Praise for the Sad Part Was “The Stories That
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Praise for The sad ParT Was “The stories that form Prabda Yoon’s mind-bending and strangely melancholic universe are unfailingly provoca- tive… Playful, coolly surrealist... this landmark collection... is not only the first of Yoon’s work to be translated into English, but a rare international publication of Thai fic- tion... Mui Poopoksakul’s translation renders the stories fluent and accessible, ironing out the linguistic kinks and allowingPROOF Yoon’s portraits of Bangkok lives to take centre stage.” — Financial Times “Evocative, erudite, and often very funny stories of Bangkok life.” — The Guardian “Very, very clever… A completely fabulous book.” — Monocle 24: Meet the Writers “The Sad Part Was is unique in the contemporary litera- ture of Bangkok—it doesn’t feature bar girls, white men, gangsters or scenes redolent of The Hangover Part II. Instead it reveals, sotto voce, the Thai voices that are swept up in their own city’s wild confusion and energy, and it does so obliquely, by a technique of partial revelation always sus- ceptible to tenderness.” — New Statesman “Young prodigy Yoon’s style seems most influenced by the street-smart, chatty American posse, and revels in all kinds of contemporary twists of the postmodern and meta kind. However its savviness never tips into the sort of self-congratulatory indulgence that many of its western peers suffer from, and it remains charming throughout.” — The Big Issue “This trenchant observation of lives in a vibrant, alluring setting, elegantly rendered in English for the first time, definitely raises the bar for Thai literary works to be trans- lated in the future.” — World Literature Today “Formally inventive, always surprising and often poignant, with the publication of this fluid and assured translation of The Sad Part Was, Prabda Yoon can take his place along- side the likes of Ben Lerner and Alejandro Zambra as a writer committed to demonstrating that there’s life in the oldPROOF fiction-dog yet.” — Adam Biles, author of Feeding Time “An entrancing and distinctive collection. Yoon’s limpid prose faces up to large, transcendental questions, all the while flickering with beautiful other-worldly images and flashes of deadpan humour.” — Mahesh Rao, author of One Point Two Billion “Prabda Yoon is one of Thailand’s finest writers. These witty, adventurous, and wholly brilliant short stories were a necessary shot across the bow when they first appeared in Thai, a deceptively revolutionary collection that helped to transform the country’s literary landscape. Long deemed untranslatable, given their interests in linguistic wordplay, their appearance in English—in this supple, agile transla- tion by Mui Poopoksakul—is a cause for celebration.” — Rattawut Lapcharoensap MOVING PARTS PROOF TRANSLATED BY PROOFMOVING PARTS PRABDA YOON MUI POOPOKSAKUL TILTED AXIS PRESS This is an uncorrected, watermarked digital proof. ThisPROOF book will be published on 6 September 2018. If you intend to quote from this book, please contact [email protected] to confirm the final text. Visit tiltedaxispress.com to sign up for our mailing list, or follow us at @TiltedAxisPress. word tk PROOFword definition tk PART 1: YUCKING FINGER 9 PARTPROOF 2: EVIL TONGUE 29 PART 3: DESTINY’S A DICK 41 PART 4: FEET FIRST 57 PART 5: MOCK TAIL 71 PART 6: NEW HAND 87 PART 7: BELLY UP 101 PARTPROOF 8: A HAIRY SITUATION 115 PART 9: EYE SPY: A ONE-ACT PLAY 129 PART 10: LONG HEART 143 PART 11: BUTT PLUG 161 PROOF PART 1: YUCKING FINGER PROOF “You have one chance to redeem yourself, Maekee.” Ms. Wonchavee’s voice seeped through every fiber of the eleven-year-old’s nerves. And it even ran to the tip of his tongue, giving the boy with a buzz cut enough of a flavor to know: his teacher’s voice tasted bitter. Maekee (“His papa’s name’s Maeka. Hahahaha. Maeka came to see Maekee, Teacher lashed them in the heinie, both Maekee and Maeka. Hahahaha.”) pursed his lips so hard that blood was wrung up to the apples of his cheeks. The chalk in his right hand, which hovered over the blackboard, was trembling. He felt trouble brewing in his tummy, and closer to the tail end of that situation—there was no question about it—the area already felt oddly distended, drag- ging and distressing, as though within seconds the orbs of his butt cheeks were going to blow into pieces. X to the third power plus Y to the