Beyond these activities, neither Clive nor Neil had much interest in the Thai people. Clive refused to learn the language because, he declared, “I doubt they’d have anything to tell me that couldn’t be relayed by someone in English.” Thailand, Clive liked to say, had no culture because it lacked a literary tradition. There were no Thai novels written before the late twentieth century, he informed me—a sign, he declared, of a fundamental absence of imagination.
I set out to find Thai literature, if only to refute him. Not much had been translated for the literary appetites of Westerners. In an English-language bookshop ten hours south in Bangkok (there were none in Chiang Mai), I picked up a copy of Khamsing Srinawk’s The Politician and Other Stories. Srinawk, a writer from the impoverished northeast, was one of the best-known writers in the country. A journalist turned short-story writer, he benefited from a brief period of press freedom in the late fifties, when his stories began appearing in local newspapers. He had traveled abroad in the sixties as the recipient of a Time-Life grant; later, he became politically active and was exiled and banned before returning in the eighties.
Srinawk’s work, often satirical in nature, gave voice to the Thai peasant class. Just the year before my arrival in Thailand, the National Culture Commission named him the National Artist of Thailand in literature. There was Thai literature; Clive just didn’t know about it. The limits of his curiosity exasperated me. I made a heavy notation of The Politician and Other Stories in my Book of Books in frustration.
It had been a long time since I’d hung out with someone my age, from a similar background, someone to whom I wouldn’t have to explain myself and all my references, someone who was inspired by the same stories. Of course, I had sought precisely this scenario by moving to Thailand in the first place. Living there was a constant exhilaration and provocation; I just hadn’t realized how tiring that would be. My main release was on paper—books and Bob and letters home, long missives I sent to my mother called Pamograms, which she photocopied and mailed to a list of friends and family.
In my Pamograms and in my mind, I tried to envision myself a noble heroine in a grand and epic novel culminating in the realization of some larger purpose. If not Anna Karenina, then some equally romantic but less suicidal figure. Any morning could be the dawn of a new narrative, one tailored to that day’s circumstance, something that would offer, if not a happy ending, then at least a better story line. You could assume the character of whatever novel or biography you were reading at the moment, create your own, or attempt to alter yourself to suit any relevant ambitions. “Today, I’ll be the more intrepid type,” I’d tell myself upon waking, and proceed through the day like a character from a completely different story.
Over the years, I had developed a related habit of narrating my every move aloud, occasionally in the third person. “There she goes for the five-to-eleven shift,” I’d mutter on my way to work. “Perhaps tonight she’ll have rice pilaf for dinner.” Mostly I yammered away in the plain old first person: “I’ll just swing open the door of the car,” I informed my best friend, Ericka, while visiting her at Wesleyan freshman year. “Then I’ll get back in and drive up I-95. I should be there before dark.”
“Stop it!” she yelled. I’d been doing this all weekend, apparently. “Stop narrating your every move! It’s unbelievably annoying.”
Oh my God she was right. I think I’d been annoyed, too, I just hadn’t realized that I was the problem. From that day forward, I tried hard to keep the narration to myself, and to a minimum. Narrating your life necessarily means holding it at a certain distance. There’s a risk to reading your life more than actually living it.
But I still unconsciously broke my days down into stories—tailoring haphazard sequences of events into neater narratives, ones with beginnings, middles, and ends circulating in my head like a private polyphonic novel. You could sketch out characters, editing as you went, predicting upcoming plot points, and then cleaning it up afterward. You could take full advantage of l’esprit de l’escalier, making everything just a little more clever than it actually was.
After dinner, enveloped by my ants, I’d plunge back into Anna Karenina and try to locate myself within Anna’s story. Feeling unloved and unexcited by the relationship possibilities around me, I lived vicariously through Anna’s mad affair with Vronsky, her desire and abandon filling the void where a boyfriend might have belonged. Her story expanded on my own, enriching and filling out the parts that felt missing. When you’re young and single, infidelity is more opportunity than tragedy, and the pain of abandoning a child is unimaginable. Perhaps you’d read the book differently if you were newly married, finding it scandalous and wrong, or after you’ve been married for a time, at which point it might once again make you swoon but for different reasons. For me in that place and at that time, Anna Karenina was incredibly seductive, Anna’s story adding a tinge of romance to round out the coarser aspects of my life abroad. Pitching myself onto a train track held zero appeal. I nonetheless wished I could be just a little more like my heroine.
CHAPTER 10
Swimming to Cambodia
The Company of Narrators
The friends I made living in Thailand were friends of circumstance—Angela, a yellow-haired English minister’s daughter who wore brightly colored jewelry and said things like “faffy” and “grotty”; Brad, a fiftysomething history teacher from Hawaii who lived with a Thai teenager; Alma, a Swedish backpacker I hung out with on the beach, seemingly the only other solo girl on Ko Phi Phi for the holidays. Each provided a companionship of convenience; we probably never would have crossed paths at home, and if we had, we’d have each swiftly moved on. Here, I clung to them.