A Sea of Stories: Islands as Shima in Rattawut Lapcharoensap’s Sightseeing

Rattawut Lapcharoensap, born in Chicago in 1979 to a Thai family fleeing the military crackdown on leftists in their home country, and raised and educated both in Bangkok (1982-1987 and 1990-1995) and the U.S., stresses that he wrote the stories in his 2005 collection Sightseeing partly as a reaction against the portrayal of Thailand by contemporary expatriate writers (1) (qtd. in Larkin 7). The typical gaze of these writers and their narrators--who are thrown into a strange world of drugs, corruption, sex, and Thai characters that "speak in aphorisms, like a Zen master" (7)--can be characterized as that of the independent tourist. In a study that traces motifs and tropes from European colonialism in narratives of independent tourism, Alex Tickell identifies that gaze as an exercise in self-actualization and self-transformation, with the foreign place as a mere vehicle or trigger: "[I]t is the encounter with the self, by way of 'Otherness', that concerns the independent tourist" (41). The attitude apparent here, which implies that what the traveler sees does not need to bear any relation to the actual, authentic local culture (Urry 11, Tickell 43), shows many parallels to the way islands have traditionally been looked upon and used in Western literature and discourse; so many, in fact, that the island motif could be called a precursor to, key ingredient of, close relative of, or necessary precondition of the modern tourist narrative. Islands in fiction have long functioned as representations of a "site where everything is different" and where "the radical variation from normal life ... promises to challenge the individual in his or her existential ideology" (Classen 69), while "in all these instances, the 'realness' of an actual island is an irrelevance, even an inconvenience" (Hay 554). Given the status of islands as the founding sites of the tourist gaze, (2) as well as the fact that tropical islands, the objects of "one of the best branding exercises in the history of marketing" (Baldacchino 248), indeed play a very real part in Thailand's tourism and tourist literature industries, it is only logical that a thorough rewriting of the island motif is at the beginning and the core--quite literally, since both the first and the title story of the collection deal with islands--of Lapcharoensap's literary response to the expatriate writers. In this article, I will analyze how in Sightseeing the traditional Western imagination of islands as small, static places of absolute difference whose meaning is created only by their discovery through visiting mainlanders gets systematically countered and replaced with island imagery strongly reminiscent of the way the Japanese linguistic and cultural concept of shima has always understood islands, that is, as central, not marginal places which are well-connected and whose identity is inextricably linked to their inhabitants. Using a Japanese idea to help capture and illustrate how a Thai American author counters certain Western notions of islands and Thailand is of course not without its problems. The approach seems to suggest a homogenization of 'Eastern cultures' (Japan and Thailand together versus the West) that is not only generally naive but in this case particularly jarring. Given the history of Japanese imperialism in Southeast Asia in the 1930s and 1940s, it appears odd to imply a collaborative Thai-Japanese liberation project by proposing that Thai reactions against outside influence follow patterns that could be seen as culturally Japanese. These concerns are valid. However, from an empirical standpoint, shima, Japanese or not, simply constitutes the best conceptual framework to describe what Lapcharoensap is doing. Correcting what is factually wrong and normatively problematic about the traditional (Western) view of islands, it offers the most convincing systematic alternative to the latter (as is evidenced by the fact that the leading social/natural science journal on research into islands is named Shima). …