Where Strange Gods Call: Harry Hervey's 1920s Hong Kong, Macau and Canton Sojourns (Blacksmith Books)

Before Fu Manchu, the Dragon Lady, the Yellow Peril, and the benign cliche of Charlie Chan, there was Harry Hervey. A young prodigy who published his first piece of pulp fiction when he was sixteen and whose stories were frequently found in Black Mask magazine after his early debut, Hervey published his first novel at the age of 22. Caravans by Night: A Romance of India was followed a year later by The Black Parrot: A Tale of the Golden Chersonese and apparently gave Hervey a financial windfall that took him to the part of the world that he had profitably imagined.

In 1923, Hervey voyages to Hong Kong where he immediately begins his search for corners of that city that would be “rich in the atmosphere of Cathay.” Fortunately for him, he has a local contact, a wealthy, cultured Hong Kong resident whom he had met in New York. Chang Yuan becomes Hervey’s guide and mentor, giving him an introduction to “a race that had always seemed inscrutable to me.” Together the two explore the “nauseous effluvia” and “fetid gloom” of Chinese opera theaters, the “gorgeous wickedness” of Macau’s gambling halls, and make the acquaintance of the “queer, impassive little dolls” who sing in restaurants as wealthy gentlemen have their suppers. “It was inevitable,” Hervey says, “that we should visit an opium house,” a place he finds “as colorless as naked lust.”

In between these forays into the parts of Hong Kong that Hervey finds “very wicked and very pleasant,” Chang Yuan delivers interminable lectures on Chinese history and politics. These are so meticulously recorded that it becomes impossible to believe they’re not the puerile thoughts of Hervey himself. This theory is almost confirmed when Hervey describes Chang as “uncommunicative,” which would preclude his monologues that take up many of the pages in his Hong Kong chapters.

Without Chang Yuan’s companionship, Hervey seems daunted by Canton, which he describes as “too stupendous and too indefinite to be sheathed in words.” He certainly doesn’t explore it with the enthralled energy shown by Constance Gordon-Cumming, forty-four years earlier. However he has a focus for this visit. Fascinated by Sun Yat Sen from childhood, he manages to gain an audience with his hero, whom he terms the Doctor of Canton, a man whose “personality submerged words.” The words recorded by Hervey speak of the threats posed by Europe and Japan and of the “militarists of the North (who) wish to Prussianize China.” The interview ends with Sun Yat Sen declaring the necessities of having only one currency and one language shared by all Chinese, which Hervey later dismisses as “splendid dreams.”

This reprint of two chapters from Hervey’s Where Strange Gods Call: Pages Out of the East seems a peculiar choice for Blacksmith Book’s new series, China Revisited. Hervey’s writing can barely qualify as travel writing, steeped as it is in his fictional fantasies and thinly veiled racism. “How pleasant I was (sic) to see soldiers who were not yellow,” he gushes when passing a group of British troopers and Chang Yuan is described as “astonishingly well educated…faintly grandiose.” Not even his childhood idol escapes the snobbery of this high school-educated product of Texas, who charitably reports Sun Yat Sen’s perfect enunciation “was not surprising, as he is a college graduate.” It escapes Hervey that even the sing-song girl who entertained him with a song in Pidgin English is bilingual, which he himself, in true American fashion, probably is not.

Perhaps when all of the choices for this series of attractive little books are published, Harry Hervey, who later became a Hollywood screenwriter largely because of his presumed knowledge of Asia, will take his place among them without making readers wondering why. Let’s hope so.~Janet Brown

Wanderings in China: Hong Kong and Canton, Christmas and New Year 1878-1879 by Constance Gordon-Cumming (Blacksmith Books)

Constance Gordon-Cumming was in her fifties when she first came to Hong Kong on Christmas Day in 1878 but her reactions to this city, and later to Canton, had the enthusiasm of a young girl who had just left home for the first time.

This was far from the case. Gordon-Cumming had been a devoted traveler for twenty years, making her first overseas voyage when she entered her thirties and sailed to visit her sister in India. From there she had gone to Ceylon, Fiji, New Zealand, and Japan before she had set her sights upon China. Although at this point she had seen enough of the world to view it with a jaded vision, this wasn’t her style. An artist who had the goal of ending “never a day without at least one careful-colored sketch,” she looked at the world with hungry eyes that took note of everything she saw.

Gordon-Cumming fell in love with Hong Kong’s “steep streets of stairs” that led past “luxurious houses encircled by “camellias and roses and scarlet poinsettias.” Bamboo groves and banyan trees, the intertwining of the city’s Chinese and Portuguese areas, the piercing blue water of the surrounding harbor—”Only think what a paradise for an artist!”

Paradise went up in flames that night when Christmas festivities were interrupted by an act of arson that threatened to consume the city. Perched above the conflagration in a Mid-Level home, Gordon-Cumming watched the fire as it destroyed Chinatown and advanced upon the affluent homes of Hong Kong’s expatriates. Ten acres of the city were devastated with 400 houses gone in a single night, an unimaginable spectacle with “a horrible sort of attraction…so awful and yet so wonderfully beautiful.”

By New Year’s Day, Hong Kong’s “social treadmill” had resumed and by January 9th a short voyage takes Gordon-Cumming to Canton. There she’s met by a “resplendent palanquin” that was fit for a mandarin but lay in wait to take her to her hostess on the Western enclave of Shamian Island. Delighted by the English social life that held sway in this community, she refuses to succumb to its charms that keeps many foreign residents of Shamian from going into the heart of Canton.

Instead Gordon-Cumming submerses herself in the city’s shops and markets, on streets with names that are “touchingly allegorical”—The Street of Refreshing Breezes, The Street of One Thousand Grandsons. She’s overwhelmed by the commerce that she finds there—flowering branches for Chinese New Year, oranges that have been peeled because the peels, used for medicine, are more valuable than the fruit, ivory carvers, tallow-chandlers, vendors that sell drinking water next to porters that transport raw sewage. (Tea drinking is the pervasive custom because the water for it has been boiled, she observes.)

From there she is taken to Canton’s riverine world where a separate city exists. Families live in domestic comfort on boats, with order preserved by “water police” who are notoriously corrupt. Crafts that hold barbershops and medical clinics serve this community, along with market boats and river-borne kitchens. Floating biers carry corpses to their final destination while other vessels hold leper colonies. Gordon-Cumming, with aplomb befitting the daughter of a British baronet, finds her way to the “flower boats” that she euphemistically describes as places where dinner parties are attended by wealthy citizens who are entertained by “singing-women.”

From Canton she travels to Macau, a place she finds “most fascinating” but so “essentially un-Chinese that I have decided to omit the letters referring to it.” This decision does quite a bit to illuminate Gordon-Cumming’s character and helps to explain the decision that ended her life of travel. A year after her time in Canton, she remained aboard a ship that evacuated its passengers when it ran aground. Refusing to leave the watercolors she had painted on the voyage, she stayed with the captain until the two of them were finally brought to safety.

Did her explorations come to an end because she was unnerved by this disaster or was she blacklisted by shipping companies because she refused to take to the lifeboats when that command was given? Somehow I doubt that this conclusion to her travels was Gordon-Cumming’s idea and I’m sure she fumed over it for the rest of her life.~Janet Brown

The Dragon's Pearl by Sirin Phathanothai (Simon & Schuster)

In 1956, as the Cold War took on lethal proportions, Thai politician Sang Phathanothai sent two of his children to China. This was a clandestine and potentially dangerous move for everyone concerned, one that was inspired by the ancient custom of tribute paid by one nation to a greater power. Phathanothai saw the Korean War as a Chinese victory against the United States and although Thailand had fought as a US ally in that war, he felt it was essential to establish ties with the People’s Republic. In the sort of byzantine politics that Thailand specializes in, he convinced Thailand’s prime minister that if by giving his children to China under extreme secrecy, an act that would go against US interests if it were ever disclosed, he would create an indissoluble bridge between the two countries.

When they leave for China, Warnwai is a twelve-year-old boy and his sister Sirin is only eight. Wai is old enough to carry the responsibility that he takes on when he is designated as a representative of Thailand’s Prime Minister, a task that gives him a connection to his homeland and fosters his ability to keep careful records of his meetings with Chinese officials. Sirin, an indulged and pretty little girl, has no such weight placed upon her. For her this is a bizarre vacation in a country where she has no maids to wait upon her and where the house they were to live in compares sadly with their Thai home that had twenty rooms on three floors and four gardeners to tend a profusion of orchids.

