After the Last Border by Jessica Goudeau (Viking)

The United States is peopled by the descendants of immigrants. Despite this, U.S. immigration policy has historically been ungenerous. Emma Lazurus’s poem The New Colossus, written in 1883, has always been the ideal, not the reality. “The huddled masses yearning to be free” have received a grudging welcome through “the golden door.” Jessica Goudeau vividly reveals this in After the Last Border, through the stories of two immigrant women and a concise history of America’s stance toward immigration.

A year before Lazurus wrote her classic poem, the US slammed the door on Chinese immigrants with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. A battle between restrictionists and liberalizers of immigration has been raging ever since, with racism fueling the restrictionist side. Like the president who would come long after their first appearance, restrictionists wanted “literate, upper-class, white, Northern Europeans without disabilities.” Even those criteria failed to save the 937 Jewish asylum seekers fleeing Hitler on the MS St. Louis in 1939. Refused entry into the United States, the passengers were sent back  to Europe where 254 of them died in concentration camps.

Scarred by that act of cruelty and fueled by the Cold War, U.S. immigration softened to allow entry to refugees from Communism. First the Hungarians and Cubans arrived, and after the signing of the Immigration Act of 1965 came Southeast Asians. But the policy ignored Haitian refugees and Nigerians who fled the Biafran war. Racism still lurked under the surface, limiting immigration as best as it could.

Goudeau shows the mercurial nature of U.S. immigration policy through the stories of very different women whose experiences diverge because of the rapid changes that can come to that policy without warning.

Mu Naw is the lucky one. She, her husband, and their two children arrive as refugees in Austin, Texas in 2007. Karen villagers who had fled Myanmar for the safety of a refugee camp in Thailand, Mu Naw and her family had never known security and they welcome the idea of resettlement. Young and rootless, the young parents find their new life is one where they can make a living, as sparse as entry-level positions will allow, and where their children can be educated. Mu Naw had lived in refugee camps since she was five. In spite of the challenges and hardships that come her way in Texas, she proves to be more adaptable than her husband and eventually more successful. When they buy a house in 2016, her husband admits this achievement is because of her efforts.

Hasna is less fortunate. In her midyears, she too comes to Austin, nine years after Mu Naw, with her teenage daughter and a husband who has been so badly injured that he’ll never work again. War in Syria disrupted her life as an affluent, educated, proud matriarch, sending her across the border into Jordan. When she’s advised to apply for refugee status, she turns it down--until she learns that family resettlement is a key provision in immigration policy. Her husband’s objections to this plan are silenced by an explosion that tears his body apart and her adult children are scattered across different countries. The thought that they could all be together again, along with the promise of medical care for her husband, propels Hasna into the bureaucratic thicket of paperwork and interview that will take them away from war to a family home in another country. She arrives four months before Donald Trump is elected president. Two months later, his ban against Muslim immigrants and his dismantling of the family resettlement policy turns Hasna’s dreams into a waking nightmare.

Jessica Goudeau’s skillful and intimate journalism gives the narratives of Mu Naw and Hasna the pace and detail of a novel, interspersing them with chapters that illuminate the policies that have shaped these women’s lives. What could easily have been a polemic is instead a quiet and heart wrenching history that is too little known by most of us and should be read by all.~Janet Brown

You’ve Changed: Fake Accents, Feminism, and Other Comedies from Myanmar by Pyae Moe Thet War (Catapult)

What happens when you’re taught a foreign language from birth at the same time that you’re learning your country’s own language? What happens when you’re praised for your success in English while your mother tongue languishes from disuse? What happens when your mouth accommodates sounds not extant in your native language, changing shape as it masters English? What happens when you’re told from the start of your life that English is more important than Myanmar and you’re sent away from home to perfect your mastery of the language of colonizers?

“Not all languages are created equal,” Pyae Moe Thet War learns at an early age. Later she reads in the National Geographic that “one language dies every 14 days,” with 230 vanishing between 1950 and 2010. With each death, a culture disappears. 

