Writer as Native Informant, Reader as Interloper
A review of Welcome Me To the Kingdom by Mai Nardone
I’m sharing my review of Mai Nardone’s Welcome Me To The Kingdom which was originally written for the 2023 issue of Georgetown Literary Festival’s publication Muara. I’m grateful to Deborah Augustin for commissioning and editing the review. GTLF is on next week (29 November to 1 December) in case you’re the sort of person who’d like to and can pop over to Penang for fun. (I cannot.)
This newsletter has been quiet for a fair bit but I’ll return to a more regular schedule soon! I’ve been busy working on Mynah, the longform magazine I edit. We have a newsletter on Substack where we share updates and talk about the work of running an independent magazine. That newsletter goes out every Monday, without fail. I’m shocked too!
Writer as Native Informant, Reader as Interloper
I recently visited Daunt Books, a London bookstore where titles are arranged by geographic region. Originally intended as a travel bookshop, Daunt would stock a range of genres like novels, guide books, and historical monographs to give travellers a sense of their destination before they got there. While the store has since expanded its scope to cater to more general interest readers, the shelving system remains. Countries like France occupy multiple shelves with titles ranging from literature by Nobel laureates to travelogues from bemused Englishmen to tomes about Napoleon. Other regions are less well-served. All of Southeast Asia is housed within the same shelves, none of its individual countries prolific enough to fill its own. The selection is weak. There are the usual Lonely Planet guides and their copycats, travel diaries from mostly Western men, books about World War Two, books about various Indochina wars, and several foreign policy books with “dragon” in their titles. Very few of these books are authored by Southeast Asians. Of the little literature available on the shelves, one is just as likely to find a colonial-era novel from the metropole as they are a contemporary work by a writer from the region.
Not much of Southeast Asian literature is available to English language readers. There are few translators for the literatures of many Southeast Asian languages; a University of Rochester study estimates that only five books translated from Thai were published in the US between 2008-2019, four of those books were translated by Mui Poopoksakul. More work is being written in English as well, perhaps owing to an increasingly globalised population. Welcome Me to the Kingdom, a collection of short stories by Bangkok-based “Thai and American” writer Mai Nardone, is one such title.
The stories in Welcome Me to the Kingdom span three-and-a-half decades. Characters recur. They experience growth spurts during the intervening years. But before the reader is introduced to the inhabitants of Bangkok, the prologue. Written in the first-person plural, the unnamed voice recounts arriving in the city on a train. The station serves as a catchment area for hopeful transplants from the provinces and they wait “surrounded by tourism banners” that read “Take Home a Thousand Smiles”. Already, the English-language reader is implicated. This message was not translated by the author, it already existed in English for our benefit. Bangkok frequently tops lists for international travellers, whether those lists are for the future-tense “must-see cities” or the past-tense “most visited cities”. The image of Thailand as a tourist destination looms large in the Western imaginary. Most of that reputation exists in one of two forms: the neutered spiritual exotic where monks and kings live or the hyper-sexualised neon-soaked playground for a good time.
“What You Bargained For”, the second story in the book, opens with a provocation— “Women are meant to be Thai.” Caveats appear with a quickness. “That’s what your buddy Phil told you before you flew over from the States.” The second-person voice employed here, the sole instance throughout the entire book, once again implicates the English-language reader. Immediately, the reader is placed in the loafers of the worst archetype of foreigner in Thailand: the white male sex tourist. Rick is in a bar in Bangkok post-divorce at the behest of his friend Phil. Phil is a regular. He’s also a cad. He does this trip to Bangkok regularly, either pilgrimage or seasonal migration, and always looks for the same woman because she’s “no trouble”. Next to Phil, Rick reads like a saint. He is reluctant. He reminds himself that the “woman—no, a girl” he’s sitting with is the same age as his teenage daughter. He makes several unsuccessful moves to leave. None of this matters; the reader learns just a few paragraphs in that Rick and this “girl” will be wed in a year. The rest of the chapter is Rick circling the drain.