The two children are placed under the guardianship of Zhou Enlai, China’s premier who’s second only to Mao Zedong, a decision that Wai understands and records as fully as he’s able in careful notes and a daily journal. Sirin quickly succumbs to Zhou’s legendary charm and swiftly begins to think of him and his wife as her new parents. Equally delightful and much more accessible is Liao Chengzhi, a high-ranking official whose father was American-born and who has an informality that brightens Sirin’s new life.

Although she lacks the diplomatic skills that her brother had been schooled in, Sirin learned early in life that to gain the attention she wanted, she needed to be attentive as well as beguiling. By the time she went to China, she had absorbed a rudimentary political understanding that she brings to bear in conversations with Zhou and Liao. But while Wai absorbs these conversations as an observer, Sirin takes them to heart. The advice she receives from her Chinese “fathers” lets her adjust to the sacrifices of The Great Leap Forward and the precursor to the Cultural Revolution that flourishes briefly in 1957. When she learns that her father has been arrested in Thailand, she clings even more tightly to the relationships she’s forged with the men who are now her protectors.

Their Chinese lives aren’t easy to relinquish because of the secretive nature that has pervaded them from the beginning. in 1967 Mao’s wife Jiang Ching begins to strengthen her power by nurturing the seeds of the Cultural Revolution. Her Red Guards ransack Liao’s home and issue thinly veiled threats against Zhao. It’s the wrong time for Sang Phathanothai to come to China at last, bearing a conciliatory message from the US government. His children know the danger this action carries. Their father does not. When he makes the message public and then departs, he leaves Wai and Surin unprotected, their contact with Zhou Enlai cut off.

Wai defends his father and is expelled from China. Surin, alone and defenseless, says “Wai’s world was not disintegrating. Mine was.” Officials tell her “You have to choose your own destiny. Denounce your brother.”

To survive in a country that is going mad, Surin publicly denounces her family on a radio broadcast, an action that does little to soften her life in the years to come. Her life is caught in the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, where her brains and charm just barely keep her safe.

Her story is a devastating account of a time that China has done its best to erase from its history, an era that has inescapably shaped Surin’s life. Despite an escape that is close to miraculous, she has never been able to leave China completely, a country that is more her home than the one she was born in. The Dragon’s Pearl, told with the acumen and objectivity that kept her alive in a perilous time, is a balanced look at a country few understand and many fear.~Janet Brown

Death of a Red Heroine by Qiu Xiaolong (Sceptre)

Qui Xiaolong was born in Shanghai, China and went to the United States in 1988 to write a book about T.S. Eliot. Then in 1989, The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened, so he decided to remain in the U.S. to avoid persecution back home. 

Death of a Red Heroine is the first book in his series of crime novels featuring Police Inspector Chen Cao who works for the Shanghai Police Department. Cao was a rising star in The Communist Party of the Republic of China and was on the road to become a diplomat. Unfortunately, one of his uncles was found to be a counter-revolutionary so he was assigned to his current position.

In Communist China, even if a distant relative is found to be a counter-revolutionary or if some relative had committed a crime, no matter how minor, it can affect one’s standing in getting a promotion or not. Chen was lucky. Although he was considered “an educated youth” who graduated from high school, he was not sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution “to be reeducated by poor and lower-middle peasants”.

Fortune seemed to smile down upon Chen as he was assigned his own apartment, which was another social problem of living in Shanghai. During Chen’s housewarming party, he received a call from his colleague, Detective Yu Guangming. The body of a young, naked woman was found in a remote area of a canal.

Chen is head of the “special case” department and does not usually deal with homicide cases. However, Detective Yu had informed there was nobody else to handle the case that particular day so he went out to investigate it. Normally, their squad didn’t have to take a case until it was declared “special” by the bureau, usually for an unstated political reason. 

It had been four days and still no one filed a missing persons report. Chen was still contemplating taking the case or not but decided to ask his friend who is also the medical examiner who did the autopsy to give him a detailed description of the victim. Once he got the information, he faxed it along with a picture of the deceased to various units and surprislingly got a response the following week. 

The picture was recognized by a security guard at the Shanghai First Deparment store. The woman said she was going on vacation but had not returned. He showed the picture to the people who worked with her and they all recognized her. Her name was Guan Hongying. “Guan for closing the door. Hong for the color red, and Ying for heroine”. “Red Heroine”. Chen remembered her name. She was a National Model Work and a Party member. 

However, this was the only information that Chen and Yu had but Chen decided that their branch would take the case. He informed his superior that he would treat it as any homicide case and because the victim was a well-known celebrity, he would keep her name out of the news and press. 

As their investigation progresses, it leads them to their number one suspect - Wu Xiaoming, a son of a powerful Communist Party official. People like Wu Xiaming are informally called H.C.C., High Cadre’s Children. They often behave as if they are above the law and that no one can touch them because their parents are in a position that puts fear into the lives of normal people. 

Once Chen Cao’s superior became aware of who their number one suspect was, a lot of pressure was put on them to deter them from continuing the investigation. Chen knows that it is best to tow the Party Line but he cannot in good conscience give up the investigation although he knows that he could be relieved of his duty or worse yet, be taken off the force. Will Chen Cao tow the Party’s line or will he continue the investigation knowing the results might put an end to his career?

It’s not hard to imagine the Republic of China putting the government and the Communist Party first and foremost above everything else. I also imagine the H.C.C. are quite similar in attitudes to children of diplomats, especially embassy kids, which I have had the misfortune of having to deal with when I worked retail. But if there are more people like Detective Chen Cao in China, then I do see hope for China’s future. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo (Henry Holt and Company)

“I exist as either a small canid…or a young woman. Neither are safe forms in a world run by men.” Snow, however, is well equipped to defend herself whether she takes the form of a beautiful woman or a fox. Unfortunately her daughter is not. When the fox cub is captured by a photographer to sell on the open market, the baby is easily broken. By the time Snow finds her, the child is ready to die.

Now Snow is out for revenge, taking her human form to find the man who is responsible for her baby’s death. Her quest takes her to the home of an old woman whose son is a photographer and who knows the murderer. This old woman is attracted to something within Snow, an indefinable quality that reminds her of a fox she encountered long ago in the northern grasslands. She hires this enigmatic beauty to be her maid servant and companion.

Bao is an elderly man who long ago was taken to a fox shrine to save his life and ever after is a lie detector in human form. He can immediately distinguish truth from lies the minute the words are spoken. “Truth is a green garden hedged thickly with bamboo that he can’t escape.” He uses this blessing and curse in his work as a detective, a job that puts him on the path of a beautiful young woman who might be a fox. While on his hunt, he always keeps an eye out for the woman he loved when he was young, a girl who claimed she had once been rescued by a fox.

The Fox Wife suddenly becomes a mystery based upon myth, where three foxes find each other, all of them linked through time, history, love, and tragedy. Yangsze Choo makes them not only plausible, but absolutely possible and completely desirable. “We make our living beguiling people,” Snow says and anyone who picks up this book is certain to be beguiled.

Ancient Chinese stories, Choo explains in notes at the end of her book, were augmented by footnotes and in this book, she had wanted to include footnotes written by Snow. Instead she gives tidbits of information sprinkled throughout her novel and within her closing notes. Foxes are recognized as magical shape-shifters in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, beings that are capable of pursuing a thousand-year journey toward becoming celestial foxes. While on that journey they are known to humans as spirits, demons, and gods. 

First mentioned in the Shanhaijing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), a work of Chinese literature that dates back to the 4th Century B.C., foxes were believed to have the power to become a woman at fifty, a beautiful woman or an adult male at one hundred, with the ability “to know things more than at a thousand miles distance.” They could use sorcery to kill or to “possess and bewilder,” and often were the presiding spirit of villages.

Even without these historical facts, Snow’s story is skillfully interlaced with Bao’s in a novel that’s poetic, romantic, and steeped in adventure. Trapped in neither mystery nor fantasy, The Fox Wife brings a new depth to fiction, along with a yearning for a sequel—with footnotes.~Janet Brown

Falling Leaves : The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter by Adeline Yen Mah (Broadway Books)

Adeline Yen Mah’s book Falling Leaves is the story of her life. It is the true story of growing up in a family where she tries her best to please her father and step-mother but nothing she does changes their apathy towards her. It is a heart-breaking story of family bonds and how those ties are often broken. 

Adeline Yen Mah was born into a very wealthy family in a city just north of Shanghai, China. Her mother died a couple of weeks after she was born. She was only thirty-years old. Her dying words were to Adeline’s Aunt Baba, “I’ve run out of time. After I’m gone, please look after our little friend here who will never know her mother”. Adeline has no idea what her mother looked like, she has never seen a photograph of her. 

