Pitchaya Sudbanthad, "Bangkok wakes to rain" Interview 2021

                                         

Credit Christine Lee

My mail reaches Pitchaya Sudbanthad while he is in Bangkok. I write to him that I envy him, but did he feel safe travelling? He answers that Bangkok is Covid-free. I envy him more than ever. His answers to my questions about his charming novel “Bangok wakes to rain” dull my login for the city whose name means ‘city of the angels’.

    A traditional novel, following a linear timeline and with a couple or a small group of characters, is certainly easier to write than a novel like yours, where different threads intertwine. I think it is genial and requires genius. How did you work upon it? How did you manage to keep track of all the small plots? Did you write parallel stories joining them together a second time? Somehow I imagine it would be better to write by hand, drawing sort of maps.

    My novel grew in a very orchestral way. I was searching for a book, and I think each thread could have become a book in its own right, but I ended up continuing with the different parts. They ended up connecting into a whole. Each narrative strand felt like it had a life of its own, but with my selection, assembly, and adjustments, I was able to make very seemingly different parts move with or against each other.

In many ways, it felt like I was a composer despite knowing very little about music. Once I had a first draft, I “relistened” to how everything sounded together, and then I rearranged or added what was needed. Later on, I worked with my editor, who helped with creating more continuity where I hadn’t realized it.

Significant parts of what I’d written did not make it to the ultimately published composition, but I think their absence is for the better. There is a larger story that I hope the readers can feel within my novel, even if I had not entirely described it.

   Who came first, among the characters?

   The first storyline that came to me was the one about the woman who runs the Thai restaurant in Japan. I was thinking about my own experience of living far away from Thailand at a time when Thai food was not very available, and the food really had to come through the suitcases of friends and family. After I wrote the beginnings of that storyline, I began to wonder about the character of the woman’s sister, and then the house and its owners came to me, followed by the missionary doctor and the jazz musician. It felt like I had created a stage in a theater, and the characters were coming and going.

   All in all I think your novel is an elegy to a city: is Bangkok the real main character?

   Bangkok is such a large, complex city. There is no singular Bangkok. It’s a city that can be heaven for someone and hell for another. It’s an ancient scene of temples and stupas, or it’s one with sky trains and digital ad displays everywhere. It has always been a place that attracts people from everywhere, and Bangkok is something to them that is different from those born there. It’s definitely one kind of city if you have money, and another if you don’t. It’s a city that, like all cities, is in a constant motion of self-building and self-erasure.

In that sense, the city is like a character with many conflicts and contradictions, but I don’t think that Bangkok, or Krungthep, as it’s called by Thais, can be completely captured as if it were one main character. There is no novel large enough for that. What I hope that I have been able to do is to depict my imagination of lives that intersect within it across time and place, and therefore, create a sense of a city as a creature of many faces and souls, in the past, now, and perhaps in the future.

   I have read that you live in the U.S. most of the time. Do you miss your hometown? What do you miss most? Do you still feel you belong there?

   Whenever I’m away from Bangkok, I miss everything about it. When I am here, I’m always complaining about the heat, traffic, and mosquitoes. It’s a lucky privilege to be able to go back and forth with what I sometimes call a foreigner-native point of view. Because I can speak, read, and write in Thai, when I’m with my family in Bangkok, I take part in the city’s everyday life, but I can also see the city with a kind of journalistic distance. There’s always a negotiation of identity wherever I am, which I think is now pretty normal in a very globalized society.

  You most often call Bangkok with its true name, Krungthep, and later you give a new name to the sinking city of the future, Krung Nak. I wondered whether it might mean ‘city of ghosts’, because this is what it is- ghosts of buildings, ghosts of people, ghosts of the past: a city of angels and ghosts.

   A nak is a mythical serpent creature that dwells in a watery world. It could be said that the world where they live is a sunken heaven, which Bangkok may well become.

 Whatever its future, Bangkok, or, Krungthep, is a very quickly changing place. Therefore, it is also a very haunting city. The past remains, even as the city develops. Where new condo towers rise, you can still see a small house ritually built for the spirits of the land. The ancient and the future, the physical and the intangible, the spiritual and the scientific—-they all co-exist in the same flow of lives and events.

Patterns occur and reoccur, be it with individuals or society as a whole. The same mistakes get made, and dysfunctions continue, but love and other wonders also persist for a long time. 

  I have seen pictures of the very bad floods in 1977 and in 2011. The destiny of the city reminded me of Venice. Are they working at something to prevent this destiny which would be an enormous loss for mankind, besides being a tragedy for its inhabitants?

   I was there in 2011 to help my parents build a wall of sandbags for their home. We were lucky to not have been very affected by the floods, but it could have easily turned out far worse. I still shudder every time I see water collect in the streets after a rainstorm. 

I’m not sure what kind of planning and preparations are being made right now in Bangkok, but it’s a city that shares a fate with many others around the world that are under threat from the ongoing climate crisis. I don’t think enough people realize the depth and scale of potential loss that will come from the continuation of massive carbon emissions that can be largely attributed to a reckless fossil fuels industry.

As a city, Bangkok is still full of exhaust fumes, dust, and smoke. So much waste is newly created as the city grows. For a people who believe in the notion of karma, very few Thais think of the consequences of our current way of life. Capital accumulation for the few takes precedence over the health and wellbeing of the many and the environment. Bangkok has long been a site of value extraction, where human greed has worked against nature in our shared physical world so as to support unrealistic, unsustainable expectations of abstract economic growth. That needs to change before it’s too late for all of us.

The memory of Ayutthaya, the beautiful ancient capital, is always present, like a guardian angel to Bangkok. Does this mean that, whatever happens- and we do hope it will not happen- , Bangkok will always keep its glory just like Ayutthaya?

   Ayutthaya fell into decline and was sacked by a Burmese army. The glory it possessed only survives now in the form of charred ruins. I certainly hope Bangkok can avoid the inheritance of that story arc, at least in the near-term. All cities eventually become remnants of what they were. In my past visits to Ayutthaya and other former grand cities like Sukothai, I walked through the ruins trying to feel what their past inhabitants felt, back when the city was the place of their everyday life and everything might have seemed like it would last forever. Change is the strongest, most inevitable force in the known universe.

  The most painful pages of the book are, maybe, the ones about the uprisings in 1973 and 1976 and the massacres of students and protesters. Last October there was a new uprising: is the end of the monarchy near in Thailand? Isn’t there the risk of a military dictatorship?

  Most people who visit Thailand often cannot see beyond the outer facade of beautiful beaches and delicious food, but if they take a longer look, most will easily see the hierarchies and injustices that lead to upheaval every few years.

I think many in Thailand want the country to emerge from a vicious cycle of inequality and political dysfunction that has been its biggest obstacle for a very long time. I believe young people now, like their predecessors, are very eager to define their own future in an actual democracy. There has always been a tug of war between different ideals and priorities of many classes and generations as the country goes through changes, with the backdrop of far larger societal shifts in the world. The effects of our global climate crisis are gradually being felt, adding to the complexity. I’m not sure what will happen.

  You must be aware of the expectations about your next novel. It won’t be easy after such an impressive debut. Are you already working at it?

I usually don’t talk much about what I’m working on at the moment. I can only say that I’m in a mode of exploration and experimentation. I hope the results will be worthy of my readers’ attention and time.

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