Cat Park

Written by: Prof. Stephen Sohn

Managing Editor: Yosra Thabet

Davin Malasarn’s The Outer Country (One World, 2026) is one of the debuts I have been most looking forward to reading this year. The terrain of Asian American literature only gets more expansive as the years go by, and part of this trend is necessitated simply by the fact that some ethnic groups are publishing more and fleshing out areas of the field. Such is the case with Malasarn’s The Outer Country, which delves into Thai transnational and Thai American cultural contexts. Malasarn thus joins a still relatively modest group of Thai American and Thai diasporic writers who have previously published literature in the US (including but not limited to Cherry Cheva, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Pitchaya Sudbanthad, and Ira Sukrungruang). Let’s get to the book’s marketing description: “Sisters Manda and Siripon have been divided by continents for years, estranged since their parents decided to send just one of their daughters from Phet Buri to America—the foreign land they call “the Outer Country.” As the eldest, Manda assumed she would be the first to go. When their parents chose Siripon, the more obedient second daughter, the decision sparked a lifetime of rivalry. The birth of Siripon’s son brings the sisters back together. Despite the disorientation of Los Angeles and the difficulty of sharing her sister’s home, Manda becomes a second mother to Ben, a precocious only child who fills her with fierce joy. But as Ben grows increasingly effeminate, her joy transforms to fear. Believing that the spirit of a dead girl has possessed her beloved nephew—and that her sister won’t do anything to fix matters—Manda and Ben’s father, Kamron, secretly arrange a Buddhist exorcism. The ceremony sets off a decade of anxiety-induced illness and bullying, even as the ritual burrows beyond Ben’s memory. For Ben to grow into his authentic self, he must accept his queerness and confront the scars of his past. He attempts to navigate his family’s tense relationships and live amidst the damage. But how long can they all go on before the truths are uncovered? From the mangrove forests of Thailand to a modest stucco house in Los Angeles to the sandstone quadrangles of Stanford, The Outer Country is at once epic and intimate in scope, a breathtaking journey across cultures and generations.” At the core of the story is precisely the scene of the Buddhist exorcism, which tracks across Ben’s life. The reverberations of that moment become clear: Ben internalizes that event as a trauma and acts it out routinely in any stressful circumstance, and he vomits. Throughout his young life and well into his late teens, Ben will suffer from this psychosomatic manifestation, clearly still dealing with not only the violence of the ritual but his internalized knowledge that something may be wrong with him. Of course, nothing is wrong with him. He just happens to have some queer yearnings, which, as many of us see in Asian American transnational contexts, become seen as something pathological. Malasarn is careful enough with the social dimensions of Thailand to let readers know that cultural contexts have always involved the flexibility of gender dimensions through the subjective positionality of the kathoey, a kind of third sex figuration. Yet, Ben doesn’t identify as kathoey at any point, nor does that kind of subjectivity traffic in the American context where Ben resides. Thus, at its core, Malasarn’s text is an ethnic bildungsroman, a queer coming-of-age story embedded in Thai American culture. Ben is not the only major character. His mother, Siripon; Siripon’s husband Kamron, and Siripon’s sister Manda loom large. The challenge that this text sets up is that Manda is childless and becomes attached to Ben in a way that is both heartfelt yet complicated. Indeed, the American nuclear family dynamics end up casting Manda as a kind of excess that must be mediated in a variety of ways. Manda’s characterization is probably the most challenging of this text, and it is this figure that I most gravitated to in some ways because there seems to be little place for her in the United States. The transnational dimensions of this novel are likewise rich, as Ben, Siripon, and Manda must maintain their extended family entanglements, which necessarily include aging and infirm elders. This aspect of the text showcases Malasarn’s ability to weave together disparate plot points with the intent that Siripon and Manda aren’t going to let their ethnic homeland become some completely distant memory. When I wrote my second book, there weren’t many narrative plots like that one Malasarn imagines: Ben grows up in the shadow of AIDS; when he comes out to his mother, it doesn’t seem to be the biggest deal, even as it is clear that there will be some bumps in the road in the future. Perhaps the biggest and most welcome surprise in this text is that Ben’s queerness seems assured, even amid campus protests for queer equality and the ethnic rituals that suggest that his same-sex orientations are problematic. In this way, the major triumph in this text is that it imagines the possibility for Asian American queer yearnings even at a point in time where it would seem unimaginable. The political heft of this text appears then in the way that it routes a path of possibility for Asian American queers, who seek to desire and to have their desires constitutively recognized. This novel is thus one of the few that might spotlight something that might be called an Asian American queer optimism. A gleaming debut filled with multidimensional characters and a plot of Asian American queer fulfillments rarely seen.

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-outer-country-davin-malasarn/1148002813?ean=9780593731659