Latest news with #Thai-American
NZ Herald
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Book of the day: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech. Tony Tulathimutte: Witty, courageous, often brutal. Photos / Supplied What does literary fiction have to offer the chronically online ‒ people who spend more time gaming, gooning and doomscrolling than reading? And what do the chronically online have to offer fiction writers; what plot points can be crafted from our inaction, what motivation from our compulsive sating of surface desires? There are reasons fiction hasn't kept pace with the changing ways we live. Thai-American author Tony Tulathimutte, who's 41, nevertheless plays catch-up in his book of stories, Rejection, upping the difficulty by casting powerfully self-pitying, misanthropic, misogynistic and malevolent characters, people who not only experience rejection but come to identify as rejects. In the opening story, The Feminist, we meet a 'nice guy', a gender studies major who, despite devoting all his energy to understanding women, just can't get laid. The Feminist blames his narrow shoulders, but it's socially that he's most underdeveloped; flirtation's 'subtextual cues no more perceptible to him than ultraviolet radiation'. The Feminist is comically desperate to come across as an ally, his online dating profile leading with 'Unshakeably serious about consent. Abortion's #1 fan'. Despite virtue-skywriting in public, he privately stews about the broad-shouldered guys getting the girls. 'Dragging his virginity like a body bag,' the wound of rejection turns septic and he adopts an incel's checklist of obsessions and anxieties: depo-testosterone, canthal tilt, death-grip syndrome. Given a wake-up call on the Narrow Shoulders/Open Minds (NSOM) blog, The Feminist slams the phone. Having done everything right, in his view, for the past 40-something years, he comments, calling out the 'mass abrogation of the social contract by the legions of treacherous, evasive, giggling yeastbuckets'. Villain arc completed, what he does next further ties The Feminist to Elliot Rodger, the socially impaired, slender-framed, self-described 'sophisticated polite gentleman', whose lack of the sexual and romantic attention he felt he deserved drove him to kill six people and injure more in Isla Vista, California in 2014. Several of the stories in Rejection work this way. Tulathimutte presents marginal personalities, caricatures played for laughs in TV series such as Girls and High Maintenance, and keeps adding detail, cross-hatching in the darkest recesses of their minds. In Pics, love-starved Alison spirals after having supposedly no-strings-attached sex with a pal, 'occasionally posting a cryptic song lyric, ones where if he went and looked up the line right after it, he'd see it was about him and hopefully be devastated'. She complains in her friend group chat, dates a string of men she saves to her phone as icks (Mesh Shorts, Mr Gifs, The Feminist) and buys a raven in a cuckoo attempt to stave off loneliness. All of it – pal, friend group, lovers, even the bird – gets swallowed by the validation-consuming vacuum inside her. Eminently vulnerable, Alison is love-bombed, gaslit and economically entrapped by a tech bro named Max in the story Our dope future. With all the room-reading powers of Elon Musk, Max relates the tale of their failed relationship on a site like Reddit, underscoring his rizz, generosity and drive, including the desire to have at least a dozen kids using IVF ('four per gestation cycle would strike the ideal balance between fast and reliable'.) Learning in the comments that he's not just the OP (original poster) but an op (the opposition) doesn't compute: 'If everything I did was so evil, how is it that up until now not a single person ever told me No?' The protagonist of Ahegao, or The Ballad of Sexual Repression, is a closeted gay sadist named Kant who's as blinded by self-loathing as Max is by narcissism. Deciding it's the only way he can satisfy his hideous desires, he commissions impossibly depraved pornography – the kind that can be realised only by using special effects – from an OnlyFans-esque creator. The script, which makes Sam Rockwell's sex monologue in White Lotus seem tame, is a Chekhov's gun of humiliation just waiting to go off. Where Kant excessively identifies with his kinks, his sibling Bee abandons identity altogether. They sell their gender to a kid named Sean for $22, noting, in a sublime turn of phrase, that 'before I learned gender was fluid, I'd learned it was liquid'. Refusing even to identify as non-binary, Bee infuriates well-meaning, category-obsessed classmates. Disgusted by 'bad-faith identity-cels' and confident that 'discourse is loneliness disguised as war', Bee dedicates theirselves to elaborate online trolling operations, like The Joker with a Twitter account. Tulathimutte is extremely witty, his knowledge of the digital discourse-loneliness-war way beyond Wikipedic, but oof, Rejection is brutal, the characters so mercilessly denied love, hope and redemption. They wallow in grievance, weaponising it, like Trump voters or Netanyahu apologists. It's a temptation available to us all; to enumerate your grievances and find them wanting only helps level the score. In the final tale, Re: Rejection, Tulathimutte imagines us disliking not only his characters but the book itself. It's a rejection letter written by a fictional publisher who wonders if the manuscript isn't 'trying to espouse the conventional literary virtues of insight, empathy, fun and so on' because the author is deliberately soliciting rejection. In that regard, Rejection is a failure. All the poisonous Ivy League-level black-pilled rumination will leave you with a rash, but the book is also compelling, courageous and unusually engaged with the growing portion of people who feel abandoned, left out and looked over. Rejection, by Tony Tulathimutte (HarperCollins, $24.99), is out now.
Business Insider
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
She got in trouble as a teen in New York City, but in Bangkok, she became a beauty queen
Metinee Kingpayome arrived in Bangkok on her 20th birthday. Born in Maryland and raised in New York City by Thai immigrant parents, Kingpayome had only visited Thailand twice as a child. That trip back to Thailand in 1992 marked more than just a birthday milestone; it marked the beginning of her new life. "It was something special," Kingpayome, now 53, told Business Insider. "Something that would change my life forever." Troubled teenage years Raised in a working-class neighborhood in Queens, Kingpayome was around 9 when her parents separated. As the oldest of four — and the only daughter — she often took on the responsibility of looking after the house. "My brothers were still quite young, so I had to help my mom at a very young age," Kingpayome said. She spent her childhood in a tight-knit Thai-American community, and her mother enrolled her in Sunday school to help her learn Thai. At home, her mom spoke to her in their native language. "She was very traditional, and she tried to raise me in that way," Kingpayome said. "We clashed a lot. You spend 16 hours a day speaking English, living the Western life, and then you come home, and your mom is super strict." Her teenage years were especially rough. By 14, she was getting into trouble and clashing with her mother. She barely made it through high school. A wake-up call came when the boy she was dating in her late teens got arrested. Working a dead-end job as a waitress in a Thai restaurant, she knew something had to change. "I just felt like, OK, this is not working out. There's got to be more," Kingpayome said. She'd always been drawn to fashion and decided to try modeling. But in the early '90s, the industry favored blonde hair and blue eyes — a beauty standard that she didn't fit. Determined not to give up, she decided to give Thailand a whirl. Just for six months, she told herself. She booked a one-way ticket, moved in with an aunt, and entered a beauty pageant. Several months later, she won Miss Thailand World 1992. An unexpected beauty queen Kingpayome says she didn't intend to be a beauty queen, but modeling was competitive. "I thought that would be a very good stepping stone," she said. "Pageantry was huge back in the '80s and '90s. So I entered a beauty pageant, not expecting to win, but then won." Winning the crown changed everything. She was thrust into the spotlight and, at the end of the year, represented Thailand at Miss World 1992, where she was crowned Continental Queen of Asia and Oceania. The transition from being unknown to a recognizable face was tough to navigate, especially for someone still finding her footing in a new country. Thai society was more conservative at the time, and women were generally expected to be more reserved, she said. "All of a sudden, I have to be this very proper, polite woman, and I struggled with that for a year," Kingpayome said. "Being born and growing up in the States, I was very, very vocal." Once her pageant contract was up, she started modeling. In the late '90s, Kingpayome was featured in advertising campaigns for brands such as Lux Soap and Sony. Since then, she's also appeared on the covers of the Thai editions of Vogue, Elle, and Harper's Bazaar, among many others. Kingpayome says she stood out in the industry because of her bold fashion choices, such as taking part in photoshoots while wearing swimsuits. "I felt I was part of the movement where things were starting to shift from conservative to modern," Kingpayome said. 'I was always professional' Unlike the " sabai sabai" Thai way of life, where locals often adopt a relaxed, go-with-the-flow attitude, Kingpayome said her work ethic set her apart. "If the call time's eight. I'm there at seven-thirty. It doesn't matter how hungover I am. I might look like crap, but I was there," she said. "I was always professional." Still, it took time to convince her family of her career choices, as they struggled to understand the nature of her work. It was only years later, when her mother eventually relocated to Bangkok from the US, that she began to understand, especially once Kingpayome started bringing her along to photoshoots. "She's like, oh, OK. You're not actually taking off your clothes," Kingpayome said, recalling her mother's reaction. Trading covers and catwalks for motherhood and a slower life Young, independent, and suddenly in demand, Kingpayome's life in Thailand took off. "I worked hard, but I played harder because, as a teenager, I never had that kind of life. When I left New York, I was only starting to be legal to go clubbing and stuff," she said. Everything in Thailand felt so different and new, she added. "I kind of got lost in the party scene, and my career was taking off. I was in every fashion show. I was on every cover of every magazine. It was just like, wow, oh my God, I love this life," she said In addition to modeling, she also built a successful career in show business, working as a TV presenter and appearing in numerous Thai movies and TV shows. Her fast-paced lifestyle lasted nearly a decade before she began to feel burned out and decided to slow down. In her mid-thirties, she got married and later had her son, who is now 16 and a competitive swimmer. The marriage ended in a divorce, but she still co-parents with her ex. In recent years, she's served as a mentor and judge on modeling reality shows and has coached contestants in the Miss Universe Thailand pageant. In 2021, she established a modeling academy with her brother called Muse by Metinee. "We use runway modeling as a tool to help people gain confidence. So our youngest student is 4 years old, and my oldest student, who is still with us, is 59," Kingpayome said. Many of her students are kids who have been bullied or who have low self-esteem, and seeing them break out of their shells and become more confident has been rewarding, she added. Since pageantry is still big in Thailand, she also coaches men, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community who aspire to compete. The academy has since expanded to include a modeling agency. Jack Titus, the winner of Mister Model International 2025, who also grew up straddling both American and Thai cultures, told BI that his training at the academy was "the backbone" of his performance in the pageant. "From the way we walked to the way we spoke, every moment was designed to prepare us for the world stage," Titus said. "The discipline, presence, and emotional resilience I gained at Muse played a massive role in that win." Thailand, always Over three decades later, Kingpayome is still one of Thailand's biggest stars. Parisa Pichitmarn, a millennial journalist based in Bangkok, told BI that she has always admired Kingpayome. "She comes across as a strong woman who's professional and also doesn't take any crap," Pichitmarn said. Manorat Sangsuk, a Thai Gen X finance specialist, told BI that in the '90s, a lot of the models were half Western and half Thai, and having someone who "just looked Thai" was refreshing. "She's pretty cool in her own way — you know, not like sweet, gentle, traditional Thai type." It's hard to say whether Kingpayome would have enjoyed the same level of success if she had stayed in the US. "Because you're a tiny fish in a big pond, whereas in Thailand, I was a big fish in a tiny pond. So it was very different," she said. These days, Kingpayome lives in Bangkok and considers herself to be more Thai than American. "When I go back to America, I feel I'm visiting. I don't feel like it's home," she said. She used to visit the US more often, especially when her son was younger. But now, with her mother and two of her brothers living in Thailand, there's less reason to return. Only one brother remains in New York, still living in the Queens apartment they all grew up in. Years from now, Kingpayome says she might end up living by the beach, running a small bed-and-breakfast. Or she might move to wherever her son decides to live when he gets older. "But I think my life is in Thailand," she added.
Online Citizen
10-07-2025
- Business
- Online Citizen
Trump's nominee for Singapore ambassador, Anjani Sinha, faces tough Senate grilling over knowledge gaps
Dr Anjani Sinha, US President Donald Trump's nominee for ambassador to Singapore, came under heavy scrutiny during his Senate confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 9 July 2025. The hearing, which also assessed four other nominees for diplomatic positions, quickly became tense when Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth, a Thai-American military veteran, began her line of questioning. In his opening remarks, Sinha thanked President Trump for his trust and Republican Senator Marco Rubio for his support. He described Singapore as the United States' 'key strategic partner and friend' in the Indo-Pacific. He promised that, if confirmed, he would aim to expand defence and security ties, deepen economic relations, and enhance people-to-people exchanges between the two nations. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham warmly endorsed Sinha's nomination. Graham, who has known Sinha for years, highlighted Singapore's robust medical community, adding that the nominee's medical background made him an excellent match. Senator Pete Ricketts also spoke favourably of Sinha's potential to strengthen relations with Singapore's leadership. Ricketts recounted meeting Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan and Defence Minister Chan Chun Sing during the Shangri-La Dialogue earlier this year. Duckworth's scepticism and pointed questions However, Duckworth quickly set a stern tone, warning that an ambassadorship in Singapore was not a role to be taken up on a whim. She told Sinha directly that she feared his lack of preparedness could strain the US-Singapore relationship, which she described as critical in countering regional threats, including from the People's Republic of China. When Duckworth quizzed Sinha on the size of the US trade surplus with Singapore in 2024, Sinha initially gave an incorrect figure of US$80 billion, then changed it to US$18 billion. Duckworth corrected him, stating the actual surplus was only US$2.8 billion. She used this discrepancy to question his understanding of economic ties between the two countries. JUST NOW: Tammy Duckworth grills Dr. Anjani Sinha, Donald Trump's nominee to be the next Ambassador to Singapore, who clearly has no idea what he is doing at all — Marco Foster (@MarcoFoster_) July 9, 2025 Tariffs and diplomatic challenges Duckworth further asked Sinha how he would explain to Singapore the Trump administration's decision to impose tariffs despite the trade surplus. In April 2025, the administration imposed a 10 per cent tariff on Singaporean goods, with the president having threatened duties as high as 25 per cent. Sinha avoided giving a direct opinion on the tariffs. Instead, he reiterated that he supported Trump's overall trade policy, describing it as an effort to 'reset trade numbers' through dialogue. Pressed again by Duckworth to clarify his stance, Sinha did not commit to opposing or supporting the tariffs specifically targeting Singapore. Knowledge gaps on ASEAN and security ties Duckworth then tested Sinha's familiarity with ASEAN matters. She asked when Singapore would next chair ASEAN. Sinha failed to provide the answer, which Duckworth noted was 2027. When asked what Singapore's priorities might be as chair, Sinha's response was dismissed by Duckworth as too broad and lacking depth. The senator also sought details on the US Navy's cooperation with Singapore, which Sinha failed to specify. 'You want to be ambassador to Singapore, one of our most important alliance friends in the Indo-Pacific,' Duckworth said sternly. She stressed that the role required someone who understood both the strategic significance of Singapore and the complexities of regional security. Duckworth's warnings on treating Singapore as a 'glamour posting' Duckworth warned that Singapore's rich culture and high living standards should not blind nominees to its importance as a security partner. She accused Sinha of failing to take the position seriously enough, repeating her point that the post could not be treated as a reward or an escape to an attractive city-state. 'This nation is too important to the United States, to ASEAN, to the entire region,' Duckworth said. 'I just feel that you are not taking this seriously, and you think this is a glamour posting that you're going to live a nice life in Singapore.' Duckworth has previously challenged other nominees on their grasp of regional affairs. During an earlier hearing, she pressed Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth on his knowledge of ASEAN member states, with similarly unimpressive results. Sinha's defence and claims of personal ties Defending his suitability, Sinha highlighted his medical background, portraying himself as a 'bridge builder' accustomed to fostering strong professional ties. He emphasised that, if confirmed, his first priority would be to establish close working relationships with Singapore's leadership. Sinha also pointed to personal connections, noting that he and Singapore's Foreign Minister Balakrishnan share a medical background. He claimed that both he and Balakrishnan had trained at the same medical school, with Sinha specialising in orthopaedics while Balakrishnan became an eye surgeon. Sinha also stated that their wives shared similar professional paths, claiming Balakrishnan's spouse is a neurologist. However, this statement was factually incorrect. Joy Balakrishnan, the minister's wife, is an educator and active community volunteer, not a medical doctor. According to the Mainly I Love Kids Fund, which she co-founded in 2004, Joy Balakrishnan has dedicated herself to community work and previously led Girl Guides Singapore. Trump's endorsement and the nomination process In March, Trump announced Sinha's nomination on Truth Social, describing him as a 'highly respected entrepreneur' who would put 'America first'. Sinha, a practising orthopaedic surgeon on the US East Coast, has built multiple medical practices across New York and works as a senior consultant in Florida. He holds a Masters in Orthopaedic Surgery from Delhi University and MGM Medical School in India. Under US law, ambassadors are nominated by the president and must be reviewed by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. The committee may hold hearings to question nominees before voting on whether to advance the nomination to the full Senate. If approved by the committee, the full Senate then votes on whether to confirm the nominee. Once confirmed, the ambassador presents credentials to the host government.
