For many readers, fiction can offer the ideal escape from a modern world that seems overwrought with stress and loss. But I often find that nonfiction offers its own kind of peace: one where the door is “kicked open” to what it really feels like to grapple with lost love, lost identity, a lost sense of self.
This is exactly what I found in Ira Sukrungruang’s latest memoir, This Jade World. He so generously takes us along on a journey of discovery and healing. I’d like to think that maybe in embarking on that path with him in the memoir, we can all discover a little bit more about ourselves—how we can heal and make peace with what we thought would be and what is. We can all feel a little less alone. That’s the beauty found in great creative nonfiction.
I hope you enjoy this conversation with Sukrungruang.
Melinda Medeiros: Again, thanks for the interview. It’s such an honor to talk with you about your latest work. This Jade World is your fourth book of creative nonfiction, following Buddha’s Dog & Other Meditations (2018), Southside Buddhist (2014), and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy (2010). You've also published a collection of short stories, The Melting Season (2016), and a poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night (2013) — and all within about a decade! This newest memoir is a story filled with raw, personal history: yours, your ex-wife’s, your loved ones. Why choose nonfiction as its package? Why not poetry, or fiction? How does genre serve this story?
Ira Sukrungruang: That’s an awesome question. I think one of the things that I’m always looking for in nonfiction is a sort of personal understanding and responsibility. So one of the things that happened with the writing of This Jade World was that I broke a couple of rules that I usually have for myself. One of the rules that I always tell my students: You have to have some sort of emotional distance from a topic so that you’re able to write about it right. I think that when the divorce happened and the breakup happened, there was nothing else I could think about. So it made me kind of start rethinking this idea of emotional distance. Some people, for example, who go through trauma, I don’t think there’s such a thing as emotional distance.
To write about this, what does that mean? For me, even though in many ways it is a breakup story, a divorce story, it is something that shook up my identity and shook up the way I thought about the world. And the reason I chose nonfiction to do it was, I had a personal stake in trying to discover the things I needed to discover. I didn’t want to put it onto a surrogate narrator. I didn’t want to give it to a speaker. I wanted to be able to sit in my past and take my time sifting through these things that were there, even before the marriage started. Like what we bring into the baggage of a marriage— the baggage of ourselves.
That summer, I returned to Thailand. Actually, the summer in the book is the summer when I actually started writing the book. So it was immediate, not even a year. And I started off as usual, keeping a blog of my travels to Thailand. But I soon found out that the blog was becoming something else, and I'm like yeah, I ain't gonna share this.
Medeiros: You weren’t ready yet.
Sukrungruang: Right. So for about six weeks during that trip, I wrote the first draft of the book, which was like 100 pages, not that big. And my then-girlfriend Deidre, who is now my wife, read the book and she's like, yeah it's not that great. It's not good. Terrible. You're not done yet, not even close. And she was right, even though I really did not like what she said. (And she said sorry.) So I spent the next five years kind of filling in these holes.
I think what happened in that first year was that I was still protecting myself, and I was still protecting the people in the book too. And these are all defense mechanisms that writers have when they’re writing vulnerable stuff. They try to skirt the issues, they become overly intellectual, they become overly lyrical sometimes. Every time that I’m overly lyrical in my writing, I know that I’m avoiding the issue, and so it took more time to be complete. But that initial writing of the piece was kind of a personal pursuit of trying to understand the person I was. And the person I was becoming. To really understand what I wanted, which is something I never really asked myself.
Medeiros: I’m so glad that you did break your rule of having to have emotional distance. A lot of beautiful work comes from breaking rules. I think what the book retains is some of that rawness of the emotion that comes from an experience like that— comes from the dissolving of an identity that you thought was you. This is one of the reasons I love nonfiction so much. There’s greater connection when there is that genuine emotion there. Because when we experience those things, it’s raw and it’s real, and not filtered by time and distance. I think that you really were able to maintain that and and also to shape it into something that is completely authentic and at the same time, very eloquent.
Sukrungruang: Absolutely right. And so, I think the reason why nonfiction, for me, is that. You know, when I go to a computer, I kind of have a sense of what genre I want to work in.
Medeiros: So before you sit down, you already know?
Sukrungruang: I kind of do. And a lot of times, I might be completely and utterly wrong. There’s times where I revised poems and I said, you know what, that just doesn’t want to be a poem; that wants to be an essay, and vice versa. Or sometimes when I’m writing a really narrative-driven essay, I’ll think, maybe this works better in fiction. Maybe in fiction I can explore a little more in-depth, the issues that this character’s dealing with.
