Mai Nardone: On Intersecting Families Through Intersected Stories

Mai Nardone is a Thai and American writer whose fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Granta, McSweeney's, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He lives in Bangkok. Welcome Me to the Kingdom is his first book. Follow him on Twitter.

In this post, Mai discusses his literary novel-in-stories, Welcome Me to the Kingdom, his advice for other writers, and more!

Name: Mai Nardone
Literary agent: Rob McQuilkin and Max Moorhead
Book title: Welcome Me to the Kingdom
Publisher: Random House
Release date: February 14, 2023
Genre/category: Literary Fiction/ Short Stories
Elevator pitch for the book: Set in Bangkok around the turn of the century, this linked story collection follows three families of characters who attempt to gamble, seduce, bribe, and work their way to the “good” life. There is a mixed-race family at odds with one another, a well-known Elvis impersonator and his daughter, and two orphaned boys who have adopted each other as brothers.

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I wanted to write a story collection that centered the 1997 Asian financial crisis, which began in Thailand and tore through its middle class. I’d studied the crisis as an economics student in college and was drawn to the exuberance of the years before the crash and the lingering consequences afterward. Even today Bangkok’s skyline is punctuated by the concrete shells of projects that went bankrupt.

The oldest story in the collection was written a decade ago, when I was still an MFA student. As I wrote stories beyond that of a family affected by the 1997 crisis, the collection expanded across lines of class and background, until I had three different storylines going and a book that was more of a cross-section of late 1990s Thai society, covering everything from karma cults and skin-whitening crazes to game-fowl gambling.

I don’t think I had a good idea of the scope of the collection until my poor copyeditor (sorry, Jocelyn!) created a spreadsheet to keep dates, character ages, and chronology consistent. That was the first time I appreciated the stories as a collection rather than thinking about them individually.

I usually have a good idea of what I’m trying to achieve when I start a story. I might have a strong sense of voice or setting, or have an anecdote I’m trying to flesh out. Then comes the execution when, mysteriously to me, the story completely derails what I had thought I was writing.

For example, I started the story “Handsome Red” (in the end about a multimillion-dollar fighting rooster) with an idea to write about lottery culture in Thailand combined with something glimpsed while driving home one day: a couple dragon dance performers sitting on a shophouse stoop, one on her phone, the other with his head in his hands, the dragon slumped over beside them. Neither the dragon nor lottery culture made it into the story.

I hope readers will get an idea of contemporary Thailand that’s different from the country’s image in the global imagination. The collection’s not a flattering portrayal. Because of its large tourism sector, Thailand is always trying to sell outsiders something, from tantric yoga and full-moon raves on an island in the gulf, to skyscraper fine dining, to sex-tourism, to medical care in five-star hospital-hotels. I hope this collection gets behind the image the country presents to outsiders.

Readers are excellent at telling you what’s wrong with a story. Listen to them! They’re also terrible at telling you how to address what’s wrong with a story. That’s the writer’s work.

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