Steve Rosse’s Thai Vignettes (Bangkok Books, 2005) is a collection of stories the author had published in several English-language magazines and newspapers based in Thailand. The book comprises of around fifty short pieces centered on the life of various foreigners living on the Island of Phuketin the south of Thailand.
Unlike some travel writers who get bogged down in the history of a place, Steve Rosse looks closely at the human factor and is able to see and describe men and women just the way they are. Rosse proves to be a keen observer of the people around him and, in his brief prose, he manages to show the readers what makes each one of us tick.
For Steve Rosse, Koh Phuket is not Thailand’s largest island situated in the southwest, surrounded by the Andaman Sea, but rather the mosaic of tens, hundreds, or thousands of different people, all with their own personal histories, dreams, fulfillments, and dramas. It is them that Thai Vignettes has as main characters and it is their (mis)deeds that drive the reader into reading story after story after story.
Some of these stories were based on the life of real people, such as Tristan Jones, an English author and mariner who died in poverty (in 1995) as a double amputee in Phuket, as well as the usual fictional expat, foreign tourist, andThai, whose personalities and (mis)adventures must have surely been based on the people Rosse had personally interacted with.
Although there are plenty of bargirls in Thai Vignettes, the book does not centre on the Phuket nightlife and its target readership is not one interested in lewd escapades. Nevertheless, one wonders why bargirls are given such a great importance and we can only speculate that, indeed, bargirls are a part of the genuine socio-economic reality of this famous tourist destination.
After reading Thai Vignettes, the readers should then pick up SteveRosse’s second book, Expat Days: Making a Life in Thailand (Bangkok Books, 2006) and brace themselves for the same detached narrative about the different people the author had encountered while living in Phuket.
But Expat Days is a different kind of book. These stories, greater in word count than the previous volume of vignettes, were written for Phuket Magazine and The Nation between 1989 and 1997. Most, if not all, are about Steve’s personal life and the tribulations he had to go through raising a family and making a living in Thailand before he finally decided to relocate himself and his family to the US.
In a comment on thailandstories.com, Steve Rosse defended the self-righteous voice he employed in Expat Days as his musings were “designed to stand out from Trink and Crutchley and Eckardt and the other columnists of the time, who were all promoting the bar-and-brothel lifestyle. Believe it or not, in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, when I was writing, it was still unpopular to question any aspect of the sex industry in Thailand in the Nation or the Post. The smug, self-righteous, judgmental voice I created was politically incorrect for the time. These days, my columns would not elicit a single letter to the editor in the mainstream press, because they reflect the attitude of the media and of the English-reading public in the Kingdom today.”
Some of the stories build on and/or expand on the short pieces in Thai Vignettes, while “my wife Mem” is a character who obsessively ‘interferes’ with Steve Roses’s first person singular prose. The fact that the stories are longer, gives the reader an extended reading pleasure, as opposed to the jerky rhythm one gets accustomed to while reading Thai Vignettes.
The interconnectedness of the stories invites us to glimpse into the life of a man who was, at that time, the only full-time white Caucasian journalist on the Island of Phuket. We witness the embarrassing moments when Steve was first introduced to his Thai wife’s family, we learn about the profound influence that his son and, later on, his daughter had on him, we read about the ups and down of having to share a home with a woman who comes from a totally different background, and find out about the usual antics that foreigners who have lived in Thailand for some years generally engage in.
A sense of nostalgia picks up towards the second half of the book while a somewhat nihilistic tone imbues the latter stories. The plight of the prostitutes sold by their families to brothels, the locals’ unforgiving attitude towards tourists, the ecological destruction that modernization brings about, and the loneliness of long-time expats who often wonder “What on Earth am I doing here in Thailand?” are only some of the themes that one can spot beneath Rosse’s stimulating fiction.
An astute literary critic and a harsh commentator on the sorry state of some of the e-books that have been published in Thailand with the recent boom in e-publishing, Steve Rosse’sThai Vignettes and Expat Days are still available as paperbacks on the publisher’s website (www.bangkokbooks.com) and at most AsiaBooks stores.
His later books of stories and essays appeared directly in e-book format and are available online via Kindle and the publisher’s bookstore:She Kept the Bar Between Them (2011), It’s Just Sex, Guys (2012) and It’s Still Just Sex, Guys (2012).
Initially published in Mango Metro (September 2013, Vol. 7, No.10)
Browse out gallery for more photos from Phuket and beyond:
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