Description
Book Synopsis2022 Book of the Year Award from the Chicago Writers Association
2022 Eric Hoffer Book Awards Finalist in Memoir
2021 Foreword Indies Finalist
This Jade World centers on a Thai American who has gone through a series of life changes. Ira Sukrungruang married young to an older poet. On their twelfth anniversary, he received a letter asking for a divorce, sending him into a despairing spiral. How would he define himself when he was suddenly without the person who shaped and helped mold him into the person he is?
After all these years, he asked himself what he wanted and found no answer. He did not even know what wanting meant. And so, in the year between his annual visits to Thailand to see his family, he gave in to urges, both physical and emotional; found comfort in the body, many bodies; fought off the impulse to disappear, to vanish; until he arrived at some modicum of understanding. During this time, he sought to obliterate the stereotype of
Trade Review"It was like watching an artist paint a picture. First come the random brushstrokes, then bits of color, then shape. Eventually the complete image emerges and what a thrill to have been there to see it evolve. While these essays circle around the topics of love and divorce, they're also about renewal, finding love again, and, of course, the joy of fatherhood."—Debbie Hagan,
Brevity“In
This Jade World Sukrungruang offers us a prayer and a meditation on the beginnings and endings of love. The love of parents and their children. The love among men and women. The love between the skin we live in and the memories we house. In this rare and beautiful offering, we experience a man undone by love and his journey to salvage hope in the face of incredible loneliness and doubt, a search for salvation found first in a dream.”—Kao Kalia Yang, author of
Somewhere in the Unknown World and
The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir
“It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that when seemingly happy couples break up we all wonder what the hell happened. In Ira Sukrungruang’s affecting and vulnerable memoir,
This Jade World, he narrates the dissolution of one marriage and the burgeoning of another as a double love story, laced with wonder, grief, downward spirals, and mature reinventions. Set in both Thailand and the U.S., examined against an epic web of family domestic strife and rearrangement, this gorgeously written book illuminates the necessity and complexity of intimate joy.”—Barrie Jean Borich, author of
Body Geographic and
Apocalypse, Darling “
This Jade World is compulsively readable—its short chapters are polished stones, each delightful by itself while leading us on to another, another, until we’ve walked the road through the author’s divorce and into his new life and love. Mostly set during his yearly visits to his family, Sukrungruang offers a keenly observed Thailand—the monks slipping their cellphones into their robes, the tattoo artist praying before pushing his needle into the author’s back. And throughout we have the deepest pleasure—that of language charged with imagery, leavened with humor, and pierced with insight.”—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of
Heating and Cooling: 52 Micro-MemoirsTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
The First
I
I Am Sad
In 1997
Touch
A Brief History of Sex
Stupid Men
This Bed That Was Not My Bed
Mount Crested Butte
July 10
II
After the Hysterectomy
The Gastropub
Sex Education
The Abyss
The Impossible Dream
The Red Balloon
Giggles
July 10
III
What I Want
Bed, Bath, and Beyond
The Sleep of the Restless
It’s Raining
July 10
IV
Ruins
Fortune
July 10
V
Inked
Flesh of the Land
Man Baby
The Talk of the Body
July 10
VI
Monarchs and Memory
The Broken Hearts Club
To Have, to Hold
Flowers
Michael Chang
Signs
July 10
VII
At the Border
Balance
Lesbians
Invisible Partners
July 10
VIII
Okay
That Long Couch
Goodbye
XI
The Next Life
