this biography essential for literature lovers.<\/strong><\/em><\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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\"Sightseeing<\/a>Rereading can be a hazardous affair. There\u2019s nothing more disappointing than returning to a book you once cherished only to find that you and it have fallen out of love. The characters seem wooden, the dialogue flat, the plot predictable (even allowing for the fact that you already know how it ends). Your love of this book, you realise, had more to do with you \u2013 with the age you were then, the situation you were in, the things that were preoccupying you \u2013 than with the book itself. So one of the great pleasures of rereading Rattawut Lapcharoensap\u2019s short story collection Sightseeing<\/a> has been discovering that the qualities I admired in it the first time are all still there: the precision of the writing, the beautifully constructed plots, the compelling narrators and, perhaps above all, the indelible images: Priscilla the Cambodian\u2019s golden teeth, Anek with his face on fire, or Clint Eastwood, the narrator\u2019s pet pig in \u2018Farangs\u2019, swimming desperately out to sea.<\/p>\n

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\"Black

Rattawut Lapcharoensap<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

Born in Chicago and raised in Thailand, Rattawut Lapcharoensap<\/a> burst onto the literary scene, in the US and far beyond, in 2005 with his debut story collection, Sightseeing. Published when he was just 25, the collection delighted readers and critics alike with the freshness of its perspective and the maturity of its voice. \u2018Sightseeing is not mere reportage, but storytelling of the highest quality, profoundly human and universal,\u2019 wrote William Sutcliffe in The Guardian<\/a>. \u2018Every story in this collection is dense with event, emotion and meaning.\u2019 It won the Asian American Literary Award and was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007 Lapcharoensap was named as one of Granta\u2019s Best Young American Novelists.<\/a><\/p>\n

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One of the great strengths of Sightseeing is the way it turns Western clich\u00e9s about Thailand on their heads. This is not the Thailand of tourist fantasy. Though \u2018farangs\u2019 \u2013 Thai slang for foreigners \u2013 certainly feature, in all their inevitable crassness and cultural insensitivity, the stories in Sightseeing are told mostly from the point of view of the Thai characters: children, troubled adolescents and their just-as-troubled parents, often living hardscrabble lives on the edges of Bangkok, or running a motel on a resort island choked with tourists, or scraping by in menial jobs.<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/a>Lapcharoensap\u2019s Thailand is a world dominated by gangster capitalists, a world in which the military runs a corrupt draft process, in which teenage girls work as prostitutes, in which whole neighbourhoods are falling into ruin; a world where drunk men conspire to burn down a refugee camp and rats rifle cheerfully through garbage. It\u2019s a world the West has permeated in many ways, from tourism to films, even inveigling its way into the dreams and aspirations of the characters, though more often than not it only serves to disappoint (the eleven-year-old protagonist of \u2018At the Caf\u00e9 Lovely\u2019, tasting his first American burger, is promptly sick). Yet it\u2019s also a world of extraordinary beauty and human warmth, where two brothers can share a moment of tender solidarity on the back of a dilapidated motorbike, where a bicultural family can bond by playing bumper cars at their local Buddhist temple, and where, for one brief summer, two Thai boys and a Cambodian girl can make their own entertainment out of an empty swimming pool. A world where pigs can\u2019t fly but they can swim.<\/p>\n

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One aspect of Lapcharoensap\u2019s work that\u2019s always compelled me, both as reader and writer, is the narrative voice. While his protagonists are often children or adolescents, flawed, fallible, and \u2013 like the lovesick narrator of \u2018Farangs\u2019 \u2013 somewhat lacking in self-knowledge, it\u2019s their grown, or older selves who tell the story, often writing long after events, with all the melancholy wisdom that comes with knowing how everything turned out. These first-person narratives should really be called first people narratives, since often what we get are two voices \u2013 the young protagonist and the older narrator \u2013 and the challenge of capturing both of these voices on the page \u2013 capturing, in short, a sense of personal identity and how it evolves \u2013 is one Lapcharoensap navigates with aplomb. I\u2019ve no doubt that his facility for narrative voices has influenced my approach to my own \u2013 very different \u2013 narrator, Simon Pritchard, the protagonist of my novel, Montreal, which I\u2019ve just completed as part of a PhD in creative writing at the Open University<\/a>. And it\u2019s this \u2013 and many other \u2013 qualities that give Lapcharoensap\u2019s work the novelistic richness that makes it feel so vital. I can\u2019t wait to hear him speak about his work, and I hope you\u2019re as excited as I am.<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/a>

Alistair Daniel<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

Alistair Daniel is an Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University. His short stories have been published in journals including\u00a0The Missouri Review,\u00a0Narrative,\u00a0Litro,\u00a0The Stinging Fly,\u00a0The Irish Times\u00a0and\u00a0Stand, and he has held the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. He has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a PhD in Creative Writing from the Open University.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Enter the world of Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s “Sightseeing” through Alistair Daniel’s insightful biography. Lapcharoensap’s debut collection, born from his upbringing in Thailand and Chicago, challenges Western perceptions with its nuanced portrayal of life in Bangkok’s margins. Daniel’s exploration unveils the enduring … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[603,490,592,602,598,595,605,604,600,594,601,599,591,593,597,596],"class_list":["post-1265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","tag-age-and-literature","tag-alistair-daniel","tag-biography","tag-character-development","tag-coming-of-age","tag-cultural-perspective","tag-east-meets-west","tag-literary-awards","tag-literary-criticism","tag-narrative-voice","tag-personal-identity","tag-rattawut-lapcharoensap","tag-rattawut-lapcharoensaps-sightseeing","tag-short-story-collection","tag-thailand","tag-western-cliches"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1265"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1429,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1265\/revisions\/1429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}