What do you think?
Rate this book
The Romance of Siam
2017 Lambda Literary Award Finalist
The Romance of Siam: A Pocket Guide is a subverted travel guide that interrogates the desire white people have to lose and reinvent themselves in Thailand. Ravine tracks how this “white love” manifests in the tourism industry, popular American media and the western imaginary. Ravine writes, “As a person of Thai and white descent, my attempts to connect to Thailand as a place or cultural identity are completely colonized by white desire; writing this book and performing its texts has been a way for me to try to decolonize that relationship.”
It’s a lonely planet for the white alien, but let Jai Arun Ravine stage your hysteric dream tour. Navigating Siam’s dream jungle might require mounting white elephants, hunting nasty cats and exotic tigers, consuming stinky tropical durian. Too tame? Too cliche? Then stage your disappearance from whiteness and pop culture disfigurement: dance a threesome with Yul, Anna, and Christy; share a bed with Somerset and Haxton, hang yourself by silk threads from pagoda rafters, gild yourself in gold before mummification.
Karen Tei Yamashita
It is difficult to describe the experience of reading The Romance of Siam. It is impossible to describe the experience of constitution in a body that disappears under direct gaze. The Romance of Siam is an unqualifiable "Death by Dream." What is the essence of Siam? To ask that question is to ask what the essence of whiteness is. It is the parable of the blind men and the universal white elephant. At the moment of conception/colonial desire, the "abject" of identity is already lost. A dream dies when it comes true.
Feng Sun Chen
Jai Arun Ravine’s Siam is a mesmerizing land of Cheshire-cat smiles: a sly, feverishly antic journey through a détournement of pop songs and travel television shows, labyrinthine reimaginings of The King and I and W. Somerset Maugham, and rapid-fire sestinas of lifted tourist lingo unfolding like tropical flowers ready to bite. Is Thailand an actual place in Asia, a mythologized theatre of longing, or some uncanny hybrid of both? Beyond questions of authenticity, beyond discourses of identity underlying this outré trip, The Romance of Siam reveals Ravine as an exuberant DJ of culture shock who unleashes a boundless capacity for self-reinvention.
Pamela Lu
The Romance of Siam: A Pocket Guide is a subverted travel guide that interrogates the desire white people have to lose and reinvent themselves in Thailand. Ravine tracks how this “white love” manifests in the tourism industry, popular American media and the western imaginary. Ravine writes, “As a person of Thai and white descent, my attempts to connect to Thailand as a place or cultural identity are completely colonized by white desire; writing this book and performing its texts has been a way for me to try to decolonize that relationship.”
It’s a lonely planet for the white alien, but let Jai Arun Ravine stage your hysteric dream tour. Navigating Siam’s dream jungle might require mounting white elephants, hunting nasty cats and exotic tigers, consuming stinky tropical durian. Too tame? Too cliche? Then stage your disappearance from whiteness and pop culture disfigurement: dance a threesome with Yul, Anna, and Christy; share a bed with Somerset and Haxton, hang yourself by silk threads from pagoda rafters, gild yourself in gold before mummification.
Karen Tei Yamashita
It is difficult to describe the experience of reading The Romance of Siam. It is impossible to describe the experience of constitution in a body that disappears under direct gaze. The Romance of Siam is an unqualifiable "Death by Dream." What is the essence of Siam? To ask that question is to ask what the essence of whiteness is. It is the parable of the blind men and the universal white elephant. At the moment of conception/colonial desire, the "abject" of identity is already lost. A dream dies when it comes true.
Feng Sun Chen
Jai Arun Ravine’s Siam is a mesmerizing land of Cheshire-cat smiles: a sly, feverishly antic journey through a détournement of pop songs and travel television shows, labyrinthine reimaginings of The King and I and W. Somerset Maugham, and rapid-fire sestinas of lifted tourist lingo unfolding like tropical flowers ready to bite. Is Thailand an actual place in Asia, a mythologized theatre of longing, or some uncanny hybrid of both? Beyond questions of authenticity, beyond discourses of identity underlying this outré trip, The Romance of Siam reveals Ravine as an exuberant DJ of culture shock who unleashes a boundless capacity for self-reinvention.
Pamela Lu
- GenresPoetryLGBTTransgender
141 pages, Paperback
Published August 17, 2016
1 person is currently reading
64 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
May 2, 2017
I received this book as a trade with the author. They chatted about the premise to me and I was verrry intrigued. The idea of subverting a well known travel guide format to pick apart the practice by white colonizers of escapism/identity tourism in "exotic" locales – specifically Thailand – struck me as fucking excellent choice of weapon. I really like when institutional formats are thwarted to show how predatory & entrenched in colonialism/capitalism they are.
