Papaya Salad

by Felix Cheong

War memoirs usually announce their scars, complete with bandaged words that barely conceal old wounds.

Elisa Macellari’s Papaya Salad does something quieter, and perhaps more effectively. Her debut graphic biography retells the picaresque life of Sompong, her Thai great-uncle. When the young Macellari meets him at a family gathering, he regales her with his rags-to-rattled story—one so dramatic that it could only be true.

Born to a humble family, Sompong applies for and lands a Thai military scholarship. But before he can be sent abroad to a military academy in Berlin, World War II breaks out, and all hell breaks loose. He is then reassigned to Italy, but just when life gets comfortable, Mussolini turns the tables.

What follows is a series of unfortunate events as he is shunted from post to pillar, one diplomatic posting after another. History, or whatever it is called when it develops a cosmic sense of humor, keeps pulling the rug—even whole countries—out from under him. At one point, he and other staffers of the Thai embassy are mistaken for Japanese and interned. The only good thing to come out of this long-and-winding mess is meeting and marrying Lek, an ambassador’s daughter.

Page 156-157, Papaya Salad

What makes Papaya Salad interesting as graphic medicine is the distance between event and recollection. There is no couch, no diagnosis and no psychiatrist patiently peeling back Sompong’s trauma. Instead, we are given a man who seems to cut through adversity with the ease of a butter knife. Today, of course, we might be tempted to filter his experiences through the language of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): he might be dissociating from what happened, perhaps still processing it decades later.

But the book itself resists such easy retrospective labelling. Sompong does not present himself as psychologically shattered. He keeps a Buddha-like calm and carries on. The more interesting question is whether carrying on is the same as getting over, or merely getting through.

Macellari’s art style complicates that question. Her lines are delicate, her palette a pastel shade of prettiness, and her compositions often airy. Sometimes, she even leaves spaces audaciously blank on the page, as if the artwork itself needs to breathe. Even when history turns ugly—there’s a surreal scene of buildings around Sompong being bombed to smithereens while the Thai embassy remains intact, as if protected by a force field—the pages remain oddly graceful. There is no visual equivalent of a scream. At times, you feel that war has rolled right over Sompong without leaving its tired marks. Yet the gentleness may also be the point. We are not privy to trauma as it happens, but to trauma already sanded down by years.

That softening is central to the book. After all, Macellari is not recounting her own experiences but reconstructing someone else’s. Sompong remembers and records his past; Macellari first hears the story as a child, then rediscovers it years later in his diary before reconstructing it as a graphic novel. In other words, history has already undergone two rounds of editing. You are reading two possibly unreliable narrators at work.

This is where the book’s unreliability becomes part of its strength rather than a flaw. Memory is not a case note. You can’t stick a Post-it on it, come back later and expect it to remain exactly where you left it.

The title provides the clue—or the recipe. Whatever else has changed, or is about to, food in Papaya Salad remains the constant. It is a carrier of memory, intimacy and continuity. In fact, the book is structured around the recipe for the Thai dish, each section opening with a set of simple instructions that echo what follows.

Towards the end, when Sompong prepares papaya salad for young Macellari, the act becomes a kind of inheritance, something passed on through taste rather than testimony. History may supply the ingredients, but recollection decides what to cut up and discard.

Unlike revenge, memory is rarely served raw.

Felix Cheong is a Singapore-based author who has published 33 books across different genres, including eleven graphic novels. He is the author of the graphic medicine books In the Year of the Virus – A Poignant Look Back at the Time When the World Was Affected by the Coronavirus (art by Eko) and A Mild Case of Mass Hysteria (illustrated by Ritwick Roy & Riddhi Trivedi). In January 2027, Felix will publish another graphic medicine book, Opium: A War Story (art by Cheah Sinann). It’s about opium addiction and two Singapore doctors who start an anti-opium movement in 1905.