Daria Sommers is the author of the new novel Sawadika American Girl. She is also a filmmaker and is the managing editor of VBC Magazine. She lives in New York.
Q: How much was your new novel inspired by your own experiences growing up in Bangkok?
A: Sawadika American Girl is a work of historical fiction. However, the narrative elements that drive the story and the characters in it are drawn from the world I grew up in.
For example, the main character, Piper, studies piano with a Thai prince who was a student of the great Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau. That character is loosely based on a Thai prince who was my piano teacher and who studied with Arrau.
Piper has a high school friend who lives with her brother in a Bangkok hotel so they can both attend Bangkok’s college-accredited International High School while their parents work for the American embassy in Vientiane, Laos. That setup sounds wild but it happened.
What I want readers to know is that the events in the novel occurred in some form or another to me, or someone I knew, or they were part of the lore that you lived with as an American in Bangkok during the Vietnam War years.
Q: Did you need to do much additional research to write the book, and if so, did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: I was fortunate to inherit my father’s journals, letters, and program reports that detailed his USAID work in both Thailand and Vietnam. They were a great resource for the specifics of what he was up to, what USAID was doing and what the mood was for the Americans working over there at the time.
Equally important was what I got from my mother. Throughout the ‘60s and early ‘70s, she worked as a writer and art director for SAWADDI Magazine, a bimonthly publication of the American Women’s Club of Bangkok dedicated to stories on Thai art and culture. She kept more than a decades’ worth of copies.
Sometime in the 2000s, I saw them piled next to the trash bin at my parent’s house and swooped in to save them. I knew I was going to write this book and that they were research gold.
While I recalled a lot, the magazines served as a critical check on my memory. They were a great resource for street names, identifying what stores were where, and the location of old markets that no longer exist today.
A lot of the names and spellings I use in the book were taken from the magazine. That is important because my novel is told through the lens of the Americans who lived there. Getting that frame of reference right was important to me.
The Siam Society in Bangkok was also immensely helpful and responded to my crazy email requests with documents and important links to material I couldn’t access anywhere else.
About halfway through the book, I had an epiphany of sorts. I realized that this private, nagging sense I’ve carried with me that I’d grown up in an aberrant world, as wonderful as it was troublesome, was true.
In a way, writing the novel confirmed my own history for me and relieved me of that private burden. That was personally liberating. Telling stories really does matter.
Q: How did you create your character Piper?
A: My intent from the start was to make this a coming-of-age story with a 17-year-old female protagonist. That struck me as an unexpected yet powerful way to shed light on this hidden history. Even though I am younger than Piper, her voice represents my own. Why would I change that?
Growing up in Thailand during this period was, at times, great but it also came with enormous burdens and a lingering bewilderment at the world. An enduring dislocation. The war was always present. My character Piper is deeply aware of that. So was I.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I knew all the plot points in advance. However, I didn’t know how I was getting from point A to point B or point B to point C. I just dove in and started writing and the way forward always appeared. That was the fun part. Writers say it all the time because it is true. At one point, the characters take over. I followed their lead.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: My next book takes place in during the summer of 2021. All I’ll say for now is that it is an uplifting, spirited story with some unexpected female protagonists that unfolds against the backdrop of the second wave of Covid, the George Floyd protests, and the imminent fall of Afghanistan.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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