The “girl” Rick marries is Nam. In the book's opening story “Labor” she’s a recent orphan and has relocated from the country with her childhood sweetheart Pea. It’s possible that they make up part of the “we” in the book’s prologue. Pea, the more romantic of them, clings to the shared innocence of childhood. He recalls their juvenile game of throwing stones in an abandoned swimming pool and taking turns to undress. The two never venture beyond that, the furthest Nam goes is removing her school skirt. It’s not the way Rick describes her, “an open face as painted up as a false rose, glistening under a sheen of moisture, a red mouth widening in a way that reminds you of what’s between her legs.” In many ways, the book revolves around Nam’s concerns. When she and Pea relocate to the big city, she knows they need to make it. Bangkok is not a city for children. She initially gives him thirty days to make a living for them both but is unwilling to sit idly by while he shuttles between menial jobs. Having little faith in his idealism, she hides her decision to work in a bar from him. In “Pink Youth”, when Nam begs folk abortion provider Hasmah to take her on, she explains that she’s not like the other bar girls, “well-oiled and pliable enough for the foreign men to work”, who pass through her apartment.
“My husband. You think leaving my husband is easy. You know what a husband is? I suppose you don’t.”
“I had a husband,” Hasmah said.
“It’s a living.” Nam stopped, and then tried again, deliberately, but her speech was unraveling. “A living. Not so good, maybe, but you don’t know what the alternative was like.”
For Rick, Nam represents a do-over. He meets her within a year of his divorce and marries her within another year. He doesn’t want a child with her because he already has one that he “left behind” for Nam. His Thai life has nothing to do with his American life. It’s supposed to be a clean slate. For Nam, Rick represents her only shot to get out of poverty. That he’s the first person she sleeps with, not just the first customer, is a sign of how quickly she wanted to take that chance. The abortion doesn’t work. They name their daughter Lara. The do-over with Nam and Lara doesn’t carry the same importance as his first try with his American family. When things get difficult during the Asian Financial Crisis (“Easy”), he moves back to the US and leaves them both behind. Despite his confusion over why his American daughter wanted nothing to do with him after the divorce, he makes no more effort to be a better father the second time around. He never learns enough Thai to speak to Nam so she speaks to him in halting English. Lara translates where they both fall short. Rick’s blue passport gives him the option not to try.
I waited for him to invite me to stay in the States so I could tell him what I thought of him: just another foreigner passing through, a white man with minor wives, a colonialist. What had the papers said of them—foreigners—in recent months?
Dad didn’t ask me to stay.
Perhaps unwittingly, the book makes the case that the more Thai a character is, the less chance they have of leaving their misery behind. The characters know this to be true, whether they’re conscious of their belief in the redemptive power of the Western world or not. Benz and Tintin, two “strayboys” who’ve left their slum, idolise the international footballers turned millionaires that grace the beer advertisements on the local corner shop’s TV (“Captain Q is Dead”).
Over the players’ hearts, in the customary place of a hero’s crest, would be stitched the logo of a leading beer brand. Carlsberg! Heineken! To the boys these represented distant kingdoms, key centers in some vast sporting empire. Boys with their own rags-to-riches futures rolling from their mouths, unfurling before them like red carpets.
The boys identify with the beer—no international brews for them, just Singha—not the careers with meteoric rises. They understand the limits of what they can attain. This is not the case for all the book’s characters. Cosmetology student and sugar baby Pinky hosts her family friend Ping because her apartment is closer to the high achieving student’s new selective school(“Feasts”). Pinky introduces Ping to the fineries of life — cosmetics, jewellery and midnight meals. Like Nam, Pinky sees men as opportunities for social mobility. But Pinky’s man is Thai and cannot be a living for her. He is only “a step”. What she really wants is to be a flight attendant for Thai Airways: literal international mobility. She is, however, too Thai. Her English-speaking skills are too feeble to carry her through the interview. The one time she takes Ping to a Western restaurant, they don’t even get served. Her idea of extravagance is too gauche for the real cosmopolitans.
