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  Praise for Sightseeing:

  “Seven deeply affecting but never maudlin stories. Rather than endure in noble silence, Lapcharoensap’s characters bicker, swear and suffer lurid nightmares. The author’s skill in conveying their humanity invites empathy rather than sympathy.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “An uncannily smooth Thai-American writer … Seven subtle and tone-perfect stories … He sketches an adolescent’s postpubescent cruelty, a grandfather’s ornery isolation, a daughter’s bitter humiliation, with equal skill.”

  —Carlin Romano, The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Each story is crisp, and characters are painted with startling economy, clearly defined by word and deed. … [Lapcharoensap’s] characters are well defined, his dialogue is clear, and his mastery of the craft is amazing.”

  —Robin Vidimos, The Denver Post

  “[An] auspicious debut … Young or old, male or female, all of Lapcharoensap’s spirited narrators are engaging and credible. Anger, humor, and longing are neatly balanced in these richly nuanced, sharply revelatory tales.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Lapcharoensap’s writing is both elegant and vivid.”

  —Carole Burns, The Washington Post

  “Superbly well paced, nimble, vividly descriptive … many faceted… these tales of modern Thailand are fresh and captivating, funny and sad, and exceptionally astute.”

  —Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

  “A truly novelistic richness … Most impressive of all is the manner in which Lapcharoensap finds moments of beauty in otherwise bleak settings. This collection is intensely political and profoundly angry about the corrupt, poverty-stricken condition of Thailand, yet every story is primarily driven by a warmth and a belief in humanity that allows for unexpectedly uplifting and touching moments. That he achieves this without ever straying into kitsch is astonishing.… Sightseeing is not mere reportage, but storytelling of the highest quality, profoundly human and universal.… Every story in this collection is dense with event, emotion and meaning. This debut shows more than mere promise: it is a fine achievement in its own right.”

  —William Sutcliffe, The Guardian

  “So tenderly crafted and beautifully realized that they’ll snuggle up behind your heart and stay there for a long time.”

  —Priya Jain, Salon.com

  “A writer to remember … Lapcharoensap displays a wicked command of language and an unerring sense of place … as he charts the inevitable collisions between East and West.”

  —Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, The Wall Street Journal

  “[A] brilliant collection … The perfect novella “Cockfighter” … [is] a stirring coming-of-age fable, brimming, like most of Sightseeing, with sharp-clawed survival lessons.”

  —Mark Rozzo, Los Angeles Times

  “The short story is not dead. But it has taken a young, Bangkok-raised author named Rattawut Lapcharoensap to infuse moving, imaginative new blood into the literary form. … His prose carries an unforgettable resonance. Lapcharoensap’s stories of family life—often terribly dark and tragicomic—take you to places both familiar and exotic.”

  —Steve Garbarino, New York Post (four stars)

  “A newcomer to watch: fresh, funny, and tough.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Set in a contemporary Thailand that’s resonant, rich, and real; the style is vivid and lush, tactile and enveloping, immersing us in an immediacy of sights and sounds. … Lapcharoensap’s vision is candid and wise well beyond his years.”

  —Sara Good, Elle

  “The beaches of Thailand, graced by Technicolor sunsets and eerie blue phosphorescence in the waves, are beautifully described in Sightseeing, a brilliant debut story collection by Rattawut Lapcharoensap. … Learn to pronounce his name—you’re going to be hearing it again.”

  —Carole Goldberg, The Hartford Courant

  “[The stories] have the ring of personal experience that is irresistible.”

  —Nancy Schapiro, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Display[s] a degree of compassion and perception that is rare in a writer of any age … Sightseeing manages to showcase both a writer of promise and a writer already capable of delivering on that promise.”

  —Brad Zellar, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

  “Lapcharoensap’s keen eye for … cultural idiosyncrasies brings Thailand to startling life on the page.”