Pyae has spent her life fighting to keep her culture close at hand, even as her knowledge of her native language dwindles. In Yangon (still known more widely by its English name of Rangoon), her teachers at international schools struggle with the pronunciation of her name. While many of her friends and her little sister accommodate those in authority by adopting English names, Pyae keeps the name given by her parents, with all of its inherent challenges. 

“But what’s your Christian name,” the mother of her English boyfriend asks, happily ignorant that Pyae has never been Christian. When taking official examinations at school, Pyae is confronted with spaces for first, middle, and last name, while she has none of these. When she separates Moe, Thet, and War into these spaces, she’s faced with a name that isn’t hers. Her western friends stumble over the complexity of her name, although as she points out, “Elizabeth has no more syllables than Pyae Moe Thet War,” and nobody who finds the pronunciation of her name difficult has trouble saying “Elizabeth Taylor.” 

Living in English, Pyae exists without crucial external touchstones with Myanmar culture. In English, there’s no word for hpone, a concept that governs the way Myanmar women should do laundry. Hpone refers to the Buddha nature that every man is born with and every woman lacks. While the stupidest man in Myanmar could possibly embody the next Buddha, Aung San Suu Kyi never could--in fact her undergarments have the power to destroy a man’s hpone. 

For Pyae, hpone clashes with “slut walk” and the Vagina Monologues--and loses. Even in Yangon, Eve Ensler’s play has been staged, although the women in the audience probably still separated their underwear from male apparel when doing laundry. Pyae however does not. In this crucial way, she has stopped being “a good Myanmar woman.”

Instead she’s one of many “Brown people operating in white spaces,” for whom baking a cake becomes a small act of cultural transgression.  A much larger cultural gap destroys her seven-year relationship with an Englishman. If they were to marry, Pyae would lose her Myanmar citizenship and quite possibly her ability to go home again, while her UK residency would be predicated upon her husband’s income. Her marriage to a white man would break her father’s heart to the point that he might well disown her. Pyae makes her choice. She now lives alone in Yangon.

The very concept of “alone” is alien to Myanmar culture. Family is community in Pyae’s country and when she goes to a movie by herself, this is inexplicable, if not insane, behavior. Her friends understand but they too are “outside of the village,” as a Myanmar proverb describes nonconformists. When they’re together, they speak “Myanglish,” a hybrid language of English sprinkled with Myanmar phrases. 

Pyae is a writer who can’t write in her native language. Her grandmother and her father will never read her books. “I don’t want this to be a race book,” she tells her western literary agent. But as an English-language  writer of nonfiction, from a brown-skinned country whose culture has been overlooked and exoticized, not even Pyae’s well-honed sardonic humor can keep race at bay. From “cake” to “laundry,” language reinforces race with one superiority strengthening the other.  Pyae will always be a “Myanmar writer,” a truth for which we should all be grateful. With English, she illuminates her culture and pillories our own.~Janet Brown 

Clash of Honour by Robert Mendelsohn (Prion)

Clash of Honour is Robert Mendelsohn’s debut novel and was first published in 1989. The story will take you to Thailand, Singapore, Burma, Spain and Japan. It centers on the theme honor, deceit, betrayal, loyalty and obligation. It is mostly a story of revenge and how far a person will go to achieve their aims without giving thought to the consequences of their actions.

The story opens in Bangkok, Thailand in December of 1975. A young English woman, the daughter of a British soldier and a Spanish mother, has come to the country and is heading Bang Saray, the place where her father died. 

Anna Bellingham is the daughter of Lt. Derek Pritchard, a soldier who was captured by the Japanese Imperial Army after the fall of Singapore. She is determined to find a man named Yoshiro Katsumata in the hopes of leading her to his father, Lt. Keichi Katsumata,the man she believes was responsible for her father’s death.