And a lot of times, I think fiction is a really wonderful genre for me because it’s a genre that I don’t have to have responsibility. I feel like in nonfiction you always have to have some sort of responsibility, which is partly that you’re flawed and you’re trying to figure out why you’re flawed. This is part of the reason why we read nonfiction, right? We’re trying to figure out the why. But behind fiction, there’s a freedom to it. You can have your character suffer, but you don’t have to save them.
Medeiros: True.
Sukrungruang: And I kind of love that. So the other companion part of the divorce was my story collection, The Melting Season. That was written during the bad times of the marriage. Basically, I wrote it so that all the things— even though the whole thing is completely made up. I never worked in a restaurant; a lot of stories revolve around food. But the characters— what they’re feeling and what they were suffering were exactly the things I was suffering in my marriage. But I didn’t want to save them. So it was like this really angsty, emo way, right? Of writing what you’re feeling without having to claim it.
Medeiros: Totally. I dabble in fiction the least, but I find if I have to write something that’s very emotional, I sit down and write a really terrible poem about it first. That sometimes gets expanded into a longer piece. I think it’s incredible that you can kind of navigate through all of the genres and in between them as well. Genres might help us understand how to approach a piece of writing, but I don’t always find that definition necessary.
Sukrungruang: Right, right. To me, in terms of the rules of genre— the lines of genre are so blurry. I think right now we’re living in an age where the arts are crossing lines, are borrowing from each other, and I kind of love the place we’re in. My favorite classes that I love teaching are not bound by genre.
Medeiros: It is a really incredible time for literature and art in general. And I still think it’s amazing to have that sense of shape or genre ahead of time, before you write.
Sukrungruang: It goes in phases. Poetry comes to me in really unpredictable moments. And usually when I’m writing poetry is when I’m also wrestling with dense ideas in my creative nonfiction— topics that are very layered and have many entryways into them. Poems sometimes help me kind of silo off a portion of this idea that I’m trying to wrestle with, and then I can sit there and begin to figure out the rhythm and language of this topic that I am trying to play with. A lot of times for me, a poem helps me launch into these larger ideas in my nonfiction.
Medeiros: That sounds like a great method. As far as the rhythm of language— in your book, you write about communicating in Thai— do you write solely in English, or do you also write in Thai?
Sukrungruang: I write solely in English. I can read Thai at a very slow, I would say sixth-grade level. That’s the most I can do. I think of English as a secondary language for me, because I did learn Thai first. So my brain does a lot of rewiring to write in English, and I often catch mix-ups in syntax. I often mess up pronouns— because pronouns in Thai are very different. I would love love love to be able to write in both languages, but I’ve so firmly saturated myself in English.
Medeiros: Maybe part of that translation in your head— that rewiring— maybe that helps you have a greater awareness of how the rhythm is playing out on the page? I can recall a lot of beautiful rhythms in This Jade World.
Sukrungruang: Absolutely, yeah. I think, where I see where the Thai language really helps my writing is in my poetry. Thai is such a tonal language, where subtleties of sound change meanings and words. And so, when I’m looking at a poem, really looking at sound and rhythm and pacing— and I think because of how my brain goes to Thai first— it really helps me think about a different type of rhythm that I'm trying to play around with.
Medeiros: Another aspect I really valued in your latest memoir is the vulnerability that you’re willing to share on the page, and you do so without flinching. You don’t back away from some of the most vulnerable moments; you’re willing to share those with your reader. For example, you touch on body image and self worth issues that so many of us struggle with, but are often not portrayed from a masculine perspective. I think that’s so important and so incredible. In addition to your latest book, you’ve also contributed to anthologies that examine the fat experience through a literary lens. What do you hope that your readers, or the world, take from your willingness to share that vulnerability on the page?
Sukrungruang: Well, first and foremost, one of the things that I think our world, our culture suffers from is this fear of vulnerability. I think our culture has defined vulnerability as a weakness. That’s probably the reason why I love nonfiction so much. I think nonfiction is where writers are able to be vulnerable and to make sense of their vulnerability.
One of the things I keep telling my students when I teach nonfiction, and something that I’ve really had to tell myself when writing this book in particular, was: You have to rip the Band-Aid off. You have to look at the wound for what it is. The genre of memoir— as hard as it sounds— thrives on suffering and it lives on vulnerability.
Medeiros: You’re so right.
Sukrungruang: I don’t want to make it sound like the memoir is about, say, the “pity party.” I think a good memoir— this is my Buddhist nature coming out— helps us notice that life is suffering. But we’re trying to figure out the various roles and paths one can take to alleviate suffering. Memoir is looking at a character in crisis and they’re standing, not at a fork in the road but like hundreds of different pathways, and they’re going to take one path and they’re going to maybe fail. But that’s part of that journey, too.
