nwasianweekly.com
June 11, 2005

A quick look at books

Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites With the Sister She Left Behind, by Loung Ung. Published by HarperCollins, 2005.

Ung’s first book, First They Killed My Father, describes her comfortable Cambodian family losing the father first (obviously), but also the mother and several siblings, to the Khmer Rouge invasion in 1975. For this sequel, she alternates her own story with that of her sister Chou’s.

Ung’s brother and sister-in-law laid a plan for escape and decided, after painful deliberation, that they could take only one other person. With the two of them, Loung made it across the border to a Thai refugee camp, and from there, finally, to America. Loung was 10 years old and so nervous that she buttoned her brand-new dress shirt crooked before stepping off the airliner.

Chou was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in the Cambodian hinterlands, where she grew up in a level of poverty unimaginable to many Americans.

Drawing upon her sister’s memories, Ung contrasts the two parallel lives. She struggles with American talk, clothing, school and, as she gets older, romance and her career. Chou struggles every day to put food in her mouth, as well as with the distance between her and her aunt and uncle, who love her ferociously but cannot replace her parents.

Lucky Child ends with reunions, hugs, laughter and joyful tears. It reminds us, though, that the dead — the murdered dead, especially — linger. They probe at our consciousness and sear themselves into our lives as a result of their absence, all life long.

Sightseeing, by Rattawut Lapcharoensap. Published by Grove Press, 2005.

Impressive newcomer Lapcharoensap is Thai by blood, Chicagoan by birth and Bangkokian by upbringing. He evokes many vivid people through his debut short-story collection, even through variations on a few quickly familiar themes.

The barely-of-age youth in “Farangs” (a Thai term for Western foreigners) can’t pull free from his mother’s clutches, so his affairs with young white women fall apart and his guilt over his half-farang heritage underscores both. “Sightseeing” itself sketches an older young man who is ready to leave for college but held back by his mother’s impending blindness and her wish to see the Thai island of Koh Lukmak before her world dissolves into a sandstorm. Both mothers radiate spark and the take-no-prisoners attitude necessitated by single parenthood. Both sons play along in the parental wake, puzzling over how to shine using their own inherited smaller spark.

“Priscilla the Cambodian” puts two Thai boys together with a Cambodian refugee girl in a story that contrasts pubescent attraction with natives’ distrust for newcomers. (“Cambodians probably think rats are a delicacy,” declares one Thai man, and his friends, the boys’ fathers, agree.)

“Don’t Let Me Die in This Place” relocates an American man, half-paralyzed from a stroke, from Baltimore to Bangkok, home of his son and Thai daughter-in-law. There he frets about dying friendless in the fetid heat. “My six-year-old grandson adores his older sister to the point of annihilation,” he observes, with a half-smile, debating whether to let the heat drag him into sleep.

Andrew Hamlin can be reached at scpnwan@nwlink.com.

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