Yoshiro Katsumata is a businessman climbing his way to the top of Sato Kaisha where he works. He may become the first outsider to head the family-owned company. He has no idea that a foreign woman would come looking for him to seek revenge for her father.

After the fall of Singapore in 1942, Lt. Derek Pritchard and an Englishman colonel, Dr. James Hedges became Prisoners of War. However, they were not sent to a P.O.W. camp. The two soldiers became a pawn in a secret mission for the Japanese government. 

As the story progresses, the reader begins to question what really happened between Pritchard, Hedges, and Katsumata. Of the three, it is only Pritchard who died in the war. Anna and Yoshiro are told the stories of their fathers by surviving members of the ordeal. 

Hedges was friends with the Pritchard family. As he was present in Bang Saray, Pritchard’s wife insisted on knowing the circumstances of her husband’s death. Listening to the evils committed upon the one she loves, she instills in her daughter the venom and hate against the Japanese and especially against Lt. Keichi Katsumata.

Yoshiro hears the story of his father from his father’s commanding officer. It is after Anna meets him and is seduced by her that he finds out the truth about her. He feels obligated to ask Pritchard’s family for forgiveness and believes it is his duty as a Japanese son to bear the responsibility of his father to retain the honor of the family name.

It isn’t until the very end where the reader learns the truth surrounding Lt. Derek Pritchard’s death and the motives of those involved. In this story the sins of the father do fall on the son but not all is as it seems. 

In this day and age, having the son bear responsibility for the sins of the father seems to be an outdated idea or at least one where the Bible is misinterpreted as it states, “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father.” 

Japan also has a feudal tradition called katakiuchi which is also the taking of revenge against someone who has killed an ancestor of the avenging party. Fortunately, in today’s society, it is against the law to take the law into one’s own hand. If not, who knows how many unnecessary deaths would continue. ~Ernie Hoyt

Gold Leaf and Terra-Cotta : Burmese Crafts throughout History by Ma Thanegi (ThingsAsian Press)

Myanmar is a country that was isolated from the world for a number of years. When Marco Polo first visited, he called it the “Kingdom of Mien” which is what the Chinese called it. Mien was derived from Myanmar whose name can be traced to a stone inscription found in Bagan and dated to be around 1235 AD. Then the British came and mispronounced the name of the majority tribe called the Bamar and called the country Burma. After the military junta took over, they changed the name back to Myanmar. There is still a lot of debate about which name should be the official name of the country. 

In this complicated country, Ma Thanegi was born. She has written numerous books on the culture and traditions of her native land. Gold Leaf and Terra-Cotta focuses on “Burmese crafts throughout history” but also gives the reader an easy to understand lesson in Myanmar’s history. As Myanmar is a mostly Buddhist country, many of the featured artifacts are related to the religion and its mythology. 

The founder of modern Buddhism, Guatama Buddha “warned disciples not to make graven images of him but to strive to achieve the highest and purest within their own hearts”. Five-hundred years later, his followers had either forgotten or ignored their master’s warnings and images of Buddha started to surface. Their need for “concrete symbols of faith have produced uncountable images and hundreds of thousands of pagodas and temples of all sizes”. 

“The first art in Myanmar, other than Stone Age cave paintings, were those with Buddhist themes on the temple walls of Bagan.” With those words, Ma Thanegi introduces us to Myanmar's fascinating history of arts and crafts. She also discusses the life of the royals, society in general, monasteries, Burmese spiritualism, and the feasts and festivals that are celebrated in her home country. Each chapter is followed by full color pictures of a variety of historical artifacts. 

In addition to images of Buddha, many of the art pieces are of celestial beings, spiritual beings called nats, ordinary items such as a hat box or betel box, book cabinets and a book trunk, puppets, mosaics and bas reliefs, all made with intricate designs. There are also a number of pictures of food caskets used for ceremonial purposes. One of the most interesting items is a pillow made of lacquered wood. 

