by JULIET WATERS

Thai-American writer Rattawut Lapcharoensap's first collection of short stories, Sightseeing, probably deserves more than a facile metaphor. But these resonant stories are so addictively satisfying that it's hard to resist. So, sorry, but they're the Thai food of literature. And I mean that in the best sense. Not that they're exotic (and anyways, how exotic is Thai food by now?).

Lapcharoensap has a rare advantage as a writer. Born in Chicago in 1979, his childhood and teenage years were spent living back and forth between Bangkok and the U.S. During the years he lived in North America, his parents were service workers. When in Thailand they were middle-class. Neither typically immigrant, nor typical native, Lapcharoensap has created a unique but strangely familiar narrative voice. It's like a fusion of first world and third world consciousness as imagined from the innocence - more or less - of children and teenagers.

In "Priscilla of Cambodia" for instance, two Thai kids do bike tricks in an empty pool and talk like they could also be living in California. "Awesome," they say to Priscilla, a young Cambodian refugee whose father, a dentist, has smelted the family gold and put it in her mouth. "They should make a movie about your life, girlie." And sure they could make a movie from these stories, or maybe a great TV series (Degrassi: The Thai Generation?). Yet, there's no question where these kids are living. It's not North America, it's Southeast Asia, which in these stories is far from the pre-Tsunami paradise of popular imagination.

"Pussy and elephants. That's all these people want," announces a lead character's mother in the first story, "Farangs," the Thai word for tourists. The gauntlet is thrown in the first paragraph as every familiar brand of tourist is stereotyped with the retaliatory glee of a writer who's probably seen (and probably enjoyed) too many Kung Fu movies. "This is how we count the days. June: the Germans come to the Island–football cleats, big T-shirts, thick tongues–speaking like spitting. July: the Italians, the French, the British, the Americans... Americans are the fattest, the stingiest of the bunch."

This story offers a slightly different take on the American beach babe. Just as vacuous as she is in the usual depiction, here she's also as crassly exploitative as any male tourist. Luk, the teenage boy narrator, who uses his pet pig, Clint Eastwood, as an unusual babe magnet, has had a long string of girlfriends.

"Girls with names like Pamela, Angela, Stephanie, Joy. And now Lizzie." Half farang, himself, Luk's mother was abandoned by an American soldier who did stick around long enough to teach him English as a first language and buy him Clint. Despite all he knows, Luk just can't help falling desperately in love with these girls. The latest has a Budweiser bikini and a boyfriend who will end up in a potentially heartbreaking showdown with a swimming pig.

"Farangs" is a great story, but just an appetizer before progressively risky terrain. As these stories unfold, squalor and oppression are negotiated with extremes of generosity and casual brutality. "Priscilla of Cambodia" is probably the most complete in the way it works all of the elements - humour, love and horror - then glides towards an ending that in our culture would be considered heinous, but in this place is too close to ordinary.

By the time the collection closes with the novella "Cockfighting," most of the comedy seems to have left the country. Then, just when you think you can't read another page of this truly chilling story of a village in the grip of two generations of sadistic thugs, out of nowhere, the writer's wry and brilliant sense of irony unearths an unexpected survivor. Sightseeing far exceeds the expectations created by its bland title. It'll be interesting to see if Lapcharoensap will meet the expectations created by his debut.

Sightseeing by Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Viking, hc, $28, 250pp