Where Rivers Part by Kao Kalia Yang (Simon & Schuster)

Kao Kalia Yang comes from a line of beautiful women who gave birth to beautiful daughters. All of them had a special closeness to their mothers and in this lovely history, Yang pays tribute to three generations of these strong and stunning Hmong women.

Beginning with her great-grandmother who was “unexpectedly beautiful…smart and able, though rumored to be promiscuous,” and moving on to the Bad Luck Woman, the grandmother whom Yang never knew except through the stories of her own mother, she then unfolds the story of Tswb, “Chew,” whose own bad luck is counteracted by her quick and determined mind, and who gives birth to daughters whose luck is shaped by the life their mother has made possible.

Chew’s beauty gives her an indulged childhood that ends with the death of her father and the war that takes her away from the village of fruit trees in blossom, where two rivers meet and diverge. In the midst of upheaval and death, Chew’s mother leads her children in a perilous and grueling flight through Laos’ jungles. 

This is where Chew first sees the man for whom she will leave her mother. Without hesitation, she marries Npis, “Bee,” a “song poet” whose lack of ambition is counterbalanced by his deep and unflagging love. He pulls her, their infant daughter, and his mother across the Mekong River into Thailand, and stands on the opposite bank with his skin torn into “pale ribbons of flesh,” shredded by the tubes of bamboo and the ropes that he clutched to bring his family to safety. 

But Bee had grown up in poverty. He lacked Chew’s background of comfort and education that drives her to seize all opportunities for a better life. After spending years of squalor in a refugee camp, she persuades him to seek repatriation in another country and two years later, Bee, Chew, and their two daughters are on a plane that will take them to Minnesota. 

In America, they “have been tossed through time.” Their daughters swiftly become fluent in English. Chew struggles through two years of night classes to attain a high school diploma while Bee fumes that she’s wasting time. She “should have just taken the GED test,” as he had. Now he studies through a community college to get a machine operating certificate. They all, parents and daughters, sit at the kitchen table every night, doing their homework.

 Chew is constantly pregnant and her children are predominately daughters. She is determined to break the cycle of “bad luck women” and through her efforts and example, her daughters go to Stanford, Columbia, Carleton College, the University of Minnesota. They live outside of what their mother had known when she “existed in a picture of need.”

Where Rivers Part is the third book in Yang’s trilogy that began with The Latehomecomer (Asia by the Book, April 2008) and The Song Poet (Asia by the Book, March 2021) . Each tells a different segment of Yang’s family history--her own memories of life in the refugee camp with her shaman grandmother and the story of Bee’s life as a child who had never known his father and who struggled to learn how to be a father himself after he and Chew were married. But the most tender and poetic of these three family histories is Yang’s story of her mother. 

The story of a girl who grew up in a gentle home, who loved to learn, who fell in love at first sight with a stranger and married him when she was still a child, who gave birth to fourteen children and lost half of them before they left her body, who returned to Laos after her seven surviving children were grown and realized her own mother was there, ready to welcome her home after she died, is told in words that give Chew’s life the luster of fiction and the blessings of truth.~Janet Brown

The Delightful Life of an Expat Crime Writer: Fifteen Journeys with Colin Cotterill and Dr. Siri (Soho Press)

Who would imagine that Hercule Poirot could ever be displaced by an unqualified coroner in his seventies who lives in Laos during the 1970s-80s? Or even more surprising, who would imagine that a middle-aged cartoonist with a background in physical education who lives in the depths of Thailand would become one of the English-speaking world’s leading crime writers? 

