Photo taken by Peerapat Wimolrungkarat (Add)
“If you’re born in Southeast Asia, ghosts can be more real than people you can see and touch, even if their existence is made up entirely of stories. Let’s take Dao, the ghost-child in the novel. We get to know him through fragments of stories: ones that he heard from Grandma Sri, ones that he remembered from his mother and ones about the Black Rose Cat as well. But those stories are unfinished; many links are missing.
In a way, that’s also our state of existence: a lot of things that we know about ourselves are told to us by other people. They’ll tell us who we need to be, what we need to do and believe, but we ourselves are not sure of what is missing. That’s how we too are made into ghosts, for our stories are also fragmented. Dao is a ghost. The Tong family are also immigrant ghosts. We people now are also ghosts. We’re all made of stories we didn’t invent, living the curse without knowing why we are cursed, who cursed us, or worse, how to undo this curse. This is the politics of our time: we choose but we receive only what others in power decide for us.”
Interview with author Veeraporn Nitiprapha published in Mekong Review, August – October 2024 Issue. A read-only link to the article’s PDF copy can be shared upon personal request.