I think one of the best ways to learn about a country’s history is through their art throughout the ages. It gives you an idea of their beliefs and customs and shows the greatness of the craftsmanship of bygone eras. The pieces are also wonderful to look at and appreciate. Ma Thanegi makes you want to visit her home country and discover Myanmar on your own. As the country had been closed for so many years that “many beliefs in old traditions and the appreciation for ancient crafts were both nicely preserved”. If we want to continue to see the traditional rural lifestyle, now would be the time to visit before the country gets inundated with Starbucks and McDonald’s! ~Ernie Hoyt

Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig (Grove Atlantic)

On a hot and airless afternoon last summer, I stayed inside and read Miss Burma, a strange book that took on the fictional-biographical shape of Vaddy Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, but much less successfully. This is a quasi-novel which is bogged down by its history, while the author should have stuck with the phenomenon who was her own mother, the legendary Louisa.

The book only flares into life when Louisa, Miss Burma, is on stage and again when she faces the future tragedy she has yet to know when she takes on the leadership left by her dead husband. But there is all too little of Louisa, far too much of her parents' history, and this sinks the novel.

An extraordinary woman who used her beauty wisely, Louisa remains legendary among the Karen, who claim that she is still alive, riding through the jungle on a white horse. Half-Karen herself, she grew up dominated by the politics of separatism and nationalism, a child whose life was war-torn and uncertain, who quickly learned that only her beauty could save her.

She covered her courage and her brain with the advantages given to her by her face and figure, until a general saw through her stunning mask and married her for the qualities that the rest of the world was eager to overlook. And that is the story of Miss Burma, padded much too generously with Louisa's mother’s life story and her father's role as a device to convey the country's history. As a novel it fails. It turns Louisa into little more than a footnote and thus it barely works.

But even so it sent me to the Internet to learn more about this woman and that means the author achieved at least part of what she wanted to do. Although Charmaine Craig's choice to focus on the efforts of her grandparents more than she did on her mother was a bad mistake, she probably thought it was the nobler approach. Her attempt to honor a wide panorama of history rather than the story of a beautiful freedom fighter who led guerrilla soldiers as a young widow, eventually married an American, and continued her struggle from the U.S. is praiseworthy but mistaken. Her passion lies with her mother and Louisa is the life of the book.

But it was a brave attempt and Craig deserves points for trying. I’ll keep the book for awhile and reread the ending that I raced through last night, history-bogged as it was. The final paragraphs are perhaps the most gripping of the entire novel but are also the most flawed. We know Louisa lived because she gave birth to the author, but we have no idea in what manner she survived her  crossing of the Salween River and her time of fighting alongside a brutal leader of men. One more chapter that took those last paragraphs and expanded them would have made such a difference in the entire work. It's a pity that Charmaine Craig didn't do it.~Janet Brown

Defiled on the Ayeyarwaddy by Ma Thanegi (ThingsAsian Press)

Of course it wasn’t Ma Thanegi’s fault that I found myself risking my life trudging beside a busy highway on the outskirts of Penang’s suburbs. Just because I was reading her latest book Defiled on the Ayeyarwaddy when I overshot my bus stop, so immersed in her longing to play the drums at a Kachin festival that I was half-way to the airport before I looked up and realized my error, I have no reason to blame that on her. God knows I’d been eager enough to rush downtown to get her book and bring it home—and it was my greedy curiosity that made me rip the package open before I even left the post office.

Just because I was still thinking about the stones she had found at the beginning of the Ayeyarwaddy River, which she had someone polish into smooth, cool beads and string into necklaces and bracelets, and was feeling blessed that she had given one of each to me, and wondered what they had looked like when Thanegi found them and crammed her pockets full—this was no reason to mentally castigate her while I walked cautiously along a little grassy strip as cars whizzed past me.

