Catfish and Mandala by Andrew X. Pham (Picador)

Back in the 13th century, a Chinese diplomat named Chou Ta-Kuan may have been the first travel writer to voice the phenomenon that the 20th century called culture shock. Brought up to believe his country was the measure of all things, he was unsettled by the glory and splendor of the Khmer empire’s capital, Angkor Wat. Like many travelers who ventured into unknown worlds long after his death, Chou offset his rumpled world view with scathing derision of habits that differed from his own. This is a palliative that contemporary travel writers continue to use as an antidote to discomfit, from Paul Theroux to an obscure Englishwoman who made the ill-fated decision to make her home on Pitcairn Island and lived to tell the tale.

Andrew X. Pham was broadsided by culture shock. He never expected it to happen when he went to Vietnam. He was returning to a place where he had lived for the first half of his childhood.  He was coming home.

Pham’s parents left when Vietnam was still emerging from its war with the U.S. From the time he was ten, Pham lived with a new language, new customs, and memories of his old home. Nearing the end of his twenties, he’s lost his job, his apartment, and a sister who dies after choosing to become his brother. Faced with the prospect of moving in with his parents, he takes his savings, his bicycle, and a few clothes and gets on a plane to Vietnam. His plan is to bicycle from Saigon to Hanoi and use the story of his journey to propel his career as a freelance writer. He knows the language, he knows the codes of behavior, he’s a seasoned cyclist. What could go wrong?

Thomas Wolfe could have answered that question. Pham enters a country where his memories have been eradicated during the past decades of rebuilding and change. Without knowledge of the progress that’s taken place since the end of the war, he’s disgusted by the poverty that surrounds him. He discovers he’s no longer seen as Vietnamese; he’s a Viet-kieu, one who left for the safety and comfort of another country. Worse still, he’s a Viet-kieu who came back with no gifts for relatives and who is so careful with his money that he’s perceived as stingy. Suddenly Pham is an outsider and an unwelcome one at that. 

Rejected by the people he thought were his own, Pham’s vision fixates on the misshapen, the crippled, the women with with “hungry vacant eyes,” men who “perk up like coyotes” when they see him pulling into town in his American clothes, on his American bicycle. He meets a taxi-dancer whom he thinks he could love, until she discovers he won’t be her avenue to a green card. In Hanoi he becomes the patron of a boy who lives on the streets and is passed on from traveler to traveler. He leaves town without saying goodbye.

“The sight of my roots repulses me. And that shames me deeply.” Pham admits. The only monument that impresses him are the tunnels at Cu Chi and the kindnesses shown him as he makes his journey seem to be outweighed by the anger and envy that he excites along the way. One old man takes him home, gives him a place to sleep, and shares meals with him, telling him “Here is my home, my birthland, and my grave.” A younger man tells him, “Some call you the lost brothers. You are already lost to us.” And Pham at the end of his journey realizes “my search for roots has become my search for home,” and that home is not Vietnam.

His honesty in recounting his multi-leveled odyssey is stark and blunt; the story he tells is a young man’s way of looking at the world. At the same time, this is a tale of adventure through in an unknown land, which Pham describes without overlooking its beauty. His descriptions are riveting and appreciative glimpses of the natural world and his bicycle trip rank right up there with the worst journeys ever taken, in terms of pain and injury. His travels are underpinned with family history and tragedy, both in Vietnam and within the U.S., making readers wonder if the price of immigration may be too high a cost in the long run.~Janet Brown

Storywallah by Neelesh Misra's Mandali (Penguin)

Neelesh Misra is an Indian journalist, musician, writer, and the founder and editor of Gaon Connection, “India’s biggest rural media platform”. He is also the founder and CEO of Content Project Pvt. Ltd, a company that is “home to some of India’s best emerging writers, collectively called the Mandali”. 

Storywallah is a collection of short stories written by the Mandali. All of the writers originally wrote their stories in Hindi. The stories are as varied as the writers who come from all across India. In this collection, Misra features twenty writers including bloggers, teachers, a university professor and journalists. 

Kanchan Pat’s Wildflower is about an Indian daughter named Nemat who was brought up in Scotland by her mother. The mother left Nemat a letter after she died and in the letter asks Nemat to read it “not as a daughter but as a woman”. Now Nemat finds herself going to India, to a small town called Kosi in the mountains. She was going to seek help from the person she most hated - her mother’s lover. Her mother’s letter had caused her anguish but found that she couldn’t hate her mother nor forgive her. She was going to meet Anirudh Thakur which will help her decide “whether she would love Ma or hate her for the rest of her life.”

In Letters by Analuta Raj Nair, the protagonist is a sixty-year old man who is retiring from government service after working for thirty-five years. He had been working on his autobiography when he chanced upon a bundle of letters from a girl named Anamika - his first love. He has never told his wife about her and has never shown her any of the letters. The man wants to include his one and only love story in his autobiography “as if to make a dishonest relationship honest, legitimate” but is afraid to tell his wife of thirty some years. 

Nails by Umesh Pant centers around a girl named Simmi who’s about to get married and questions if she’s doing the right thing when on the day of their engagement, her fiance, Sumit,  says to her, “Yaar, the least you could have done was cut your nails. You know I don’t like these long nails.” Simmi tried to make light of the situation but noticed that her fiance looked more upset than he looked. But his response, “It’s not just a matter of a nail, Simmi” would not leave her mind.

The above are just a taste of the stories you will encounter. The other seventeen stories are all about everyday people living everyday lives. They all share a universal appeal as they focus on family relationships, love and betrayal, doing what’s best for the family or having the family and others decide what’s best for the person in question. Many of the stories are about finding who you really are. Each story is so different yet they all share a common quality, one in which anybody can see themselves as the main character in the stories. ~Ernie Hoyt

Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith (Random House)

How far will far will we go to find the life we were meant to live? How do we learn to use what lives inside us, haunting us? 

Winnie Nguyen, half Vietnamese, half white American, comes to Saigon on a one-way ticket, bringing with her “a passport, two sets of clean clothes, and her own flesh.” The suitcase she carries is almost empty. So is Winnie. She becomes an English teacher because it’s the easiest job for a foreigner to get, she reads cheap novels as her class pretends to work on amorphous assignments, she buys clothes in drab colors that will let her fade into the background. She has no friends yet no reason to return home. When she disappears, nobody, not even the man who has taken her into his life and his bed, has any idea where she might have gone. Winnie has lived without a trace and her disappearance mirrors the way she lived.

Binh is an orphan, brought up by relatives. She’s a rebel, a child without fear, who’s followed faithfully by two brothers. When the boys grow up and leave her, Binh remains in the village, still a girl who follows no rules and has no ambition, until she becomes obsessed with revenge.

Winnie is a woman who has never felt at home in her body. Binh has never been at rest within hers. They wouldn’t have ever met if not for the two brothers who loved Binh and left her when they went off to live in  Saigon. Long, the younger brother, has tried his best to love Winnie. Tan, the older of the two, has been cursed by a death that troubles his dreams and brings Binh back into his life.

This novel begins with a page that holds the names of all the characters, followed by several detailed maps. They are essential clues to the story, which moves with what seems to be a dizzying incoherence between 21st century Saigon and the highlands of Vietnam from colonial times through the Japanese occupation. The characters are so diverse that they seem random. They are not. Each one of them, from the homesick French farmer who yearns for the taste of gougère to the peasant girl who is seduced by a dissolute plantation-owner, from a fortune-teller who can transform his face into a mask of inhuman flexibility to a wealthy villager’s beautiful daughter who goes missing in a forest that’s infested with venomous snakes—they all carry clues to solving the jigsaw puzzle that Violet Kupersmith has skillfully constructed. 

The ghosts of Southeast Asia are a horrific lot that put the pallid spectres of the West to shame. Kupersmith has added a new one to the pantheon, one that can become either a blessing and a torture. But this is not just a ghost story, or a mystery, although it combines both of these elements. Within its rich and enigmatic plot is a satirical examination of expats in a world that they try desperately to sanitize, a portrait of Saigon that embraces its ugliness as firmly as it describes the city’s allure, the psychological dissection of an unraveling personality, and the fragmented history of lost girls who each find their own way of belonging in the world.