In 1930’s China, men were expected to have a wife while women were “expected to sublimate their own desires to the common good of the family”. In the past there was a double standard between men and women. Single girls who were not married by the time they were thirty often remained single for the rest of their lives. Men, on the other hand, were expected to take at least one wife, regardless of his age. 

Adeline’s father was thirty-years old. He was the president of his own company. He had properties, investments and other successful businesses. He decided he would now do something to please himself. While driving around with his sons he spotted a woman who he became totally infatuated with. Her name was Jeanne Virginie Prosperi. She was the seventeen-year-old daughter of a French father and Chinese mother. 

He eventually marries Jeanne and had the family call her 娘 (Niang), another term for mother, as the other children often talked about their deceased mother and called her 媽媽 (Mama). As Niang became a part of life, great changes would come, and nothing would be the same again. 

It is now 1988 in Hong Kong. Adeline Yen Mah’s family had all gathered together for the first time in almost forty years. The only person who was absent was Adeline’s youngest sister, Susan. The occasion was for her father’s funeral and reading of his last will and testament. 

At the end of the will, the solicitor said, “It is my duty to inform you that I have been instructed by your mother, Mrs. Jeanne Yen, to tell you that there is no money in your father’s estate”. 

It was this reading of her father’s will which was the catalyst for Adeline to tell her story. She and her siblings could not believe that their father died penniless. Adeline Yen Mah says she had to go back to her Grand Aunt and grandfather’s time to explain why this came to be.

Adeline Yen Mah’s bittersweet memoir of a happy childhood turned nightmare is heartbreaking as it is inspiring. It’s a story of finding one’s identity and the search for the most important things in life - acceptance, love and understanding. I believe it’s a goal we all strive for and for those of us who have it should count our blessings. ~Ernie Hoyt

Beijing Sprawl by Xie Zechen, translated by Jeremy Tiang and Eric Abrahamsen (Two Lines Press)

To country boys in China’s distant provinces, the ones who drop out of school and have no skills, Beijing is where the money is.  Opportunities in the capital are “like bird shit--it would spatter on your head while you weren’t looking and make you rich.”

Four boys have come from the same village to Beijing, where they live together in a room that holds only four bunk beds and a desk.  The rooftop is their living room, where they meet at the end of their work day. Sitting on stools, they drink beer, eat donkey burgers, and play cards, surrounded by a city that “spreads quick, like a tropical jungle.”

They all have the same job, pasting ads on empty walls night after night, making just enough to pay the rent for their room and to buy food for their rooftop meals. They’re young enough that this seems like fun--the oldest is twenty and the youngest only seventeen. But they know that life in Beijing for people like them is a “young person’s game.” While they can still be romantic, falling in love with girls whom they see at a distance and dreaming of forming a rock band, they’re well aware that their city life has an expiration date. They see it as it claims older people who came from their village to find wealth but watched their dreams die instead. 

One of these men works on construction sites, “wiping out everything that isn’t a skyscraper,” while back in his village his little son calls every man “father,” since he has never known the man who deserves that name. Another patches a car together, building it from scrap that is discarded in the garage where he works. It looks ridiculous but it runs and when he drives it to work, it draws customers to the shop and eventually leads to vehicular homicide. 

Occasionally Beijing succumbs to an attack of “urban psoriasis” when street vendors and the boys who paste ads become the itch that the cops are told to scratch. The cleanup brings an enforced leisure that turns into gang fights where different factions arm themselves with whatever they can find. “Sticks, iron coal shovels, furnace tongs,” all become weapons and one boy dies from tripping over the sharpened blade of a hoe and cutting his own throat. 

Boredom is a dangerous occupation. From their rooftop, the boys become enraged by the barking of a neighbor’s dog that is chained up nearby. First they tease it and then become more purposeful. What begins as a game turns into cruelty and then death. 

Even good intentions turn into tragedies. A young man who lets himself worry about a little girl who begs on the street is lost forever in his attempts to take her to safety. Another who falls in love with a girl whom he only sees when he peers through the window of a tavern ends up back in his village, a drooling idiot. 

“I’d sell blood twice for that,” one boy says after treating his friends to a restaurant meal. But in fact, all of these lost boys sell their blood every day in a different form, as they scrabble to keep their expiration dates at bay. They know that, for lives like theirs, there are no happy endings. Their stories are bleak and beautiful, stark and laced with humor, interlocking to form a novella that just might break your heart.~Janet Brown

The Woman Back from Moscow by Ha Jin (Other Press)

Yan’an, 1938: Two young women study the dramatic arts in the place where Mao Zedong brews the ideas that will lead to China’s liberation in ten more years. Both women have recently appeared on stage, with Yomei in the starring role and Jiang Ching taking a secondary part. The older of the two by seven years, Jiang Ching, is ambitious and competitive. Yomei at seventeen is an incandescent beauty, glowing with life and in love with the theater.

The older woman’s jealousy is apparent but Yomei is under Zhou Enlai’s guardianship and knows she has nothing to fear. The daughter of a dead revolutionary, Yomei became Zhou’s adopted daughter when she and her mother moved to Yan’an. Already powerful, Zhou’s cloak of invulnerability shelters the girl he has taken into his family, leading people to call Yomei The Red Princess.

The community of rebels in Yan’an is small and closely knit. While Mao is a man that Yomei is familiar with, Jiang Chang has to work to gain his attention. Yomei receives Mao’s permission to study drama in Moscow for seven years and Jiang Chang uses every advantage she possesses to become Mao’s indispensable helper and eventually his wife. 

When Yomei returns to Yan’an after struggling to survive in Russia during World War II, she has turned from being an actress to becoming a director. Steeped in seven years of theater arts training in Russia, where Stanislavsky has transformed the way plays are interpreted, Yomei has soaked up everything that her teachers could give her. Her intelligence allows her to enter into the heart of every play she directs and her enthusiasm and generous way of teaching others makes her a charismatic figure. Combining that with her fluency in Russian, her sophistication from her years in another country, her relationship with Zhao Enlai and his wife, and her glowing beauty, she is irresistible.

Jiang Chang, on the other hand, has become Madame Mao, China’s First Lady. She’s eager to use Yomei to her own advantage but Yomei has learned to be wary of politics. Seeing that Jiang Chang plans to use culture and the arts to increase her own power, Yomei keeps her distance.

Ha Jin has taken the life of Sun Weishi while giving her the name she called herself when she wrote letters to close friends and family, Yomei. “Reality,” he says, “is often more fantastic than fiction.” His research to uncover the truth in Yomei’s story carried him only so far, There were gaps in her life that he was forced to create, rather than recreate, so he calls this work a novel instead of a biography. 

As he carries Yomei through seven hundred pages, he brings her to life as an artist who had the power to enchant everyone she met, except for the woman whose goal was to “crush her spirit and destroy her beauty.” Slowly Ha Jin uncovers the politics that led to the horror of the Cultural Revolution and the insane power of the woman who brought it into being. What was at first the story of art and beauty becomes an inexorable tragedy of power and twisted political decisions that darkens the second half of this novel, as it does Yomei’s life.

Born In China in 1956, Ha Jin was a child during the Cultural Revolution and its tragic consequences. He came to the U.S. as a student of American literature in 1985 and made his decision to stay after the Tiananmen Massacre. A poet and a novelist, he writes his poems in Chinese and his novels in English.

In a book as lengthy as The Woman Back from Moscow, this is both an advantage and a handicap, especially when he writes dialogue, where the language becomes stilted. However, this slight lapse in facility simply accentuates the Chinese reality of the thoughts and words and actions that spawn terrible forces and engulf the life of a brilliant and beautiful artist.~Janet Brown

The Apology by Jimin Han (Little, Brown and Company)

Jeonga Cha is an unlikely heroine.  Not only is she a sprightly 105, within the first few pages of The Apology, she’s dead. But neither of those factors get in her way. Immediately she launches into the story of her life, one that’s both charming and duplicitous.

Jeonga has secrets, ones that she’s never disclosed to her sisters, Mina,the oldest at 110, and Aera who’s 108 but boasts the most beautiful hair in the family. These women have learned to coexist through their “territorial intuition and quest for harmony.” These traits show up primarily in the colors they choose for their clothes, which never clash. Otherwise the sisters often do, with Jeonga usually being the one who prevails.

