A medical worker makes her rounds in a long-tailed boat of old Bangkok to help those too poor, or simply unwilling, to escape to higher ground: The end of the book illustrates the fear of many for Bangkok’s inevitable future. Pitchaya’s imagery of rain and river-of water’s destructive power to recast a modern metropolis-is visceral. Each confronts what it means, if but for a moment, to become closer to events or locales long-lost to the rising tides. The characters must contend with their own versions of dislodgement. The breadth and scope of these incongruous tales end up making sense together in the end, like waves rolling into each other to create a greater whole.īangkok Wakes to Rain, Pitchaya Sudbanthad (Riverhead, Sceptre, February 2019) Some of these characters include a doctor and an engineer working for a 19th-century Christian mission, a student lover lost in the 1976 October massacre at Thammasat University, an American jazz pianist relocated to a postwar Bangkok, a Thai photographer wandering the globe, an upper-class family at the Thai embassy in London, and a couple of school-aged friends, who are now too grown old to do much else aside from discuss the peculiarities of a technologically advanced future where former citizens of Bangkok must call the new settlements along the mountains that border Myanmar and Thailand their home. The distinct stories begin to merge as the narrative progresses, so that the city of Bangkok itself becomes a common touchstone. The book contains many separate stories of different characters so that the chapters flow back and forth between different centuries and disparate individuals. Pitchaya artfully intertwines the fate of Bangkok-and what he later imagines as New Bangkok after a terrible flooding-with the main characters’ longing for things past. Much of early Bangkok was designed in remembrance of that former international trading port and royal house farther up the Chao Phraya River. Bangkok itself is an apt exemplar, as the town was born as a refuge after the Burmese sacked Ayutthaya in the 18th century.
Those rituals they perform, some of them spiritual and some of them diurnal, are a way to connect themselves to a remembered past.
Some of Pitchaya’s uprooted individuals are displaced from a physical locality-others from traditions and histories that defined earlier versions of themselves and their communities. His debut novel Bangkok Wakes to Rain is as much an ode to the metropolis’s extremes as it is to the wide-ranging and singular characters that animate its streets and sois.Īll of the characters of this novel connect with Bangkok, or what Bangkok once was, in a meaningful way. Pitchaya Sudbanthad’s story of Bangkok is the most complete and engrossing tale of this megacity of fifteen million souls ever portrayed in a single publication.
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