In 2004, Soho Press published a quiet little mystery called The Coroner’s Lunch that introduced Dr. Siri Paiboon, a medical doctor who becomes national coroner for the country of Laos simply because he is one of the few surviving physicians. Dr. Siri accepts the offer that he really couldn’t refuse and makes the acquaintance of his forensic team, a young nurse with a flair for foreign languages and an assistant with Downs Syndrome. Fortunately both Nurse Dtui and Mr. Geung have absorbed the finer points of Dr. Siri’s new profession. Siri’s contribution to the coroner’s office is a highly developed sense of skepticism and a distaste for bureaucratic obfuscation, which proves useful in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. He also learns that he has an invisible posse dogging his heels—a collection of spirits from the Great Beyond—who both help and hinder what becomes his real vocation. Siri is unable to view a cadaver without discovering its true cause of death and this leads him to amateur detective work, for which he has a natural flair. Joined by Chief Inspector Phosy and a friend of his youth, the irascible Civilai, Dr. Siri makes his way through fifteen books, solving crimes in a leisurely and amiable fashion.

The books that chronicle his crime career are permeated with the placid, unhurried pace of Laos time and many delightfully sarcastic jokes, along with those pesky spirits getting in the way. Over time, the characters grow older and happier. Siri falls in love with Daeng, a gorgeous septuagenarian noodle seller who learned the fine art of killing during the American War, and Dtui and Phosy become a couple. Even Mr. Geung finds love. 

Through the years, the books deepen with historical research, which has all but taken over the latest volume, The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot. When Dr. Siri is sent a package that contains a diary, with the first half written in Japanese and the second in Lao, this provides a serial drama, chapter by chapter, as Siri reads it aloud to Daeng every evening. Gradually an invisible character tries to dominate the book and Siri and Daeng go off to find why the journal ends so abruptly and who the writer truly was.

Suddenly the book becomes suffused with a kamikaze pilot, the Nanjing massacre, the Japanese occupation of Laos, and a fascinating but deeply disgusting pantheon of Japanese ghosts. Siri and Daeng have to work overtime to keep control of the plot but with fourteen earlier adventures under their belts, they’re more than equal to the task.

A man who has given the world fifteen volumes of Dr. Siri in sixteen years, Colin Cotterill is a master of the shaggy dog story, where the punch line is almost incidental to the plentiful and fascinating details. His characters have made these books irresistible, to the point that when the killer is discovered, it’s difficult to care. What draws his readers back are the members of this eccentric, delightful community—oh, and the titles help too. I Shot the Buddha. Curse of the Pogo Stick. Don’t Eat Me. (Cotterill was incensed when Soho said he couldn’t use The Devil’s Vagina for one of Siri’s mysteries. Whatever replaced it was much less memorable than the original, which was a direct translation of the name of a plant that grows in Laos.)

The real mystery at the heart of his latest book comes in a note of thanks at its very beginning. “This last book in the Dr. Siri series,” Cotterill says and ends his thanks with Sayonara. However since Dr. Siri is still alive at the book’s end, let’s hope the man meant “latest,” not “last” and that Sayonara is simply a form of homage to the Suicide Pilot. After all, Siri has the spirit world on his side and his creator has only “a number of deranged dogs,” a truth to which I can testify. I’m putting my money on the eventual reappearance of Dr. Siri.~Janet Brown

The Song Poet by Kao Kalia Yang (Henry Holt and Company)

When Kao Kalia Yang was eight, she saw a crowd of people weep at a Hmong New Year celebration as her father sang poetry, his words and music “blending hardship and harrowing hope.” The songs he created gave shape to the story of leaving one country for another and evoked the beauty and loss of what had been left behind,  “a reminder, a promise, of home.” 

Across the United States, Hmong people heard about Bee Yang’s songs and begged that he record them. He made a tape with six songs that yielded a profit of five thousand dollars. Instead of putting that money into another album, he turned it into “grains of rice and strings of meat” to feed his children. Although he continued to write songs and recorded them on a basic tape recorder, he never made another album again. But his poetry surrounded the lives of his children, who “took it for granted that this would always be so.”

Instead, when Bee’s mother died, he lost his songs. His poetry vanished.

What stayed with him were his stories that he embedded in the memory of his daughter, a girl who became a writer herself (The Latehomecomer, reviewed in Asia by the Book in April, 2008). Listening to her father’s recorded songs and translating his poetry into English led her to the story of her father’s life, from his birth in the Laos mountains to his struggles in the United States.