Kupersmith has written a novel so compelling that it’s tempting to race through it in one sitting yet it’s complicated enough that it calls for another reading to immediately follow the first. She’s created a world that’s both repulsive and seductive—one that’s gone unvisited until she brought it into life.~Janet Brown

Mistress Oriku : Stories from a Tokyo Teahouse by Matsutaro Kawaguchi (Tuttle)

Originally published as Shigurejaya Oriku in Japanese in 1969 and available for the first time in English, Mistress Oriku : Stories from a Tokyo Teahouse by Matsutaro Kawaguchi and translated by Royall Tyler focuses on the life of the owner of the famous Shigure Teachouse, Mistress Oriku. It is set in the early Showa era, sometime around the 1920s. 

Oriku, who is now in her sixties, grew up in the Asakusa area and is currently talking to another native of Akasuka, Shinkichi, who is in his late twenties, about life in the area during the Meiji period, some forty years ago. Oriku’s Shigure Teahouse which also served as an inn was built along the river in Mukojima, an isolated area on the outskirts of town. The place looked like a farmhouse and contained eight tatami floored rooms. The house specialty was chazuke, green tea over rice, served with clams brought in from Kuwana on the Ise coast. 

Oriku was telling him, “you could drop a line in the river from the garden of my place and catch a sea bass”. She was telling Shinkichi that people jumped in the river from the jetty in the summer, they didn’t swim but just cooled off in it which proves how clean the river was. They were both lamenting on how Tokyo changed over the years and how the Sumida River has become so dirty. 

Oriku was also telling Shikichi, “People nowadays don’t even know what good food is anymore. They have sake with some tuna sashimi, then some shrimp tempura with their rice, and they think they’ve eaten well.” She goes on to tell Shinkichi that people can’t eat sashimi or tempura three days in a row but at the Shigure Teahouse “you can eat clam chazuke three-hundred and sixty-six days of the year and never get tired of it.”

As the two continue to talk, Oriku tells Shinkichi that before she started her restaurant, she worked in the Yoshiwara District, the pleasure quarters which was created by the Tokugawa Shogunate in the 17th century. She was sold to a brothel called the Silver Flower at the age of eighteen. She tells Shinkichi that she was on her way to becoming a courtesan but became the mistress of the owner, and then worked there herself, not as a prostitute but as brothel madam after the owner died. 

At the age of forty, Oriku leaves the Silver Flower to her adopted daughter, Oito and her husband and opens the teahouse. Everybody around her said it was a bad idea but she was adamant about following her own dream. 

Kawaguchi brings to life the Tokyo of bygone days featuring geishas and artisans, actors and musicians performing a certain style of theater such as kabuki and noh. He blends real life historical figures and locations along with the creations of his own imagination. He portrays Oriku as a feminist before her time. She’s strong and passionate, does what she thinks is right and has no shame in taking on a number of lovers but refuses to settle down with any one of them. 

Although Kawaguchi’s Oriku wasn’t born in Edo, she epitomizes the spirit of the true Edokko, a person born and raised in Edo, the former name of Tokyo. Timeslip into the past and enjoy the journey. ~Ernie Hoyt

Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So (Ecco, HarperCollins)

They’re California kids, doing their homework and killing time in their parents’ shops, smoking dope, having sex, wearing teeshirts that extend to the knees of their baggy jeans, stealing packs of their dads’ cigarettes, envying the kid who drives a Mustang—but as one of them says, “carrying...the aftermath of war, genocide, colonialism.” They call themselves Cambos, these children of people who came to the U.S. in flight from the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia’s Auto Genocide, of people who have “clawed their way to a livable and beautiful life,” ”always thinking on the past and worrying for the future.”

As the kids memorize 50 Cent lyrics and watch Boyz in the Hood, hang out in a mall “that did so badly Old Navy shut down,” they balance their parents’ ambitions for them with the weight of the word “survivors.” They attend ceremonies for infants who have come into the world carrying the spirits of dead relatives who have chosen these babies for their rebirth. They put on the robes of monks to ensure that their prayers will allow a dead parent to pass easily into the next life. The simple act of drinking a glass of ice water can provoke a father into saying “There were no ice cubes in the genocide.” Even when they go off to college and begin to enter a larger world, they’re still haunted by the “dreams of the dead...the ghosts of all our suffering.”

At home, their mothers watch Thai soap operas since that’s the closest form of entertainment to what they once knew in Cambodia. A family wedding means “300 Cambos in the Dragon Palace Restaurant” with a singer imported from Phnom Penh. The wife of a man who triumphed over his early years by becoming a doctor in his new country clutches her Louis Vuitton purse and offers an easy way to become rich. All a Khmer boy needs to do is marry a wealthy girl from Cambodia and bring her to the U.S. A young teacher in San Francisco finds a man on a dating app who’s Cambodian and comes from his part of California. Before finalizing the connection, he checks to be certain that the man isn’t some unknown second cousin. His new boyfriend serves him a meal that both of their mothers once cooked for them, but it’s been transformed into health food; “ the essential ingredients were there but it looked disfigured, like it’d been extinct and was then genetically resurrected in a petri dish.”

In the final story of this collection, a mother tells her son “I’ve always considered the genocide to be the source of all our problems and none of them. Know that we’ve always kept on living. What else could we have done?”

The trauma of atrocities becomes part of the genetic code and is passed down to following generations, living in the bodies of the children of survivors as much as the stories of genocide live on as retold memories. “If you think that I’m interesting,” Anthony Veasna So told an interviewer, “it’s probably because you’ve never met someone that’s come from my particular context.”

It’s true that “his particular context” had never been revealed in fiction before. It’s also true that he tells his coming-of-age stories with a sardonic humor and a bitter compassion that’s powerful and irresistible. The tragedy is we enter the lives of his characters only after So’s own life came to an end. He was never able to hold Afterparties as a finished book and he will never write the four other books he had planned to bring into being. Dead at 28, a writer who had already been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Granta, and Zyzzyva, So has turned his first book into his epitaph.~Janet Brown

Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics by Frederick L. Schodt (Kodansha)

Originally published in hardcover in 1983, Manga! Manga! is still the definitive book that introduces the world to Japan’s multi-billion dollar industry - the world of manga or Japanese comics. It is also the first book to take a serious look at the phenomenon in English.. Although it isn’t a bestseller, the book continues to sell and is often used in university classes on Japanese pop culture. This is an updated edition that was published in 1986. It is currently 2021 but this book is still relevant today as it was when it was first published back in the early eighties. It is not a comprehensive history of the subject as that would take hundreds of volumes to accomplish and would require many additions. 

Schodt, who studied Japanese at International Christian University in Japan and graduated in 1972 was awarded a scholarship from Japan’s Ministry of Education to further his education in translation and interpreting. After completing his advanced studies, he and a few students contacted Tezuka Productions, the animation studio started by Osamu Tezuka, to get permission to translate Phoenix into English. 

The Foreword is written by Osamu Tezuka, considered to be the God of Manga. He is also known as the Walt Disney of Japan. He is the creator of not only Phoenix but Tetsuwan Atom , Jungle Emperor and Ribbon no Kishi, which are known in the U.S. as Atom Boy, Kimba the White Lion, and Princess Knight.

Just to give you an idea of the magnitude of this business, in 1984, over five billion books and magazines were produced in Japan. Almost thirty percent of the total were manga in either book or magazine form. Even in 1984, “some enterprising reporters have discovered, Japan now uses more paper for its comics than it does for its toilet paper.”

Unlike American comic books, which usually consists of thirty or so pages with a large number of those pages dedicated to advertisements and is purchased mostly by young boys who read it and adult men who collect them, Japanese comics are first serialized in a comic magazine. They are then compiled into books and can run thousands of pages long. 

Schodt provides a chronological history of the manga starting even before the term manga was used. One of the earliest examples of manga Schodt talks about are the Chojugiga or “Animal Scrolls” by a Buddhist priest named Toba from the twelfth century which comprised of “Walt Disney-style anthropomorphized animals in antics that mock Toba’s calling - the Buddhist clergy.” 