third power 10 Moving Parts equals one hundred fifty-two. Comma. X squared Y plus X Y squared equals one hundred twenty. English letters, numbers, mathematical symbols— these things were ganging up on him with their glares of derision. PROOFYoung Maekee’s task was to find the value of X. Why on earth do you have to find it? Just let X be X. Why is it that when you come across an X, you have to insist on knowing what number it really sig- nifies? Maybe it doesn’t appreciate being an object of public attention. “Hurry up, Maekee. Your stalling is wasting your classmates’ valuable learning time.” (“Maek’s a dumb nickname, being called Cloud is lame, his father is to blame. Hahahaha.”) With a right-handed grip, the boy landed the white, powdery stick on the blackboard. Confusion was blooming and even bearing fruit inside his skull. Everything he had ever learned seemed in that moment to have been snatched up by panic and shuf- fled and stirred together until chunks of information practically ricocheted off one another inside the two halves of his brain. Last night I dreamed about a crab… The crab Yoon 11 was crawling along the beach. When I grabbed it and sniffed it, it pinched my nose with its right claw. Shocked, I screamed in pain, ouch! And then I hurled the crab into the ocean. It was really angry at me. It refused to be defeated and hurried off to fetch its mother from her hole. The mother was very large, even larger than me. On top of that, she had a human headPROOF and looked exactly like my mother. But the crab called her, mother, mother, therefore the mother crab probably wasn’t my mother. The little crab, that tat- tletale, told its mother that I’d attacked it. I shot back that the little crab attacked me first, but at the end of the day, a mother’s always going to side with her off- spring, so the mother crab chose to believe the little crab over me. This being the case, she scowled and threatened to pinch my neck clean through. I tried to negotiate. I said, can’t you pinch some other part? I have a sore throat. But the mother crab didn’t lis- ten and insisted on cutting my throat, so I had to run away. I didn’t get far before I heard my own mother call me: “Maek, Maek, wake up, sweetie. Otherwise you’re not going to make it to school in time for the national anthem.” I startled awake, saw that my clock said it was 7:15. Oh no, I had got up late again. And I hadn’t finished 12 Moving Parts my homework. I still had three questions left. I bolted into the bathroom, did my business as fast as possible, and then went into the kitchen to look for something to eat. My mother was sitting there pounding some kind of chili paste. I looked up at the clock on the wall. Oh! It was only 6:50… or had I showered back in time? I ran back to look at the clock on PROOFmy bedside table. It turned out the short hand was still at seven and the long hand at three—it was still 7:15 just like it was earlier. That meant my clock wasn’t working, so I felt a little relieved. But not very relieved, because, in any case, my homework wasn’t done. And I didn’t know how to do it. That was why I hadn’t finished it in the first place. I have no stomach for Xs and Ys. My mother thought I would be late for school if I took the bus, so she asked Aunt Louie from next door if she could drop me off. I couldn’t complain—I like riding in the back of Aunt Louie’s motorbike. It’s nice and cool, even if the pollution smells bad. Aunt Louie’s nice, too. And her body’s squishy—it’s kind of fun to hold on to. She asked me if I’d finished my homework. I fibbed and said yes. A Buddhist precept broken again, always the same one. But what was I supposed do? It’s what they call a white lie—it doesn’t hurt anybody. When I got to school and ran into Muay, she imme- Yoon 13 diately started running her mouth, making fun of me. “Maeka came to see Maekee, Teacher lashed them in the heinie, both Maeka and Maekee. Hahahaha.” Yeah, yeah, laugh. I asked Piag if I could copy his homework but he wouldn’t let me. Piag’s a prig—he thinks he’s Ms. Wonchavee’s favorite. So I ended up having to make upPROOF the answers. As it turned out, they were all wrong. When it was time for Ms. Wonchavee’s class, she asked, “Are you the only dumb one in this class, huh, Maekee? When you’re in class, do you pay attention? Come here. Come to the front of the class, and let’s see you solve this problem.” Then she went about writing an equation on the blackboard.