Hmong song poetry is an art in which the singer “raps, jazzes, and sings the blues;” it holds “humor, irony, and astute cultural and political criticism.” Kao Kalia Yang tells her father’s story in his voice, in answer to his songs, entering his heart, mind, and history.

Bee Yang never knew his father, a man who “did not live to see his son yearn for a father, or struggle to become one.” A child of two shamans, Bee searches for his own answers in the words of the people around him, looking for beauty within what he hears in his village and what he sees in the natural world within which the Hmong people coexist. 

When war makes Bee and his family flee for safety into the jungle, he falls in love with beauty in the person of a young girl, one whose spirit challenges and sustains him as they reach the safety of a refugee camp, get on a plane to live in America, and work to raise their children by doing jobs that would cripple their hands, tear at their lungs, and lacerate their spirits.

“When I speak English, I become a leaf in the wind,” Bee admits, as his children become interpreters of life in America and he a storyteller of life in Laos.He watches his children grow away from him as they work toward the goals he has set for them; his dream of them becoming doctors, lawyers, successful Americans. He rages at his oldest son who, racked by bigots and bullies at school, drops out and follows his parents into manual labor.  But in spite of the gaps that yawn between his children’s lives and his own, Bee’s family holds together, bound by the persistence of his love.

Haunted by the memory of an adopted brother who was tortured into madness by Laos soldiers and died as “a collection of open pits, broken trees, and burnt houses,” Bee longs to return to his country and honor his brother’s memory. Although his oldest daughter gives him a plane ticket to Southeast Asia, he’s stopped at the border between Thailand and Laos with the warning that if he crosses into his homeland, he will be killed. Instead he and his wife climb to a Thai mountaintop and stare down at a country where Hmong people once fought against Communism and from which they are now exiled as a result.

In the country that has never been his own, Bee, old, deaf, and physically beaten down by factory work, proves that his spirit is unbroken when he stands up against unfairness in his workplace and walks away, never to go back. “I leaned on my children, who told me “...Everything will be okay.” They help him buy a house on a hill where he gardens, raises chickens, watches his grandchildren play. “Each breath I take, each song I hear, gives my heart something to sing about, silent songs…”

Kao Kalia Yang has reached into her father’s poetry and used it to illuminate his life, honoring him and the many men like him, who live “in this land as strangers, beneath the foreign sky,” so their children can find peace. In a time when immigration is threatened, this book is a potent reminder of what the US owes to these men and their families.~Janet Brown

Run Me to Earth by Paul Yoon (Simon & Schuster)

Imagine putting together a jigsaw puzzle that when finished will become a Chinese painting done in ink, in which the empty spaces are as meaningful as the brush strokes. Imagine being caught by its slow beauty and subtlety, then feeling the awe that comes when all the pieces are at last in place. This is what happens while reading Paul Yoon’s Run Me to Earth, a novel that’s breathtaking in what—and how much—it reveals.

Three children serve as couriers for a makeshift hospital in an abandoned French villa, a refuge for people who are unlikely to survive. “The three orphans,” as they’re known to all now, ride motorcycles through fields made deadly by unexploded ordnance, bombies buried in the earth. Two boys and a girl, bound together by their early lives in a Laos village, where the houses were so close together that the sounds from one family’s daily living also belonged to their neighbor, live in the moment. They ride through the possibility of death every day to bring medicine and supplies back to the doctors who tend to the nearly-dead. Through war the three have become nomad children who know how to kill by plunging a needle of air into a vein, with the quick slash of a scalpel, or with the pistols they always carry with them. They’re certain they will never die; they “have learned from the dead” where to find the safe paths they’ll  take for their motorcycle journeys.