  —Parul Kapur Hinzen, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Absorbing … daring … The stories in Sightseeing move swiftly, thanks to the author’s cinematic eye and excellent pacing, through settings few Western readers will recognize. … You may only be sightseeing when you visit Lapcharoensap’s Thailand, but you’ll almost certainly bring some of it home with you.”

  —Seattle Weekly

  “Stunning in their craft, evocative in their sunbaked setting, these stories avoid a tourist’s-eye view of Thailand, instead traveling deep into the heart of this country and its Westernized people. … Lapcharoensap crafts the seven stories in his collection with incredible realism and grace.”

  —Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, The Boston Phoenix

  “‘Pussy and elephants. That’s all these people want.’ What a splendid truth, hilarious and sad in equal parts. Gifted with colonialist global-gallop subject matter, the writer does not rest there. He finds a deadpan heartfelt voice, true comic scope, a whole new use for rage. There’s a force and rich latent potential in all the work.”

  —Allan Gurganus, Judge’s Citation from The Hopwood Award

  “This is a brilliant collection. … It has an interesting set of characters with their own idiosyncratic concerns, complex cross-cultural settings in both Thailand and the USA, and, best of all, a manner of direct-but-subtle presentation that gives to all the scenes an intelligence, humor, restraint, and feeling that are most impressive.”

  —Charles Baxter

  “A collection of stories by a prodigiously gifted writer, exploring themes of loss and identity, what it means to be a son, a brother, a parent, a lover, a Thai, an American, a Thai-American, a human being. This writer is blessed with intelligence, humor, a gift for language, a fine sense of structure and deeply important material. Sure to go far.”

  —Eileen Pollack

  SIGHTSEEING

  SIGHTSEEING

  Stories

  Rattawut Lapcharoensap

  Copyright © 2005 by Rattawut Lapcharoensap

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lapcharoensap, Rattawut.

  Sightseeing : stories / Rattawut Lapcharoensap.

  p. cm.

  eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4673-2

  1. Thailand—Social life and customs—Fiction. 1. Title.

  PS3612.A59S54 2005

  13’6—dc28 2004 054131

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  841 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For my mother,

  Siriwan Sriboonyapiratr />
  It is no wonder if the Siamese are not in any great care about their Subsistence, and if in the evening there is heard nothing but singing in their houses.

  Simon de La Loubère, A New Historical

  Relation of the Kingdom ofSiam (1693)

  CONTENTS

  Farangs

  At the Café Lovely

  Draft Day

  Sightseeing

  Priscilla the Cambodian

  Don’t Let Me Die in This Place

  Cockfighter

  Acknowledgments

  SIGHTSEEING

  FARANGS

  This is how we count the days. June: the Germans come to the Island—football cleats, big T-shirts, thick tongues—speaking like spitting. July: the Italians, the French, the British, the Americans. The Italians like pad thai, its affinity with spaghetti. They like light fabrics, sunglasses, leather sandals. The French like plump girls, rambutans, disco music, baring their breasts. The British are here to work on their pasty complexions, their penchant for hashish. Americans are the fattest, the stingiest of the bunch. They may pretend to like pad thai or grilled prawns or the occasional curry, but twice a week they need their culinary comforts, their hamburgers and their pizzas. They’re also the worst drunks. Never get too close to a drunk American. August brings the Japanese. Stay close to them. Never underestimate the power of the yen. Everything’s cheap with imperial monies in hand and they’re too polite to bargain. By the end of August, when the monsoon starts to blow, they’re all consorting, slapping each other’s backs, slipping each other drugs, sleeping with each other, sipping their liquor under the pink lights of the Island’s bars. By September they’ve all deserted, leaving the Island to the Aussies and the Chinese, who are so omnipresent one need not mention them at all.

  Ma says, “Pussy and elephants. That’s all these people want.” She always says this in August, at the season’s peak, when she’s tired of farangs running all over the Island, tired of finding used condoms in the motel’s rooms, tired of guests complaining to her in five languages. She turns to me and says, “You give them history, temples, pagodas, traditional dance, floating markets, seafood curry, tapioca desserts, silk-weaving cooperatives, but all they really want is to ride some hulking gray beast like a bunch of wildmen and to pant over girls and to lie there half-dead getting skin cancer on the beach during the time in between.”

