Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University


 

Priscilla the Cambodian

(2005)


Rattawut Lapcharoensap

(1979– )

 



Notes

95  ingots:

 

95  Dong: a common Thai nickname for boys

 

99  Kasikon Bank

 

101  Khmer Rouge:

 

104  Onnut: A street in Bangkok

 

115  Pattanakan Road: A street in Bangkok





Thailand


Dan: Your descriptions of Thailand in the stories give the  juxtaposition of living in what others consider an  exotic retreat. Was this something you were specifically trying to show?

A: Indeed it was; I’m glad that it came across as such. I’d always found it peculiar, personally, that the place where I lived—Bangkok—seemed a kind of paradise to others, since it hardly seemed a paradise to me or to those around me. Bangkok was simply the setting of our daily struggles and our daily joys. It was where we *lived* and, as such, perfectly mundane. But here were these people voluntarily arriving in Thailand to RELAX, and here, too, was an entire economic infrastructure reliant upon their presence and the money in their wallets. For better or for worse, it’s increasingly difficult these days to go around Thailand without being reminded of the tourism industry. I think that a strange, albeit very modern, situation often arises out of this: these emblems of leisure—the modern traveler, vacationer—must rub shoulders on a daily basis with an entirely different social class, those who must toil for their pleasure. It makes for peculiar, though at times heartbreaking, situations. Jamaica Kincaid has written quite beautifully about this in “A Small Place,” her essay on Antigua’s tourism industry.


Dan: It’s also interesting to see how racism and snobbery between classes becomes more a human condition than an American condition reading your stories—“Priscilla the Cambodian” specifically brings these issues about, but it is prevalent throughout the collection. How big of an issue do you find the level of racism and class distinction to be in Thailand versus that in America?

A: A can of worms! This is an excellent question, though one I’m not sure I’ll be able to answer adequately. That said, last I checked, Americans certainly didn’t have a monopoly on “racism and snobbery between classes” (the efforts of the current administration be damned). If that were the case, all we’d have to do is leave America for any other golden, utopian shore. Indeed, Thailand is racked with its own nefarious set of social divisions, just like any other country, and these have their own historical context and genealogy. 

All that said, as a reader, I’m often suspicious of fiction that doesn’t have some small sense of the very real material effects that social divisions have on people’s lives. More often than not, I think, our very desires are wrapped up in such divisions, divisions not entirely of our own making; the way we achieve these desires must span the entire range of human possibilities, from the comic to the honorable to the tragic to the heinous and despicable, etc., etc. Human beings want things, we have our various ways of getting what we want, and so often this entails stepping on a few people’s toes. Some of my favorite stories are entirely unambiguous about the way these desires materialize.

The citizens of that development in “Priscilla the Cambodian” are very clear about what they want: a good life for their children, economic stability, a livable place. When they torch the shantytown they are not torching it out of hatred or spite (though there is that): they torch it, above all, as a way of bettering their own lives. It’s a cruel and ludicrous and barbaric act, of course, but that isn’t the point—even the most horrifying of men are, in their own eyes at least, good and kind and wonderful people.


—Dan Wickett, "Interview with Rattawut Lapcharoensap," Emerging Writers Network, 18 Jan. 2005.




Language


MN: When you sat down to write these stories you had said that you wanted to portray a side of Thailand and of Asian American culture that you hadn't seen. What do you think was missing?


RL: I think there's a tendency in a lot of English language literature about Asia to exoticize Asian cultures and to really use Asia in some ways as a backdrop for Western characters to resolve their personal crises. It's a very old story, I think, that goes way back to early travel accounts. And a certain range of humanity seemed to have been omitted. People spoke a lot in clipped, terse sentences, or they spoke in Buddhist aphorisms or Zen wisdom. And I really wanted to capture a broad range of speech, really, and human emotions that I felt I had never seen Thai characters possessing in English language literature.


MN: The language is interesting because it's bawdy and sassy and has sort of a rhythm and a  pattern that would not be foreign in a suburban strip mall in America.


RL: Yeah, that was— One of the real difficulties I had in writing this book was trying to translate a diction for my readers. The language that these characters are speaking are neither Thai or English, in some ways, in my mind. It's a bit of an invented language. And part of this was because so much of the Zen aphorism literature often omits a native sense of humor or bawdiness. My own experiences of folks from Bangkok and Thailand have been that they are just about as funny as anybody else in the world. So I felt that I had to invent a kind of language that these characters would speak and because I was writing in English, the contemporary American idiom seemed the closest way for me to approximate humor and pathos and bawdiness.


—Michelle Norris, "'Sightseeing': Beyond the Tourist's Thailand," All Things Considered, NPR (2005)



 



Characters

Dong – friend of the narrator; eleven years old (98); nicknamed "Pregnant Duck" because he is "knock-kneed and kind of fat" (98)

the narrator, "I" – friend of Dong; eleven years old (98); nicknamed "Black Wheezy" because of his dark skin and asthma (98)

Priscilla a Cambodian girl; "All her teeth were lovely ingots, each one crowned in a cap of pure gold" (95); "Her father was a dentist" (98); "Over the next three years as Priscilla and her mother moved from camp to camp, she sometimes went for days without opening her mouth....She made Priscilla nibble on gruel and salted fish in the relative secrecy of the warehouse they shared with hundreds of other refugees" (96); "'Leave my mother alone,' she said sternly in Thai" (99); "That tiny Cambodian girl had Dong pinned facedown to the railroad ties" (100); "She was named after Elvis Presley's wife" (105); "Priscilla believed her father was still alive" (105)