As Japanese manga evolved, from kamishibai which is a form of street theater and storytelling to what it has become today. Manga artists began to gain not only fame but became quite wealthy too. However, the competition is fierce and the work is hard as all the work is usually done by one person - the artist who must think up the storyline, draw the pictures, and meet deadlines. This becomes even more difficult if the artist is writing and drawing manga for multiple publications. 

The latter half of the book introduces the reader to a few examples of Japanese manga. Included are excerpts from Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix (Hi no Tori), Reiji Matsumoto’s Ghost Warrior (Borei Senshi from the series Senjo), Riyoko Ikeda’s The Rose of Versailles (Berusaiyu no Bara and Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen), a comic based on his experiences before, during, and after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. 

The manga business continues to thrive in Japan. One of the most recent manga which caused a social phenomenon was Kimetsu no Yaiba, known to the English-speaking public as Demon Slayer. As with many of its predecessors, the story got its start in one of the comics magazines, was compiled into book form, then an anime series was created, followed by a full-length feature film, not to mention all the merchandising that accompanies successful stories. 

The manga industry continues to grow and has become popular in other countries as well. There seems to be no end in sight for manga and all the would-be manga artists who are hungry for the fame and fortune it may bring. ~Ernie Hoyt

Malaya: Essays on Freedom by Cinelle Barnes (Little a)

“We had everything, then we had nothing. But I always had books and dance.” When Cinelle Barnes is asked about her childhood in Manila, this is how she sums it up, “like the summary of a fairy tale.” But within the space that ought to have been the fairy tale’s happy ending, Barnes comes perilously close to losing everything—books, dance, and her strength. She leaves the Philippines when an aunt on Long Island decides to adopt her and gives her everything she wants, including a Communion-white dress as a gift on her seventeenth birthday, which she will wear to INS offices as soon as her adoption is finalized. There an immigration officer tells her she’s two years too late, to become naturalized by adoption she should have been there before her sixteenth birthday.

Paralyzed by depression, Barnes lies in bed at her sister’s house, unable to brush her hair or her teeth. “My spirit or gumption or essence departed from my body.” Barnes’s sister knew of only one way to cure her, by forcing her to move and took her to work at the cleaning company their brother has launched. Slowly Barnes returns to life, graduating from high school and working her way through college as a cleaner, a waitress, a nanny—jobs that don’t require proof of legal residency. She doesn’t choose U.S. citizenship until she has a degree and is married, with a child. A year after that her first book, Monsoon Mansion, is published and Barnes decides her epitaph will include the words “telling stories that dragged them out of their fiction.”

Her stories are mosaic—a tile here, another in the opposite corner. Their jagged honesty drags readers out of their fiction and the fluid beauty of her writing keeps attentions riveted until her entire story comes into focus. Barnes’s success happens in spite of this country, not because of it. She shows that even for a smart, ambitious, determined immigrant who arrives from a former U.S. territory with English as a primary language, brown skin ensures a long series of barriers and micro-aggressions. She makes it plain that sad stories kill as efficiently as cigarettes, if they aren’t brought to the surface to be heard. She flinches when her child tells her “I want to be a writer” and hopes the little girl will choose to be a physicist instead.

Soon after her daughter is born, living in a southern state where her husband’s family has roots going back for over 200 years. Barnes longs for some facet of life that belongs to her alone and takes up surfing lessons. She finds a teacher who gives lessons for free, tough, blonde, looking like a character from Blue Crush, and a mother. Happy to have met another woman with “a proclivity for dangerous sports, Barnes invites her new friend to come over for tea. When she asks the woman what she did before taking up surfing, she’s told she’s talking to a former drug delivery girl who never got caught. “Nobody will stop a young blonde girl, that’s the truth. We just get away with things, you know?”

Barnes, who never had the luxury of breaking the smallest law for fear of deportation, who couldn’t get on a plane or even order a cocktail, who lived “in perpetual hiding” forces a grin in response and hides her anger. “I’m Brown, an immigrant. I’m forever clean.” And in one story of one encounter, she nails white privilege to the wall, leaving none of us white women exempt.

Cinelle Barnes has laid claim to the personal essay and has made that form her own. Her stories etch themselves upon the minds of their readers, with their fierce tenderness and unwavering truth. I hope with all of my white-privileged heart that her next book finds a home with a publisher that is not owned by Amazon.~Janet Brown

The Book of Saladin by Tariq Ali (Verso)

The Book of Saladin is the second book in Tariq Ali’s Islam Quintet. Although it is the second book in the series, each book can be read as a stand alone novel. The story is based on the real life historical figure of Al-Nasir Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub. Salal al-Din or Saladin as he is known to Westerners was a Sunni Muslim Kurd who became the first Sultan of Egpyt and Syria and served under the sovereignty of the Caliph of Baghdad. He was also the Muslim leader who led a campaign against the Franj (the Franks or Holy Crusaders) and retook the city of al-Kuds (al-Quds) which is the Arabic name for Jerusalem. 

Many of the other male characters are also based on actual historical figures such as Saladin’s father, brothers, uncles, and nephews. Ibn Maymun is the great Jewish philosopher who is also known as Maimonedes. The women are Ali’s creation as there are no records of the women from the Sultan’s era. 

In Ali’s novel, the story is narrated in three parts by Isaac ibn Yacob. It starts off in the city of Cairo, Egypt, then continues in Damascus in present day Syria and the conclusion of the story leads to al-Kuds or Jerusalem in the Levant which includes present day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and most of Turkey east of the Euphrates. 

Ibn Maymun came to visit Ibn Yacob on a cold night in 1181 according to the Christian calendar. On the same evening, Yacob receives another visitor which he surmised was for his friend. The visitor was unknown to Yacob until Ibn Maymun addressed him as “Commander of the Brave”. Ibn Yacob realizes he is in the presence of the Sultan.

The Sultan has come to Ibn Maymun to ask for advice on finding a scribe to whom he could dictate his memoirs. It is Ibn Maymun who recommends Ibn Yacob but suggests but tells the Sultan, “Your request poses a problem. You are never in one city for too long. Either the scribe must travel with you, or we will have to find another one in Damascus.”

The Sultan surprises both Ibn Maymun and Ibn Yacob. He says, “And a third city beckons. I hope to be visiting al-Kuds soon.” al-Kuds or Jerusalem is still under the power of the Crusaders. It was an occupied city. Ibn recognizes that the Sultan has just announced his intention to take al-Kuds back from the non-Believers. The following day, the Sultan begins to dictate his memoirs.

Ibn Yacob has no choice but to follow the Sultan to Damascus and then to Jerusalem to continue to write about the Sultan’s life, his thoughts and his exploits. As the scribe to the sultan, he spends more time in the palace than he does at home which causes a rift in his marriage. To complicate matters further, he made a surprise visit home, only to find his good friend Ibn Mayum on top of his wife!

Ali’s attention to historical detail makes this fictitious biography and memoir not only entertaining but educational as well. The story still hold true today as the forces of Islam and Christianity continue to clash. Even now, in the 21st century, the future of Palestine and the Middle East is still in turmoil with no resolution in sight. It makes you wonder if religion is actually, “the root of all evil”. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Road to Sleeping Dragon by Michael Meyer (Bloomsbury Publishing)

What booksellers categorize as travel literature comes in two different sorts of books: the ones written by people on the move and the ones who go to another country and stay put. Within that second category are three different sorts of writers--the poetic, idyllic ones, the ones who become instant experts, and the ones who realize that their new home needs to be earned, paid for with mistakes and mishaps, many of them comic. 

Michael Meyer understands that from the outset when the Peace Corps sends him to teach at a small college in a Sichuan town for two years. Here he encounters students with English names that are rarely sported by native English speakers, girls named Rambo, Dinger, and Chinatown, boys who call themselves Carnegie and Wiseman. Since Meyer has been given the Chinese name of Heroic Easten Peach Blossom, he’s in no position to laugh. He knows from experience that this sort of mirth stings. While on an ill-fated solo bus ride that concludes his two-month training period, one that ends in bloodshed and a first-hand look at rural Chinese police crime deterrance, he learns to steel himself for the merriment that comes from bearing a name more commonly given to girls.

