E-Mail This Article to a Friend Inside and outside A young Thai eyes his homeland BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN
	Sightseeing By Rattawut Lapcharoensap. Grove Press, 250 pages, $19.95.

A natural fracture exists between the gloss of travel brochures and the reality of the lives of the people who aren’t there to visit. With Sightseeing, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, who was born in Chicago and raised in Bangkok, bridges this schism with a native’s knowledge of side streets, alley ways, and underbellies and a tourist’s wide-eyed, alienated wonder. In seven stories set in Thailand, the 25-year-old author leads us through a world largely unknown to travelers pursuing paradise, a world where shantytowns, cockfights, huffers, and hookers edge up against beach resorts and other innocuously exotic attractions. These lush and pungent tales enable the reader to feel like insider and outsider, tourist and native, alienated and embraced.

East and West collide in a sweet-and-sour way in the opening "Farangs" ("Westerners"). Like most of the stories, it’s narrated by a young male Thai, in this case one with a habit of falling for American girls, never abandoning the hope that he’ll be more to them than a holiday indulgence. He admits his love for a girl in a Budweiser bikini to his mother (who "bonked a farang herself" and was left with "a broken heart and me") while watching Rambo: First Blood Part II, describing his love in über-Western terms: "It might be real love, Ma. Like Romeo and Juliet love." The ending, with hurled mangoes and the narrator’s pet pig — named Clint Eastwood — swimming in the sea, is fantastic in every sense.

The narrator of "At the Café Lovely" is younger, but at the hand of his older brother Anek, he’s exposed to encounters far less innocent than beachside crushes on pretty tourists. And he demonstrates an unconscious aversion to Western ways: when Anek takes him to a McDonald’s-style fast-food joint as a birthday treat, he pukes up the hamburger "all over that shiny American linoleum floor." Later, Anek takes him to the title café, where prostitutes and paint thinner forestall any promise of loveliness. Lapcharoensap nails the perspective of a kid on the threshold of the adult world.

This threshold is the focus of many of the stories. Adult lives seethe in the background, but the protagonists are not-yet-comprehending spectators. The narrator of "At the Café Lovely" observes that "when children learn to acknowledge the gravity of their loved ones’ sorrows they’re no longer children." And indeed, Lapcharoensap is at his best with the youngest characters. In "Priscilla the Cambodian," an infestation of rats shadows the arrival of a group of Cambodian refugees in the neighborhood of another young boy narrator and his pal Dong. The two boys are more interested in bike tricks than in their parents’ anxieties about the new neighbors. Then they encounter the title character, a fiery gold-toothed little girl.

"Draft Day" and "Sightseeing" are about young men, one dodging the draft by bribing officials, the other taking a vacation with his mother. The narrator of "Draft Day" goes with his best friend to the draft lottery knowing his name will not be drawn. Although Lapcharoensap evokes sweat-beading tension between the two friends, this story is less satisfying than his others because less is at stake. And in the title story, the narrator and his mother, who’s losing her eyesight, become tourists, taking a trip the summer before the son heads off to college. It’s here that Lapcharoensap’s writing echoes the brochures of all the farangs. The water is "a clear skin stretched over the earth"; the sand is "soft as a slab of fresh clay." When the mother’s vision falters, "A cold white flash flooded her eyes," and when they refocus, "it was like the world was breaking into a million tiny pieces."

"Don’t Let Me Die in This Place" is one of two stories that’s not narrated by a Thai male. An old American man moves to Thailand to live with his son, the son’s Thai wife, and their two children. Lapcharoensap is convincing in the voice of the displaced but less so in the voice of an old man. "Cockfighter" is told by a 15-year-old girl; it’s a raw look at masculinity, violence, cruelty, sex, and the conflicting sense of threat and attraction they embody. Ladda’s attraction and revulsion to the exotic and forbidden echoes any tourist’s: who knows whether the result of exploration will be true paradise or pain? The characters of Sightseeing find both.

Rattawut Lapcharoensap reads next Thursday, March 3, at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street in Coolidge Corner, with Colin Channer, author of Passing Through; call (617) 566-6660.