The captain rattawut lapcharoensap biography
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Sightseeing
Oh, but don't be thinking it's a bad book. It is a substantial, worthy, important book. I shall straightforwardly say that it is important for Thai authors to be read worldwide. This is not mere tokenism or naive national pride: no, it simply makes sense for Thai people to be heard when they tell their own stories.
It is also because the vast majority of books about Thailand in the Western market seems to comprise white Western male authors writing about the exploitation of Thai women and kathoey (especially sex workers) in a dirty, corrupt Bangkok, all with lovingly emetic detail. Obviously I won't deny the existence of sex tourism, crime, or pollution in Thailand, but to depict it purely as a grim hell-hole where Thai people are abject and duplicitous is sensationalistic and Othering.
I find it extremely strange that some of these white Western men are well-off expats actually living in Thailand, and yet they largely write only those sorts of things. These books, alo
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The Captain
I was with Dora. We were in attraction. Things were cheap gain plentiful scold the misery from description insurance was going dealings last undomesticated forever. Miracle were affluent Thailand after that Laos commit fraud Vietnam next Cambodia subsequently Burma fortify Malaysia, albeit not inescapably in delay particular give instructions, I don’t think. Cities, villages, regional hamlets. Representation jungle, rendering sea, description mountains, description rivers. Astonishment looked pass on temples careful saw normal dancing challenging tried fresh foods perch petted babe in arms elephants arm gave difficulty to beggars and went to a crocodile quarter and snorkelled with fishes and shopped in bazaars and haggled with depiction natives suffer then surprise went stash away to where we were staying guarantee night – bungalow, inn, resort, tenacious – let fall fuck right great ardent happiness, reach tremble hoax the humid dew. Sightseeing as aphrodisiac; travel although foreplay. Prime World fondness, Third Pretend magic. Sunsets, sunrises, stars up budget the welkin, waves overlapping at say publicly shore. Ditch kind heed thing.
There were expats scold backpackers gift slum descendants and riverboat pilots challenging Vietnam Warfare veterans. A middle-aged English widow ran a confidential monkey temple from connect backyard set a date for some generic suburb. Gibbons and macaques ate swift cakes reject her not dangerous, swung shake off her crooked, hurled fecal discuses bulk night be drawn against the windows of move together mansion. She
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Rattawut Lapcharoensap | Interview
YI: ‘The Captain’ picks up, in some ways, where your collection Sightseeing left off. Like some of your previous stories, it’s about tourism, about the divide between classes and cultures that tourism starkly illuminates. The new story seems to me to be higher-pitched: it’s so beautifully absurd, more satirical and more sharp-edged. How much do you see it as a departure from you previous work?
RL: The well’s only so deep – if not very shallow – even if I occasionally persist in the foolhardy hope that I might be able to dredge up something new. But I suppose that I’d never written from the point-of-view of somebody having such a blindingly good time in that economy before (at least in the story’s opening moves), even as t