Authors' Insights: Zoe Zolbrod's 'Currency' - Why Thailand?

Books tell more than the story of their characters; they tell the stories of the place in which they're set.

We asked Zoe Zolbrod about Thailand as the setting for Currency and she offered the following insights about her choice of setting.  Many thanks to Zoe for sharing her thoughts with us.

 

I backpacked around Southeast Asia in my mid-twenties, and I spent chunks of time in Bangkok, where a friend of mine was living. When I settled back in to life at home, I found myself writing a lot of travel-themed material, always from the perspective of the American abroad. One day I sat down to explore the first-person voice of a Thai man, just as an experiment to help me flesh out a character in a story I was revising. I ended up writing nonstop for hours. That voice turned out to belong to Piv, one of the two main characters in Currency. The novel could not have been set anywhere else, because his voice and his situation were the driving force behind it.

 

One of the things that fascinated me while I traveled was the relationship between local people and the tourists. This was especially true in Thailand, even though—or maybe because—it was the most developed and stable country I visited. I felt so acutely the differences in the power of our respective currencies, the ways in which geography is destiny, the ways in which human connection can overcome these things and the ways in which it’s very challenging.

 

Of course, in places like Thailand where tourism is a major industry, it’s easy for everything to become commodified, including sex and relationships. As a young woman in the States, I had been used to thinking that girls and women were always on one side of the equation. It didn’t occur to me that I could be seen as a potential buyer. This role reversal seemed like rich material to me. Plus, Thailand is a beautiful country that inspires a sense of longing in many of the Westerners who travel there. The source of that longing is interesting to me, too. What are we looking for when we travel someplace we deem exotic?

 

When writing Currency, I sought out books set in other countries—The Quiet American by Graham Greene, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, and When Mountains Walked by Kate Wheeler are some of my favorites. The book I most recently fell in love with that has a strong sense of place is Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell. It’s set on the Stark River and Kalamazoo River in central Michigan, and I felt intimately connected to the place as I was reading.

If you would like to browse other books set in or about Thailand our recommendations are here.