An old woman whom everyone calls Auntie directs the network of couriers that span the bombed country, a childhood friend of  the doctor who heads the hospital where the children live and work. She’s the one who engineers escapes into Thailand. She’s the one who will eventually clean and bury the severed head of one of the three children. She’s the one who sends a young orphan across the Mekong river, into a Thai refugee camp, a girl laden with “the intensity of a promise”—to find the child who made it to a world of safety.

That young girl, who becomes part of a Lao family that makes a life in upstate New York, learns in a small town ballpark not to recoil from the sight of the hurled baseballs that are the same size and shape as a bombie. As an adult, she travels in search of the survivor, bringing with her a tangible trace of the lives those three courier-children once shared, back when they were centaurs, half-human, half-motorbike, believing they were immortal.

Paul Yoon has created a masterpiece of loss and yearning, the story of the one who left, the one who went back, the one who went off the path, and the one who became burdened with the promise she made to someone she’s met only once. Every small detail of this spare novel is resonant with meaning; every description brands its poetry into memories so tangible they become the readers’ own: “Rain spraying on the windows,” a “moon the color of fire,” “the paling dark.” Run Me to Earth becomes the circle drawn in pencil on a scrap of paper that’s carried to the survivor, haunting, permanent, and never-ending, one that should be started again immediately after it’s finished~Janet Brown

The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill (Soho Crime)

The Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotterill is the first book in a mystery series set in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic in the late seventies when the communist Pathet Lao took power. The story features a seventy-two year old man with bright green eyes named Dr. Siri Paiboun. He is a forty-six year member of the Communist Party and is also a surgeon. Comrade Kham, a high-level government bureaucrat, tells Siri that he has been appointed chief police coroner...of the entire country - a position he could not refuse even though he has never done an autopsy in his life. 

Siri’s assistant, Geung, a young man who has Down’s Syndrome, informs that Comrade Kham’s wife is waiting for him at the morgue. She is described as a “senior cadre at the Women’s Union and carried as much weight politically as she did structurally.” What Geung fails to tell him though is that Mrs. Kham is in the freezer. Dr. Siri’s nurse, Dtui tells him that she was brought in because she died an unnatural death. 

Senior Comrade Kham had already been informed of his wife’s death and came to the morgue the next day. Kham was confident about the cause of death. He told Siri that his wife was addicted to lahp, a dish that is often made with raw meat. Dr. Siri says he cannot issue a death certificate until he can confirm that the cause of death was by parasites. Comrade Kham said that isn’t necessary as he had her own surgeon already sign it. 

Siri begins to suspect foul play when Senior Comrade Kham rushes to have the body cremated and goes as far as saying, “Even a man of science needs to show sensitivity to culture and religion” as the Comrade Kham was a member of the committee that outlawed Buddhism as a state religion and banned the giving of alms to monks. 

A group of men came into the morgue bringing a coffin to remove Mrs. Kham’s body. This is when Siri sees an ominous shadow of a figure behind the men who has a striking resemblance to Mrs. Kham. He saw the outline of Mrs. Kham run at Comrade Kham with full force with a look of hatred but vanished when she hit him making Comrade Kham shudder with a sudden chill. 

Fortunately, Siri still had Mrs. Kham’s brain setting in formalin. He knew he should leave it alone but his scientific mind wouldn’t let it rest. What if Mrs. Kham had been poisoned or worse yet, what if she had been murdered? And recently there have been three other deaths by unnatural causes and it appears that Comrade Kham may have had something to do with that as well. 

Cotterill weaves an engaging story with characters you can care for. He blends the tale with a good dose of humor and action and adds a bit of shamanism and spirits into the picture as well. The government and people really come to life and leave you wanting more. Fortunately, there are fourteen more titles in the series! ~Ernie Hoyt

Eternal Harvest : The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos by Karen J. Coates (ThingsAsian Press)

Many people do not know where Laos is located nor do they know its official name. It is the Lao People’s Democratic Republic and is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia bordered by Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, and Myanmar. It’s a beautiful and serene country. The people are very friendly and open but Laos is also a very dangerous country due to the amount of unexploded ordnance (UXO) that remain in the ground, left over from the Vietnam War.

