Prabda Yoon: My First Time with Thai Fiction
When 1 + 1 is more than two: The tale that enchanted my mind
Immersing oneself in the works of the Thai writer Prabda Yoon means entering a subtle and profoundly human narrative universe. Known for his ability to explore the nuances of existence through original perspectives, Yoon has established himself as a significant voice in contemporary literature. His collection “Feste di Lacrime” [“Tears Celebrations”] published in Italy in 2018 by add editore and translated by Luca Fusari is a striking example, offering readers a series of intense and poetically evocative tales, often focused on the experiences and reflections of female characters. In English, the collection was released in 2017 under the title “The Sad Part Was” by Tilted Axis Press. The Thai version of “The Sad Part Was” was entitled “Kwam Na Ja Pen” and published in 2000. This collection of stories won the prestigious S.E.A. Write Award in 2002, establishing Prabda Yoon as a prominent figure in Thai literature.
Among these tales, “Diario di una Scolara” [Schoolgirl Diary] has particularly impressed me because of the character of Tong-Jai, a nine-year-old girl whose view of the world possesses a disarming depth. Her peculiar relationship with the number two has sparked a persistent reflection in me. Tong-Jai’s difficulty with mathematics is not merely a simple scholastic gap; it is a rejection of passively accepting conventions. Her questioning of the fact that “uno più uno fa due” ["one plus one equals two"] reveals a mind that is not content with automatism but demands an understanding of the underlying processes, with a freshness that adults often lose.
Her argument is striking for its originality and the depth hidden beneath an apparent ingenuity:
“Come fa a fare due? Aspetta. Se ne hai uno, da dove viene l’altro? E come fanno a fare qualcosa insieme? Questa è già una questione spinosa. Mettiamo che papà è uno, più un altro, che è mamma. Ovviamente fa tre, perché quando si sono uniti loro sono nata io, e facciamo tre. In più, mettiamo che l’unione di mamma e papà non finisca qui. Se mi arriva un fratellino, fa quattro. E se al mio fratellino arriva un fratellino, fanno cinque. Mettiamo che uno è una tigre e un altro un coniglio. Se li metti insieme, la tigre mangia il coniglio, e ne rimane uno. Mettiamo che uno è mercurio, e ci aggiungi mercurio: mercurio più mercurio fa un sacco di mercurio, cioè di nuovo uno.”
[“How does it make two? Wait. If you have one, where does the other come from? And how do they produce something together? This is already a thorny issue. Let’s say that Dad is one, plus another, who is Mom. Obviously, that makes three, because when they united, I was born, and we make three. Moreover, suppose that the union of Mom and Dad does not end here. If I get a little brother, that makes four. And if my little brother gets another little brother, they make five. Let’s say one is a tiger and another a rabbit. If you put them together, the tiger eats the rabbit, and only one remains. Let’s say one is mercury, and you add more mercury: mercury plus mercury makes a heap of mercury, that is, again one.”]
This stream of thoughts, far from being a mere logical error, is an exploration of the transformative dynamics that characterize reality. Tong-Jai intuits that the interaction between elements is not reduced to a mechanical calculation but generates something new, something different from the simple sum of its parts. The metaphor of the tear is particularly evocative:
“Mettiamo che cada una lacrima e si combini con un’altra, fanno una grande lacrima…”
[“Let’s say that one tear falls and combines with another, they make one big tear…”]
It is not merely a quantitative addition, but a qualitative transformation that generates a new entity. The young girl intuitively perceives that vital continuity which characterizes existence, where nothing remains identical in its encounter with the other.
This reminded me of the Tao Te Ching, particularly the verse:
“L’Uno genera il Due, il Due genera il Tre, e il Tre genera le miriadi di esseri”
(chapter 42, translation by Fausto Tomassini, Feltrinelli, 1977).
[“The One generates the Two, the Two generates the Three, and the Three generates the myriad beings”]
This Taoist phrase links deeply to this context, as it describes a cosmic process that is not mathematical, in which the One gives rise to multiplicity through dynamic, non-additive transformations. In this sense, the “Three” is not an arithmetic result, but a symbol of the emergence of new realities through the interaction of opposites (such as, for example, father and mother).
Just as I was letting myself be permeated by Tong-Jai’s rebellious logic, the text unexpectedly triggered a short-circuit in my mind: the idea of arithmetic as a creative, rather than a mechanical, act began to resonate with distant echoes. It is as if the purity of her doubt forced a breakthrough between worlds, dragging me toward territories I would have never associated with a nine-year-old girl.
And so, without premeditation, I found myself thinking of Schrödinger’s cat experiment, one of the most famous examples from quantum mechanics. Imagine a closed box containing a cat: as long as the box remains closed, we cannot say for certain whether the cat is alive or dead, because it exists in a “state of superposition” [“stato di sovrapposizione”] – a set of possibilities that coexist simultaneously. That “1” does not represent a fixed value, but contains within itself several potentialities; and if we add another “1,” we do not simply obtain “2”: the possibilities intertwine in a complex manner, defying the linear logic of addition.
When you finally open the box, the process of observation collapses the state of superposition into a defined reality – but until that moment, what might have been a simple sum reveals itself as a dynamic and uncertain intertwining of possibilities. This idea, which reminds us that reality is not always predictable and linear, in my view, strongly resonates with the way Tong-Jai challenges the assumption that “uno più uno faccia due” ["one plus one equals two"].
So, then, what is 1+1?
Mu.
Note: The English translations have been done arbitrarily by me from the Italian edition of the book "Prabda Yoon – Feste in lacrime, racconti dalla Thailandia" – published in Italy in 2018 by add editore. Also, the translation of the Tao Te Ching verse was done by me from Fausto Tomassini’s Italian version.
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