I tried hard not to let my mind wander to the prospectors who dredge one of the rivers that becomes part of the Ayeyarwaddy, looking for gold, wondering how similar they were to Alaskan gold panners, and forced myself not to think about the woman with the baby strapped to her back whom Thanegi talked to, the one who dreamed of finding lumps of gold as big as peanuts in the round wooden tray that served as her gold pan.

But as I realized my trek was taking me into the territory of a freeway and retraced my steps to find a less hazardous route, I began to think about the quiet villages and rock-strewn roads and the ice-cold, clear water that began Ma Thanegi’s 1300-mile trip down the Ayeyarwaddy river and felt envious. I roamed past squat, ugly, cement “link houses” with a strong pang of gratitude that I didn’t live in one of them and wondered why some women find themselves wandering in search of a bus stop while others boat-hop their way down one of the world’s great rivers.

When I found a bus that would take me home, I refused to allow myself to go any further with Ma Thanegi until I had entered my apartment. After all, it’s not as though I hadn’t read it before, I scolded myself, I’d edited it, for God’s sake. But even though at one point a year or so ago, I practically knew every page of this book by heart, I couldn’t wait to plop down on my couch and keep reading.

A whole day shot to hell, I thought happily as I sank back into Thanegi’s verbal company. Drat the woman, I echoed her long-suffering pal, Ko Sunny, here we go again…

Ma Thanegi is my friend; I am her editor at ThingsAsian Press. I can’t review this book. But I can lose myself in it, I can get lost while reading it, and I can tell everyone I know that if they want to meet one of my favorite people in the world, take a trip with her down the Ayeyarwaddy. Just don’t begin your journey while you’re still on a bus.~Janet Brown

Available at ThingsAsian Books

Burmese Light by Tom Vater and Hans Kemp (Visionary Press)

Stone Buddha statues poised near the golden evening glow of an intricately carved temple wall, the gleam of gold radiating from the legendary Shwedagon Pagoda that defines the Yangon skyline, a line of young nuns garbed in rose-pink robes—this book’s introduction to Burma is portrayed through images of that country’s strong spiritual faith, which underpins Burmese Light as it does the country itself. The beauty of its temples, the bare feet of monks as they walk on their alms rounds, the playfulness of novice nuns and monks who are still children, the 4000 temple ruins stretching across the plain of Bagan, all shown against a glorious open sky with its rich variety of light, are the images that comprise much of this book. They are almost otherworldly in their undisturbed relationship to the world that swirls around them, a backdrop that is both natural and man-made, enduring and temporal, changing faster in the past year than it has in previous decades.

A procession of oxcarts makes its way to a traditional village Nat Festival; there they will watch men in heavy make-up and ornate robes become mediums for the spirits that briefly take up residence within the body of the men who channel them. A heavily laden motorcycle transports young lambs to market, one sprawled across the driver’s lap, two more peering from a basket that’s tightly bungie-corded to a platform built over the rear tire. In Yangon the traffic that flows past the Shwedagon is decidedly more modern—vans, SUVs, shiny new automobiles. Burma missed a large portion of the 20th century; now it’s eager to leap into the 21st.  “By the end of the 19th century,” author Tom Vater says of Yangon, “it boasted public services on a par with those of London.” Infrastructure has crumbled since then and inhabitants are hungry for civic improvements.

Although showing colonial buildings in Yangon and the old palace moat in Mandalay, Hans Kemp’s photographs linger longest in the countryside where women sell bundles of firewood and men harvest rice by hand, where cheroots are smoked and betel is chewed, and women beautify their faces with swirls of a sunscreen and cosmetic paste ground from the bark of a thanaka tree. The diversity of the country’s people is well-represented in Burmese Light; with “some 135 distinct ethnic groups” bringing their cultures and customs to that of the Burmese, “who make up almost 70-90% of the population and dominate public life.” Beautiful, proud faces fill the pages of this book, jostling with the stunning landscape shots for pride of place.