“The U.S. military and its allies dumped more than six billion pounds of bombs across the land - more than one ton for every man, woman, and child in Laos at the time. American forces flew more than 580,000 bombing missions across the land, the equivalent of one raid every eight minutes for nine years.” “To this day, Laos remains, per capita, the most heavily bombed country on earth.” 

Eternal Harvest brings to light a problem still facing Laotians today. One of the most common types of munitions used were tiny bombs, called “bombies” which were designed to open in midair releasing smaller explosives over a large area to cause a maximum amount of damage. 

No one knows the exact numbers but even forty years after the end of the Vietnam War, many of these “bombies” didn’t explode on impact. “Millions of these submunitions fell into forests, where many lodged into treetops and scrub brush.” These bombies are the most common form of unexploded ordnance (UXO) and are very dangerous as well. Every year, around 100 to 150 people are injured or killed by UXO. 

Coates travels throughout Laos interviewing people who live with this constant everyday threat. She talks to farmers who have to work in their fields to grow food for their family. She meets people who search for UXO to make money from the scrap metal business and she interviews members of various bomb-disposal teams. 

Coates introduces us to Noi who was working in a field when a bomb exploded sending shrapnel into her face. She meets Lee Moua who makes utensils out of old bomb casings. She talks to Joy, a young boy with a metal detector he uses to look for scrap metal which could kill him. Coates also meets Jim Harris, a former elementary school principal from Wisconsin who gave up his job and now blows up bombs in Laos. 

This is one of the most fascinating books I’ve read about Laos, a country I had the opportunity to visit a couple of times. Coates makes me care about the people and the country. This would make a great compliment to people interested in learning more about America’s secret war in Laos and the effects it still has on the country today. It also makes you question why the United States government refuses to sign and ratify the Convention on Cluster Munitions which puts an international ban on the use of these weapons. As the country becomes more accessible to tourists, this book will make visitors more aware of the dangers of traveling off the beaten path. ~Ernie Hoyt

Available at ThingsAsian Books

In Laos and Siam by Marthe Bassene (White Lotus)

It's easy for us 21st century travelers to believe that the practice of adventure travel began with the creation of Lonely Planet, which encouraged anyone with a little extra cash to grab a backpack and a guidebook and set off on the road less traveled. Yet our modern adventures look rather pallid and tame when compared to the travels and travails of Marthe Bassene, a flower of the French colonial system in Vietnam, who went with her husband to visit Laos and Siam in 1909, a journey that at that time was a three-month excursion up the Mekong and into the jungle.

There were no roads, only the trails followed by trade caravans, and Mme. Bassene anticipates "difficulties...and some dangers." Crossing the rapids of the Mekong, with its whirlpools, submerged rocks, sandbars that could hold a vessel captive for months, and its gorges with "walls of rock eighty to a hundred meters high" was a daunting experience in a small steamboat, and one that passengers quickly learn to confront with sang-froid. ("Shut up," is the captain's response to Marthe Bassene's initial cry of fright.)

Her week-long trip from Laos into Siam is equally arduous, riding horseback along a mountainous, rocky trail through the jungle, soaked to the bone by rainstorms, and sapped by "the humid, tropical heat that knocks down all courage." Wearing her husband's clothes because her own are thoroughly saturated, riding barefoot because her shoes are dripping wet, Marthe dreams of sleeping on a bed with sheets, indoors, as she reposes on a camp bed near a bonfire that blazes all night to frighten away tigers.

Throughout her travels, Marthe's observations remain crisp and descriptive. The fragrance of Laos impresses her from her first day and follows her through the country, "a subtle and delicate perfume" that, she decides, "is simply the scent of Laos." Arriving in Vientiane, she finds traces of a ruined city that reminds her of Angkor Wat. Sacked by the Siamese in the previous century, the remains of the temples are shrouded by the roots of trees, covered by vines and brambles, and looted by Europeans as well as the Siamese conquerors. "The time is not far," Marthe observes, "when the Laotian gods will be everywhere, except in Laos."

