Sunisa Nardone Manning was born and raised in Bangkok. Her mother is Thai and father American. She's received residencies from the Hambidge Center and Hedgebrook, and was an Affiliate Artist at Headlands Center for the Arts. Sunisa got her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and BA from Brown University. Her fiction and essays appear in The Rumpus, Cargo Literary Review, Atlas and Alice, and LitroNY. She lives in Berkeley, California. (Q1) In your short story "Golden Land," two women from different backgrounds happen to become acquainted on a flight to Australia. Only mid-flight does the Thai woman who is coming to Australia for the first time realize that the other woman is also Thai. The power dynamics between the two women slightly shift as this fact is revealed. Did you have this theme of language and power in mind when you set out to write the short story, or did it emerge during the writing process?
It emerged during my writing process. I don't start out knowing what a story will be about, and instead meander until something sticks. Usually I begin writing because of curiosity; there's a question I'm trying to answer. In the case of "Golden Land", I was sitting in the Bangkok airport, freezing under the blast of the air conditioner, and I started speculating about the people around me. Then I started speculating about a character speculating: what projections and fantasies get written onto others, and what does it say about the person doing the assuming?
The narrator of "Golden Land" is a woman who judges because she is burdened with the belief that she has to differentiate herself from the stereotypes that exist around Thai women. This is a common feeling, and one I've experienced too, this desire not to be mistaken for a bar girl or prostitute, a vulnerable woman open for approach. "Golden Land" looks at how that defensiveness can harden a person. When writing the story, I had the image of the narrator thawing over the course of the flight as she got to know the woman next to her.
I don't operate with a rule of thumb; I try to take into account the register of language the characters are using, what's going on in the story, and whether there's a word or phrase in Thai that is crucial to the text in English. Crucial Thai words might echo to function as a refrain, capturing the preoccupation of the character's thoughts in a way that would have a different texture if I rendered that refrain in English.
As translators know, words don't go from one language to another in a one-to-one equation; I write in English about Thai people, usually without the intermediaries of Westerner characters translating the culture or events of the story for a Western reader.
In my head, my characters often have conversations in Thai, so in my sentences I try to keep the roundabout movement of face-saving. What could be thought outright in an American mind is more likely to be more buried, hidden to a Thai character. This means that even in a close third point of view, the reader has to do the work of interpreting what the character says, since the character is only willing to give up so much. Reading becomes an active process of interpretation.
I appreciate the fierce politic of using a language without translating it, and I'm aware of the problem of othering Thai by placing it in italics, but in my own work I do try to give the reader of English a sense of what the Thai word or phrase means. Most of the time I'll embed the meaning of the Thai word in the context of the paragraph. I try to shape my work to be true to a Thai mindset and milieu while building bridges for readers of English to enter the culture.
Here's an example from my novel. Boonsin is the village headsman. He is currently talking to Nui's father:
"Boonsin knew Nui was the kwan jai of her father, the ease of spirit of his heart."
Kwan jai means favorite. My mother says she'd translate it literally as "that which makes my heart leap." I translate it literally to be "spirit of the heart." Either way, in this instance I use the more poetic, literal translation of each word, not the shortcut meaning, "favorite," because it draws out the moment when a father asks his favorite daughter to do something terrible.
This is imperfect translation no matter what I choose, but in this case I feel the phrase, kwan jai, is important to the texture of the writing and the moment the characters inhabit. There's so much that is juicy about Thai that I can't capture in English! Banter, slang, swinging puns...but I try.
(Q3) Have any works (fiction, non-fiction, film or television) helped to shape your works? Have they informed your use of a real or imagined Thailand?
Huge question! Luckily there are a few shelves of the bookcase in my office that provide a glance-able answer.
I've relied on academic work to help me research 1970s Thailand, the setting for my novel. Some of the politics in that era are taboo to discuss in the Kingdom; people will talk about it only with close friends or family, and it's hard to find frank discussion of what went on. I've leaned on academic books that started out as PhD dissertations because they have the intellectual rigor to provide specific details that blossom when correctly situated in a novel. The most useful of this type of book was "Political Conflict in Thailand: reform, reaction, revolution" by David Morell and Chai-anan Samudavanija. Chris Baker and Pasuk Phongpaichit's "History of Thailand" also provided context for the conflict my characters get caught in. I have to imagine that "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy has shaped my creative work. It's my favorite book, and I return to it often. For me, the book encompasses everything. I find youth, idealism, partnership, ambition, combat, longing for glory, marriage, aging, death: much wisdom in one book. Reading "War and Peace" I have the impression that the characters live real lives, and I happened to dip into their drawing room/tent/battlefield, peering into their hearts for an instant before Tolstoy prods me onto a different tableau.
I don't formally know how the book influences my fiction because I try not to think about it. Capturing the influence might lessen my messy involvement with the book, and I'd mourn that. For now, the obsession runs strong, and I can only guess that it leaks in stylistically, and into the preoccupations of my characters.
(Q4) What works have you most enjoyed teaching at Berkeley City College? What types of assignments have you found most successful in generating compelling writing from your students?
I teach critical thinking and literature at Berkeley City, not creative writing. As an instructor, I try to generate connections between the seemingly esoteric "required" books, and the texture of life many of my students experience. Many of my students work two jobs and come to class juggling a lack of childcare. So what generates compelling writing, engagement, and thought are works that have an urgency to them, that prod and push and capture a moment my students see themselves in too. Last semester I paired Baldwin's"Letter to My Nephew" with the last section of Ta-Nehisi Coates'"Between the World and Me" (which has a Baldwin epigraph) to discuss forming your own argument in the context of race. It hit home.
(Q5) What can you tell us about the novel you're working on?
Right now it's titled "Quiet Country" and is set in 1970s Thailand. It concerns a trio of students who radicalize and try to overthrow the dictator at the time. My main character is a member of the nobility, and the way I got to him was with this question: if the ruling order worked in your favor, why would you try to change it? That inquiry propelled me through the manuscript. I should mention that I made myself a Terrorists & Radicals reading list to study how other writers captured a character's political transformation. Here are selected favorites: "The Heather Blazing" by Colm Tóibín, "The Feast of the Goat" by Mario Vargas Llosa, "The Princess Casamassima" by Henry James, and "The Flame Throwers" by Rachel Kushner.