Attacked by food poisoning, he goes to a doctor who hands him a prescription for watermelon and Pepsi. A winter cold is medicated with Coca-Cola boiled with sliced fresh ginger. It takes three weeks for letters to reach the U.S. and in the pre-internet days of 1995, posted correspondence is an essential lifeline. His advisor tells him to “teach the Beatles,” and later in his academic career he’s given a course simply called Movies.

“The Peace Corps attracts curious people who are comfortable being alone--one reason, perhaps it had incubated so many writers, “ Meyer speculates. He finds that what Aldous Huxley called “the reducing valve” that modulates and pigeonholes sensory impressions doesn’t operate in his corner of Sichuan, where everything is fresh and new, never experienced before. “I’m hyperaware,” he writes to his mother, “but also exhausted.”

At the end of his two-year stint, he’s grown accustomed to the mild electric shocks provided by his morning shower, has become a local basketball star, and is no longer greeted by passersby with faintly pejorative shouts of “Laowai.” Reluctant to leave China, he applies for a job in a Beijing international school, where his Sichuan dialect and his habit of an afternoon break for three hours immediately mark him as a country bumpkin. 

No longer restricted by the Peace Corps’ ban on dating local girls, Meyer falls in love with a co-worker. Lily is smart, ambitious, and fiercely Chinese. When Meyer greets her dream of studying in the West by questioning whether she would ever want to return home, she almost breaks up with him. Instead when the school’s winter break arrives, she invites him to spend Christmas at her family’s home in Manchuria. Meyer walks into the house and is greeted with a fully-trimmed Christmas tree, wrapped presents for him resting beneath it. “You are home, “ his future father-in-law tells him.

Lily’s acceptance at San Francisco State begins the couple’s long period of separation. Meyer becomes a travel journalist and the author of The Last Days of Old Beijing, his account of living and teaching in an old  Beijing neighborhood with the lack of of personal privacy that comes from using a communal toilet. When the Olympics are scheduled to happen in Beijing, he’s asked by a local police officer to teach him “English vulgarities so I’ll know when a foreigner is cursing me.” Official police courses teach dialogues like “Dissuading Foreigners from Excessive Drinking” along with the indispensable phrase “Don’t pretend to be innocent.”

Even though his Chinese work permit proclaims that he’s a “foreign expert,” Meyer never lapses into the role of an omniscient Old China Hand. He keeps his sense of wonder and mercifully never loses his sense of humor. His love for his other home in the world is contagious; this book should be required reading for every foreigner who plans to visit, work, or live in China.~Janet Brown

The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years by Chingiz Aitmatov (Indiana University Press)

Chingiz Aitmotov’s debut novel, The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years was originally published in an 1980 issue of Novy Mir, a Russian literary magazine. It was subsequently published in book form in 1981 with the title The Railway Siding Burannyi. This English language edition was published by Indiana University Press in 1988

The story is set in the early years of the Cold War at a remote railway station called Boranly-Burannyi in Soviet-era Kazakhstan. “On either side of the railway lines lay the great wide spaces of the desert - Sary-Ozeki, the Middle lands of the yellow steppes.”

“In these parts any distance was measured in relation to the railway, as if from the Greenwich Meridian”. 

“Trains in these parts went from East to West, and from West to East…”

Only two families have actually settled in this lonely place. The main character Burrannyi Yedigei, “so-called because he had worked at the Boranly-Burannyi junction ever since he returned from the war” and his wife Ukubala and their long-time friend Kazangap.

On a cold, winter night, Ukubala has come to inform her husband that their friend Kazangap has died. Although Kazakhstan is a part of the communist Soviet Union, most of the people who live in the region are Muslims. Yedigei makes it his responsibility to pray over the body and to inform Kazangap’s son about his father’s death. He also needs to inform his two daughters and their husbands to come to Boranly-Burannyi as well. The daughters may not be blood relatives of Kazangap, but they were born in Boranly-Burannyi and knew Kazangap well and cherished him. 

The rest of the story takes place in a single day as Yedigei makes arrangements to have his friend Kazangap buried at the cemetery of Ana-Beiit which is located about thirty-kilometers away from the Boranly-Burannyi junction. Yedigei is the only one of the current residents at the railway station that knows how to get there although everybody has heard about the cemetery as there were many legends surrounding the place and the person it was named after. 

Yedigei leads the way to the cemetery sitting astride his camel, Karanar, that Kazangap had given to him as a gift many years ago. Kazangap’s son Sabitzhan and his sister Aizada, along with her alcoholic husband have also come to Boranly-Burannyi to make the trip to the Ana-Beiit cemetery. 

As the entourage makes their way to the cemetery, Yedigei reminisces about his early life before the war when he lived as a fisherman along the Aral Sea. He talks about his own history and the history of his people, mostly to himself, always thinking about Kazangap, who was the person to convince him to move to Boranly-Burannyi. 

Aitmatov includes a subplot about two cosmonauts, one Soviet and one American who have made contact with intelligent extraterrestrial beings and have gone to visit them on their home planet of Lesnaya Grud without informing their superiors. After Ukubala informs Yedigei about the death of his friend, Yedigei witnesses a rocket launching into the air. Although rocket launches are infrequent they are usually announced beforehand and a great celebration is held. This launch was unannounced. At the same time, a rocket from the desert of Nevada has also taken off to meet with its Soviet partner at the Soviet-American space station called Parity. 

The two concurrent stories deal with the questions of tradition and progress. The central character recalls legends from the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan, published at a time when the nation was still a part of the Soviet Union and challenges the status quo as the hero is an ordinary worker who wants to bury his friend in the Muslim tradition of the Kazakhs.

The subplot of making contact with an intelligent alien species and how the governments of the U.S. and Soviet handle the situation leads one to believe that the two countries aren’t working in the name of progress but are focused on thinking of ways to keep themselves in power. It’s a reminder that even governments are afraid of what they don’t understand.

The book is a great introduction to the Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan. The land may be barren but the book brings to life the culture and traditions of a country most people could not find on a map. ~Ernie Hoyt

Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala (Knopf)

On the day after Christmas, 2004, Sonali Deraniyagala is chatting with her friend at a Sri Lanka beach resort. Her husband is in the bathroom and her two sons are absorbed by their Christmas presents. Suddenly her friend looks out at the sea and says. “Oh my god. The sea’s coming in.” The two women watch as waves grow larger and come closer. They call to their families and then they all run.

A jeep moves by, stops, and picks them up but the water finds them, filling the interior of the vehicle until it reaches their chests. The jeep turns over. 

Sonali is alone, spinning, within the wave, feeling crushing pain, her chest hurting as if it’s “being pummeled by a great stone.” Time moves slowly enough that she pinches herself on the leg to wake herself up, hoping that she’s dreaming. Her head finally moves above the water and she begins to float, a screaming boy beside her. She looks to see if he’s her child. He’s a stranger and she puts him out of her mind. When she sees a tree branch above her, she grabs it and her feet touch solid ground in “an immense bogland,..a knocked-down world.”

She wonders if it was the “end of time,” which it is, for her. From the beginning she knows her husband and children are dead. She berates herself for not warning her parents before she and her husband ran away to save their sons. She feels disconnected from everyone she sees, from other survivors at a hospital to her brother andf his family when she returns to Columbo. She wants to die and knows that as soon as she has the strength, she will kill herself.

Her relatives stick by her side. Friends come from her home in England. She lives in agony, wondering why she and her husband had insisted that their children have two homes in the world, England and Sri Lanka. This now gives her two countries where she encounters all that they longer share. 

When her brother empties the home of their parents and rents it to a Dutch family a year after the wave, Sonali begins to haunt it. She pounds on its gates every night,, telephones the tenants at two in the morning, rings their doorbell, leaves and then comes back to do it again. Without peace herself, she refuses to give the right of living in peace to these strangers who have invaded her past.

When she returns to England, the life she used to have with the dead people she loves still fills the house they lived in. Ordinary objects pierce her wherever she looks and when her academic career as an economist offers her the chance to live in New York, she grabs it with the same savage desperation she had used to clutch the tree branch while engulfed in the wave.