For me, I want to make sure readers and writers of memoir feel as if they don’t have to self-censor when writing about issues that our culture deems inappropriate, like a man who writes about being fat. Or a man who writes about divorce or a breakup. One of the best rejections I got from a publisher for the book was that it was “chick-lit” written by a dude. And I’m like, well thanks. There’s something that’s telling about what people expect right there in that comment. People expect certain things from male writers, and one of those things is that we don’t talk about these things.
But at the same time, that also creates these tensions that exist in the world— these closed-minded ideas of masculinity. Toxic masculinity is born by silence, born by expectations of gender. They can perpetuate year after year, generation after generation. For me, I’d rather open Pandora’s box and have things out there and then have the conversation. Rather than keeping it all bottled up, not have the conversation at all.
Medeiros: Absolutely. It was really refreshing as a woman who has struggled, like so many, with body image issues, to read a masculine perspective that is so relatable. To be able to have true empathy for that experience, and to understand more fully that women aren’t the only ones who are subjected to self-worth issues because of societal expectations of body shapes. I know so many men who would benefit from being able to read such an honest perspective of someone who puts it out there and says, we’re all going through this, but why?
Sukrungruang: Yeah absolutely.
Medeiros: There is a passage from your memoir that has been stuck in my mind since I read it. It’s from the chapter “At the Border,” where you are talking with your Aunty Sue while the two of you are on a road trip in Ayutthaya. She has started crying, and you seem to have been caught off guard and are trying to get her to stop:
“The past is the past,” I said, borrowing my mother’s favorite phrase.
“The past is our present,” she said. “Sometimes we can’t let go.”
Sometimes we can’t. Sometimes there are images and memories that keep haunting, that stick to the core of us. Sometimes we go over them again and again and shiver. Five, ten, fifteen years later these memories echo back. Reverberate in our skulls. Freezes us up.
This touches so eloquently on what I feel is almost a bane of nonfiction writers. Many have these meticulous memories and at the same time, they are also really sensitive or experience emotions intensely. It can make letting go of the past especially difficult. Do you find that it helps to write the personal stories that haunt you the most? Do you think bringing them into the physical realm allows you to release them a bit from that grip of memory?
Sukrungruang: I think an easy answer would be yes. But— yes for me, right? I know of writers who are writing about really painful moments in their lives, and they had to stop because it made their mental health even worse. It made them not able to function in the real world, because their mind was stuck in that past, in that trauma. In figuring out the why or why me.
I think that's one of the more dangerous things about nonfiction. You have to be really aware of yourself as a person and writer, to gauge whether or not— maybe emotional distance isn’t the right kind of phrasing. You have to have an emotional gauge of yourself, of whether or not you’re able to write about certain things without causing more harm. For me, the writing of this book was healing, was cathartic. I was able to come to some sort of understanding of who I was at that time: that 20-something-year-old kid who met the love of his life and was married for over ten years and suddenly he is without her. Who is he now? It really helped me figure out this kind of emptiness that one feels sometimes after a long relationship.
One of the things that I always think about and kind of bristle over, is that pop therapy idea that seems to permeate our culture. Which is like, when you write something, it doesn’t help you close that door. When you write something, you kick the door down. There’s no closing of the door. You actually open the door wide open; you’re there, and not only are you there, you’re inviting other people to come in with you. That’s also the beauty of it: that invitation for people to come in. To bear witness to this side.
And this is very close to what therapists might say to people who have experienced trauma: You never close the door. There’s no such thing as closure. There is: I am living today with the thoughts and knowledge of this thing having happened. It’s not closing the door on it, it’s just figuring out what I’m going to do today with that as part of me. And I think, maybe that’s the thing that I was working towards in this book. I was writing my way into it, so that it became a part of me. Because when you look at a relationship— a breakup— or you look at something that shakes up the core view, you often think of it as a severing of the self or fragmenting of the self. That you’re broken. That’s the common phrase: I’m broken. But maybe for me, the writing of it was to kind of write the fissures, to connect things, to claim it. So that I can move on.
That’s something that I’m always telling my students: You’re not writing to close the door. You’re writing to open the door, to kick down the door. You’re never going to be without it once you write it. You will never be able to close the door, because now it’s there, it’s in language. There it is.
Medeiros: So maybe don’t use writing as a replacement for therapy.
