Thai writer, filmmaker and artist Prabda Yoon has been gaining international fame ever since UK based publisher Tilted Axis published a translated version of his collection of short stories The Sad Part Was in 2017.
Yoon, who has transformed the literary landscape of Thailand with his witty ‘liquid modernist’ stories, is well-known in his home country. Not only has he won the SEA Write Award, the most prestigious literary award in Southeast Asia, he has also brought Vladimir Nabokov and J.D. Salinger to Thailand with his deft translations.
In his work, Yoon captures the surrealism of cosmopolitan existence in Bangkok. His stories swerve and shift and capture large portions of time in small spaces, depicting urban Thai life in the late 1990s, and shifting focus from social realism and rural life to modernity and globalisation.
The Sad Part Was, translated by Mui Poopoksakul, begins with explaining the meaning of Ploang, a Buddhist approach of dealing with the precarious disappointments of life:
“To put something down, to unburden, to be at peace with letting go… It is not to dwell on something that causes suffering, nor is it to forget about it; it is learning to live, stoically with it.”
Influenced by writers like E.E. Cummings, Beckett, and Joyce, Yoon writes stories where nothing really happens:
“I think my use of surrealism and speculative elements is meant to be subtle, as if the weirdness is actually quite normal for the characters involved. I don’t like to overemphasise it. In that sense, the weirdness in my stories is meant to mirror the weirdness in everyday life that we considered normal just because it’s been accepted and experienced repeatedly, but when we take the time to reflect on it, we realise it’s far from logical or reasonable.”
Yoon’s work is intriguing – readers are often transfixed by the oddness of plotlines. In The Crying Parties, four friends get together to consume “brutal cocktail recipes”, in a building resembling a “concrete phallus” with their friend June. Every Sunday, they get drunk and eat raw bird’s eye chilies until tears came out of their eyes:
“June used them as a way to detach crying from sadness. She wanted to train herself to cry for amusement.”
The one who cried the longest was crowned winner. June, who is known for her self-deprecating humour, later dies by suicide. The friends want to organise a final crying party at her apartment, and ask the new tenant for permission:
“The release of tears without sorrow or pain is a really interesting sensation.”
It doesn’t take reading between the lines to realise that the friends do not host these parties for amusement.
The alienation and loneliness of metropolitan life is portrayed through slippery plotlines, allowing space to both linger and look away. Although Yoon’s work may have the tendency to test one’s patience, his unique and candid prose is undeniably chic. His work has come to represent a generation of Thai writers and readers who want to stray away from traditional storytelling.
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But Yoon is more than a modern voice. After studying art in New York, he returned to Thailand and gained fame as a young star, appearing on magazine covers and writing lyrics for popular indie bands. Since then, he has started his own publishing house, Typhoon Books, designed dozens of book covers and written screenplays for Pen-ek Ratanaruang, one of Thailand’s most well-known new wave and arthouse directors. They collaborated on the film, Last Life in the Universe, which became a sensational hit, where comic and tragic elements are fused to form an almost surrealist output, much like Yoon’s short stories.
In his directorial debut, Motel Mist, Yoon juxtaposes a revenge flick with a sci-fi horror. An old man brings a reluctant teenager to his custom-made motel room, where he has dozens of sex toys and costumes. While she convinces him to let her friend join in on the fun, a former child-star checks into the room next door and converses with aliens through his notebook. After suffering some torture and abuse, the girls restrain the old man. In a slick montage, dressed in sexy costumes, they physically attack him for turning an old friend of theirs into a “vegetable”. In the other room, the former child-star manifests his alien powers and transforms into a killer.
In the fast urbanisation of the metropolis, Yoon writes about metaphysical anxieties. But he is also aware of why the world hasn’t taken much notice of Thai literature yet:
“I think one of the reasons Thai literature has been of so little interest globally has to do with the history of modern Thai literature itself, specifically the fact that it has always been heavily influenced by Western Literature and never produced any qualities that could be said to be unique. In the past, when the West was seeking oriental exoticism, Thai literature probably wasn’t able to compete with works from China, Japan, India, or Indonesia, because ‘culture’ in Thailand was simply not as rich and there was very little literature available… Maybe globalisation was needed in order to generate more interest in Thai culture, for better or for worse.”
In India, Thailand is a popular travel destination. Over 1.5 million Indian tourists visit Thailand every year. In 2018, India was ranked sixth among nationalities visiting Thailand. Yet, we rarely find ourselves reading Thai authors.
Because “world-literature” is impacted by colonialism, the hierarchy created within languages does not favour writers who write outside of English. Asian writers are disregarded by the imperial canon. Translation, therefore, is the site where imperialism and neo-colonialism can be razed.
Suhasini Patni is an English and Creative Writing graduate from Ashoka University. In 2019, she graduated summa cum laude from the Ashoka Scholar’s Programme and since then she’s worked as a teaching fellow for various professors and as visiting faculty at Nirma University. Her writing was short-listed for the Toto Funds the Arts, Creative Writing in English award, 2021. Her work has appeared in Scroll.in, Asymptote, Femin