Loneliness is a quiet dilemma. Many of Edward Hopper's celebrated paintings are a testament to this truism. In New York Movie, for example, the painting splits into halves. The left side depicts a movie theatre with silhouettes of viewers and what's being shown on the screen. We are, however, drawn to the right: An usherette, tall, lean, blonde, has her left hand supporting her elbow, her chin touching her right hand. Her pensive gesture suggests she is far away from the wall that separates her from the moviegoers. She probably has seen the movie countless times but her countenance compels us to wonder what is taking place in her mind.
The Sad Part Was by Prabda Yoon 2017 Tilted Axis Press 189 pp ISBN 9781911284062 Translated in English by Mui Poopoksakul
Similar to Hopper, Prabda Yoon, a New York-educated writer, is a painter of alienation. The writer's weaving of letters, through much of his wordplay, should be read in the context of transition. Time is immaterial, but literature binds to it, and literature has always adapted to new situations. Fifteen years ago Prabda became the voice of a new generation on the Thai literary scene as the social and cultural milieu of the 1990s gave him a route of exit from traditional Thai literature. Now brought together in 12 stories, and translated into English by Mui Poopoksakul, The Sad Part Was is a collection of short stories mostly taken from Probability (Khwam Na Ja Pen), the work that earned Prabda the SEA Write Award in 2002.
The capacious book captures agonising, lonely, sometimes funny but mostly alienated characters in urbanised, neon-lit Bangkok.
In Miss Space, an eccentric protagonist is obsessed with the spaces between words. He lives his life, psychedelically, to find one thing: the meaning of space. In Marut By The Sea, Prabda builds layers of meta-story when his going-to-be character challenges the writer to his task. The Crying Parties depicts a group of friends who're addicted to throwing parties with beer and chillies. Eating hot chillies makes them tearful "without ... sorrow", an experience they find beguiling.
Strange and quirky as it is, the stories in The Sad Part Was are culturally acute when they depict social hierarchy in Thailand. Prabda's character in Pen In Parentheses addresses himself as "pi" (big brother) and "Ei Ploang", alluded to a particular social standing. Ei is something lower than a "lad" but relatively higher than a "bastard" and interestingly there's no "khun" (Mr or Ms) in Prada's writing. (Does it implicitly say that he isn't interested in the middle class?) "Ploang", the name of the protagonist, is wordplay on the cultural philosophy of life: the word refers to the Buddhist concept of letting go. Ei Ploang in the story likes to sit in Lumphini Park observing people passing by. He sits like a monk meditating, though he doesn't chant but relies on his observations to classify "good" and "bad" people. Ei Ploang doesn't applause or condemn the people he watches. He only believes that "the quantities of good and evil are never equal in humans, while other things have more of a balance".
Something In The Air challenges readers with a question of moral dilemma in a Buddhist nation. As it rains a lot in the tropics, the heavy rain brings two youngsters to an extramarital affair while they, at the same time, witness the death of a man who was crushed by a fallen advertisement sign. The squad of officers who come to investigate the dead man find "the fragrance in the air" and condemn "the moral collapse of the younger generation".
Caught in a moral impasse, the young man, nonetheless, doesn't give in. He's convinced that the sexual conduct between him and the young woman had nothing to do with the dead man. Prabda's idiosyncratic crime of passion reflects different values of generations that live in the changing metropolis of Bangkok -- the brutality of death indulged and the fatality of desire explored.
Snow For Mother, on its surface, seems to be the odd one out as the characters in the story are more "fitting-in". It is a tale of a diligent mother who saves up for a trip to Alaska with her 31-year-old son. But again, alienation feeds in.
The son has perceived grass as snow since he was nine. He's been giving his mother a lump of grass as a token of love every day. The mother hopes that Alaska, with real crisping snow, will eventually cure him. If not, her discourse goes: "How many mothers out there get to say thank you to their child as often as I do?" A bitter, broken thing surfaces in this melancholic narrative.
The Sad Part Was, in a literary context, is like a strange and inventive language of its own game. It neglects readers in some parts, and makes up for it in many. The language game isn't a barrier of communication. It instead highlights the isolation and alienation of individuals who came north and south to this strange metropolis called Bangkok. Like Hopper's shadowed paintings do to the landscape of middle America, Prabda's letters beg us to question ourselves, to ask where light and darkness are.