Ping is ultimately the only character to settle into success. Her work ethic and dogged belief in education pay off. After graduating with an American PhD, she returns to Bangkok with a plum United Nations job and the social network of an expatriate (“City of Brass”). Her Chinatown childhood is firmly behind her. Her new neighbourhood has a Mercedes dealership. If she holds any survivor’s guilt, she definitely does not show it.
Rather than outrightly pointing a finger at the structural forces that keep his characters in the mire, Nardone focuses on emotional truth. This “show don’t tell” approach is par for the course in contemporary American fiction (Nardone has an MFA from Columbia) and it easily reveals itself to be a tool best used in service of individualist perspectives and not sociopolitical analysis. The stories where these two strands conflate are the book’s weakest. The most heavy-handed story of the collection, “Like Us For A Whiter You”, centres on Lara’s identity crisis. The resentment she harbours towards her father is polite in comparison to what she spits at her mother simply for being Thai.
Mom and her gently crooked accent, her limp curtain hair. I’ve told her this. I’ve said, “It makes me sick to be half you. It was you, Mom, see? You made my dad leave. It was your floor-country dirt skin.”
Feeling caught between two worlds, she spends time with other luk khrueng, the local term for children of mixed Thai and foreign parentage. She distances herself from other Thais, calling them “natives” and mocking them for their ignorance of the Western world they seem to admire. She refers to Americans as farangs, once again using a Thai word to convey difference. But even in the world of luk khrueng, there are important distinctions. Lara’s friends are models, in demand because of their European features and light skin. One of them appears in an advertising campaign for whitening cream, her skin tone labelled “Mascarpone”. The “second-rate” models, whose looks take them only as far as car conventions, are given the title “pretties”. Lara’s self-described “muddy color” doesn’t allow her to join the ranks of the prestige models; her pride and disdain for “those girls” won't let her try for a “pretty” job. The Marscapone model accuses her of being “more native than not”. She is mistaken for the kind of Thai sex worker who targets farangs by a hotel security guard; she is mistaken for somebody like her mother. In a scene straight out of a hamfisted student film decrying the hegemony of Eurocentric beauty standards, she emphasises her “telltale luk khrueng features” with a marker plastic-surgeon-style and covers herself in talcum powder. Elsewhere, in the titular story “Welcome Me To The Kingdom”, an older Lara becomes romantic rivals with “the sort of Thai girl raised under the parasol of her family name.”
Pale features. Not chocolate, not sandalwood. Not a shade of skin that needed description in a city where everyone recognized privilege.
Lara’s world view reveals a rigidity that is shared by other characters in the book. How one’s life will go is determined by the lottery of birth. In “Stomping Ground”, Benz draws a line between two types of strayboy living in his slum’s group home: the ones who “paid a pretty price for entry” and the “Fatherless”. Just like luk khrueng, a strayboy’s capacity for financial security is determined in utero. Fatherless boys are the biological sons of the women who serve as the home’s mothers. They don’t get booted from the house when they “age out” of the collective. The other strayboys land in the house because of more tumultuous conditions: abusive, absent, or dead parents. Tumult leads to more tumult, they must leave the nest at fifteen and share their adult earnings with the house mothers who took a chance on them. Benz and his friends try to make it on their own by selling the recyclables they fish out of the klong. It’s an honest living, which is what Benz prioritises. He has no interest in getting sucked into a cycle of crime. But he doesn’t have a choice. Before long, the boys are blackmailed into committing petty thefts for a crooked cop, himself a former strayboy.
In another province, this monsoon has already taken two homes and a baby boy. Now, instead of growing up to be like us, he’ll get to be something else. Something better maybe.
When I asked the morning monks about rebirth as I offered up food once, they told me that it doesn’t work that way, said I should learn to see beyond my own immediate concerns. But then, what do the monks know? They don’t even earn their own food. They might have an answer if they went to bed hungry as often as we do.
Throughout the book, various characters make futile attempts to change their fate. Most of these attempts are inflected by traditional Thai beliefs. In “Handsome Red” Tintin, one of the strayboys, lists what he’s tried: praying at a Hindu temple, praying at a Chinese temple, kneeling to monks, bowing before “big men”, carving his name in a nang ta-khian tree, feeding strays, releasing sparrows, slaughtering a (small, sickly) pig, giving his time to the temple, his blood to the hospital, his pay to the state lottery. Little Handsome Red is his latest scheme — he’s meant to be a prize fighting cock and a sure bet in the ring. The bird flees before the first round. “Parade” sees Nam taking a young Lara to the temple weekly to meet with a spirit medium. They belong to a group of misfit children “in need of a karma transfusion”. Nine-year-old Lara turns to self harm, seeing no substantive difference between the sacrifice in giving offerings to the medium and atoning for the crime of being born by punishing herself. “The Tum-Boon Brigade” closes out the collection and brings Benz, Tintin and Lara together as adults.
“Tum boon,” the monk tells them. Do good. Earn merit. Karmic rewards carry over into rebirth.
Benz and Tintin are volunteers. They monitor the radio for news of accidents, collecting the dead for cremation or carting the lucky survivors to the hospital in their pick-up truck. It’s harrowing work but this life hasn’t gone well for them anyway. Perhaps the afterlife, or a future life, will. Lara, who met Benz at a card game (gambling is another bid to control fate), calls once a week. Drunk and on drugs, she needs Benz to rescue her from whatever man she’s left the nightclub with that evening. There is no happy ending for any of them. Lara doesn’t finish her Bangkok university degree or her American conservatory music training. She sings in hotel lobbies and spends her down time inebriated. Benz finds himself completely alone at the end of the book, no less stray than when it began. And Tintin, who narrowly escapes death in “Stomping Ground”, dies of a morphine overdose. There is no escaping the gravitational pull of fate.
For any literature that is rarely available in English, let alone sought out by English language readers, new publications will end up being read as an act of representation, whether that is intended or not. While a lacuna exists where some countries should feature in the international consciousness, Thailand is one that the West loves to represent on its own terms. It’s for this reason that the short story form works so well here. Because of the short story collection’s inherent ability to juggle multiple discrete plots, readers are introduced to a varied cast of Thai characters and their attitudes towards sex work, Buddhism, corruption, and poverty. (That ought to check off the West’s main tropes.) Don’t be mistaken, the book is incredibly consistent with its perspective on the challenges that life in Bangkok holds (indeed, Bangkok life in this book is defined by its challenges). However, Nardone’s approach towards each character avoids easy stereotyping and fixity. When characters are reintroduced at later junctures of their lives, the reader gets to see them in different environments, their older selves shaped by the events in previous pages.
The British newspaper The Telegraph’s review of the book bears the headline “The true darkness of Bangkok, from the temples to the backstreets”. The New York Times lists the book in “Story Collections to Take Readers Around the World”. Neither review is unfair. In fact, they’re both positive. But how much sociological truth is expected from fiction? And is the purpose of books set outside of the Western centre to transport foreign readers to far flung locales? For some, reading is a low-commitment way to play voyeur. They use authors' biographies both as authenticity credentials and licence to cast them in the role of guide for a proverbial behind-the-scenes tour. Narratives are for consumption, consumption is for edification.
Welcome Me to the Kingdom was published by both Random House (US) and Atlantic Books (UK), two massive houses that between them serve most of the Anglophone world. Before being collected into a single book, half of these stories were published in various British and American literary journals. This puts the work in conversation with other products of the Anglo-American publishing machine rather than the backlist of Thai books that have yet to, or may never, be translated. It is, then, not the rare work of Thai literature that found a new audience outside of the Kingdom. It is more for the English reader than it is for the Thai.