“We resolve not to smile”

This essay examines Pitcha Sudbanthad’s Bangkok Wakes to Rain (2019), an episodic novel revolving around a single plot of land in the city now known as Bangkok, and the many characters and narrators who are connected to it. Adapting Samuel Delany’s ideas of network versus contact as a way to conceptualize urban encounters, I consider three sites of contact and speculation within the novel: first, representations of the 1970s protests led by university students and their subsequent massacre by the military; second, a futuristic, sunken Bangkok that alludes to the impending reality of climate crisis for this Southeast Asian megacity; third, interactions between English and Thai languages that produce what I call a speculative grammar. Focusing on the local specificities of Bangkok as an urban space and the particular affordances of Thai grammatical structure within these three sites, I argue that Bangkok Wakes to Rain’s unique narrative style contributes to ongoing processes of defining Thainess that are obscured by the hegemonic, nationalist narrative of Thailand’s three pillars of nation, religion, and monarchy.