What kind of Tourist are You?

It is a pretty common thing to travel, to go to new places and explore what is unknown or foreign to us. Trekking across the globe brings you to new places and cultures. It is often pointed out that in your native place, you can usually tell the difference between a native and a tourist. Why? Is it the big cameras or the cargo shorts and fanny packs? Or is it the lack of knowledge of the culture that is made evident through their actions?

Rattawut Lapcharoensap addresses this topic in two of the stories in his book Sightseeing. The first tourists that we meet are what the natives of Thailand call ‘farangs,’ which basically means outsiders/tourists that don’t understand the culture. Lizzie, the girl he meets on the beach, is portrayed as clueless and ignorant. He can tell she is American right away because of her Budweiser bikini that she throws around so freely. He decides to take her to ride an elephant and we see that the owner is not pleased with how she is dressed. She doesn’t realize at first that she should have dressed more appropriately for riding the elephant, the animal Thailand considers a national symbol. It is interesting though that once she is told; she seems to be somewhat concerned about lacking that knowledge. It almost seems like she is an unprepared and oblivious tourist that needs guidance. Then everything changes when we see her on the elephant.

“Lizzie hummed contentedly. Then she stood up on Yai’s back. ‘Here’s your shirt,’ she said, tossing it at me. With a quick sweeping motion, Lizzie took off her bikini top. Then she peeled off her bikini bottom. And then there she was – my American angel – naked on the back of Uncle Mongkhon’s decrepit elephant” (13).

It seems like a deliberate move on her part to go against the culture. Where she was just ignorant before, she is now ignoring what she knows. Her boyfriend, Hunter, who we meet later, is also a pretty ignorant tourist. But he is worse than Lizzie because he just doesn’t seem to care at all. He is the spitting image of Ma’s first statement, “You give them history, temples, pagodas, traditional dance, floating markets, seafood curry, tapioca desserts, silk-weaving cooperatives, but all they really want is to ride some hulking gray beast like a bunch of wildmen and to pant over girls and to lie there half-dead getting skin cancer on the beach during the time in between” (2). Hunter is the epitome of the ugly American abroad who lacks any respect or decency for the culture and place he is in.

In the second story, Lapcharoensap shows the reader tourism from a different perspective. Instead of outsiders coming into a foreign land, we are seeing locals ‘touring’ their own land. It is the story of a son and his mother going on a trip to bond because she is going blind. Unlike the tourist sense we get from the previous story, this is more about cleansing and communicating. The fact that they don’t stick out gives them the opportunity to travel and have a ‘true’ experience. The story ends with the narrator saying, “I’m walking on the sandbar, warm waves licking up across my bare feet, out to watch the sun rise with Ma, and then to bring her back before the tide heaves, before the ocean rises, before this sand becomes seafloor again” (98). Their travels are not to become worldly or to be able to brag that they have been somewhere, it is to rejuvenate and learn more about their relationship with each other and their culture.