The Father of All Things by Tom Bissell (Pantheon)

Images and memories usually emerge in a tangled coil when Americans remember the Vietnam War. It's a time that refuses to take on the detachment that comes with becoming part of past history, remaining so unexamined and raw that it still haunts two nations. For many in the United States, the demand of "Peace now" that echoed through the 60s remains unfulfilled, and the issues that divided the country then continue to gape, unbridged, decades after the war came to an end.

Tom Bissell's family history, like that of many children born in the 70s, was intertwined with this war. His father was changed by it, his parents' marriage was destroyed by it, and Bissell grew up with Vietnam on his mind, struggling to learn about his father's time there.

Given the chance to travel to Vietnam with his father, Bissell finds that his carefully acquired abstract facts find a kind of uneasy alliance with the visceral recollections that the country pulls from ex-Marine Captain John Bissell. Skillfully blending military history with his father's memories, Bissell provides a picture of Vietnam, both in the past and during the present, that is harrowing, beautiful and at times surprisingly funny. (This is a family vacation after all, as well as an excavation of a soldier's past, and Bissell is an adult child with snake phobia.)

He shows the war from both sides, giving equal respect to U.S. and Vietnamese soldiers, without glossing over the horrors that were forced upon men and changed them forever. John Bissell, a man known to his fellow-soldiers as "Nice Guy," finds himself killing women who are shooting at him with Kalashnikovs in battle. "War is its own country," Bissell reminds us, "and creates its own citizens."

This is a book that offers no easy answers in its discussion of this particular war and the lessons that it carries over to the present day. Bissell's retelling of how the U.S. removed itself from Vietnam is stark, brutal, and essential for America to remember as it contemplates a withdrawal from Iraq. The memories that his father dredges up are pieces of truth that need to be kept in mind as military personnel return home from the Middle East.

"One of the books I read says that World War II taught its generation that the world is dark but essentially just. Vietnam taught its generation that the world is absurd," Tom Bissell tells his father.

"That's horseshit," his father replies in their continuing argumentative discussion that proves to be honest, loving, and illuminating.

The lessons of the Vietnam War have yet to be fully discussed, but these two men provide a fine example of how to begin, how to listen, and how to come to an internal and personal peace.~Janet Brown

Asian Godfathers by Joe Studwell (Atlantic Monthly Press)

You can't judge a book by its cover, or in this case by its title either. Anyone who fails to keep that tired old truism in mind when buying Joe Studwell's latest is in for a very big surprise. This book is not a rollicking romp through the Asian underworld, or the sort of glossy, glitzy true crime extravaganza that poses as investigative journalism. After all, Mr. Studwell writes for the Economist, not for Vanity Fair, and he admits that his title "is more than a little tongue-in-cheek."

Tycoons is the correct term for these "colourful, obscenely rich and interesting people" who dominate the economic turf of Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia. Governments come and go, underworld figures rise and are deposed, but the tycoons continue to flourish. Not even the economic meltdown of the late 90s significantly diminished their fortunes. Instead many of them became even more wealthy during that financial bloodbath.

Immigration and colonialism were the groundwork from which these fortunes came. The large influx of Chinese, Arabs, Persians, and Indians provided a hungry and willing labor force for colonial powers, eventually becoming "economic entrepreneurs," while the local aristocracy were used to govern the native population, becoming "political entrepreneurs." Long after the disappearance of colonialism, these divisions still remain in place.

Mr. Studwell makes it clear that the wealth of the tycoons is based upon monopolies, cartels, and perhaps most of all, a hardworking and frugal labor force who are encouraged, if not forced, to use saving accounts. Banks in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, with their huge pool of "excessive savers," are ready sources of investment capital and "money makes more money."

Putting much of the blame for the Asian financial crisis upon the tycoons and their freewheeling financial practices, this book bristles with fierce economic facts that will deter many a casual reader. Those who persist will be horrified by the rapidity with which a region's economic structure can be reduced to rubble, and may wonder not if, but when, their own financial security will be devoured by shortsighted greed.