In the kingdom of Luang-Prabang, she meets King Sisavong, a monarch with a French education and an "ironic smile", who tells her "that he often regrets having left Paris." His hospitality opens the city to Mme. Bassene, and allows her a comprehensive view of life in the palace and on the streets of Luang-Prabang. Visiting the markets, she reveals the beginning of globalization and its effects, as she discovers "poor-quality stuff...with English and German factory labels." Falling in love with the city, she decides it's "the refuge of the last dreamers."

When she arrives in Siam, Marthe finds herself a precursor of the bedraggled backpackers of the future, but as a Frenchwoman, she's well aware of the "distorted version of French elegance" that she presents. "My vagabond-like get-up," she remarks mournfully, "shamed me." As a Frenchwoman, she is also disconcerted by the independent, uncolonized Thai spirit; when forbidden to use a cabin on the upper deck of a boat because she is a woman, she threatens to complain to the governor of Phitsanuloke. "The governor governs the city, I govern my boat," she is decisively told by the Siamese captain, whom she characterizes as a "stubborn mule."

Given the imperial tenor of her time, and the length and difficulty of her journey, it's surprising that Marthe Bassene indulged in so little petulance and national chauvinism. It's equally surprising how easy travel has become in the past hundred years. In 2008, to replicate the trip that Marthe did in 1909 would be the height of masochism--if not completely impossible. But wouldn't it be fun--or at least interesting--to try?

Ant Egg Soup by Natacha Du Pont De Bie (Sceptre Books)

If you believe that one of the main reasons to travel is to find new things to eat and if your favorite souvenirs are recipes from the countries you explore, then Natacha Du Pont De Bie is going to be your new best friend. She's the kind of woman who goes to a country simply because she's intrigued by its food, "a tourist with an inquisitive nature and an empty stomach."

Discovering that there was only one book in print written in English about the cuisine of Laos, she tracked it down, found the man who published it, Alan Davidson,and learned that he as the former British Ambassador to Laos had been given a collection of royal recipes by the Crown Prince, shortly before the monarchy was dissolved by the Pathet Lao. That was enough to send Natacha to Laos, and in 2000 off she went with her copy of Traditional Recipes of Laos, determined to meet people who would show her how different contemporary Lao cooking was from that which had been set before the King.

Arriving in Vientiane just in time for lunch, she throws herself on the mercy of the man who stamps her passport in the airport and is immediately taken to eat raw laap. This may not be the most conventional introduction to Lao food for the beginner but Natacha loves it, telling both the reasons why and how to make it in kitchens far from Laos.

There are far too few books about traveling and eating in Laos, and for that reason alone this book stands out. But to recommend it on those grounds alone would be unfair to Natacha. She's a traveler who wants to go everywhere, eat everything, talk with her mouth full, peer over shoulders in every kitchen--and then tell stories about it all. She's not averse to drinking too much Beer Lao, or even more disastrously lao-lao, but is up the next morning to see what's for breakfast (coffee, bananas, rice balls, baguettes, honey, chili sauce, sticky rice and home-made papaya jam greet her during her first Lao hangover.)

She's the kind of woman who's never met a market she didn't like, and her journey through Laos is studded with descriptions of markets and how to cook the food that's sold there. And she's clever enough to go with people who can show her food that won't be found outside of Laos' national borders--like a sliver of wood called sa-khan that's put in stews and tastes "faintly metallic with a mere trace of clove" which,she says,"made the inside of my mouth tingle and zing" and gives plain water the flavor of lemon. Ant eggs have a mild, nutty flavor that prompts her to call them the "caviar of Laos" and she tells how to cook them, if you can find them frozen or canned. Or better yet, just follow in Natacha's footsteps and eat them in Salavan on the edge of the Bolaven Plateau. I certainly plan to--and I'll probably be there in the company of my battered and travel-worn copy of Ant Egg Soup.