It's not a short story collection although it could seem like it. There’re many characters involved, and the author builds tenuous links between them. The characters’ lives and respective stories are interwoven into daily life, since they live in the same residential condominium. It feels like a frame story. (Reviews here, here, here and here.)
The stories revolve around this residential condominium tower built atop the compound of an old demolished Thai house owned by Sammy and his family, and built by his great-great grandfather. Said condominium was the backdrop of the characters' stories. I decided to save myself a lot of headache by reading the reviews first. Otherwise, I'd be royally confused by who the hell these people are, and where the story is headed.
There are a lot of characters in “Bangkok Wakes to Rain,” multiple generations all connected, it turns out, to a single house built by the great-great-grandfather of Sammy, a photographer with a penchant for leaving when things get uncomfortable. In rough chronological order, the Bangkok home is linked to an American missionary doctor, a divorced socialite, a construction worker hopped up on brightly colored pills, a student who survived an earlier political massacre, a troubled plastic surgeon and the young owner of one of the faces he carves. There are many others. Some are animals.
One little story that stood out for me revolves around estranged sisters Nee and Nok whose lives are so different in adulthood. Nok lives in Japan where she runs a Thai restaurant with her husband. Nee is a trained nurse, but she's now a receptionist at a residential condominium. The sisters are estranged, over a matter of Nee's lover, Siripohng, who was killed in a protest against the country's tyrannical government years ago when they were part of the student protest movement. Nee is angry with Nok who chose to do business with an exiled Thai military officer who was part of that tyrannical government in the 1970s.
We've been warned that Bangkok might under water in less than twenty years. But this isn't a book about climate change or just about the government, or the collective amnesia of some parts of the 15-million-strong population. The author beautifully described that sense of belonging and displacement, recollection of memories and loss.
At the end of the book, I couldn't find anything to extract. It’s frankly rather disjointed. Arrrgh. It doesn’t go anywhere, and it’s not an ideal narrative technique. It’s painful trying to make sense of it all, and that’s not a good thing to allow readers to draw parallels with Bangkok’s political upheavals and societal discourse. In this post, I’d rather draw out reviews to highlight the many characters that are involved in this book.
Characters come and go, washed away by the tides of time, but at the center of “Bangkok Wakes to Rain” remains a grand house built by the son of a laborer who founded a trading company and grew rich. We see this building with its flowery tiled ceiling in varying conditions in different periods. In one, it’s the home of a wealthy divorced woman who lives with a gathering of ghosts that only live music can exorcise. In another era, the house has been overtaken by a high-rise condo development — the facade of the original Sino-Colonial dwelling reduced to decoration in the glitzy new lobby. And later still, decades ahead in the 21st century, the building is subsumed by the rising sea that has overwhelmed, but not snuffed out the capital.
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