My Way or the Thai Way

So I decided to put my creative writing degree to use and actually write something that doesn’t involve news. It’s a book review of sorts for Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? by Thomas Kohnstamm. The point of the blog that published it, which is run by the awesome professor Ira Sukrunguang, is to combine life and books to create unconventional reviews. I find them to be more interesting than the Times’ book supplement.

I drew upon my Thailand experience for the book review. . Writing about the semester I spent there has been difficult because I never knew how to approach. I wasn’t exactly a backpacker visting for a couple weeks, but I wasn’t Thai either. Either way, I get nostalgic for all my misadventures there.

Trying to strike a balance between my foreignness and my attempts at assimilation (despite looking like a freak) is something I worked on in other failed attempts at writing about the country. I think I did it fairly well in my review. I just had to remind myself that, despite my best intentions, I was often an idiot when I was there - like most other people are.

Speaking of Thailand, I often daydream about going over there and doing some freelance reporting. One of the things I’d want to do is write features about the poor manual laborers that I’d often see in makeshift shanty towns around the train tracks. The thing is that I don’t want to make it a pity piece like most writers seem to do. I don’t want to write it from the viewpoint of some rich whitey. I want to write as if it the subject was just a regular person in Westport. Just matter of factly and interesting, I suppose.

Now that the weather has warmed up in good ol’ Connecticut, hopefully I’ll stop daydreaming so much about warm places like Southeast Asia. Probably not though.