  We’re having a late lunch, watching television in the motel office. The Island Network is showing Rambo: First Blood Part II again. Sylvester Stallone, dubbed in Thai, mows down an entire VC regiment with a bow and arrow. I tell Ma I’ve just met a girl. “It might be love,” I say. “It might be real love, Ma. Like Romeo and Juliet love.”

  Ma turns off the television just as John Rambo flies a chopper to safety.

  She tells me it’s just my hormones. She sighs and says, “Oh no, not again. Don’t be so naïve,” she says. “I didn’t raise you to be stupid. Are you bonking one of the guests? You better not be bonking one of the guests. Because if you are, if you’re bonking one of the guests, we’re going to have to bleed the pig. Remember, luk, we have an agreement.”

  I tell her she’s being xenophobic. I tell her things are different this time. But Ma just licks her lips and says once more that if I’m bonking one of the guests, I can look forward to eating Clint Eastwood curry in the near future. Ma’s always talking about killing my pig. And though I know she’s just teasing, she says it with such zeal and a peculiar glint in her eyes that I run out to the pen to check on the swine.

  I knew it was love when Clint Eastwood sniffed her crotch earlier that morning and the girl didn’t scream or jump out of the sand or swat the pig like some of the other girls do. She merely lay there, snout in crotch, smiling that angelic smile, like it was the most natural thing in the world, running a hand over the fuzz of Clint Eastwood’s head like he was some pink and docile dog, and said, giggling, “Why hello, oh my, what a nice surprise, you’re quite a beast, aren’t you?”

  I’d been combing the motel beachfront for trash when I looked up from my morning chore and noticed Clint Eastwood sniffing his new friend. An American: Her Budweiser bikini told me so. I apologized from a distance, called the pig over, but the girl said it was okay, it was fine, the pig could stay as long as he liked. She called me over and said I could do the same.

  I told her the pig’s name.

  “That’s adorable,” she said, laughing.

  “He’s the best,” I said. “Dirty Harry. Fistful of Dollars. The Outlaw Josey Wales. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.”

  “He’s a very good actor.”

  “Yes. Mister Eastwood is a first-class thespian.”

  Clint Eastwood trotted into the ocean for his morning bath then, leaving us alone, side-by-side in the sand. I looked to make sure Ma wasn’t watching me from the office window. I explained how Clint Eastwood loves the ocean at low tide, the wet sand like a three-kilometer trough of mud. The girl sat up on her elbows, watched the pig, a waterlogged copy of The Portrait of a Lady at her side. She’d just gone for a swim and the beads of water on her navel seemed so close that for a moment I thought I might faint if I did not look away.

  “I’m Elizabeth. Lizzie.”

  “Nice to meet you, Miss Elizabeth,” I said. “I like your bikini.”

  She threw back her head and laughed. I admired the shine of her tiny, perfectly even rows of teeth, the gleam of that soft, rose-colored tongue quivering between them like the meat of some magnificent mussel.

  “Oh my,” she said, closing that mouth, gesturing with her chin. “I think your pig is drowning.”

  Clint Eastwood was rolling around where the ocean meets the sand, chasing receding waves, running away from oncoming ones. It’s a game he plays every morning, scampering back and forth across the water’s edge, and he snorted happily every time the waves knocked him into the foam.

  “He’s not drowning,” I said. “He’s swimming.”

  “I didn’t know pigs could swim.”

  “Clint Eastwood can.”

  She smiled, a close-mouthed grin, admiring my pig at play, and I would’ve given anything in the world to see her tongue again, to reach out and sink my fingers into the hollows of her collarbone, to stare at that damp, beautiful navel all day long.

  “I have an idea, Miss Elizabeth,” I said, getting up, brushing the sand from the seat of my shorts. “This may seem rather presumptuous, but would you like to go for an elephant ride with me today?”

