“Only you farang are so easy to come and and leave,” yells Nam to her American husband, Rick, in “Easy,” a story that sits at the emotional and temporal core of Welcome Me to the Kingdom, Mai Nardone’s debut collection of short fiction. The reason why Nam is upset is that their family has just moved from their high-rise condo back to their old townhouse. It’s 1997 and Rick—like so many others in Thailand, foreign and local—has seen his fortunes reverse due to the Asian financial crisis. This reversal puts strain on a relationship already on shaky ground.
Caught between them is Lara, their half-Thai daughter, who struggles to find her place in the world, privileged in one sense and an outsider in another. She and the other characters we encounter may be looking to better their circumstances, but their attempts are largely futile, constrained by family and class hierarchies.
I became friends with Mai on Twitter about a decade ago. I was doing an MFA and feeling nostalgic about Thailand, where I’d lived for three years. I’d happened upon a story he’d published in Slice and had been impressed by his writing and curious about his bio. We’ve been friends ever since, and have kept up correspondence over chat, and in person in Bangkok and the United States. I’ve admired his wide-ranging opinions of literature, his thoughts on Thailand, and of course his fiction—brimming with wonderfully crafted sentences and characters.
During our talk over Zoom, we discussed the complex layers of Thai identity and class, and the challenges of writing fiction that exists within and outside the global imagination of Thailand. He also explains the story behind some of the stories, and concludes with some advice for aspiring authors.
James Yu: Let’s start with your bio. It states that you’re a Thai and American writer. Why did you choose that phrasing?
Mai Nardone: For me, the hyphenated “Thai-American” seems to belong to Asian America. So it was about making that distinction of being a mixed race person who grew up in Thailand, rather than America. I didn’t necessarily grow up in a minority position as I would have if I’d grown up in the US, and I come to the world from a different perspective because of that. A lot of my book is also trying to mediate and cover the ground between what it is to be Thai and American, especially as it pertains to one of the family storylines.
JY: Can you talk a little more about not feeling like a minority per se?
MN: It’s a bit different when I was growing up in an international school environment in Bangkok, where everyone attending was a bit of an outsider, but now, as an adult, I’ve found that half-Thai self-consciousness is invented. Thai people don’t really care, especially when you’re talking to them in Thai. And so many celebrities are half-Thai, and you see them on billboards.
So I get to pass, even if people might guess that I’m half. And I’m part of the majority community given that my family is Thai Chinese, and Bangkok has so many people with this heritage.
JY: One of the characters that recurs through this collection, Lara, is half-Thai. In “Like Us for a Whiter You”, though, whatever privilege this might confer is complicated by her darker skin color. We see this contrast sharply with her paler friends, Bird and Stella. What were you trying to explore in this story?
MN: Thailand is a society with a lot of colorism, and there are different assumptions based on your skin color or ethnic heritage. This story in particular was talking about being mixed race. There’s a hierarchy, especially in media, when being half Thai is synonymous with being half-White (even though this isn’t always true), and where toothpaste ads will feature Lisa (of the K-pop group Blackpink) having skin the color as her teeth, which is alarming.
JY: Relatedly, another thing I really like about this collection is the way it explores class. I’m thinking specifically of Ping and Pinky in “Feasts.” Ping is a whip-smart teenager who tests into the best Thai high school in the country, and moves in with Pinky (a distant relative, in her twenties) to be closer to her school. There’s an interesting class dynamic here because Pinky is beautiful and has this glamour about her, but she’s also an escort. There’s a scene when Pinky takes Ping to a fancy Italian restaurant to celebrate her graduation, and the host rebuffs them, saying they’re all booked up, even though there are plenty of seats available. Despite her seemingly fancy outfit, she’s spotted as someone who doesn’t belong in this upscale environment.
MN: Part of that restaurant scene is about Ping coming to terms with how she sees Pinky. She may seem glamorous, but when there isn’t a wealthy man by her side, these spaces are closed off to her.
Infamously, when my parents were dating in the ‘80s and they were staying at this hotel in downtown Bangkok, my mom, who is a middle class Thai Chinese woman, showed up to meet my dad and one of the concierges told her in Thai that she couldn’t come to make a living around here. The subtext being that she was an escort and looking to pick up clients.
My mother went to graduate school in the States and back in the ’90s and maybe early 2000s, in order to be outside the class system she would hide her Thainess, or pretend to be Singaporean. Because she looks Chinese, and speaks with an American accent she could get away from the class system. People couldn’t place her and she was automatically elevated and avoided any stigma.
To bring it back to “Feasts,” it was about getting these worlds into proximity with each other and trying to see how these two characters rub off on each other and getting that feeling of being a child and being really enamored with somebody older. And then in this story, over time, you lose your illusions and start to see them for who they are. It’s a sad arc for Pinky as well because she wants to maintain this glamour for the men but also Ping.
JY: Right, and in this story all the glamorous objects and gifts end up being literally fake goods.
MN: You can look the part but you won’t be allowed into these circles and this is the rigidity of Thailand’s class system. The markers aren’t always visible. It means something to have a Louis Vuitton bag, but it means something entirely different if you have an English accent because you went to boarding school in the UK, which sets you in another tier of society entirely.
JY: In a way I relate to your mother and choosing to opt out of this whole social hierarchy. Besides the friends, I think that’s partially why I like going to Thailand, because I’m freed of my Asian-Americanness. I can just float in and out and choose my level of engagement and have this privilege of being both American and Korean.
MN: That’s what I really like about your essay for Mekong Review, on literature written by foreigners in Thailand. I can also fake it like my mom does and so I have this outsider status, and that’s currency because you transcend the hierarchy, especially as an English speaking American. And that puts you in a different place than if you were a Korean. The way you ended your essay originally is that when you come to a foreign place, you find what you’re looking for. And when you’re looking for the exotic that’s going to be what you find.
It’s a really privileged position to be a writer and to be on the periphery of society and able to look in instead of being caught and tossed around by its current. It’s interesting that you feel that about Thailand, but if you went to Korea would it be the same thing?
JY: No, when I think about Korea I think about the time I tried asking an old man at a newsstand for directions. I fumbled my Korean, he looked disgusted, then responded in English. I think there’s this embarrassment about going to Korea because I’m afraid of being seen as this fraudulent person who can’t speak Korean well.
MN: But instead, in Thailand, you can speak Thai and it’s almost like it’s the opposite effect, right? I still remember that time we got caught in a rainstorm in Chinatown and you were talking to these women in front of the 7-11. I think most Thai people are charmed when an outsider can speak Thai, so you get to flit between being an outsider and part of the culture.
JY: I guess part of the thesis about my essay was this tendency for the writers to frame their foreign characters as victims at the hands of locals and the local culture. As a writer, I can see why this might happen, say, out of a desire to build narrative energy or drama. If you’re writing from a first-person or close-third point of view, you’re naturally incentivized to frame this culture you’re encountering as a tourist or expat as weird, bizarre, or menacing. Your position is different as a Thai person who grew up there and can speak the language, but how do you think about this when crafting a story? How do you think about how it’s going to be received?
MN: A lot of those works you reviewed were self-conscious of the foreign gaze, especially the Paul Theroux story. Up until the very end it seemed to be very aware of the fact that it was writing a white man into Thailand and his experience interacting with Thai people. I have that self-consciousness, where I’m trying not to let my American background and perspective dominate on the page, alienating the Thai characters just so it makes more sense for an American audience. Being an English-language book, my audience is going to be English speakers. So it’s not pandering in that case, but it is mediating–I deal with a lot of things that exist within the global imagination of what Thailand is. If I’m not a Thai person and I’m thinking about Thailand and all I’ve seen is The Hangover Part II or The Serpent, or the Bridget Jones Diary movie where she ends up in Thai prison. I remember watching this in a theater in Thailand and the prison scenes were supposed to be funny but it was dead silent. This blond woman is surrounded by Thai women in prison and they’re singing something.
Some of the stories I’m writing take that on. I write about sex tourism, but the stereotype of these sorts of works that are written by foreigners usually is that a white man gets cheated by a sex worker and there is some sort of crime involved. “What You Bargained For” is written in second-person, from the perspective of this white man, Rick, who is soliciting this woman for sex. The idea was to try and write a perspective that is authentic to the white man coming into this and yet from within his perspective be damning and not sympathetic. I wanted someone like Rick to be able to read this story and recognize himself and see himself the way not a foreigner might see him but the way a Thai person might see him, and so there was this wolf putting on the sheep’s coat disguise in order to get into this role, which is also why it’s in the second person, because it’s this guy who’s wrestling with his conscience, the ‘you’ that’s talking to him.
And so when I’m taking on the Thailand that is in the global imagination, it’s taking on things like that but also trying to show the things that don’t exist outside. So if it is the sex industry, it’s to show that a lot of massage parlors are for Thai people and there’s no town you could go to where you wouldn’t find a karaoke shop house with sex workers sitting outside which is catering to Thais.
JY: To me, Rick ends up being a pretty complex character, especially when we see him in various touch points after “What You Bargained For.” One that I’m thinking about is “Easy,” which takes place during the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997. He loses his job, which puts pressure on his relationship with Nam and his daughter Lara.
MN: Now that I’m getting reviews, I’m noticing that they all sort of portray my book as if it’s just covering the dark and shady parts of Bangkok, but the story of 1997 financial crisis is really the heart of the book, a cataclysmic event that happens to this family, which is one of the three main storylines. The ‘97 crisis wiped out generational wealth. It was this event that I wanted at the center of the book and it was convenient because it was a time when someone like Rick, who’s working in Thailand, might actually see his position erode from beneath him. And it’s a story in which the grown-up dynamics of being a mixed-race person comes through. The daughter, Lara, is leveraging her English against her mom, who isn’t as fluent in English, and holding things from her dad. She goes to an international school, which is maybe one-third multinational expat, one-third super rich elite Thais, because there’s a Thai quota it’s very hard to get in without connections. The third group is people like me, half Thais who for some reason their outsider parent has managed to stay in Thailand but they’re in between the super rich and the expat kids. The crisis cut through all these different groups. But the expat kids’ parents would throw elaborate farewell parties before leaving the country, while the Thai kids were pulled out mid-term as their families’ financial circumstances became apparent and everything was falling down around them.
JY: And it’s very shameful. I remember this description of the Thai kid whose father shot himself in his Mercedes before it was seized, and then when the kid was getting ready to leave, one of his classmates writes, “Get well soon!” Another classmate says that’s insensitive but I can imagine the weirdness of that—what do you say to your classmates as everything is falling apart?
MN: I was a lot younger than Lara, who is 14 at this time. I was only 8 years old, so I didn’t have a good idea of what was going on until afterwards. And yeah, the students are trying to negotiate this reality when before the topic of conversation might have been stupid gossip. The stakes have been turned up, but they’re still approaching things in the same “get well soon” kind of way.
JY: Even though Rick chooses to leave his family and go back to America, it also feels like he’s being pushed out because he can no longer provide for the family.
MN: Part of that feeling bad is also because it’s told through Lara’s perspective who, at least at the beginning of the story, takes her father’s side. But I also wanted to get at this idea of the murkiness of these relationships that come out of sex work, sometimes it’s just these dependent relationships…a better description of the relationships in this collection might be to describe them as dealing with imbalances of power. Someone always has more power, whether it’s about finances or skin color. And for these two characters it’s her expectation that he’d be the provider. This is also a time when many Thais blamed foreigners for the crisis, because it was foreign money that came in very quickly and went out really quickly as well. The transactional nature of their relationship is not as clear-cut as one might expect. Men of Rick’s position are savvy about this. They understand that these women are twenty years younger than them, and aren’t marrying them for their company or good looks. Rick understands that by losing their old condo and moving them back into their smaller place, he’s failing to live up to his side of the bargain.
JY: I think the complexity of these dynamics allows these stories and characters to breathe. Can we talk a bit about “City of Brass”, which is set from the perspective of this younger white guy, Jimmy, who has moved to Bangkok to be with his Thai girlfriend, Ping. They hang out with with this UN / do-gooder NGO crowd, but they’re not all angels, either.
MN: In this story Jimmy invents an idea of himself, and in fact a lot of his life is telling a story and trying to live his life according to that story, as if that’s reality. And he becomes a lot more unreliable as the story moves on and we understand how much of the story he tells about himself doesn’t line up with reality. One of those things is that “he’s not that kind of white guy” like Rick. He tells himself that he’s a good actor coming to Bangkok, and that when he goes along with a former international school friend to a shady club filled with escorts, he’s being taken unwillingly.