In their creative collaboration, Kemp and Vater provide a taste of a country that is transforming itself, documenting Burma as changes began to come. This is far from a typical coffee table book. It’s a springboard into more exploration, more illumination, more… I'm begging for a sequel.~Janet Brown

Burma: Rivers of Flavor by Naomi Duguid (Artisan Books)

Whether you call it Burma or Myanmar, the country that lies below India, adjoins China, and borders Thailand, is a huge collection of highly diverse ethnic groups, each with their own customs and cuisine. “A cultural crossroads,” says Naomi Duguid, in her latest compendium of recipes, photographs, and stories, Burma: Rivers of Flavor.

Duguid has spent decades traveling through Asia with her family, steeping herself in daily life and learning different forms of home cooking. She first went to Burma over thirty years ago and has spent time roaming around the country, leaving the cities to learn the flavors of the Shan, the Karen, the Rakhine. Her photographs are generous in showing who she met and what she saw; her stories are enticing glimpses of a place that remains largely untraveled. From monasteries to market towns, from the serenity of 15th century temples to the devastation left by Cyclone Nargis, Duguid goes there and takes us with her.

But the glory of her books lies in the food she shares through recipes—and her latest is perhaps the most accessible to the Western cook. In common with their Southeast Asian neighbors, cooks in Burma use fish sauce and chilies and a multiplicity of fresh herbs. But the preparation involved is much easier, with fewer steps involved than in many Southeast Asian dishes—and the flavors encompass the Subcontinent and China too, with a distinctive local flair.

“Classic Sour Soup” is made with a fish stock, tamarind pulp, and bok choi—but “in Mandalay,” Duguid tells us, “…when the tall kapok trees are in bloom, cooks add their velvety, faded-red flowers.” Not a flavor the average cook will employ but will yearn to taste—this is Naomi Duguid’s trademark, to make home cooks long to leave their kitchens and eat in other places.

Bland potatoes become incendiary when a Rakhine cook is finished with them—first she boils them and then tosses them in a fiery shallot oil that’s been pumped up with lots of chilies. It’s a potato salad that will spice up potluck picnics in an unforgettable fashion.

And she tells how to make the country’s most famous dish—mohinga, a fish soup that is far more complicated than most of the other recipes but so very much worth the time and effort that it requires. With her customary generosity, Duguid gives both the Rakhine and the Rangoon versions of this –and tells a story attesting to the regional loyalty toward this “classic breakfast food.” Apparently no region can stomach another’s mohinga, which makes at least one prospective eater want to embark on a mohinga tour of Burma.

Duguid’s new book is a smaller size than her earlier ones, which makes it easier to use in the kitchen—and it is certain to be used. Perhaps more than any other cuisine she has explored, Burma’s is the most user-friendly to the Western cook, with hearty cold-weather dishes of stews and chutneys as well as salads, crepes, and desserts for lighter meals.

But when her book is first opened, it will keep readers going from picture to story to recipe, exploring Burma for hours in the company of a woman who is eager to share it. Burma: Rivers of Flavor may be the cheapest ticket to another country that you will ever buy.~Janet Brown

To Myanmar With Love: A Travel Guide for the Connoisseur edited by Morgan Edwardson and photographs by Steve Goodman (ThingsAsian Press)

Myanmar is often in the news and often for reasons that make people determined that they will never set foot in the place. To find any information about what lies beneath the government's actions and policies or the latest national disaster takes such effort that the casual inquirer is likely to give up long before any results are found. And yet a lingering desire to know about the people, the culture, the daily life of this much-maligned country continues to tease curiosity, unsatisfied--until now.

"You have to go," the editor of To Myanmar With Love was told by a traveler, "It's such an amazing place and the people are so sweet." Morgan Edwardson put aside his qualms and set off to see Myanmar for himself. He was so delighted that he "returned three more times in the following year. Each visit was unforgettable." He goes on to say that the people of Myanmar, "not the government, are the focus of this book."

And they are--as contributors to the essays in the book as well as the subjects of the essays, generously and wholeheartedly eager to share their country and their culture with the outside world. As one Myanmar citizen said, "Show people that my country is not some sort of hell."

This book does this so well and so vividly that readers will race through the essays, vicariously savoring noodles with Yangon gourmet Ma Thanegi, having a traditional teashop breakfast with Win Thuya in Bagan and other places, carbo-loading with Giles Orr before tackling the sightseeing glories of the Shwedagon Pagoda. With Robert Carmack they will explore the colonial glories of the Strand Hotel in Yangon, learn the pleasures of being derailed in Bago with Peter Walter and a friendly railway clerk, and watch the launching of fire balloons that are three stories high with Anne Marie Power in the Shan State town of Taunggyi.

Breakfast with 2,700 monks in the company of Morgan Edwardson, explore a forest where spirits reside with Hpone Thant, visit a market where not a single souvenir can be found with Guillaume Rebiere where "colors, fragrances, and sounds are all sewn together into a patchwork." Deep sea dive in the Myeik Archipelago with Graydon Hazenberg, find the elusive Ayeyarwady dolphins with Hpone Thant and learn how these extraordinary creatures help the local fishermen. Take a bicycle, a boat, a pony cart, a trishaw, or a slow, slow train. Learn the joys of chewing betel or the casual elegance of wearing a longyi or savor the sweetness of tamarind flakes dissolving on the tongue.

The two features that appear in every volume in the To Asia With Love series of guidebooks are particularly outstanding in this book.

Paying It Forward: Suggestions for giving back while you're on the road reminds readers that "a donation can include more than just money." Viola Woodward tells how travelers can help spruce up schools and monasteries with a coat of fresh paint by supplying the paint and the labor. Sudah Yehudah Kovesh Shaheb's chance encounter with beach vendors leads to a visit to their homes and a trip with then to Yangon. Jan Polatschek tells how to teach English at monasteries while passing through town. Kyaw Zay Latt explains how to help in orphanages, with a list of places to visit with addresses, and Janice Neider provides a list of items to give children instead of money or candy,

Resources for the Road offers a variety of annotated reading lists, suggestions for language learning materials, a wonderful essay on the bookshops of Yangon by James Spencer, and a comprehensive list of informational websites. And throughout the entire book, Steve Goodman's photographs reveal the faces of the Myanmar people and the beauty that is found in their country.

To go or not to go? That is a choice we all are free to make on our own. To know or not to know? For years we have had little-to-no choice in this matter. Now we can choose, and with that choice, now we can know the culture, customs, cuisine, as well as the luminous and gracious people, of this isolated country.

Available at ThingsAsian Books

More books on Myanmar at ThingsAsian Books

Myanmar Architecture: Cities of Gold by Ma Thanegi and photographs by Barry Broman (Marshall Cavendish)

What most of us know about Myanmar could be tattooed on the abdomen of a mosquito. When we try to learn more about the country, the books that most easily come to hand are either highly political, highly outdated, or highly unreadable.

Who would ever think that one of the best introductions to Myanmar, its culture, and its history would be found in a coffee table book, that genre which is usually very pretty, examined once for its remarkable photographs, and then is ignored until it's time to donate something to the next church rummage sale?

Myanmar Architecture: Cities of Gold does indeed have remarkable photography but the writing is what makes this book extraordinary. Ma Thanegi, author of the travel classic, Native Tourist, is a writer whose sentences sparkle with vitality and humor, and she uses that gift to make the history of her country more enticing to read than many novels are.

With forms of architecture serving as her structure, Thanegi leads readers through time, recreating the life of her country throughout its history, from its ancient and turbulent early kingdoms where temples were built and monarchies were elevated and toppled in bloodsoaked succession, into its imperial days of glory before the forces of Western imperialism barged in and took over, bringing with them their Victorian towers and turrets, dripping with gingerbread trim.

