"It was like watching an artist paint a picture. First come the random brushstrokes, then bits of color, then shape. Eventually the complete image emerges and what a thrill to have been there to see it evolve. While these essays circle around the topics of love and divorce, they're also about renewal, finding love again, and, of course, the joy of fatherhood."—Debbie Hagan, Brevity
“In This Jade World Sukrungruang offers us a prayer and a meditation on the beginnings and endings of love. The love of parents and their children. The love among men and women. The love between the skin we live in and the memories we house. In this rare and beautiful offering, we experience a man undone by love and his journey to salvage hope in the face of incredible loneliness and doubt, a search for salvation found first in a dream.”—Kao Kalia Yang, author of Somewhere in the Unknown World and The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir
“It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that when seemingly happy couples break up we all wonder what the hell happened. In Ira Sukrungruang’s affecting and vulnerable memoir, This Jade World, he narrates the dissolution of one marriage and the burgeoning of another as a double love story, laced with wonder, grief, downward spirals, and mature reinventions. Set in both Thailand and the U.S., examined against an epic web of family domestic strife and rearrangement, this gorgeously written book illuminates the necessity and complexity of intimate joy.”—Barrie Jean Borich, author of Body Geographic and Apocalypse, Darling
“This Jade World is compulsively readable—its short chapters are polished stones, each delightful by itself while leading us on to another, another, until we’ve walked the road through the author’s divorce and into his new life and love. Mostly set during his yearly visits to his family, Sukrungruang offers a keenly observed Thailand—the monks slipping their cellphones into their robes, the tattoo artist praying before pushing his needle into the author’s back. And throughout we have the deepest pleasure—that of language charged with imagery, leavened with humor, and pierced with insight.”—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating and Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs
