Department of English
Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University
Priscilla the Cambodian
(2005)
Rattawut Lapcharoensap
(1979– )
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Notes
95 ingots:
95 Dong: a common Thai nickname for boys
99 Kasikon Bank:
101 Khmer Rouge:
104 Onnut: A street in Bangkok
115 Pattanakan
Road: A street in Bangkok
Thailand
Dan: Your
descriptions of Thailand in the stories give the juxtaposition
of living in what others consider an exotic retreat. Was this
something you were specifically trying to show?
A: Indeed it was; I’m glad that it
came across as such. I’d always found it peculiar, personally, that the
place where I lived—Bangkok—seemed a kind of paradise to others, since it
hardly seemed a paradise to me or to those around me. Bangkok was simply
the setting of our daily struggles and our daily joys. It was where we
*lived* and, as such, perfectly mundane. But here were these people
voluntarily arriving in Thailand to RELAX, and here, too, was an entire
economic infrastructure reliant upon their presence and the money in their
wallets. For better or for worse, it’s increasingly difficult these days
to go around Thailand without being reminded of the tourism industry. I
think that a strange, albeit very modern, situation often arises out of
this: these emblems of leisure—the modern traveler, vacationer—must rub
shoulders on a daily basis with an entirely different social class, those
who must toil for their pleasure. It makes for peculiar, though at times
heartbreaking, situations. Jamaica Kincaid has written quite beautifully
about this in “A Small Place,” her essay on Antigua’s tourism industry.
Dan: It’s also
interesting to see how racism and snobbery between classes becomes
more a human condition than an American condition reading your
stories—“Priscilla the Cambodian” specifically brings these issues
about, but it is prevalent throughout the collection. How big of an
issue do you find the level of racism and class distinction to be in
Thailand versus that in America?
A: A can of worms! This is an
excellent question, though one I’m not sure I’ll be able to answer
adequately. That said, last I checked, Americans certainly didn’t have a
monopoly on “racism and snobbery between classes” (the efforts of the
current administration be damned). If that were the case, all we’d have to
do is leave America for any other golden, utopian shore. Indeed, Thailand
is racked with its own nefarious set of social divisions, just like any
other country, and these have their own historical context and
genealogy.
All that said, as a reader, I’m often suspicious of fiction that doesn’t
have some small sense of the very real material effects that social
divisions have on people’s lives. More often than not, I think, our very
desires are wrapped up in such divisions, divisions not entirely of our
own making; the way we achieve these desires must span the entire range of
human possibilities, from the comic to the honorable to the tragic to the
heinous and despicable, etc., etc. Human beings want things, we have our
various ways of getting what we want, and so often this entails stepping
on a few people’s toes. Some of my favorite stories are entirely
unambiguous about the way these desires materialize.
The citizens of that development in “Priscilla the Cambodian” are very
clear about what they want: a good life for their children, economic
stability, a livable place. When they torch the shantytown they are not
torching it out of hatred or spite (though there is that): they torch it,
above all, as a way of bettering their own lives. It’s a cruel and
ludicrous and barbaric act, of course, but that isn’t the point—even the
most horrifying of men are, in their own eyes at least, good and kind and
wonderful people.
—Dan Wickett, "Interview with Rattawut Lapcharoensap," Emerging Writers Network, 18 Jan. 2005.
Language
MN: When you sat down to write these stories you had said that you wanted to portray a side of Thailand and of Asian American culture that you hadn't seen. What do you think was missing?
RL: I think there's a tendency in a lot of English language literature about Asia to exoticize Asian cultures and to really use Asia in some ways as a backdrop for Western characters to resolve their personal crises. It's a very old story, I think, that goes way back to early travel accounts. And a certain range of humanity seemed to have been omitted. People spoke a lot in clipped, terse sentences, or they spoke in Buddhist aphorisms or Zen wisdom. And I really wanted to capture a broad range of speech, really, and human emotions that I felt I had never seen Thai characters possessing in English language literature.
MN: The language is interesting because it's bawdy and sassy and has sort of a rhythm and a pattern that would not be foreign in a suburban strip mall in America.
RL: Yeah, that was— One of the real difficulties I had in writing this book was trying to translate a diction for my readers. The language that these characters are speaking are neither Thai or English, in some ways, in my mind. It's a bit of an invented language. And part of this was because so much of the Zen aphorism literature often omits a native sense of humor or bawdiness. My own experiences of folks from Bangkok and Thailand have been that they are just about as funny as anybody else in the world. So I felt that I had to invent a kind of language that these characters would speak and because I was writing in English, the contemporary American idiom seemed the closest way for me to approximate humor and pathos and bawdiness.
—Michelle Norris, "'Sightseeing': Beyond the Tourist's Thailand," All Things Considered, NPR (2005)
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Characters Dong – friend of the narrator;
eleven years old (98);
nicknamed "Pregnant Duck" because he is "knock-kneed and
kind of fat" (98) the narrator, "I" – friend of
Dong; eleven years old (98); nicknamed "Black Wheezy"
because of his dark skin and asthma (98) Priscilla – a Cambodian
girl; "All her teeth were lovely ingots, each one crowned in
a cap of pure gold" (95); "Her father was a dentist" (98);
"Over the next three years as Priscilla and her mother moved
from camp to camp, she sometimes went for days without
opening her mouth....She made Priscilla nibble on gruel and
salted fish in the relative secrecy of the warehouse they
shared with hundreds of other refugees" (96); "'Leave my
mother alone,' she said sternly in Thai" (99); "That tiny
Cambodian girl had Dong pinned facedown to the railroad
ties" (100); "She was named after Elvis Presley's wife"
(105); "Priscilla believed her father was still alive" (105) Mother – the narrator's mother; "Mother was reduced to sewing panty hose out of a Chinese woman's house" (97) Father
– the narrator's father; "Father carried concrete
beams at a construction site for minimum wages" (97) the Thicknecks – "the nicer
development down the road from ours—where the Thicknecks
frolicked in their Olympic-sized community pool" (104);
"onto Pattanakan Road, past the Thicknecks' pristine
development" (115) |
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Places Thailand – Cambodia Phnom
Penh – "Priscilla remembered sitting on his [her father's]
dentist's chair in the empty hospital while bombs fell on
Phnom Penh" (95–96)
Time 1970Summer April
– "one April afternoon" (97); |
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Comprehension
Check
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Study Questions
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Sample Student Responses to Rattawut Lapcharoensap's "Priscilla the Cambodian"
Study Question: Close read a joining of disparate things in one of the works this latter half of the semester. How are the incongruent things brought together? For example, syntactically, semantically, logically, aurally, spatially, emotionally, historically. In what ways are the entities at odds? Is there a lead up to the connection or does it happen suddenly? Look at where this linking of unlike things occurs in the work. What purpose does it serve?
Response 1:
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Last updated September 21, 2021