It’s not until she returns to the Sri Lankan beach where she and her family were last together that she can look at the past without being stabbed in the heart. The eagles that her oldest son loved to watch are still there. When she ventures out onto the sea on a whale-watching expedition, the blue whales that fascinated her son come to the boat and Sonali sees “burst after burst of glowing blue,” the immensity of a tail breaking through the water. One of the whales comes close enough that she can hear it breathe; she believes it releases “a doleful sigh.” 

Her memories no longer cut through her with jagged edges. “I can only recover myself when I keep them near,” Sonali realizes. With deep generosity and great love, she has turned her vanished life into art and her pain into a terrible and blinding knowledge that all of us are afraid of, that all of us, she says, would be able to survive.~Janet Brown

The People's Republic of Desire by Annie Wang (Harper)

The People’s Republic of Desire is Annie Wang’s version of “Sex and the City”, replacing New York City with contemporary and urban Beijing, China and focuses on three upwardly mobile women - Niuniu, Lulu, and Beibei. The story is narrated by Niuniu as she and her friends discuss all sorts of topic that used to be taboo in Chinese society such as sex, divorce, and watching pornography. 

Niuniu is American by birth but returned to China when she was five years old as the Chinese government “called on ‘patriotic overseas Chinese’ to return to their homeland to build ‘a modern, strong China’”. Her parents emigrated to the United States in the mid-seventies. Her mother, Wei Mei, was the daughter of revolutionary opera performers. She has been married three times and currently socializes with Beijing’s ex-patriot circle. Her father, Chen Siyuan, was an orphan from Taiwan. He is in his second marriage, his current wife being his former secretary and is only eight years older than Niuniu. They are about to have a baby. 

Lulu and Beibei are Niuniu’s childhood friends. They met when they were students at Beijing’s Jingshan School. Beibei is the oldest of the three, seven years older than Niuniu. Lulu is four years older. The school included grades one through twelve all on the same grounds and the three were fighting with some boys over the use of a ping-pong table. Beibei was in high school, Lulu, a junior high student, while Niuniu was still in elementary school. However, Niuniu liked hanging out with older kids. The three of them became inseparable friends. 

Niuniu was educated in the U.S. and received her B.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri at Columbia and got her M.A. in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley. She is now in her twenties and is currently working as a reporter for the World News Agency in Beijing. She is considered one of the members of the xin xin renlei who are considered the “new” new generation. They are the Chinese generation Xers and Yers who enjoy hanging out at bars, have multiple sex partners, and get plenty of use out of the Internet. As a returnee, Niuniu says she’s sometimes called a fake. The local Chinese call her a jia yangguizi - a “fake foreign devil”.

Lulu is the executive editor of a fashion magazine called Women’s Friends. Although she was offered high paying jobs after graduating from Beijing University she chose to be an editorial assistant at a fashion magazine. Fashion magazines were still new to Chinese society, “that few people could afford to buy them and the pay for working there was low.” Now, she is the number two person at the magazine. She “enjoys wearing expensive high fashion numbers from designers like Gucci and Versace.” Lulu is also in love with an artist named Ximu who has brought her nothing but bad luck. 

Beibei is the president of a successful production company. She has been married for seven years and has had a number of lovers. Her current boy-toy is called Iron Egg. She is the daughter of a Chinese general and doesn’t hesitate to use your connections for personal gain. Beibei hangs out with Niuniu and Lulu almost everyday as if she were still single.

Wang entertains the readers with the exploits of the three women and others as they try to find love and happiness on their own terms, however, it is mostly about Niuniu finding herself and discovering the strength to do what she needs to do. The story reads more like a continuous episode of “Friends” with elements of “Sex in the City” and “The Joy Luck Club” featuring strong women characters who are not afraid to speak their minds. ~Ernie Hoyt

Welcome to the Bangkok Slaughterhouse by Father Joseph Maier (Periplus Editions)

There are few heroes, let alone saints, among Catholic priests nowadays, but Father Joe Maier qualifies as both, although he would vehemently deny that. For over fifty years, he has lived and worked in Bangkok’s most notorious slum, one where other foreigners fear to tread. 

Now in his 80’s, Father Joe entered a seminary when he was a high school freshman and was sent to Thailand in 1967 by his order soon after he was ordained at the age of 28. A young rebel who protested the Vietnam War, this Grateful Dead fan was given one of the “most remote and undesirable assignments,” as his friend Jerry Hopkins says in the book’s introduction. He ended up in a hovel surrounded by a community of hovels, in the part of Bangkok where livestock are slaughtered by residents who are not prohibited from this work by Buddhism. Many of them are Catholic, so Father Joe wasn’t there to proselytize and win converts. His job was to take care of people whose religious beliefs mirrored his own.

In 1971, he guided Mother Theresa through his parish of Klong Toey. She told him “to stay in the slums, where the need was great.” He’s still there.

Every month or so, Father Joe wrote stories about his community for the Bangkok Post, which were collected and published in this book. They are heart-wrenching without being maudlin. Father Joe lives among people who have no time for sentimentality and little time for grief. He tells about them with a straight-to-the-chin approach, laced with a degree of humor and a lot of love, presenting them as heroes, even when they fail.

First he shows the children: nine-year-old Note who was born with AIDS and whose best friend is Galong, a thirty-five-year-old man who was born with Downs Syndrome and is mentally younger than the boy who takes good care of  him; Miss Naree, who at the age of eight, and with very little money in her hand,  took her friends on an unsanctioned outing from Father Joe’s Mercy Center for a visit to the zoo on the other side of the city; twelve-year-old Pim who was arrested as a drug courier, whose life was threatened by the man she testified against, and who was released into the care of Father Joe’s staff of nuns and volunteers.

The Mercy Center is a refuge, a place to live for mothers and children with AIDS, where adults with AIDS who can no longer take care of themselves are cared for, where 250 children who have no other place to live are given a safe home. It houses a preschool with over 500 students, a “successful slum women’scredit union”, a jobs program for disabled Khlong Toey residents, an AIDS hospice--and a house for Father Joe. A stipulation that came with a huge donation said the funds would be given only if he moved out of his tin-roofed shack in the middle of the slum, for health reasons. 

Father Joe ends with a stark view of his Slaughterhouse community. Khlong Toey is a village where nobody owns the land they live on, where a fire in one house can destroy thirty others in a few minutes, where truck drivers deliver livestock and buy drugs, where selling amphetamines for high-level dealers is the easiest way to keep a family afloat. He singles out heroes who have defied the odds: Miss Froggy who grew up in the Slaughtehouse and stayed on as a teacher and community activist, Miss Kanok-tip who heads a group of other disabled women in the Five Kiosk Workforce, selling snacks and soft drinks from streetside stalls, running their own businesses; Samlee whose uncle kept her in school up through high school graduation even though the family lived under a bridge and who now teaches kindergarten, making sure her own children have an education. He never mentions his own efforts.

It’s left to his friend Jerry Hopkins to tell us who Father Joe really is—a man who enjoys a cold Heinekken, who hasn’t “cut the four-letter words from his conversational vocabulary,” who lived in a squatter’s shack for twenty years as he “focused on redemption, the act of being set free, or saved” in this life, this world, not the next. Still a maverick, he told CNN “Buddhists and Muslims taught me how to be a Christian.” When guiding visitors through the Slaughterhouse, he laughs as he says of himself and of “those for whom his dreams were built,” “We’re mad. Barking mad.” But his is divine madness, in the truest sense.~Janet Brown

* * * * *

All proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Human Development Foundation, a non-denominational, community-based organization that gives aid to over thirty slum communities in Bangkok.

www.MercyCentre.org

BPO-Sutra : True Stories from India's BPO & Call Centres edited by Sudhindra Mokhasi (Rupa & Co.)

BPO-Sutra is a book best described by its sub-title, “True stories from India’s BPO & Call Centres”. The book is a compilation of stories told by ordinary people who work in the BPO and call center industry. Editor Sudhindra Mokhasi highly recommends reading the glossary first to acquaint the reader with all the jargon associated with BPOs. What’s a BPO? BPO stands for Business Process Outsourcing. It is a method of subcontracting various business-related operations such as tech support and payroll to third-party vendors. 