In the midst of all of the history and the economic gloom and the politics that are straightforwardly corrupt, the tycoons, the "godfathers," prevail through the book with the same resilience and charisma that sustain them in life. Chin Sophonpanich, the Thai creator of one of Southeast Asia's leading banks, is remembered by another financial leader as "absolutely charming—he had about six mistresses." Li Ka-shing, number ten on the 2006 Forbes list of the world's richest men, responded to the kidnapping of his son by withdrawing one billion Hong Kong dollars in cash, so huge a sum that the kidnapper couldn't fit it all into his car and had to make two trips to carry it away. An unnamed tycoon, whose son was sent a box of chocolates by a business rival, told his offspring to feed a piece to his dog, and if that wasn't fatal, "try one on his wife."

Although Mr. Studwell concludes with the confession that he used the "godfathers" as a "structural sleight" to convey a larger history, ultimately they take possession of his book with the same ease and expertise that they would absorb any encroachment on their territory. And why not? It all belongs to them.~Janet Brown

China To Me by Emily Hahn (out of print in the United States)

Emily Hahn was brilliant, beautiful and shameless. Arriving in Shanghai in 1935, she rapidly scandalized the city's community of Westerners by taking up a Chinese lover, an addiction to opium and a gibbon named Mr. Mills, who was her constant escort. (She was once enraged by a dinner party invitation that ended with "Regret we cannot extend the invitation to Mr. Mills.") Later, when Emily announced that she and Charles Boxer, a married British army officer, were going to have a child, an American dowager's huffy response was, "Some women will stop at nothing to bring discredit to our nation."

Although her personal life makes dazzling reading, if that were all there was to Emily Hahn, it would be easy to dismiss her as a precursor to Bridget Jones. Emily, however, was no literary bimbo. She was a talented and professional writer who meticulously reported what she saw and how she lived in China before and during World War II.

Chosen by the Soong sisters to be their official biographer, Emily followed them to Chungking, where Japanese planes rained bombs upon Chiang Kai-shek's government and where Madame Chiang poured her legendary energy into making marmalade. Watching the bombing of the British Embassy while picnicking in the neighboring hills, Emily gives a vividly detailed description of the visual spectacle while confessing, "Sometimes it was too much for our nerves."

When World War II began and Japanese troops seized Hong Kong, Emily was there, with her newborn daughter whose father was now a wounded prisoner of war. It was a time during which she resisted the melodrama that could well have taken over her life. Death, starvation, looting and rape are all in the backdrop of Emily’s story, while never being allowed center stage. As she manages to find food for her baby and for Charles, as she makes her way through the Japanese bureaucracy in a successful attempt to stay out of an internment camp, as she learns how to maneuver in a black market economy, Emily tells her story in the calm, dispassionate tones of a woman who had no energy to spare for flamboyant emotional displays.

Explaining why gold and diamonds are the key to wartime survival, or the stark terror felt after waking up after a night of serious drinking to discover that while in her cups she had slapped the Japanese chief of Foreign Affairs, or the shame of listening to American propaganda broadcasts that extolled the success of bombing raids on Hong Kong which had in truth accomplished nothing at all, Emily gives a clear and rarely seen picture of war, the one that is shared by the noncombatants who struggle to survive.

Emily rather unfairly dismissed China To Me as an "egotistical history" but generations of readers have given it the status of a classic. As resilient as Ms. Hahn herself, this book has bounced in and out of print since it was first published in 1946, and waits now in used bookstores across the world to be rediscovered one more time.~Janet Brown

Untangling My Chopsticks by Victoria Abbott Riccardi (Broadway Books/Random House)

"I have always believed you can learn as much about a culture by the ingredients that they put in their mouths, as by the buildings they erect", says Victoria Abbott Riccardi. She's a woman who has definitely put her money where her mouth is, having abandoned her high-powered Manhattan advertising job where "stress poisoned the air" to live in Kyoto and study the art of preparing kaiseki meals, the elaborate food that is served at a tea ceremony.

A veteran of a year at Le Cordon Bleu and a former sous-chef at a Parisian restaurant, Victoria was more than a casual cook. She had already been immersed in the discipline and techniques of haute cuisine and possessed a culinary confidence that would serve her well while she studied at one of Kyoto's leading tea schools.