And of course throughout the story he’s reading One Thousand and One Nights, which is something I stole from a Borges story called “The South.” In that story the bookish main character reads all these stories about Argentinian cowboys, gauchos, and dreams of a cowboy death. In the middle of the story we wonder if he’s actually died or not. But it becomes about the unreliability of the character creating a myth for himself out of someone else’s story.
JY: It was really eye-opening for me to hear you compare Jimmy with Rick. Like a more self-aware expat, but still falls into a variation of the Rick dynamic.
I feel like we just barely touched on the technical aspects of your writing and how you construct these stories. But I’m curious, where do these stories come from? Where do you get your inspiration? I remember having a little laugh when reading “Labor” and coming across this description of a former movie theater turned into a warehouse, and the remnant movie posters because you’d taken me to play badminton in Bangkok in a place much like you were describing there. It felt nice, like I was getting a little easter egg.
MN: I mean some of them are accidental, right? Like that badminton hall we went to had those giant hand-painted posters of old movies on the wall. Something like that is easy, because it’s so evocative when you see it. One of my stories, “Captain Q is Dead” came about from sitting in that space with my badminton coach, and hearing him tell me that when he was younger, he and his brother would go to Japan and scrap junk cars for parts, and ship the parts back to Thailand to resell. And in that story Benz and Tintin are operating a chop shop for someone else in this abandoned movie theater, and these elements came about because I was like wow, that’s a cool idea. Sometimes you’re given the germ of a story in that way.
With “Handsome Red”, I originally wanted to write about lottery culture in Thailand. These tickets come out at the beginning and the middle of the month, and on those two days it’s like the country can’t speak about anything else. But instead I ended up writing this totally different story about cockfighting.
I remember driving one night and there was a detour due to student protests, so I ended up on a street I don’t usually go down. I was stuck in traffic, looked out my window, and saw sitting outside this closed shophouse, two Chinese dragon dancers in their costumes, and the dragon sort of slumped beside them on its side. And one of the dragon dancers had her head in her arms, and the other guy was just sitting there, looking at his phone. And it was one of these evocative moments where I thought I could write a story about them. Then I tried to write a story about that, and it totally went somewhere else.
But to finish the “Handsome Red” story, because I was looking at the lottery, I was looking at different types of gambling in Thailand, which led me to cockfighting and this very successful breeder in Ayutthaya who sells fighting cocks. I later visited with my girlfriend, who is a freelance journalist, to interview him, and his operation was incredible. He was shipping a hundred birds a day to various parts of Southeast Asia, and he’s making a lot of money, even by western standards. One of his roosters is valued at two million dollars. And so you see this guy who grew up in a farm and was poor and now he’s got huge gold chains and is sitting in front of this giant house in the middle of nowhere.
Last thing with that story. Another part of it came from real life during the pandemic, when people were traveling domestically. I went down south to Phuket Town, and this pickup truck goes by playing a recording from a loudspeaker. Usually they’re advertising vegetables, tools, or whatever. But this guy had looped a recording about himself, the work he’s done, the people he’s related to, advertising that he was looking for work. And so that made it into the story.
JY: I wanted to finish by asking you about why this is a story collection. Why is this not a novel, or why isn’t this the more ambiguous “fiction?” Because I feel you could’ve hedged and had it both ways.
MN: Yeah, I mean, for the UK edition they actually took “stories” off the front cover. But when you flip to the back cover, it says somewhere that it’s a story collection. I think there’s this idea that a lot of readers don’t want to read stories, but I do feel it is more of a story collection because even with the larger arcs, they were written individually as stories and can stand alone. And also one thing my American editor said that struck me as interesting was that a lot of what I was doing formally with craft, shifting point-of-view, it doesn’t make sense for a character who we see in the first person to come back in third person, or to come back and just give a monologue.
JY: Do you have any advice for other people who are trying to write, whether it’s a story collection or novel?
MN: I don’t know if this is advice, but nobody is waiting for you to write and nobody is waiting for your work. If you’re going to put a book out into the world you can’t wait around for somebody else to motivate you. You can’t wait for inspiration. It has to come from you and you have to be your own advocate. Even though by the time you publish a book you have this great supportive team of publicists, an editor, and an agent, the work of writing is solitary. I forget where I saw this, or what the context was, but the writing has to come before the wanting to be a writer.