Aside from BPO, in order to truly appreciate the stories, the reader should familiarize themselves with the meanings of the acronyms ISP, AHT, COPC certified, SME, NCNS as well as some other terms used in the industry such as cold calling, call escalation, call monitoring, captive center, offshoring, etc. 

The meanings of the acronyms are as follows: ISP (Internet Service Provider), AHT (Average Handling Time), COPC certified (Customer Operations Performance Center) which is an organization the evaluates and certifies BPO companies that meet and maintain certain standards), SME (Subject Matter Expert), NCNS (No Call No Show) - a term used for employees who don’t call or show up for work. 

Cold calling refers to the practice of making random calls to people to promote a product or service. Perhaps one of the most hated aspects of the business as cold calling refers to telemarketers. 

Call escalation is when the call exceeds the amount of time allotted to the agent to deal with the customer to resolve issues. If the call goes beyond the allotted time, the call is then transferred to a supervisor or manager. 

Call monitoring is a practice where calls made or received by agents are monitored by quality analysts and managers to assess the quality of their call agents. 

A captive center is not a prison, it is a company-owned offshore operation where the work is also done offshore by the people hired by the company. The practice of offshoring is when one country has their work done in another country where labor costs are usually cheaper, saving the parent company hundreds, thousands or millions of dollars. 

In the early years of the 2000s, many U.S. companies were offshoring to India. Major corporations such as General Electric and British Airways proved that offshoring office work to India was a viable option. “More importantly, the world had suddenly discovered that there were millions of English speaking smart Indians. It couldn’t have been a better time.”

The stories are separated into six self-explanatory categories related to BPO life - Calls, Work, Travel, Home, Scams, and Parties and Weekends. The book invites the reader to “join us as we party One Night in Every Call Center.”

It’s almost a given that most Americans hate telemarketers and do not like dealing with call centers, however, this book gives the reader an insight to how the call centers work and by whom they are run. It is a highly informative introduction to the common practice of Business Process Outsourcing. 

One of earliest BPOs to be established were the call centers and this book gives the reader an indepth look as to what goes on inside such a place. The editor reiterates how call centers are numbers obsessed. “Everything in operations is converted to a metric, metric and monitored. Take Average Holding Time (AHT) for example. AHT is used as a measure for effectiveness of an agent. Tough luck if you get a dim customer.”

The stories range from the hilarious to the absurd. There are some pieces that are moving and some pieces that will just make you shake your head. You will laugh, you will cry and you definitely will not be bored. Remember, the next time you receive a call from a telemarketer saying his name is Sean, chances are he’s an Indian speaking with an American accent to try to sell you products or services for a multi-national corporation. ~Ernie Hoyt

City Gate, Open Up by Bei Dao, translated by Jeffrey Yang (New Directions Books)

Few books have surprised me as much as Bei Dao’s memoir of growing up in Beijing in the 1950’ s and 60’s. I picked it up certain that I was going to be faced with another “misery memoir,” tales of cruelty and deprivation during China’s Great Step Forward and Cultural Revolution. Instead this book recreates Beijing as it once was, an account steeped in the world of the senses and told through the point of a view of a child. 

When he returns after a thirteen-year absence in 2001, as his plane prepares to land in the city that had been his home, he’s dazzled by the light that sprawls below him, “like a huge, glittering soccer stadium.” In the houses of his childhood, there was no lighting stronger than 14 watts and some bicyclists when traveling at night lit their way by carrying paper lanterns. The darkness was a time for playing hide-and-seek, telling stories, acknowledging the presence of ghosts. The new glare of fluorescent light immediately makes him “a foreigner in my own hometown.” 

His hometown from the past is rebuilt with the precision and beauty of a poet, which is what Zhao Zhenkai has become famous for, writing volumes of poetry under the pen name Bei Dao. History is a dim background to the sense memories that Zhao uses to reconstruct his neighborhood in Beijing, a place filled with the smell of coal smoke and dust. The seasons are marked by other odors: winter is characterized by the smell of white cabbage, which every family buys in amounts of almost four hundred pounds, peeled, sun-dried, and stacked as a bulwark against months of cold and hunger.  Spring is announced by the blossoms of apricot, pear, and peach trees, their fragrance “so intense it made people dizzy, lulling them to sleep.” Summer has the faint perfume of the yellow flowers of pagoda trees followed by autumn’s smell of chalk dust and fallen leaves with their “bitter aroma of strong tea.”

His neighborhood rings with village noises: the crowing of a neighbor’s rooster,  the cries of  street vendors, the sounds of wagon wheels and horses’ hooves on the pavement, the “ruckus” of cicadas, those “pure noisemakers.” One night another boy takes Zhao to a a dark street where he hears the “disordered cilp-clop”  of a herd of donkeys that will soon be food for the carnivores in the zoo.

Food is a recurring theme that takes on greater strength with each chapter. Childhood treats of frozen icepops and White Rabbit candy with its edible rice-paper wrappers, along with the horror of cod liver oil that’s doled out every morning, give way to a savage hunger. Discarded vegetable trimmings that Zhou gathers to feed his pet rabbits are confiscated by his mother and turned into the family’s supper. Later, before the rabbits die of starvation, his father kills them to provide a feast that Zhao and his siblings tearfully refuse to eat. Boys dive for freshwater clams in a city lake to augment the cabbage and yam diet that has made the neighborhood swell with dropsy.

Childhood games of shooting marbles, rolling hoops, and spinning tops become subsumed in the excitement of lighting firecrackers that turn into battles  with gangs of boys besieging each other, “as if we were preparing for a war.” “The day the Great Cultural Revolution Broke out, I remembered the pungent smell of my first firecracker.”

And when life changes forever on June 1, 1966, “countless boys and girls served as the source of that energy.” At first the Cultural Revolution feels like a game that frees students from facing examinations. “All classes were dismissed, the term over; I cheered with relief, flitting about like a joyful sparrow,” Even when he and his family take his parents’ cache of banned books from the attic and burn what Zhao had regarded as his treasure, he feels “a stealthy thread of delight.” 

“I became king of the children,” and Zhao leads his neighborhood gang to the home of a man rumored to have once fought with the Kuomintang. Gleefully they  shave his head and imprison him in a basement for days. “After that, bumping into him on the street was like meeting a ghost.”

What had been a childhood that echoed Dylan Thomas’s memories of Christmas in Wales is warped into Golding’s Lord of the Flies. “His bold vision,” Zhao says, had been a ruthless reality for us.” “The stench of blood spread across Beijing” and violence shattered the city that had been a childhood idyll. 

But in 2010, I experienced three seasons in the same area that Zhao grew up in. In the evening, little stone houses on narrow streets gleamed with dim squares of light, trees furled in emerald canopies along the lake where he used to play, old men in an outdoor market sold bamboo cages that held crickets, on weekends women held bouquets of balloons for sale. And everywhere there was food in glorious abundance: piles of fresh pineapple, stalls where women made pancakes to order, bakeries filled with cakes and cookies, and the omnipresent smell of grilled lamb skewers. Everywhere I went I saw children, eating.

What was lost? What’s been gained? Who can measure this? But thanks to Bei Dao/Zhao Zhenkai, we can remember a world we’ll never know..~Janet Brown 

Soldiers in Hiding by Richard Wiley (Picador)

Soldiers in Hiding is narrated by Teddy Maki, a Japanese-American, who currently lives in Japan. Maki is the host of his own television program titled Original Amateur Hour. When Teddy sees a news item about a lost Japanese soldier coming back to Japan, he begins to relate how he and his friend Jimmy Yamamoto ended up in Japan in the first place.. 

Teddy Maki and his close friend Jimmy Yamamoto started a band after high school and they were quite successful. Jimmy managed to get an agent to book shows in Japan. Their Japanese agent called himself Ike and Jimmy and Teddy were his only clients but Ike managed to get the two many gigs and the two arrived in Japan in the winter of 1941. Ike also encouraged Jimmy to pursue his sister Kazuko in a romantic way. 

