a review of Daria Sommers’s SAWADIKA AMERICAN GIRL
One of the pleasures of historical fiction is the opportunity to discover a previously unknown perspective on known historical events. Daria Sommers’s forthcoming new novel, Sawadika American Girl, provides exactly that, telling the story of Piper Lewis, a teenage girl living in Bangkok with her USAID Official father and stepmother during the Vietnam War. As Sommers points out in her Author's Note, not many people know that Thailand served as a major outpost for the U.S. military during that period. But in many ways, the less familiar viewpoint—expressed by characters who are adjacent to the war, not directly involved in the worst of it—offers a more complete, if no less heartbreaking, depiction of the Vietnam conflict.
Having grown up in Bangkok herself, Sommers makes Thailand come alive through evocative descriptions that have the reader trudging along with Piper through the water-laden air of the tropical climate, straining to hear the calls of the nocturnal tokay lizard outside her bedroom window, and exploring the dusty grounds of Phimai, an ancient Buddhist temple. At the same time, Sommers offers a disturbing portrait of the many Americans who enjoyed a luxurious expat lifestyle in Bangkok while the war dragged on, and more people died, and “fat cats” and small guys alike profited from the conflict.
Like all good coming of age stories, Sawadika American Girl covers familiar territory but in a moving, relatable way, drawing the reader back to their own intense teenaged emotions. Piper faces common adolescent challenges—risk-taking friends, conflict with parents, first love, self-definition. However, much like the four young women in The Derry Girls, the terrific television series set in Northern Ireland at the height of the “Troubles,” Piper does so against the backdrop of violent world events that impact her daily life but are out of her control. In 1964, Piper is an innocent 13-year-old who wants to believe in her father’s professed mission to help developing countries, to believe his assurances that “America would make life in Southeast Asia better for everyone.” But by 1968, she’s a jaded 17-year-old who can’t help but see how much Bangkok has changed as the war has escalated, with much of its “sordid business” (as her stepmother calls it) catering to American soldiers seeking “R&R.” At first only dimly aware of the growing anti-war sentiment at home and around the world, eventually Piper must also start to question whether “behind her father’s noble quest for democracy something ugly was going on.”
The core of the novel is Piper’s involvement with Jack, a 19-year-old GI who comes to Bangkok for a short leave. Not long after they meet at a party, Jack is implicated in a drug investigation, and their already limited time together becomes even more fraught. Piper is also navigating complications at home, as she learns more about her father, who’s almost always somewhere else. The compelling storylines and distinctive settings make it easy to immerse yourself in the world Sommers creates.
Two particular aspects of the novel stood out for me. First, Sommers presents a layered, realistic picture of grief, both its long shelf life and insidious way of emerging at unexpected times and in unexpected ways. A talented pianist, Piper studies under a Thai prince who himself is an accomplished musician. For much of the story, Piper is working on Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata (Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13), an intense, dramatic piece that almost becomes the soundtrack for the book. As Piper struggles to inject sufficient emotion into her playing, the Prince reminds her that the sonata’s name does not mean the same as the American word “pathetic.” Instead, he tells her, it means a “sorrow many people have together,” prodding Piper to draw on her own sadnesses to reach deeper into the universal human feelings being expressed in Beethoven’s music.
I was also taken by Sommers’s deft use of small details throughout the novel to convey the styles of the time, as well as the expats’ tone deafness and questionable taste. In the very first chapter, we discover the Lewis family living in a “red-brick suburban ranch house,” among a “stretch of houses that all looked like theirs,” a common enough background. But Sommers makes it a suburban house specifically from the 1960s with one small architectural note: the “frosted glass wall” in the foyer, with “flowers etched into its opaque surface.”
Much is also revealed when a crisis arises in a later chapter, and an older American woman purporting to help the family forces Piper to eat the “homemade tuna casserole” she brought for them. Having grown up on ‘60s era tuna casserole myself—commonly a disgusting combination of rice, frozen mixed vegetables, canned tuna and, mysteriously, canned cream of mushroom soup—I didn’t need any other information to know exactly who this woman was. Why would she have Piper eat an American dish involving hot canned tuna instead of freshly caught grilled fish native to the region like the dinner Piper at one point enjoys with Jack? Similarly, in another scene, why would Piper’s stepmother insist she eat eggs, toast and sausage instead of her favorite breakfast of sliced mango and sticky rice? Because like so many other colonizers, these American expats were arrogant and out of place, intent on recreating their old home instead of embracing their new one.
An enlightening, emotional novel, Sawadika American Girl demonstrates the power of fiction to offer insight into real life events, here the breadth of the damage wrought by the Vietnam War both on the personal and global level. It’s an impactful story of young love, lost innocence, and heartache that hits hard and lingers long.
Sawadika American Girl by Daria Sommers comes out on May 5 from Vine Leaves Press.
