At the start of Ira Sukrungruang’s new book, This Jade World, he’s about to meet a new woman in a hotel room while his wife is packing her things to walk out on their marriage. This is going to be an open and honest memoir, a journey that will conclude with lessons learned and a new lease on life. Along the way, Sukruangruang writes about Asian masculinity, women’s relationships, and how his Chicago upbringing was shaped by his divorced Thai immigrant parents.
Sukrungruang met his first wife in college when he was twenty-one and she was his professor, nine years his senior. Sukrungruang writes that he lacked a positive role model when it comes to marriage: his parents split up when he was a teenager; his father had been carrying on with another woman. Despite resentment, Sukrungruang’s mother worked hard as a nurse in Chicago and built a comfortable home with her friend and fellow nurse, a woman Sukrungruang calls Aunty Sue.
After his mother and Aunty Sue moved back to Thailand in 2004, Sukrungruang visits them in Chiang Mai once a year from his home in the US. On one of these trips, his first wife, Katie, sends an email on their eleventh wedding anniversary that will change his life. A good portion of the book is set a year later, after Sukrungruang is already separated and has started dating Deedra, the woman who would become his second wife. A lot happens during that year and when he’s back in Thailand he is able to reflect back on how he’s changed.
Sukrungruang muses about masculinity and how he was raised by his mother and Aunty Sue, two feminists. He’s determined not to be like his father, or the other Thai men in his family who have also cheated on their wives.
I don’t want to be a Thai man. I hate what bad Thai men stand for. Hate how they hurt without remorse. But the fear of being one is always there.
Yet after his first marriage breaks up, he finds himself meeting strange women in hotel rooms after finding them online. Sukrungruang is such a likeable protagonist on the pages of his memoir that he’s forgiven when he fails to return women’s texts.
Body image is also something that has bothered him and he writes about weight loss and how he celebrated that with tattoos, even though he went against his mother’s and aunt’s wishes.
Before the tattoo, I stopped looking forward to my trips to Thailand. They made me aware of how large I was. I believed I was failing at being Thai, worse yet, failing at being human. I imagined myself as Jabba the Hut from Star Wars, who many of the bullies in grade school nicknamed me with unique variations: Jabba the Stupid, Jabba the Chink, Jabba the Fatso. During those trips, I hid into myself. Aunts and uncles were confused at my reluctance to come down from my room; they only knew the young Ira who was unafraid, who spoke to every Thai person like a native, who walked with confidence through congested streets.
For most of the book, the title of Sukrungruang’s memoir seems as if it’s a play on words as he writes about how his mother became jaded after the failure of her own marriage, despite her companionship with Aunty Sue. Sukrungruang also seems jaded by hooking up with women after his first marriage breaks up. At the end of the book, the meaning of the title becomes clear when Sukrungruang is on a plane on his way back to Deedra. He thinks back to all the times he’s left Thailand before and how much his parents’ homeland means to him.