“An epilogue is what I wanted in my own life,” she tells herself but when one turns up, it isn’t particularly welcome. A letter arrives from the U.S., addressed to Mina. Since Jeonga is the only sister who’s fluent in English, the language used by the letter’s writer, she’s the one who’s given the task of reading it and then relating its contents to her sisters.

As she makes her way through the English words, she uncovers a bombshell, the kind that works well in a Shakespearean comedy but much less so in ordinary life. Two separate branches of the Cha family had emigrated to America several generations ago, branches so separate that they were unaware of each other’s existences. Now through an annoying twist of fate, the great-grandniece of Jeonga’s vanished sister, who had long ago defected from the family home in Seoul to North Korea, and Jeonga’s own great-grandnephew both have chosen to attend Oberlin where they meet, fall in love, and are happily planning their wedding. This, Jeonga decides, is a scandal and she must prevent these cousins from marrying.

The backstory of this problem is rooted in Jeonga’s secrets and she’s damned if she’s going to let her sisters in on any of those hidden details. Still Mina and Aera are as determined as their baby sister. Even with the falsified details of why Jeonga is taking an unexpected flight to the United States., the other two insist on going with her.

The comedy becomes convoluted but quite delicious as the old women bicker their way across the Pacific and into a luxurious hotel in San Francisco. Jeonga’s hidden past unfolds as she casts her memory back upon it and the suspense of how she will solve the family dilemma without involving her sisters heightens and then swiftly dissolves when she has a fatal encounter with a moving bus. 

Now what? 

At this point, the author switches gears so thoroughly that The Apology becomes two separate narratives. Jeonga in a murky version of the bardo state roams through the afterlife, unsure that she will ever be able to forestall the catastrophe that continues to simmer in the world of the living. Unfortunately anyone who’s still reading this novel begins to feel unsure as well and gradually begins not to give a hoot.

A delightful beginning turns into a mass of tangled storylines and none of them lead to a satisfying conclusion. “All’s well that ends well,” Shakespeare insisted but a felicitous ending needs a better underpinning than what’s served up in The Apology. 

With luck, Jimin Han’s next novel will concentrate on these three centenarian sisters because they steal the story when they stand together. They’re far too marvelous to leave stranded as they have been in what becomes an annoying and unsatisfying attempt at fiction.~Janet Brown

Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City by Jane Wong (Tin House)

Jane Wong is in college when she learns about the Great Famine, also known as the Great Leap Forward. When she looks at the dates of this tragic era in Chinese history, she realizes that when her grandfather said his family had “disappeared,” and told her how he was adopted by a man whose family had also “disappeared,” that in truth the “disappeared” had starved to death. Wong, who has never gone hungry, races from the classroom in the grip of a panic attack, “heaving tears as thick as wheat.” 

Too respectful to breach her grandparents’ “chosen silence,” Wong pieces together bits of information as it falls in conversational crumbs. “What happens,” she asks, “when your archive is a ghost?” Her reply to herself is “I have no choice but to let food haunt me.”

During the pandemic, she learns to make jook, that supreme comfort food, and dreams of the day when she’ll be able to make it for her grandmother. Later she learns that on the day she made jook for the first time, her brother has done the same thing. A dish that “at its simplest core” is only rice and water holds the secret and power of a sacrament, comforting and connecting.

Wong needs comfort and connection. Although her mother and her grandparents feed, nurture, and love her, her father truly has “disappeared.” A man who gambles away the restaurant he owned and leaves his wife to support two children, the father gives his children only a collection of memories—the trips to the casinos of Atlantic City. There he parks his family in a squalid hotel room for days while he plays all night “in that red-velvet world of his.” After he loses everything he has, he buys a ping-pong table that’s meant to keep him at home but he and his friends eventually begin betting extravagantly on the matches. And then he vanishes.

Wong’s mother was the “village beauty,” who came to America for an arranged marriage with the wrong man. When she gave birth to her daughter a year after the wedding, she looked at the baby and said “She knows too much.” But even as she works two jobs in the wake of her husband’s abandonment, she fosters her daughter’s intelligence and takes pride in her beauty. 

Although this book has “A Memoir” emblazoned on its cover, it’s a collection of essays, deeply personal and fluid, not linear. Wong is a poet  and her poetic art burnishes the  language of her narrative. She discloses the rage that filled her childhood home and that still burns within her when she thinks about her father. Her stories of the other men who have left her are told with agonizing honesty and she illuminates her mother with a love that’s almost blinding in its clarity, empathy, and truth.

She tells how it was to leave Hong Kong after living there for a year as a Fulbright Scholar, flying to Iowa, where she’s accepted in the legendary Writer’s Workshop. Trading the smells of soy sauce eggs and sweet egg waffles for the odors that waft toward her in a Midwestern airport, reeking of “old carpet and recycled air,” Wong realizes that she’s no longer surrounded by Asian people. In fact she is “the only Asian person” to be seen and she “immediately felt unmoored.”

Now the author of two volumes of poetry and a university associate professor, she asks “How did I get here, glistening with all this nourishment?” These brilliant, shining essays show every step of Jane Wong’s emotional odyssey, and “memoir” will never be the same again.~Janet Brown

Four Treasures of the Sky by Jenny Tinghui Zhang (Flatiron Books)

“Practice erasing and overturning and re-creating the self until all I have to do is disappear.”

Daiyu has been doing this all of her life. Born to parents who named her after a doomed woman in an ancient story, she is a loved and cherished little girl until the day her parents disappear. Her beloved grandmother tells the twelve-year-old girl that she too must vanish, so the captors of her parents won’t come back to take her away. Cutting Daiyu’s hair and dressing her in the clothing of a boy, her grandmother gives her a boy’s name, Feng, and sends her off to a distant city. 

As Feng, Daiyu becomes a boy, finds work as a calligraphy master’s servant, and begins to learn the characters on her own. The Four Treasures of the Study become her implements: the inkbrush, inkstone, inkstick, and paper, and she’s taken on as an after-hours student at the master’s school. One day, while exploring the city streets alone, she falls into the hands of a stranger who drugs her, puts her in a dark room, and holds her prisoner for almost a year. During that time, an old woman comes every day to teach her English and when she has learned enough, her abductor covers her body with tar and stuffs her into a basket filled with coal. “You’re going to America, to a place called San Francisco. If anyone asks, tell them you came from New York.”

But nobody asks. Instead the girl is taken from the ship as soon as it docks, is stripped naked, put into a barracoon, and is quickly purchased by a Chinese brothel owner. She’s given a new name, Peony, and eventually is assigned her first customer, a young boy who helps her to escape.

Once again her hair is cut, she’s dressed in men’s clothing, and is given papers that declare she is Jacob Li. Taken to Idaho where Chinese labor is needed, Jacob Li lives there for three years, never once betraying his true identity. Working for two Chinese shopkeepers,  Jacob struggles with his attraction to a young Chinese man who teaches the violin. The only feminine part of Jacob is the ghost of the woman with whom the girl he once was allowed to be shares a name. Lin Daiyu’s spirit is sheltered within the body of Jacob Li, as hidden as Daiyu herself.

Then the violence begins, with the white townspeople united against the Chinese residents, and suddenly “being Chinese is something like a disease.” When the Rock Springs Massacre is reported in the Idaho newspapers, a tragedy begins to unfold and a story that has the tinges of a romance novel becomes an account of terrible history.

In 2014, Zhang says in an author’s note, her father was driving through a town in Idaho where he saw a sign that said a “Chinese Hanging” once took place there. Five Chinese men accused of murdering a white store owner had been strung up by a mob of vigilantes. Later Zhang began to research the facts behind this brief account. The more she learned, the more she “wanted to tell the story, not just of the five Chinese who were hanged, but of everything--the laws, tactics, and complicity that enabled this event and so many others.”

Through Daiyu, Zhang tells this story in the form of a fable anchored in history. Through her different names and selves, Daiyu embodies the Chinese women who were forced into American brothels, the Chinese men who looked for work under identities that were not their own, the Chinese business owners who were forced to leave everything they had painstakingly built, the Chinese who faced death at the hands of white mobs. 

Four Treasures of the Sky is a smart and compelling novel that’s almost impossible to put down. Once it’s finished, it clings on, with sorrow and a terrible unveiling of whitewashed truths.~Janet Brown

Mott Street by Ava Chin (Penguin Press)

When Ava Chin first saw a picture of the completed transcontinental railroad, she was puzzled to see no Chinese faces in the photograph. From the time she was very small, her grandfather had told her stories about his grandfather. Yuan Son came to America in the 1860s when he was still in his teens and was immediately hired as one of the many Chinese men who laid track for the railroad that would unite the country. He and his crew had won a bet for their employers by accomplishing the impossible task of putting down ten miles of railroad track in a single day. Why weren’t the Chinese laborers mentioned in her history book?