Mother – the narrator's mother; "Mother was reduced to sewing panty hose out of a Chinese woman's house" (97)

Father – the narrator's father; "Father carried concrete beams at a construction site for minimum wages" (97)

the Thicknecks "the nicer development down the road from ours—where the Thicknecks frolicked in their Olympic-sized community pool" (104); "onto Pattanakan Road, past the Thicknecks' pristine development" (115)

 

Places

Thailand

Cambodia

Phnom Penh – "Priscilla remembered sitting on his [her father's] dentist's chair in the empty hospital while bombs fell on Phnom Penh" (9596)


Time

1970

Summer

April "one April afternoon" (97);

 

Comprehension Check

  • What is the profession of Priscilla's father?
  • What is the profession of the narrator's father?
  • Is Priscilla younger or older than the boys? How do you know?
  • What happens to the Cambodians' shantytown?
  • Why does the narrator's father and mother sell their house?

 


Study Questions

  • Wealth

    • The narrator begins the story, saying "The only thing I ever learned about wealth was Priscilla the Cambodian's beautiful teeth" (95). What do you think the narrator learns? What kind of wealth does he mean? What kinds of wealth do you think Priscilla the Cambodian's extraordinary teeth embodies? Who is rich, who is not? What qualities/possessions do they have that make them rich? Consider the phrase "the only thing." Does "the only thing" mean the narrator is a static character whose learning is limited? Does "the only thing" only emphasize further the unique richness contained in Priscilla's teeth?

  • Perception
    • Consider the boys' attitude and behavior toward the Cambodian refugees throughout the story. What and how do they "learn" about the refugees? How much do the boys internalize the Thai adults' attitude and language regarding the refugees? Do Dong and the narrator perceive Priscilla differently from other refugees?
    • Though characters' point of views present Cambodians and Thais as very different, the narrative creates several parallels between them. In what ways are the Cambodian squatters and the Thai residents alike? How are these similarities suggested through rhetorical and narrative devices? How are differences conveyed? Compare and contrast the language of similarities/identification with/against that of difference/alienation. What effect do these perceptual shifts create in the story?
    • How are children portrayed differently from adults? How are the three children's perspectives different from each other and from their parents?
  • Coming of Age
    • Notice the descriptions of Priscilla's experience in Phnom Penh and in Bangkok. What can we infer about Priscilla's life before and after bombings?
    • In what ways do the children characters grow up?
  • Names and Naming
    • Which characters are named and which are not?
    • What is the significance of nicknames?
    • What is the significance of Priscilla's name?

 

 

Sample Student Responses to Rattawut Lapcharoensap's "Priscilla the Cambodian"


Study Question: Close read a joining of disparate things in one of the works this latter half of the semester. How are the incongruent things brought together? For example, syntactically, semantically, logically, aurally, spatially, emotionally, historically. In what ways are the entities at odds? Is there a lead up to the connection or does it happen suddenly? Look at where this linking of unlike things occurs in the work. What purpose does it serve?


Response 1:

 

 

 

 

 

Rawida Komkai

2202234 Introduction to the Study of English Literature

Acharn Puckpan Tipayamontri

June 15, 2009

Reading Response 1

 

Terms of Endearment

 

Among the many odd combinations that Rattawut Lapcharoensap creates in “Priscilla the Cambodian” (the title itself is an unlikely joining of Elvis Presley’s wife to an eight-year-old Cambodian refugee daughter of a dentist), one stands out because of its humor, irreverence, and incredible incongruity. Leading up to that moment, Dong, the narrator and Priscilla become friends following the girl’s “killing” them (102–3). They are often invited to eat at Priscilla’s home (hut) the “good and substantial” meal of plain sticky rice where the two boys in return teach Priscilla’s mother “how to swear in Thai” (104). After Dong’s and the narrator’s fathers and other Thai men burn down the Cambodian’s shanties, Priscilla decides to give the boys her gold. These unlikely pairings of actions only build up to Priscilla’s mother calling the boys, affectionately, “Hairy Beaver…. Dickwad. Fuckface” (113). These insults, matched perfectly as a response to the narrator’s apology for their father’s violence, are a testament to the exceptional friendship between these slum boys and the educated refugees. They recall their history of learning a foreign language and the ugly conditions of their unshakable relationship to each other. In this laughably improper lexical joining of signs and signifiers is the richness of humanity that makes fighting an effective way of making friends, simple rice fulfilling, slum dogs rich, and fuckface the perfect term of endearment.

Works Cited

Lapcharoensap, Rattawut. “Priscilla the Cambodian.” Sightseeing. Sydney: Picador, 2005. 95–117. Print

 

 

 

 

 

            

 

 




 


Links
Story, Reviews

 


Media


  • "Rattawut Lapcharoensap," Living Writers, Colgate University (2010; 39:15 min.; Rattawut reads his short story "In the 90s," and answers questions at 34:40 min.)

  • Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia, dir. David I. Munro (1979 documentary; 52:13 min.)

  • Cambodia: The Bloodiest Domino, dir. Peter Du Cane and Matthew Kelley (2001 documentary; 54:53 min.)

  • Enemies of the People, dir. Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath (2009, 93:00 min.; 2010 Special Jury Prize Sundance winner, 2012 Best Investigative Documentary Emmy winner)

  • Pol Pot: Secret Killer, dir. Greg Barker, Biography (2005 documentary; 44:35 min.)

  • Inside Pol Pot's Secret Prison, History Channel (2002 documentary)

 


Rattawut Lapchaorensap
Interviews Biography

 

 


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Last updated September 21, 2021