The art of tea originated in Kyoto's 12th century Zen monasteries, spread to the imperial court, and became an artistic and spiritual influence throughout Japan. Making tea in a formal ceremony is a "spiritual ballet" and the food served with the tea is "a set series of tiny exquisite dishes that change with the seasons." When accepted at a school where her teacher was a direct descendant of the man who refined the tea ceremony in the 16th century, Victoria became steeped in the highly detailed history of a complex ritual.

Balancing the extreme formality of tea kaiseki was Stephen, the American fellow-student who became Victoria's mentor, and Tomiko, the woman who opened her household and the art of Japanese home-cooking to a stranger. Living and cooking with Tomiko's family, while preparing kaiseki with Stephen for tea ceremonies that took place away from their classroom, Victoria traveled beyond the world of a foreigner's guesthouse to a place that visitors seldom see.

From exploring supermarkets to learning the symbolism of her tea school's "paradise garden," from making delicate cherry-sized orbs from sea-urchin eggs and lily bulbs to pounding rice with a mallet for mochi cakes at New Year's, learning from painful experience the waist-choking discomfort of an obi-bound kimono and the humiliation of "feeling like a big, fat Alice in Wonderland" when wearing a baby-doll dress and a frilly pinafore in a short-lived modeling assignment, Victoria reveals the contrasts of her year in Kyoto in vivid and candid stories.

With an artist's eye, she gives precise descriptions of the city's seasonal beauty, of streets that lead back into time, of the visual abundance and glory of a fresh food market. She recreates the sheer terror of standing before a class of Japanese five-year-olds, the difficulties of being a "lounge lady" at an English conversation club, and the special problems of introducing her visiting New Yorker boyfriend to the pleasures of the public bath and a holiday at "the Jersey shore of Japan." She explains why a sushi chef has good reason to hate anyone who adds wasabi to the soy sauce that accompanies sushi, and perhaps best of all, at the end of almost every chapter she provides recipes for the food that she has enticingly described.

Although not a travel guide, this is undoubtedly a book that will launch a thousand trips. It should be tucked into the luggage of any first-time visitor to Kyoto.~Janet Brown

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The Gate by Francois Bizot (Vintage Books/Random House)

Francois Bizot was a Khmer-speaking Frenchman, an ethnologist who searched for old manuscripts and art that would illuminate the religion and customs of ancient Cambodia. A man whose only gods were Saul Steinberg and Charlie Parker, Bizot lived in a village near Angkor Wat with his Cambodian wife and their little daughter. His world was “enameled with paddy fields, dotted with temples, a country of peace and simplicity.” Then the war in Vietnam spilled over the border into Cambodia and Bizot and his family moved to the urban safety of Phnom Penh.

While working thirty miles from Phnom Penh with two of his Cambodian colleagues, Bizot and his companions were captured by a group of Khmer Rouge. They marched at gunpoint for three days to a remote village, where they were confined on their backs, their ankles shackled within two wooden beams. As they lay there alone and in pain, they could hear the sound of bare feet approaching and a group of young girls, “pretty,” Bizot noted, “ just like those from my own village,” surrounded them and spat on their faces.

The man who was in charge of this Khmer Rouge outpost was young, thin and suffering from malaria. “His authority was total. His silences were mightier than words.” Repeatedly he came to Bizot with pen and paper to receive written declarations of innocence. Bizot's statements were written in French but the conversations that he began to have with his jailer were in Khmer. “The bonds gradually forming between us depended entirely on our capacity to understand each other on common ground and this could be done only in his language.”

It was Bizot's ability to communicate in Cambodia’s language that convinced his captor of his innocence and prompted this man to persuade the Khmer Rouge leadership that the Frenchman should be freed. After three months of imprisonment, living in shackles, witnessing death, and experiencing humiliation and torment, Bizot was released. No other prisoner left that camp alive; his Cambodian colleagues were executed after his departure, despite assurances from the leader of the camp that they would be safe.

Four years later, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh. The Americans had fled, Bizot had sent his daughter to France, and his wife joined the crowd of Cambodians who were ordered to evacuate the city.