What she didn’t know was the continuing story of her great-great-grandfather who took his earnings after the railroad construction was over and moved to Idaho, a place that in 1870 had a population that was 30% Chinese. He opened two businesses and was a solid part of his community until economic turmoil struck and the Chinese Americans became a convenient scapegoat. After thirty years in the U.S. Yuan Son was chased out of his home by his white neighbors as they yelled “The Chinese must go!” He returned to his ancestral village where he was understandably reluctant to have his sons and grandsons retrace his journey to seek their fortune in the U.S.

This wasn’t the only piece of family history that Ava learned about as she was growing up. Although she often went to Manhattan’s Chinatown, she had no idea that the father she had never known lived around the corner from the building where her mother had grown up, 37 Mott Street. Nor did she know that both sides of her family, paternal and maternal, had lived for over a hundred years as neighbors in that same building. 

Long before Ava finally met her father, she learned about the tangled history of the Chins and the Wongs. It came to her in the jigsaw puzzle pieces of her grandparents’ stories about the Wong and Doshim families and through snatches of historical research about her paternal clan, the Chins. When she was in her twenties, she finally found her father, a prominent Chinatown resident who lived in the only remaining Manhattan townhouse that dated back to the days of the American Revolution, on Pell Street, only two blocks from 37 Mott Street. It was a place Ava had walked past countless times, never knowing that this place contained the hidden part of her family.

At this point, uncovering the history of the Chins , the Doshims, and the Wongs became Ava’s life’s work. Her academic training gave her the ability to do piercing and unflagging research, eventually sending her to live in China as a Fulbright scholar. However it was the torrents of memory, the oral stories, not written records, that held “the keys to truth” and revealed “the rich, loamy terroir” of both her family history and the history they inhabited on two continents.

The child of a doomed relationship between a beauty who had been Miss Chinatown and a dashing young playboy who drove a Triumph convertible, Ava’s lineage went back to the beginnings of New York’s Chinatown and continued throughout the terrible bastion of racism that was fostered by the Chinese Exclusion Act. From 1882 until 1943, her ancestors’ lives were battered and truncated by this legislation, denying them all citizenship in a country they made their home for five generations. It was only the fifth, Ava’s generation, that would have the full privileges of an American birthright from the moment they opened their American eyes.

As her ancestors worked and prospered, they did all they possibly could to prove themselves more than worthy of citizenship. During each of the world wars, Dek Foon, an uncle to Ava’s maternal grandmother and a Chinatown powerbroker and philanthropist, was at his local draft board as soon as his age group was eligible to sign up, although as a man in his late forties and then in his sixties, he wasn’t called for duty. He and his colleagues were indefatigable fundraisers for Russian Jews who suffered pogroms in !903, an act of kindness with political benefits as New York Jews took note. 

Foon’s wife, Elva May Lisk, became a pillar of strength and kindness to her husband’s family. Their marriage was a love match that was able to come into being because New York had no anti-miscegenation laws and it lasted until Dek Foon’s death. One of the most moving portions of the family history takes place when Ava discovers that Elva hadn’t been buried next to her husband. Stealthily she scoops earth from each of their burial sites, placing a portion of one spouse’s earth on the other’s grave, uniting them in the only way she can. 

The Doshims and the Wongs were people who married for love. The Chins were pragmatic Don Juans whose passion for gambling and fast living eclipsed anything they might have felt for the women in their lives. Ava’s grandmother Rose, the smartest woman in Chinatown, a graduate of Hunter College in a time when this was an anomaly and a stunning accomplishment for a Chinese American woman, told her granddaughter scathing stories about the Chins, who made and lost fortunes and squandered their expensive educations.

Through the pages of Mott Street is an overlay to this well-told family history. It’s the shameful history of the United States that Ava uncovers in a state of rage and grief, facts that live in a ghostly state of forgotten truths and are now brought to light. From Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay to the immigration hell that once thrived in the small New York town of Malone, there was no recognition of the propaganda written by Emma Lazurus. No Lady Liberty was there to “lift my  lamp above the golden door.” Even for Chinese residents who had the 19th Century equivalent of a “green card,” travel outside of the U.S. was a risky business that might ensure they could never return.

This shadowed history is beautifully and scaldingly interlaced with the stories of Ava’s families, making Mott Street a book that should be required reading for every high school civics class.~Janet Brown 

Activities of Daily Living by Lisa Hsiao Chen (W.W. Norton & Company)

Activities of daily living are how acuity and independence are measured in aging people. Can they manage their money, shop for groceries, do laundry? The list becomes more basic as time goes on. Can they bathe without help, get dressed in the morning, feed themselves three times a day? Are they able to go to the toilet alone? Do they know where they are? Can they recognize familiar faces?

It’s a heartbreaking litany of questions that Alice and her sister Amy ask themselves as the man they call The Father, whom  their mother married after her first husband abandoned his family,  loses his ability to do these things, gradually but with an alarming speed. Six months earlier he lived alone in the way he wanted, with “his standard meals of Fritos and pork rinds confettied with peanuts,” a bottle of Jim Beam, and two packs of cigarettes a day, sitting in front of his television watching Netflix.  In spite of this sustained physical abuse, “his lungs remained pink, his blood pressure and cholesterol levels normal. Just like they were now.” It’s The Father’s mind that’s shutting down. Eventually he’ll forget to breathe, just as he no longer remembers how to perform any other activity of daily living.

When Alice goes to The Father’s house, she’s surprised to discover he had been a man with projects. Old cameras and stacks of photographs, pieces of classical Chinese furniture that he has taught himself to build, a library of cookbooks: all bear testimony to an active mind which is lapsing into torpor. “Come on, brain,” Alice overhears The Father saying as he struggles to put on a pair of pants. 

Alice believes in projects. She lives in a community of artists and when they ask her what she's been up to, she tells them she’s working on a project, although it doesn’t yet exist outside of her head. Within her head she’s obsessed with a performance artist, a man who came to America from Taiwan as Alice, her mother, and sister did. 

Tehching Hsieh is bored with the activities of daily living, although his own are complicated by his status as an illegal alien. For Hsieh time is plastic, a substance to be molded in surreal ways. He selects the expanse of a year to spend or to waste in a matter of his own choosing, in enigmatic versions of his own daily activities. 

One year he builds a cage in his studio and lives in it for 365 days,  never leaving it, without speaking, reading,  writing or being amused by a radio or a television. A friend comes every day bringing food and removing his body waste. During this time he allows four showings, one for each season of the year. He follows this by putting a time clock in his studio and punching it every hour, on the hour, from  one April to the next, for a total of 8,627 punches. Twelve alarm clocks woke him every hour for a year, during which he missed only 133 punches of the clock. A few months after this piece, he lives outdoors with only a sleeping bag as shelter for a year that includes one of the coldest winters ever recorded in New York. The hardest part, Hsieh said, was staying clean; his hands became encrusted with dirt. His next piece involves another person, the artist Linda Montano to whom he is tethered by an 8-foot rope for a year, without ever touching each other. Only in sleep do the couple find privacy. Montano later admitted this piece was “dangerous emotionally.” As Hsieh said, they became each other’s cage.

Alice steeps herself in records of these pieces. She manages to find where Hsieh lives, not far from her own Brooklyn apartment. She spots him in a local supermarket and follows him to Italy where he represents Taiwan in the Venice Bienniale. She never speaks to him but his work becomes her life. 

“What is important for me is passing time, not how to pass time,” Hsieh has told interviewers. By making him her project, Alice passes time without needing to wonder how or why this is happening. But then The Father becomes the project and passing time takes on an unfamiliar urgency. 

Lisa Hsiao Chen uses the form known as autofiction and makes it a work of performance art. There is no plot and no resolution. Although The Father’s decline is the pivot point of the novel, it doesn’t provide a narrative arc. Neither does Tehching Hsieh, a living artist who exists outside of fiction, whose final performance was thirteen years of making no art at all. https://www.tehchinghsieh.net/ Nor does Alice, who ends the book with a single question: “Will there be another project?”