  Ma doesn’t want me bonking a farang because once, long ago, she had bonked a farang herself, against the wishes of her own parents, and all she got for her trouble was a broken heart and me in return. The farang was a man known to me only as Sergeant Marshall Henderson. I remember the Sergeant well, if only because he insisted I call him by his military rank.

  “Not Daddy,” I remember him saying in English, my first and only language at the time. “Sergeant. Sergeant Henderson. Sergeant Marshall. Remember you’re a soldier now, boy. A spy for Uncle Sam’s army.”

  And during those early years—before he went back to America, promising to send for us—the Sergeant and I would go on imaginary missions together, navigating our way through the thicket of farangs lazing on the beach.

  “Private,” he’d yell after me. “I don’t have a good feeling about this, Private. This place gives me the creeps. We should radio for reinforcements. It could be an ambush.”

  “Let ’em come, Sergeant! We can take ’em!” I would squeal, crawling through the sand with a large stick in hand, eyes trained on the enemy. “Those gooks’ll be sorry they ever showed their ugly faces.”

  One day, the three of us went to the fresh market by the Island’s southern pier. I saw a litter of pigs there, six of them squeezed into a small cardboard box amidst the loud thudding of butchers’ knives. I remember thinking of the little piglets I’d seen skewered and roasting over an open fire outside many of the Island’s fancier restaurants.

  I began to cry. />
  “What’s wrong, Private?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “A soldier,” the Sergeant grunted, “never cries.”

  “They just piggies,” Ma laughed, bending to pat me on the back. Because of our plans to move to California, Ma was learning English at the time. She hasn’t spoken a word of English to me since. “What piggies say, luk? What they say? Piggies say oink-oink. No cry, luk. No cry. Oink-oink is yummy-yummy.”

  A few days later, the Sergeant walked into my bedroom with something wriggling beneath his T-shirt. He sat down on the bed beside me. I remember the mattress sinking with his weight, the chirping of some desperate bird struggling in his belly.

  “Congratulations, Private,” the Sergeant whispered through the dark, holding out a young and frightened Clint Eastwood in one of his large, chapped hands. “You’re a CO now. A commanding officer. From now on, you’ll be responsible for the welfare of this recruit.”

  I stared at him dumbfounded, took the pig into my arms.

  “Happy birthday, kiddo.”

  And shortly before the Sergeant left us, before Ma took over the motel from her parents, before she ever forbade me from speaking the Sergeant’s language except to assist the motel’s guests, before I knew what “bastard” or “mongrel” or “slut” or “whore” meant in any language, there was an evening when I walked into the ocean with Clint Eastwood—I was teaching him how to swim—and when I looked back to shore I saw my mother sitting between the Sergeant’s legs in the sand, the sun a bright red orb on the crest of the mountains behind them. They spoke without looking at each other, my mother reaching back to hook an arm around his neck, while my piglet thrashed in the sea foam.

  “Ma,” I asked a few years later, “you think the Sergeant will ever send for us?”

  “It’s best, luk,” Ma said in Thai, “if you never mention his name again. It gives me a headache.”

  After I finished combing the beach for trash, put Clint Eastwood back in his pen, Lizzie and I went up the mountain on my motorcycle to Surachai’s house, where his uncle Mongkhon ran an elephant-trekking business. MR. MONGKHON’S JUNGLE SAFARI, a painted sign declared in their driveway. COME EXPERIENCE THE NATURAL BEAUTY OF FOREST WITH THE AMAZING VIEW OF OCEAN AND SPLENDID HORIZON FROM ELEPHANT’S BACK! I’d informed Uncle Mongkhon once that his sign was grammatically incorrect and that I’d lend him my expertise for a small fee, but he just laughed and said farangs preferred it just the way it was, thank you very much, they thought it was charming, and did I really think I was the only huakhuai who knew English on this godforsaken Island? During the war in Vietnam, before he started the business, Uncle Mongkhon had worked at an airbase on the mainland dishing lunch to American soldiers.