Sent to the French embassy with all other foreign residents of Phnom Penh, Bizot used his Khmer language skills once more to advantage, becoming the link between the Khmer Rouge leadership and the foreign community, and the only foreigner authorized to leave the embassy walls. His descriptions of a city emptied of its inhabitants and of the Cambodian people who were denied the safety that lay behind the gate of the embassy are haunting and soul-wrenching.

Long after the Pol Pot years had passed, Bizot returned to visit Cambodia. The camp where he was held has become famously known as Anlong Veng and is now a tourist attraction. The man who held him prisoner and was responsible for his release is known to the world as Douch, the infamous leader at Tuol Sleng, the Phnom Penh high school that was turned into a center of torture and death. Bizot’s history, lived in Khmer, written in French, and translated into English, provides stunning testimony to whatever International Tribunal may someday stand in belated judgment.~Janet Brown

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

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

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

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

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

Teza, brutally beaten and pulled back from death by a political system who values him as a symbol of imprisoned rebellion, is diverted from his morphine-fueled dreams only by the boy who brings him food, a nameless, silent child who resembles Teza’s younger brother. He feeds Nyi Lay, speaks to the boy through the jagged pain of his broken jaw, and slowly, in a place of brutality and impotence and filth, Teza hatches a plan filled with hope and power.

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

More books on Myanmar at ThingsAsian Books

Ho Chi Minh: A Biography by Pierre Brocheux/translated by Claire Duiker (Cambridge)

Ho Chi Minh

It was an internationally acknowledged fact, when World War II was over, that Vietnam needed "protection". The French were eager to repossess their former colony. Chiang Kai-shek's government wanted to welcome Vietnam into "the great Chinese family." Franklin Roosevelt claimed that Vietnam would flourish under American stewardship. The only dissenter to these magnanimous offers was Vietnam.

On September 2, 1945, a declaration of independence announcing the birth of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was read aloud by Ho Chi Minh. Middle-aged and physically frail, this was a man who had been so sick with malaria that he had been, only months before, “ a bunch of bones, staring with glazed eyes,” a man of many names who had been away from his country for thirty years and was now its figurehead.

Nguyen Tat Thanh was decades away from being Ho Chi Minh in 1911, when he arrived in France from Vietnam, an easily scandalized twenty-one-year-old who immediately asked “Why don’t the French civilize their own people instead of trying to civilize us?” Changing his name to Nguyen Ai Quoc, Nguyen the Patriot, he became a political activist, petitioning the Allies at Versailles in 1919 for Vietnam’s equality, autonomy and political freedom.

Lenin’s writing persuaded Quoc that revolution would end colonial oppression This led him to Communism and to Moscow, where he attended Lenin’s funeral, standing for hours in the frigid cold that left scars on his hands from frostbite.

Quoc traveled, studied and forged political ties in Russia, China, Southeast Asia and Europe. Delightful, diplomatic and blessed with a gift for languages, he was described by the poet Osip Mandelstam as “a man of culture…the culture of the future.”

Arrested and imprisoned in Hong Kong as a Communist criminal, Quoc faced extradition to Vietnam where he was faced with execution for “plots and assassinations.” His charm saved him. A British solicitor, Frank Loseby, visited Quoc and later wrote, “After thirty minutes, I was entirely won over.” Quoc’s death from tuberculosis was announced, and, with Loseby’s help, he was disguised as a Chinese scholar and escaped to Russia. Years later he reappeared in Vietnam as the resurrected Nguyen Ai Quoc, after having established himself as Ho Chi Minh, Well of Light, leader of the Viet Minh resistance movement and the man who would spearhead his country’s battle for freedom.

Ho’s life was defined by politics and his passion for Vietnam’s liberation; this biography is dense with historical and political background. Yet the man shines through the thicket of facts, with his wit and his poetry making Ho alive on the page: a Confucianist who adapted to Stalin and Mao, a man who fought France but loved the French, a poet who, while living in a cave for a year, wrote “Really, the life of the revolutionary is not lacking in charm.” Pierre Brocheux brings out a concise but skillful portrait from history’s obscuring layers of sainthood and demonization, allowing Ho to declare once more, “I am a normal man.”~Janet Brown