Jimmy and Kazuko got married at the end of November after a very short courtship. A week after the wedding Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Although Teddy could speak Japanese, he was not proficient at reading. He could read a little and made out the words for America, recognized the face of Admiral Yamamoto and saw the kanji character for war.

Teddy and Jimmy are stuck in Japan. They have no way of going home and no one can guarantee their safety in Japan. It was Kazuko’s words that made the two realize the seriousness of the situation. She says, “That’s what you’ll have to do. Enlist. You are Japanese before you are American. Enlist and fight!” What can the two Americans do but enlist in the Japanese Imperial Army and fight against their own country.

As Teddy and Jimmy can speak English fluently, they are attached to detail to guard and question American POWs. Their commanding officer is Major Nakamura. There was one P.O.W. who didn’t cringe under Nakamura’s gaze. This infuriated the Major who ordered his men to tie the P.O.W. to a post in the middle of the camp. When Major Nakamura discovers that Jimmy had been giving the soldier chocolate, he orders Jimmy to shoot the man in front of all of the other prisoners. 

Jimmy got as far as pointing his rifle to the man’s head but then put his gun down and said in English, “No.” This is the last straw for Major Nakamura who takes out his pistol and shoots Jimmy Yamamoto point blank in the head, killing him instantly. The Major then orders Teddy to kill the man, he says “Save yourself. Shoot him.” Looking down at Jimmy’s dead body, Teddy feels he has no choice but to follow the Major’s orders. 

The war ends and years pass. One day, there’s a breaking news story on television. A former Japanese soldier, Ike, was found and is coming home to Japan. Welcoming Ike back to Japan is another soldier from Teddy’s past - Major Nakamura! This sets a fire in Teddy’s mind as he wants to ask the Major directly, why did he kill Jimmy Yamamoto, and he wants to interview the Major on his popular television program. 

Was Major Nakamura justified in executing Jimmy Yamamoto? Would Teddy Maki have suffered the same fate as Jimmy if he did not shoot the POW? And does Major Nakamura feel any remorse about what he did during the war? This is an intense story about ethics and where one’s loyalty lies. It is also about survival during times of war and its immediate aftermath once it ends. 

As the old adage goes, “In war, no one wins!” ~Ernie Hoyt

The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad (Virago)

Asne Seierstad is a Norwegian journalist. In the fall of 2003, she spent three months in Afghanistan reporting for many Scandinavian newspapers. She first met Sultan Khan in November of that year. Sultan Khan (not his real name) is the owner of a bookstore in the Afghan capital of Kabul. He is The Bookseller of Kabul.

Seierstad had spent six weeks with the Northern Alliance “in the desert by the Tajikistani border, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, in the Panshir Valley, and on the steppes north of Kabul”. She was following their offensive against the Taliban. She “slept on stone floor, in mud huts, and at the front, travelled on the back of lorries, in military vehicles, on horseback and on foot.” After the fall of the Taliban, she went to Kabul with the Northern Alliance where she discovered a small bookstore. 

Seierstad became a regular visitor to the bookshop and enjoyed browsing for books and talking to the proprietor, an Afghan man who says he felt let down by his country time and again. She listened to him talk about running his bookshop before, during and after the reign of the Taliban. “First the Communists burnt my books, then the Mujahadeen looted and pillaged, finally the Taliban burnt them all over again.”

Talking with Sultan Khan gives Seierstad the idea of how interesting it would be to write about his family. She makes the proposal and at the beginning of February, she spends four months living with the family. As a woman, she was able to get close to the female members of the family and as a Westerner she was able to move freely amongst the men and women of the family. 

Seierstad says, “If I were to live in a typical Afghan family it would have been with a family in the countryside, a large family where no one could read or write, and every day was a battle for survival.”  

Seierstad reminds the reader that she didn’t pick this family to represent the average Afghani household. It is about one Afghan family, one that would be considered middle-class by Western standards as many of the children were educated, most could read and write and they always had enough money so didn’t face the fear of starving. She chose them because they inspired her. 

After the publication of the book, Suraia Rais, the second wife of Shah Muhammad Rais,the real-life Sultan Khan, sued Seierstad for defamation of character. At first, the courts rule in favor of Rais but Seierstad appealed the ruling and after an eight year legal battle, the Norwegian Supreme Court overturned the lower court's ruling citing “the family was well aware of the nature of the book project” adding that Seierstad was found “not to have acted negligently, and the content of the book was essentially deemed true.” 

It appears the family were unhappy with the way they were portrayed. Sultan Khan was portrayed as a dictatorial patriarch whose word is law and his second wife probably didn’t enjoy being described as spoiled and entitled. As a journalist, Seierstad manages to be objective about her subjects, she says “the manner in which they were portrayed was not “ideal” but she represented the family in a “respectful” way. 

She praises Rais for selling his books when it was dangerous to do so and believes he is an Afghan hero but says he is also an Afghan patriarch and one of the things that continued to irritate her was “the manner in which men treated women. The belief in man’s superiority was so ingrained that it was seldom questioned.” 

I also believe that Sultan Khan, Shah Muhammad Rais is a hero. As someone who promotes reading and education, he and his customers will be the future of Afghanistan. I only hope that peace and stability will one day come to their country. ~Ernie Hoyt

Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945 by Barbara W. Tuchman (Random House)

Joseph Stilwell loved China. From his first visit in 1911, when he spent seventeen days traveling through a country that was racked with revolution, he soaked up everything he could with complete gusto. 

By the time the Qing Dynasty was replaced by Sun Yat-sen’s Republic, China was a country that still lived in the Middle Ages. While western countries applauded a new age of freedom and democracy under the new republic, the fledgling government was faced with a population of 400,000,000 that was 70-80 per cent illiterate, in a country that was largely without sanitation, running water, electricity, or a transportation system that wasn’t “conducted by human muscle.” When Stilwell returned to China after World War I, little had changed but the reigning players. Sun Yat-sen was dead and three warlords battled for supremacy against the Nationalist forces of the Republic, the Kuomintang, led by Sun’s protege, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. By 1928, Chiang’s forces had prevailed, the General was in control of the government, while Japanese influence was making itself known in Manchuria. 

The stage was being set for a military, political, and psychological disaster that would take place over many blood-soaked years and would drag China into the 20th century. The three main players were the Generalissimo, President Franklin Roosevelt, and the stubborn Yankee soldier. Joe Stilwell.

When the Japanese invaded China, the Domino Theory was born. If China fell, so would all of Asia. Southeast Asia was already being devoured by Japan and within China, two battles were raging, one against the Japanese and one against Communist rebels who had broken with the Kuomintang. Although Roosevelt was reluctant to send troops to Asia, Pearl Harbor drew him into war, with the defense of China becoming a paramount issue. Stilwell, who had made a name for himself both as an unconventional military tactician and a knowledgeable Old China Hand, was designated as commander of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops. Unfortunately nobody had clarified that point with the Generalissimo.

Roosevelt’s family fortune was based on the China Trade;  his mother’s family kept a home in Hong Kong and Roosevelt’s Hyde Park home was sprinkled with looted Chinese treasures. “Because his ancestors had traded with the Chinese he had always had the deepest sympathy with the Chinese people,” he claimed. His point of view was colonial and his naivete was crippling, leading to the Lend-Lease Act that guaranteed an unrestricted flow of war materiel into China, $700 million dollars worth to start. For years China received all that it asked for under the U.S. aim of creating “Chinese military self-sufficiency”.

However, “the American purpose was not the Chinese purpose.” Chiang had no intention of launching offensives against the Japanese Army; his goal for China was to “strengthen itself with American arms and money.” To Chiang, the primary danger wasn’t the Japanese but the Communists. His strategy was to let the Allies do the fighting. He was saving the Lend-Lease money and weapons and his soldiers for the battle that would come later, against the forces of Mao Tse-tung.

Meanwhile Roosevelt’s romantic view and idealistic trust in Chiang Kai-shek’s China became American propaganda, merrily spread through the U.S press and adopted by the American people. For three years, hundreds of millions of dollars in money and weaponry were sent to China, and were taken by Chiang, not as a loan, but as a form of reparations for past Western crimes against his country. It slowly became clear that “ even the United States was not rich enough to fight in China.”