The book itself is impeccably put together, replete with gold embossing on the cover and slick color blocking on the interior layouts (for what it's worth, I'm unfamiliar with the format this guide is referencing/subverting).
Not being much familiar with Thai culture, contemporary pop culture, history, firsthand exposure to white tourism in Thailand, etc, the book's "Did You Know" footnotes provided loads of welcome context, although at times I did feel that I was a bit ignorant to the topics at hand and would have a deeper appreciation of the author's attention to them had I more experience. Regardless, it was wild to realize that many of said references were lodged in my own brain simply from passing exposure to American consumption of Thailand-as-exotic-object.
The book simultaneously layers and collapses a multitude of cultural/pop/historical Thai figures with white tourist attitudes and Hollywood & Western movies/plays/songs about Thailand, creating what (to me) feels like a surreal experience of ...alienation? Alienation from something that is supposed to rightfully be, yet is not really there? I'm not sure how to articulate it. The author is mixed race white and Thai, and I am mixed race white and Mexican, and reading this book reminded me heavily of my many fumbling attempts to connect with a heritage I exist in and yet am for many reasons distanced from... There are so many white tourists who have thoroughly consumed and traversed "my heritage," that I feel very wtf about how/trying to connect to it myself (like, my childhood points of reference to "being Mexican" had been fucking Disney's Three Amigos, La Cucaracha, and Speedy Gonzalez). As an adult when I visited Mexico for the first time (as a tourist), I found myself appalled at the tourist apparatus, featuring individuals who are somehow more entrenched in "my culture" than even seems appropriate for myself to be. Like wow if you're white you really can just put on someone else's culture to enrich your sense of purpose and not think twice about that. Double the horror when you're there like holy shit these white backpackers are entitled and rich as fuck and that's all it seems anyone IS in this piece. Experiencing stuff like that lends to some real forlorn identity crisis shit, if you ask me.
So. It was thoroughly decent to read the author's resistance and subversion of white/colonial consumption of Thai identity.
The book itself is impeccably put together, replete with gold embossing on the cover and slick color blocking on the interior layouts (for what it's worth, I'm unfamiliar with the format this guide is referencing/subverting).
Not being much familiar with Thai culture, contemporary pop culture, history, firsthand exposure to white tourism in Thailand, etc, the book's "Did You Know" footnotes provided loads of welcome context, although at times I did feel that I was a bit ignorant to the topics at hand and would have a deeper appreciation of the author's attention to them had I more experience. Regardless, it was wild to realize that many of said references were lodged in my own brain simply from passing exposure to American consumption of Thailand-as-exotic-object.
The book simultaneously layers and collapses a multitude of cultural/pop/historical Thai figures with white tourist attitudes and Hollywood & Western movies/plays/songs about Thailand, creating what (to me) feels like a surreal experience of ...alienation? Alienation from something that is supposed to rightfully be, yet is not really there? I'm not sure how to articulate it. The author is mixed race white and Thai, and I am mixed race white and Mexican, and reading this book reminded me heavily of my many fumbling attempts to connect with a heritage I exist in and yet am for many reasons distanced from... There are so many white tourists who have thoroughly consumed and traversed "my heritage," that I feel very wtf about how/trying to connect to it myself (like, my childhood points of reference to "being Mexican" had been fucking Disney's Three Amigos, La Cucaracha, and Speedy Gonzalez). As an adult when I visited Mexico for the first time (as a tourist), I found myself appalled at the tourist apparatus, featuring individuals who are somehow more entrenched in "my culture" than even seems appropriate for myself to be. Like wow if you're white you really can just put on someone else's culture to enrich your sense of purpose and not think twice about that. Double the horror when you're there like holy shit these white backpackers are entitled and rich as fuck and that's all it seems anyone IS in this piece. Experiencing stuff like that lends to some real forlorn identity crisis shit, if you ask me.
So. It was thoroughly decent to read the author's resistance and subversion of white/colonial consumption of Thai identity.
December 16, 2016
Brilliant!!! The concept, the execution, everything! Really haunting. I underlined so many parts.
February 21, 2025
Claire Danes is banned from the Philippines. Look it up. Crazy stuff.
May 28, 2021
I am not used to their style of writing, but I found insights in Jai’s book. Awareness of how I, as a white woman, encounter the world and fantasize about escaping my work-a-day life and moving somewhere else. A thought provoked by the book-why do I think my perspective matters? What does the place I am visiting mean to the people who live there? What can I do to provide that sense of escape closer to home? Jai writes a series of vignettes /stories of how white Westerners approach Thailand, and they made me think.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews