A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants - Jaed Coffin

I know I've admitted in previous posts that the narcissist in me loves to read books about people/characters that remind me of me. I was drawn to this memoir written by Jaed Coffin, a half-Thai/half-white boy growing up in Brunswick, Maine, who decides to return to his mother's village in Thailand to study as a monk, just as I am drawn to most books addressing the issue of mixed-raced-parentage and culture clashes. As I learned when I was in Thailand a couple years ago, many Thai men spend a period of their lives at a Buddhist temple, training as a monk. Some stay for a couple weeks, others stay for years. Coffin spends one summer hoping to become more Thai, and to somehow find answers to the questions about who he is and where he belongs. This book is roughly 200 pages, but I felt it could have been so much more. Part of the problem might be that it appears as if Coffin wrote the book many years after his experience, and it's possible he has not been able to recapture much of the struggle and loneliness that he felt. Monks in Thailand are so revered, it was interesting to get a glimpse into their daily lives - while full of rules, they seem simultaneously unstructured and quite varied from person to person. Coffin, while in this new environment, is never quite able to shed himself of his "other" label. He fights against the Buddhist teachings of his closest monk companion, while at the same time remains unwilling or unwanting to accept his American life. Ultimately, I suppose, it is always a struggle to reconcile, while also enjoying and appreciating, one's various cultures and belief systems. This book raised a lot of questions for me about Thai culture and relationships - questions of course that have many different answers depending on the person. It is a nice snapshot into Thai culture - but as with most memoirs - just one person's experience.