The lost civilization of Pyu that flourished for seven centuries and then vanished, leaving few traces of a people who were so devoutly Buddhist that they would not wear silk because "it involved taking of life"; Bagan, which, legend says, once held 4,446 temples, of which "today, ten centuries later, 2,230 remain"; Amarapure, where in 1795 a British envoy witnessed a daily two-hour procession of elephants, horses, servants carrying their masters' betel boxes that were made from gold, enlayed with gems, and, reported the envoy, were "no inconsiderable load for a man"; the Big Black House left from the days of the British occupation, which was made of teak and haunted by those who were massacred during the era of the British pirate, Samuel White--all are vividly described in sensuous details that are accentuated by Barry Broman's lush photography.<br

Most revealing of Myanmar culture is the chapter on Vernacular Architecture, which is where Thanegi discusses the rich traditions and customs that have guided her country through the centuries. Examining both secular and sacred buildings, she explains the reasons why homes were simple and temples were opulent, why homes were traditionally planned around trees and why houses of all social classes were raised above the surface of the earth. The home plans that she describes are still followed by some of her countrymen today, and the open veranda, the front wall made of folding doors, the smooth-planked floors, and the toilet placed at some distance from the main dwelling place sound so perfectly suited to tropical living that it seems absurd that all homes in Southeast Asia don't conform to that ideal.

For those who are curious about Myanmar, or for those who plan to go to that country and see it for themselves, this book is the ideal introduction--its size is its only flaw, making it an impractical traveling companion. But it does fulfill its original function quite well--in addition to its unexpected literary and historical value, it looks dazzling on a coffee table.

The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

Teza, known as “The Songbird,” lives in a cage, sentenced to twenty years of solitary confinement in a Burmese prison, a twenty-five-year-old man who wanted to be a rock star but whose Twelve Songs of Protest fed Burma’s rebellion instead. Locked away in a “teak coffin,” he is starving for food, for the touch of the woman who, during the first seven years of his imprisonment, married someone else, and for the freedom “to speak and be spoken to.”

Teza’s name means the fire of power and glory, and this fire lives in his voice. He sings his songs almost silently because to send them out for others to hear would add years to his prison sentence. He talks to the insects that live in his cell, to a jailer who becomes his friend and ally, and to the man who brings him meals and will betray him.

Within the walls of this prison lives a child of a man who had worked there until his death turned the seven-year-old boy into an orphan. Searching for a safe place, the child builds himself a shelter from bits of scrap and becomes an errand boy, carrying meals and messages and contraband to the prisoners. The prison is his world; he dreams of leaving to see Rangoon’s splendor but his fear holds him back. At twelve, he is a boy without a name, called Nyi Lay, Little Brother, who hoards old books given to him by prisoners but who cannot read, who never eats enough food to subdue the pain of his growing legs, and who has learned that to be silent is to be unharmed.

A cheap ball-point pen is the instrument of Teza’s betrayal and a treasure that inexplicably lands in Nyi Lay’s path. Soon after this new possession comes his way, the boy begins serving meals to a prisoner whose jaw is so badly broken that he cannot speak or eat without tearing pain, a man who pushes his food tray back to Nyi Lay and manages to utter one agonizing syllable, “Eat.”

Teza, brutally beaten and pulled back from death by a political system who values him as a symbol of imprisoned rebellion, is diverted from his morphine-fueled dreams only by the boy who brings him food that he cannot eat, a nameless, silent child who resembles Teza’s younger brother. He feeds Nyi Lay, speaks to the boy through the jagged pain of his broken jaw, and slowly, in a place of brutality and impotence and filth, Teza hatches a plan filled with hope and power.

Karen Connelly has recreated this prison world and its inhabitants with careful research and the piercing language of a poet. The Lizard Cage is not an easy book to read nor is it easy to forget once finished. It is a book that will haunt imaginations, inhabit minds, and perhaps change lives.

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