Pitted against Roosevelt’s absurd ignorance and the bottomless greed of Chiang Kai-shek was Stilwell. Nominally in charge of Lend-Lease largesse and ostensibly the military commander of all the troops in China, this straight-talking Yankee was miserably out of his depth. He had no diplomatic skills and had mortally insulted Chiang Kai-shek at the start of their ill-fated relationship by scoffing at Chiang’s order to provide one watermelon for every four men in Burma at the height of their losing battle against the Japanese. (This, according to Madame Chiang years later, was “bitterly and openly contemptuous” and poisoned any possible meeting of the minds between Stilwell and the Generalissimo.)

Stilwell lacked the polished skill of Lord Mountbatten who had delighted the Chiangs with flattery and a Cartier vanity case monogrammed in diamonds for the demanding Madame Chiang. He managed to offend Mountbatten as well,  by disdaining his lordship’s offer to divert Stilwell’s troops with the talents of Noel Coward. (Coward came and was an absolute flop with the GIs, leading Stilwell to announce “If any more piano players start this way, you know what to do with the piano.”)

Stilwell also labored under the New England creed that a man’s word was his bond and Chiang played upon that viciously, msking promises and then altering them to the point of nonexistence. In spite of the morass of corruption, greed, and lies that he waded through, “Vinegar Joe” continued to be convinced that the Chinese soldiers were capable of greatness, if only he were allowed to lead them. He proved that with the seizure of Mytkina in Burma, while leading Chinese troops in addition to those from the  British and American armies. 

It’s a tragedy that Stilwell’s passion for China led to the waste of his military talents during World War II. A year after witnessing the surrender of Japan, he died of abdominal cancer. On the day before his death, General Stilwell was given the only honor he had always wanted, the Combat Infantryman Badge, “reserved for the enlisted foot soldier who proved himself under fire.” 

A final honor that Stilwell would have relished came several days after he died. His widow was told she had a visitor at her California home, a man who identified himself only as “the Christian.”. She came downstairs to find “the huge figure and the cannonball head of Feng Yu-hsiang”, a Chinese warlord  who had fought with Stilwell.  Using her husband’s Chinese name, Feng said to her, “I have come to mourn with you for Shih Te-wei, my friend.”.~Janet Brown

Bangkok 8 by John Burdett (Vintage)

John Burdett’s crime thriller, Bangkok 8, takes all the cliches you can think of about Thailand and Bangkok in particular, and creates one of the most hilarious mysteries that blends traditional Thai culture with the fast paced life of the 21st century. There are corrupt cops, Buddhist practitioners, bar girls and kathoeys, which are best described as transgenders. There are also  Khmer thugs, drug dealers, the gem trade and snakes, lots of them.

This is the first book in a series featuring former yaa-baa, the Thai word for methamphetamine, user-turned detective, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, the son of a Thai bar girl and an American Vietnam War vet he has never met. His mother refuses to give him any information about his father. Sonchai’s partner in crime is Pichai. After killing their yaa-baa dealer, their mothers were able to get them an interview with an abbot of a forest monastery in the far north of Thailand. After six months, the abbot told them they were going to mend their karma by becoming honest cops. 

The abbot’s youngest brother is a cop named Vikorn who is the chief of District 8 in Krung Thep, more commonly known as Bangkok. Corruption wasn’t allowed to Sonchai and Pichai and If the two friends want “to escape the murderer’s hell, they would not only have to be honest cops but they would have to be arhat cops.” Simply put, an arhat is someone who has attained the goal of enlightenment. 

Sonchai and his partner have been assigned to follow an American marine driving a black Mercedes-Benz. The two lose the car for a moment but when they rediscover it, the marine is alone and doesn’t seem to be moving. Sonchai’s partner checks the car only to discover a large python is wrapped around the marine and is busily trying to swallow his head. There are also many cobras in the car and one of them has bitten Pichai in the eye causing his death. 

Sonchai is now determined to find who is responsible for his partner’s death and makes the claim that he will kill whoever was behind it. As the victim was a citizen of the United States and a Marine, Sonchai is told he would be working with an American FBI agent who turns out to be a beautiful woman named Kimberly Jones and who seems to be taken in my Sonchai’s charm. 

The further the two investigate, they discover the marine’s name is Bradley and finds that he is involved in the trading and selling of jade, more precisely, forged artworks of jade. It also seems that Bradley was involved in the illicit drug trade as well. If it wasn’t for the death of Sonchai’s partner, it would have been an open and shut case of a drug deal gone bad but the deeper Sonchai and Jones dig, the more the plot thickens as it leads to a man who is friends with Presidents and Senators and he is someone who has a dirty habit that’s not fit for print. 

The uninitiated reader may find offense at Burdett’s description of the Royal Thai Police Force which in his novel is ninety-nine percent corrupt with only Sonchai and his former partner being the only two true honest cops. Burdett says in his foreword, “I hope that any Thai cop who comes across these frivolous pages will see humor rather than slight. This is an entertainment within a very Western genre and nothing more. No offense is intended.” 

I’m not a Thai cop but even I can see that his story is full of humor and is not to be taken seriously and you can’t help but want to read about Sonchai’s next adventure. ~Ernie Hoyt

The China Option: A Guide for Millennials by Sophia Erickson (Travelers’ Tales)

After a two-month stay in Shenzhen where I wallowed in ignorance, I stopped reading travel guides to China. They’re useless for the sort of traveler that I am, the kind that stays in one place for as long as possible and tries to learn as much as they can during their extended visit. If it weren’t for the covid lockdown and a dearth of things to read, I probably never would have picked up Sophia Erickson’s guide on “How to Work, Play, & Find Success in China”. And that would have been a crying shame, as is the fact that her book wasn’t published until 2018, a year after my Shenzhen interlude. 

Although the target audience for Erickson’s book is easily fifty years younger than I, intended for recent college graduates who might want to take a job in China, I began to take notes by the time I reached the 55th page. At least two-thirds of the information she provides is valuable for travelers as well as for potential expatriates. If you aren’t planning to stay in high-end hotels that are branded with names like Hyatt or Hilton, if you aren’t planning to hire a guide, a car, and a driver, you really need this book.

Ordinary guidebooks will advise readers to get a VPN for their time in China. Erickson gives a list of the ones she considers most useful, as well as what they will cost, with the added caveat that this list is one that constantly changes. It does however provide a launching pad for an informed search.

Easily as crucial as a VPN is Baidu Maps. Although it’s only available in Chinese, if an address is entered in its search field, arrows appear to show the direction in which the place lies. Since Google Maps is useless in China, this app is essential. So is Pieco, an app that offers a free dictionary and translation service. And WeChat is a lifesaver, “ a sort of hybrid of WhatsApp and Facebook” that’s a social necessity in China.

Erickson tells how and where to buy a Chinese sim card, how to open a Chinese bank account, and why life will be much easier if you have one. She explains why a Western credit card will often be useless, and gives careful instructions on how to set up AliPay and WeChat Wallet, which are needed in the multitude of places that only accept payment via QR codes. She even tells how to buy Bitcoin and why you might want to.

Some features of daily living in China are ones that travelers also need to know: the dangers of drinking fake alcohol (yes, you can go blind--or die), which hospitals are preferable in case of an accident, and the eight cities that “regularly meet” WHO’s air pollution standards. (Sorry, neither Beijing nor Shanghai make the cut.) 

Although this isn’t a travel guide, even expats leave town once in a while.  Erickson gives detailed information on train travel, from which kind of train to choose to how to buy a ticket, how to travel by bus, and the plusses and minuses of group travel. She tells how to get a three-month Provisional Driver’s License (no test necessary other than one for eyesight), and the essential permits for travel in Tibet--not to worry--the mandatory travel guide will take care of this, as well as finding the required private car and driver. She also gives a list of “reputable travel agencies” who will organize your Tibet trip.

Now all that’s needed is the ability to travel in China again. Here’s where being a millennial has its advantages. They’ll probably live to see that day. For us septuagenarians, all we can do is cross our fingers and try to remain optimistic that we’ll be able to take advantage of Erickson’s advice. Speed that day.~Janet Brown