Sukrungruang: Right, no. Sometimes, it’s naturally going to happen. But I always tell my students: I can’t prescribe you anything. I could suggest maybe cutting this paragraph, or something like that.
Medeiros: That makes sense. We don’t ever really let any of it go. But maybe, in sharing with other people, it’s a little less heavy. Or maybe just a little less lonely. Maybe when other people find connection through your writing, better understand the emotions there, even if they haven’t been in your shoes, you feel a little less alone in the world. Another reason I love nonfiction.
Sukrungruang: Yeah, it’s the genre I turn to.
Medeiros: Okay, so what writing projects are up next for you? Do you have another one on the horizon? What are you most looking forward to in the coming year, and are you going to be doing any readings
Sukrungruang: I have a lot of things coming up in terms of readings— both virtual and in person. I’m teaching, and I’m teaching at a few writing summer residencies with Chatham and Kundiman, which is an Asian American literary organization.
But in terms of projects, no. Which is rare, because I always have something. I am always working on the next thing. But right now, because of the state of the world we’re in, I don’t have anything. I started a few things, but there’s nothing for me as a teacher and a father of a five year old. During Covid, it’s like— I just want to make sure the boat doesn’t tip over, right? And so right now, that’s the most important thing.
I do want to write a book about being a father, and I think— being a father in the age of distrust. Steven Church and I, and a couple other fathers, were part of this really awesome conversation about writing about being fathers and having kids. I think that’s always been a really large part of the things that I’m trying to figure out, especially in this age of distrust— how do you father a kid during this age? So that’s something.
I also started a novel. I can say I’ve started a novel, but it goes nowhere. I’ve started a novel, and I think during this time period fiction was something I could do because nonfiction was something I didn’t want to do. There’s too much life right now. So it was great to lose myself in fiction.
Medeiros: I look forward to whatever you come up with next, especially if you write about fatherhood. Because you touched on it at the end of This Jade World and it was just beautiful. I’m also a mother of three, so I’m often drawn to reading about parenting experiences. Maybe I haven’t been exposed to it as much, but I feel like in the literary world, we’re missing a bit of that really genuine perspective from a father that’s not just the typical masculine expectations— or failed expectations— of what the father-son relationship should be.
Sukrungruang: Definitely. I think one of the things that I’m always trying to do is again to challenge that notion of what father means and these legacies of wayward fathers. These are things that I’m always kind of bumping up against. A lot of the ideas in This Jade World are actually even more amplified by issues of body image, issues of wanting, when I’m thinking about how to raise a child. Before, I thought: Maybe I understand now. And then you have a kid, and you don’t understand. I have no clue.
Medeiros: None of us do.
Before we go, do you have any favorite independent bookstores where we can send readers to go looking for your book?
Sukrungruang: Yeah! I think Gramercy Bookstore in Columbus, Ohio is a nice, wonderful bookshop. I’m always a lover of the Seattle bookstore Elliot Bay Book Company. Love that bookstore. There’s also an awesome independent bookstore in Oswego, New York called the river's end bookstore.
Medeiros: Thanks, Ira. And thanks again for sharing your wisdom and your writing.
Ira Sukrungruang was born in Chicago to Thai immigrants. He earned his B.A. in English from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and his MFA from The Ohio State University. He is the author of four nonfiction books, This Jade World (2021), Buddha’s Dog & Other Meditations (2018), Southside Buddhist (2014), and Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy (2010); the short story collection The Melting Season (2016); and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night (2013). With friend Donna Jarrell, he co-edited two anthologies that examine the fat experience through a literary lens, What Are You Looking At? The First Fat Fiction Anthology (2003), and Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology (2005). He was a former member of the Board of Trustees for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), and is currently on the Advisory Board of Machete, an imprint of The Ohio State University Press dedicated to publishing innovative nonfiction by authors who have been historically marginalized. Sukrungruang is the recipient of the 2015 American Book Award for Southside Buddhist, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, an Arts and Letters Fellowship, and the Anita Claire Scharf Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in literary journals including The Rumpus, the American Poetry Review, The Sun, and Creative Nonfiction. He is the president of Sweet: A Literary Confection, a literary nonprofit organization, and is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College.
Twitter: @sukrungruang | Instagram: @sukrungruang
Melinda Medeiros is an MFA creative writing candidate at Fresno State, a wife, a mother of three, and a San Joaquin Valley native. She is currently a teaching associate at Fresno State, a senior genre editor of The Normal School magazine, and president of the San Joaquin Literary Association. She has previously written for The Odyssey Online and her work has been published in the Reedley College journal Symmetry and in hais: a literary journal.
Twitter: @mgmedeiros | Instagram: @mgmrose