The Lioness in Bloom: Modern Thai Fiction about Women (Voices from Asia) (Volume 9)

Wonderful stories with lots of insightful background information on the authors and on Thailand.

What started out as a necessity for a paper turned out to be an enlightening experience about the female experience written by different Thai writers. Kepner's notes at the end of each tale really helped understand the message of each story and little cultural tidbits that a western reader might miss. I laughed and I cried. This was a great collection of stories.

Thailand's bookshelves abound with volumes written about Thai women, a subject undeniably worthy of careful study. Unfortunately, most of the material in the field consists of slim volumes of bad short stories that all begin with the words "I knew a bar girl once who..."Happily, there is also "The Lioness in Bloom," edited by Susan Fulop Kepner. Readers may (should) recognize Mrs. Kepner as the translator of "Letters From Thailand," by a Thai author who wrote under the name Botan. "Letters..." is one of the most widely read novels ever written in Thai - it was for decades required reading for every middle school student - and Mrs. Kepner gave us a wonderful translation.In "The Lioness in Bloom" she has given another sixteen Thai authors an English voice, and is to be commended for democratizing a dialogue previously monopolized by white Western males.The women in these stories, all of which were written by Thai authors in this century, are "young, middle-aged, and old; urban, suburban, and rural; wealthy, middle class, and desperately poor; joyous, resigned or despairing. As Mrs. Kepner goes on to say in her introduction, "each woman has a distinct personality and a history; she is not a type or a stock character."No small feat, this. To find local authors who break the conventions and present three-dimensional characters and stories that are driven by ideas rather than hackneyed plots must have taken a huge amount of searching.Long-time residents of Thailand will be pleased to recognize their friends in these pages, casual visitors will learn something new with every story and Thai readers will be relieved to find that not every Western book presents their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters as conniving sex kittens.Anybody who has passed a rice field being planted or harvested knows that Thai women are expected to be as tough as men. Visitors to P*uket pass the Heroine's Monument, two monumental figures in granite and brass meant to reinforce the idea that in this Kingdom women are expected to lead troops into battle, and further, to win.Anybody who has seen the miles-long cosmetics counters at Thailand's department stores, or the multitude of fashion and beauty magazines on sale everywhere, or attended one of the omnipresent local "beauty contests," will know that Thai women are also expected to be ornamental.As Mrs. Kepner asks, "Can one woman be both a lioness, who is active and strong, and a flower, which doesn't go anywhere and is simply beautiful? Can a woman be a flower that roars or a lioness that blooms?"Anyone familiar with more than a few Thai women knows that they can, indeed, both bloom and roar. I would go further, and say that a book about Thai women can be both instructive and entertaining, without being condescending, or worse, mere titillation.I'm still waiting for such a book, or even such a single short story, to be written by a native English speaker.

This book is simply beautiful. It gives the reader more than a look at a culture both different and strange to most Americans, more than a look at women in another place living under other rules. It has wonderful literary value, as well as a comprehensive and careful introduction by a very erudite translator to the writers and the Thai women they wrote about. The stories are carefully chosen, switching from tragedy to drama to humor and back again, giving western readers a chance each time to see something entirely new and different, a vibrant culture, sometimes cruel, sometimes brilliant, the lives of people--women--who will remain in your memory long after you put down the book. I bought the book in order to see if I could grasp how women in another culture think; that clearly was hubris, it'll never happen, but at least I could appreciate the ways in which human beings are kin, the ways in which women struggle, survive, laugh, and cry. My favorite short story was from the writer Botan, which led me to Susan Kepner's other translation of Botan's magnificent novel, Letters from Thailand, and then to a very, very funny book Dr. Kepner also translated called Married to the Demon King.

Susan Kepner has put together a beautiful collection of stories written by Thai female writers. The book touches on many facets of life for Thai women. Some are brutally honest and some incredibly humorous. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in women's studies in Southeast Asia, and specifically Thailand.