Although this novel floats like a dream drifting through a heavy mist, it’s weighted with the unspoken questions that lie below its surface. Chen is a writer who catches ordinary life and places it in sentences of amazing beauty--”It was late spring; the days molted with gold.” She explores ideas of time and mortality through glimpses of Simone de Beauvoir and Henri Bergson. She investigates the amorphous nature of friendship in modern kinetic lives. She offers up hundreds of thoughts that are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, leaving it to her readers to assemble them into a whole that will make personal sense for each one of them. She's written a book that might never have been written before. Read it.~Janet Brown

Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig (Bloomsbury Publishing)

Shek Yeung is a girl who has been drawn to the sea from her earliest years and her determination to sail with her father and brother leads to an unforeseen destiny. When their boat is captured by pirates, Shek Yeung is sold into prostitution. Her brains as much as her beauty attracts a man who has united the pirates of the South China Sea into a fleet that defies the Emperor’s navy. She becomes Cheng Yat’s wife, his partner in battle, and his chief advisor. With his death, she pragmatically assesses the situation and allies herself with her husband’s adopted son, whom she soon marries. Together Shek Yeung and Cheung Po outwit the ships of the English, Portuguese, and the Dutch, as well as any warships sent by the Emperor. 

A bodice-ripping romance novel? Not at all. Any torn bodices have been ripped in the distant past and are quickly glossed over. Sex, for all that it is instrumental in Shek Yeung’s destiny, is not a major player in her story. Nor is romance. She’s not a woman who has time for that. She has a unified fleet of pirate ships to manage. 

Shek Yeung has one entity in her life to whom she pays respect, the deity Ma-Zou, who protects and offers counsel to those who spend their lives on the sea. Ma-Zou takes many different forms and is enshrined in different legends, some of them providing a counterpoint to Shek Yeung’s own story. But while Ma-Zou is a supernatural being who lives in myth and religion, Shek Yeung is rooted in Chinese history, a dominant figure who ruled China’s seas from 1801 to 1810 and who died under unusual circumstances for a pirate--peacefully, of old age.

She and her second husband controlled a naval empire of five different fleets, each bearing a different colored banner. She and Cheung Po sailed on the Red Banner fleet of 300 ships that scourged the sea from Vietnam to Canton. The Black Banner fleet with 200 ships controlled the waters near the Pearl River Delta, while the Green and Red Banner fleets, with 100 and 50 ships respectively, held sway over the Yangtze River Delta. Taiwan’s seacoast was the province of the Blue Banner Fleet with 150 ships.  Aboard these vessels were 40,000-60,000 pirates, all owing allegiance to Shek Yeung and Cheung Po.

Each pirate carried the weapon of their native regions and all of these were developed for hand-to-hand combat: cutlasses, double-edged swords, axes, crossbows that fired three arrows at a time, maces, and the multi-pointed tiger-head hook swords. Gunpowder got the pirates onto the ships that were their prey, but once they were aboard, courage and skill were the tools of their blood-soaked trade. 

Rita Chang-Eppig’s research is a primary strength of her novel. Although she has given Shek Yeung details that weren’t part of her history, she places her firmly as a redoubtable strategist and warrior. Poor Cheung Po turns ashen in contrast--somewhat henpecked and quite unloved. And although Chang-Eppig pays homage to Ma-Zou in her acknowledgments, as well she should, she never mentions that Shek Yeung existed outside of the author’s creative imagination. 

This is perhaps a deficiency of the advance reader’s edition. When Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea comes to bookstores in its finished form, it will garner more readers if it acknowledges that Shek Yeung once lived, breathed and ruled as a compelling and factual figure in Chinese history.~Janet Brown

A Loyal Character Dancer by Qiu Xiaolong (Soho Crime)

Inspector Chen Cao is a member of the Shanghai Police Bureau. He likes to spend his mornings reading Chinese poetry there. However, on this occasion, he was approached by a senior park security officer. The park officer led him to a dead and mutilated body, dressed in his pajamas. 

So begins Qiu Xiaolong’s novel A Loyal Character Dancer. It is a sequel to Xiaolong’s debut novel, Death of a Red Heroine and features a rising star in China’s politically complicated government - Chief Inspector Chen Cao. 

Inspector Chen is soon joined by his assistant, Detective Yu Guangming who took pictures of the victim and told his boss that it was Triad killing, the Triads being a secret society originating in China and is usually involved in organized crime. 

Forensics determined the man was killed by eighteen blows from axes. Chen and Yu also determined that the body was left in the park so it would easily be found. The only question is why. Detective Yu suggests that it may be a warning. But to who and why remains a mystery.

Inspector Chen is then summoned to his superior’s office, Party Secretary Li Guohua. Guohua is not only Chen’s superior but his mentor as well. The Party Secretary was speaking to Chen, telling him, “The Party has always thought highly of you, so this is a job for you, Chief Inspector Chen, for you alone”. 

Chen was surprised that Party Secretary Li was already informed about the murder victim found in the Bund Park.  But then, Party Secretary Li shows Inspector Chen a picture of an American woman and tells him, she is Inspector Catherine Rohn, a representative of the U.S. Marshals Service. Inspector Rohn is in China to escort a woman named Wen Liping back to the United States. Inspector Chen’s job is to help her accomplish this mission. 

Inspector Chen has no idea who Wen Liping is or who her husband, Feng Dexiang is. A major triad leader named Jia Xinzhi, has been arrested in New York. He is allegedly involved in a number of criminal activities, including people smuggling. The only one who can testify against him is Feng Dexiang. However, he will only do so if his wife is brought to the U.S. from China. 

Chen believes this assignment is more of a show to the U.S. Government and is not really interested in babysitting a U.S. Marshall, although Catherine Rohn will be a guest of the nation of China. It appears to be a simple job which Inspector Chen hopes to finish before focusing on the murder victim found in the Bund Park. 

Unfortunately for Chen, things go awry even before Inspector Rohn comes to China. Wen Liping has gone missing and nobody knows her whereabouts. The only information the police received was that she received a phone call from Feng who told her that her life is in danger and she should escape while she still has a chance. 

Qiu Xiaolong weaves an intricate tale of organized crime, political corruption, and international cooperation between Communist China and the democracy of the United States. Inspector Chen is a key figure as he must find a balance to help an American and still remain a loyal Party member. 

Will Inspector Chen find Wen Liping before Inspector Rohn gets to China? Will he enlist her help if he doesn’t? And what is the mystery of the dead man in the park? All these questions will be answered and will make the reader look forward to the next Inspector Chen adventure. ~Ernie Hoyt

Chinese Prodigal by David Shih (Atlantic Monthly Press)

David Shih’s Chinese Prodigal extends an open invitation to rummage through a well-furnished mind, in the same way  readers might root through their grandmother’s attic. Moving from one essay to the next is like opening a box, heavy, intriguing and filled with valuable items that seem to have little to do with what was unearthed earlier.

“After years of sharing my ideas with students,” Professor Shih says in a lengthy introduction, “I wanted to try to write them down to see if I could do it.” That he does, presenting many ideas with James Baldwin’s goal in mind; “...to write a sentence as clean as a bone.”  

His sentences are clean bones searching for their skeleton. Shih is a good writer whose words frequently have the clear ring of aphorism, and his ideas are provocative and mind-expanding. What they lack is a solid frame to bring them into a cohesive whole. 

Shih echoes the quest of Cheuk Kwan (Have You Eaten Yet?) in separating race from ethnicity. Unlike Kwan, he has lived almost all of his life in a country where race is poorly delineated and ethnicities shift positions, depending on what the dominant race wants them to represent. “Asian” as the name of a race in America simply means not black and not white, a liquid category that swings between “model minority” and “yellow peril” with scant reason for either stereotype. Within that racial construct, individual ethnicities also rocket between class markers, with Chinese and Japanese vying for top of the list and Southeast Asians working their way up from the bottom. 

Shih’s father has no illusions about the U.S. A man who worked hard to achieve “an honest lifetime,” he has accepted racism as an established American truth, telling his children : “Chinese people will always be second-class citizens in this country.” He refuses to let his children learn Chinese, wanting them to speak English without any trace of an accent and chooses the name “Frederick” as his own English name because he’s able to  pronounce it correctly. His offspring’s  achievements give them a place in the white world that they gained through  the mastery of English that he had insisted upon, although, Shih says, “language, like blood, can make a family. The gift of fluency  has given them a tool that is superior to their father’s  command of the language and this weakens the power of his patriarchy.

Shih’s portrait of his father is the  highlight of his book. Through uncovering this man, he lets his own private thoughts escape. When he tells how his father’s favorite grandchild was Shih’s son, a boy who strongly resembles his white mother, this leads him into an examination of being a Chinese father to a biracial child. He examines the “ethical dimension to the decision to have mixed-race children in the United States,” and then explores the historical truths and the current events that led to this train of thought. How will America view his son? What social world will he inherit?

The term Asian American, he reminds readers, is a recent one that supplanted “Oriental” or Asiatic. It came into being after the death of Vincent Chin in 1982, a man killed by unemployed auto workers in Detroit who attacked him because they assumed he was Japanese. The murderers were acquitted at a trial that brought people of Asian descent together in a united protest. 

“A word better than Oriental wouldn’t have made a difference in my father’s life,” Shih says, while later telling how “a burgeoning sense of myself as a person of color” helped to weaken the idea of hierarchy among America’s races. “People of color” outnumbered the white race and blurred the lines of the social construct that white men had created to protect and preserve their power.

The eight essays in Chinese Prodigal are excoriating, flaying the cruelties of U.S history toward immigrants of color as well as those that exist in the present, brought out from the shadows by politicians who condone and elevate racism. Shih’s mingling of the personal with the historical and the political at times becomes a tangle of confusion but his academic expertise wins out. He has things to teach and his country has a lot to learn.~Janet Brown

Have You Eaten Yet? by Cheuk Kwan (Pegasus Books)

Cheuk Kwan has lived in six different countries and speaks at least six different languages, including several Chinese dialects. Born in Hong Kong without ever having seen the Mainland village that was his family’s home for countless generations, he is a perfect example of the 400 million members of the Chinese diaspora.  Haunted by a single question, “Are we defined by our nationality or our ethnicity,” Kwan believes every member of the Chinese diaspora has a common set of values, even if they don’t, as a Chinese Canadian journalist believes they do, “carry that invisible baggage of ancestral China on our backs.” These shared values--”the importance of family ties, a desire for Chinese culture and education, and an underlying love for Chinese food”--can be found living in family-run Chinese restaurants all over the world. To back up his belief, Kwan embarks upon a four-year quest that will take him over 124,000 miles across five continents to make a documentary series, Chinese Restaurants. (Released in 2006, this series can be seen for free on youtube.)

Have You Eaten Yet? fleshes out what Kwan compressed into fifteen separate episodes and allows him a voiced subjectivity and breadth of experience that would be out of place on television. This book is a combination of travel and cooking literature, with a large helping of history and not a single recipe in sight. 

Kwan and his camera men have Hong Kong cuisine as their benchmark and are surprised to find “dim sum to die for” in Trinidad and Tobago, “a classic Cantonese rendition” of whole tilapia in Israel, “a sublime Chinese meal” in Kenya, issuing from a kitchen staffed only by Kenyan cooks. In Mauritius he finds “authentic Hakka cuisine” and Northern Chinese cooking in South Africa. In Madagascar Madame Chan serves Cantonese dishes that are “impeccable,” even though she herself has never been to China or Hong Kong and there are no Chinese workers in her kitchen.

In the north is where Chinese cooking submits to local flavors. In Saskatchawan, a seasoned restaurateur admits his cafe serves “American Chinese food, not what Chinese people eat, right?” In the Himalayan city of Darjeeling, Kwan tactfully calls his meal “Indo-Chinese…Hakka food adapted to Indian tastes.”

Kwan finds Chinatowns in almost every place he visits but it’s Barrio Chino in Havana that seems to haunt him. Once the largest and richest Chinatown in Latin America, it’s now a tourist destination with no more than 200 inhabitants, almost all of them elderly men. But when Kwan visits the Hong Kong Association and identifies himself as “a Kwan from Gao Gong,” he is thronged by members of his clan, making him remember his grandfather saying that many men from Gao Gong went off to Cuba in the early 1900s. Suddenly, in a Chinatown that’s almost dead, Kwan feels a strong connection to a place he’s never seen. “My grandfather,” he thinks, “would feel proud of me now.”

The old men in Havana still feel they are completely Chinese. In a Brazilian restaurant that makes perfect egg tarts, the owner says “This is our home, while his son adds that he himself is more Brazilian than Chinese. In Peru a restaurant proprietor talls Kwan, “This has never been my own country,” while celebrity cookbook author Ken Hom, born in Tucson and raised in Chicago, felt instantly at home on his first trip to Hong Kong “where everything talked to me,”  but now divides his time  between the south of France and Thailand. Kwan himself insists “I have six homes: Jiujiang (Gao Gong), Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Berkeley, and Toronto. Even so his journey has taught him that he is connected most strongly with the Chinese diaspora, people who retain their Chinese heritage and yet usually find their sense of belonging all over the world. 

As for “Chinese food,” Kwan raises his eyebrows more than a trifle. This catchphrase encompasses the “eating habits of more than a billion people,” spread out over “an area four times larger than western Europe.” Can anyone say there is such a thing as “Chinese food” or that “hyphenated Chinese food” is a lesser form of cuisine, he asks. 

Have You Eaten Yet? Is enough to make us believe in the idea of one world. John Lennon would have loved this book, and so will you.~Janet Brown

When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433 by Louise Levathes (Oxford University Press)

Who could imagine that a ten-year-old boy, captured by Chinese troops in the Mongol-ruled state of Yunnan, would become China’s greatest explorer of the seas? 

Ma He was a lucky child. While most of their enemies’ sons were immediately castrated on the battlefield, he avoided that fate until he was thirteen, when he became the personal eunuch servant to a son of the emperor, Prince Zhu Di.

When his father died, Zhu Di launched a rebellion against the chosen successor, a long battle in which Ma He proved to be a skilled soldier and a loyal ally to his master. After Zhu Di took the throne as the Yongle Emperor, Ma He was given a new name and as Zheng He, had a privileged position in the imperial court.

Over the past dynasties, eunuchs had gained power, rising from humble servants to form their own bureaucracy. Taking the lead as military men and heads of the emperor’s household, their influence eclipsed the Confucianist leaders who had held sway for centuries. The pragmatism of the eunuchs meshed well with the aspirations of the Yongle Emperor and trade soon became the major source of revenue.

Earlier when the Tang Dynasty had conquered Xinjiang, Mongolia, Manchuria, and Korea, this expanded territory gave rise to expanded markets and formerly unknown prized goods. Slowly China moved beyond the Confucian belief that trade was a menial occupation and the Middle Kingdom needed no contact with foreign countries. Chinese ships gradually became essential instruments for trade expansion and the Yongle Emperor grew eager to increase his trade borders by building more—and much bigger—ships.

Looking for a commander of his future fleet, he turned to Zheng He. His teenage servant had become a man with “glaring eyes” and “a voice as loud as a huge bell,” who towered above other men with extraordinary height. His military prowess and leadership skills prevailed over what was seen as his advanced age of thirty-five and made him the emperor’s choice to command the fleet that would accompany the newly created treasure ships.

Filled with porcelain, silk, brocades, iron, salt, and other luxurious commodities, the treasure ships were sumptuous and impressive, as befitted their status as representatives of China’s wealth and splendor. The largest of them is estimated to have been over 400 feet long and 166 feet wide; all of them were the only ships to have nine masts. 

They were accompanied by eight-masted “horse ships,” seven-masted supply ships, six-masted troop transports, and five-masted warships. Among the 27,000 men aboard these vessels were astrologers, Arabic translators, official secretaries and advisers in matters of protocol, skilled workmen for necessary repairs, and 180 medical officers, one for every 150 men.

This armada of 317 ships set off in 1405 on a journey that would last two years. “Our one fear,” Zheng He announced, “is not to be able to succeed.”

He returned in 1407, his ships laden with spices, ebony, ivory, pearls and precious gems. He had defeated and captured Southeast Asia’s most dreaded pirate and brought him back to China for execution. He also carried ambassadors from India, Sumatra,and the Malay Peninsula, all of them coming to pay tribute to ChIna’s emperor.

Six more expeditions followed, from 1407-1433, with Zheng He in command of all but the second. The number of ambassadors bearing tribute from the countries visited by the treasure ships became so numerous that a special compound was set aside to house them all. Technological advances were introduced by the fleet, such as a gift of magnifying lenses mounted on handles, along with “two skilled glassblowers, presumably from the Middle East.”What would become an enduring animosity between Korea and China was sparked when, along ginseng, gold,silver, and leopards, the treasure ships carried 300 beautiful Korean virgins for the emperor’s pleasure.

In 1418, the fifth voyage sailed beyond the coastal cities of the Middle East to the ports of East Africa, beating Vasco da Gama’s arrival by eighty years. Although Arab traders had told Zheng He about the riches found in Europe, he had no interest in expanding trade to that continent. The economic benefits found across the Indian Ocean and the China seas were more than enough to enrich the Yongle Emperor. What came back in the treasure ships financed the move of China’s capital from Nanjing to Beijing and made possible the creation of the Forbidden City.

Perhaps Zheng He knew the seventh voyage of the treasure ship fleet was going to be his last. Before his departure in 1431, he had two tablets made that documented the achievements of past expeditions. These proclaimed success in “unifying seas and continents,” with “countries beyond the horizon from the ends of the earth have all become subjects,” through voyages that made “manifest the transforming power of imperial virtue,” while increasing China’s “geographic knowledge.”

He was sixty when he set off on his final voyage and died on the journey home, his body consigned to the ocean.

His emperor followed him in death two years later. Under his heir,  both the tribute system and China’s maritime dominance withered. Confucians, with their belief that land was more important than the sea, regained their ascendancy. Zheng He’s ship logs were called “deceitful exaggerations of bizarre things” and in 1477 were destroyed to prevent others from following his example. In 1525 all ocean vessels were destroyed and it became a crime to go to sea on a multi-masted ship. 

But the treasure ship fleet had expanded the boundaries of those who sailed on them. At one time three Chinese envoys had jumped ship in Cambodia, never to return. Others illegally emigrated to Siam and to islands in the Philippines or made their homes in North Vietnam, Singapore, and Java. “The legacy of Zheng He was the diaspora of Chinese to Southeast Asia.”

The amount of detailed information revealed by Louise Levathe is almost overwhelming. She gives a concise history of China from Neolithic times up to the 16th century. Although her scholarship is rigorous,she can’t resist touching upon enticing conjectures, while carefully couching them in “maybe” and “perhaps.”

Did Chinese voyagers, long before Zheng He’s time, reach Australia and Africa, settling in Arnhem Land as “Baijini” and on Kenyan islands as “Bajuni”? Did they make contact with South America long before Columbus? Levathe dwells upon these possibilities just long enough to tease imaginations while wisely leaving any conclusions to future historians. 

Certainly the known history that she offers in just over 200 pages is more than enough to dazzle, inform, and enshrine Zheng He as a hero for all time.~Janet Brown

Little Soldiers by Lenora Chu (HarperCollins)

“I am a little soldier, I practice every day.” When Lenore Chu overhears her little son singing this in Mandarin, she takes it in stride. After all, he’s already serenaded her with The East is Red, extolling Mao as the “Great Savior.” This is Rainey’s second year as a student in an elite Shanghai kindergarten and he and his parents have all made sizable adjustments during that time.

Chu and her husband feel fortunate when their three-year-old is accepted at Song  Ching Ling Kindergarten, a “model school” with special rules. Although it’s part of China’s state-run public school system, it doesn’t have an open admission policy. Most of its small students are the children of Shanghai’s elite. Chu’s wealthy, influential uncle is flabbergasted. His granddaughter was denied entrance in spite of his connections that usually “made the impossible materialize.”

Born and raised in the U.S., Chu was taught Mandarin and received a strict Chinese upbringing from her Taiwanese parents. Her husband speaks fluent Mandarin which he learned as one of the first Peace Corps volunteers to show up in an isolated village in rural China. They want their child to become bilingual and they’re impressed with the accomplishments of China’s education system. Even so  they’re taken aback when Rainey tells them his teacher forces him to eat eggs, a food he detests, at lunch. When Chu tries to discuss this with the teacher, she’s told, “Eggs are good nutrition and all young children must eat them.” A week later, the teacher lets her know that Rainey now eats eggs and Chu doesn’t dash that triumph by telling that Rainey still refuses to eat them at home.

Meanwhile  Chu sees her son’s focus, attention span,and self-discipline soar. Academically he flourishes while at home his parents nurture his imagination and creativity. Chu begins to realize Rainey’s childhood is the mirror-image opposite of her own. She was given an American education and a Chinese upbringing while  Rainey has American freedom at home coupled with the rigorous life of a Chinese student. When the family returns to the U.S. during summer vacation, Rainey’s parents are relieved that their son fits in perfectly.

Chu begins to delve into China’s school system, visiting classrooms, making friends with teenage students, and researching the history of education through the centuries 

In 1949, she discovers, four out of every five Chinese were unable to read. Forty years later most children receive nine years of free compulsory education, with the goal of providing nation-wide preschool for all. However the historic dominance of tests that will determine success in later life still prevails, with the National College Entrance Exam looming over every student. Around 10 million teenagers take this annually. Only two-thirds of them will pass and go on to a university. The rest will become unskilled laborers or entrepreneurs.

The pressure of this exam permeates the lives of students, beginning when they’re only toddlers. One of Rainey’s three-year-old classmates is enrolled in three after-school classes where she learns English, Math, and Pinyin. One of Chu’s friends sends his six-year-old to eight after-school classes every week.

Chinese educators believe very young children are in a “golden period of memory expansion” which is essential for true learning. “You have to work hard to achieve,” a Chinese educator says, and effort is demanded of every student. Hard work is stressed over and above innate ability. “There is little difference in the intelligence of my students,” a teacher tells Chu, “Hard work is the most important thing.”

And yet Chu finds that Western methods are being incorporated within Chinese schools, while maintaining the core belief that learning depends on individual industriousness. “Maybe,” a Chinese educator concludes, “the hybrid of American and  Chinese systems is perfect.” If so, Rainey, whose parents plan to keep him in Chinese schools until sixth grade when the pressure of exams and political indoctrination becomes intense, is well on his way to becoming the perfect student.~Janet Brown

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng (Penguin Press)

When Noah goes to the mailbox and finds a letter addressed to Bird, even though there’s no return address, he knows who it’s from. Only two people in the world still call him by his real name, Bird--his mother who vanished three years ago and his only friend, Sadie, who’s also disappeared. The handwriting on the envelope is his mother’s and so is the drawing that he finds inside--a single piece of paper covered with cats, an illustration from a story his mother used to tell him when she tucked him into bed at night.

After his mother’s departure, Bird’s father has demanded that he tell anyone who asks that she’s not a part of his life anymore. All traces of her have been destroyed and Bird’s memories of her are shadowed and incomplete. It’s Sadie who reawakens them by showing him an article she’s torn from a newspaper. His mother is Margaret Miu, a famous poet. The title of her poem, Our Missing Hearts, has become a battle cry for rebels and Miu is regarded as the leader of the rebellion.

PACT is what the rebels are fighting against--the Preserving American Culture and Traditions Act. This is an integral part of America, installed after The Crisis that almost wiped out the country’s economy, a disaster for which China carries the blame. Chinese Americans are suddenly under suspicion, Bird’s mother most of all through the power of her words.

Suddenly Bird sees them everywhere, on scraps of paper, on posters tacked up by invisible hands, in gigantic white letters painted in front of an installation of crocheted red yarn from which dolls are suspended. 

PACT, Sadie tells him before she runs away, is why she’s in a foster home. She was taken from her parents because they were part of the rebellion--and, she says, she’s only one of many children who were forcibly stripped from their families. She and the others are “the missing hearts.”

As Bird searches for a book that might hold the story that he dimly remembers, he goes to the library where a friendly librarian helps him in his quest--and remembers both Sadie and his mother. She even knows his true name and the poem that has made his mother infamous. She’s part of an underground railroad that does its best to find the missing children and reunite them with their parents. 

Suddenly Bird becomes consumed by the thought of his own quest--to find his mother and bring her home. Armed with a mysterious address that he finds by chance and the postmark on the letter he was sent, he goes off alone on a bus from Boston to New York City.

Celeste Ng has recreated the turmoil, paranoia, and inhumanity of our present century in a novel that examines this with the soft and magical touch of a fairy tale. Bird’s journey is guided by the stories his mother read to him from books by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. From them he’s learned to trust in the guidance of strangers and to be undaunted by what appears to be matters of wild coincidence. The Duchess, the reappearance of Sadie, the bleak circumstances that govern his mother’s life are all part and parcel of the web of folktales that have informed his life.

Adult readers may find this magical construction more difficult to accept. In a world where children have been separated from their parents and may never find their way home, where Asian Hate is so prevalent that it’s featured as the cover story in magazines, and where China has become the scapegoat for many in America, one that’s responsible for everything from covid to rampant inflation, this gentle version of our reality may be offensive and infuriating.

But Ng has constructed a setting where cruelty can be combated with persistence and hope. Beneath her contemporary fairy tale setting is a call for individual action, buttressed by a sense of individual responsibility, conveyed by characters who could be real, who could be us.~Janet Brown