From A Nail through the Heart to Street Music: Thirteen Years of the Poke Rafferty Novels by Timothy Hallinan

“You can buy diaper?” This is an unlikely end to a series of detective novels that brought Poke Rafferty to life. An Irish-Filipino American travel writer, Rafferty emerged in Bangkok, “the world capital of instant gratification,” in A Nail through the Heart.  He’s a family man, happy with his beautiful soon-to-be wife Rose who was once the Queen of Patpong and his adopted daughter Miaow who spent her early years selling packs of gum on the city streets, a small girl who was fostered by a pack of feral children. 

Rose and Miaow are the core of Rafferty’s life, with its periphery buttressed by his friend Arthit, a policeman with an  expensive British education that’s left him with a highly developed sense of irony, and a motley collection of rapidly aging Western men who hang out at the Expat Bar, each of them what Rafferty “doesn’t want to be when he grows up.” Through a denizen of this bar, Rafferty becomes unwillingly involved in tracking down a missing Australian. This accidental detour from his contented domestic existence leads him into nine detective thrillers written over the span of thirteen years, and through worlds that would be the stuff of nightmares, were they not based upon reality.

Rafferty comes up against monsters immediately, ones that challenge readers to keep turning the pages. A dowager who once was one of the chief torturers in the Khmer Rouge prison of Tuol Sleng and who has lost none of her edge in old age and a man who does his best to destroy children in his thirst for pornography are as unforgettable as they are unspeakable. In the novels that follow Rafferty confronts a business empire based upon North Korean counterfeiters whose products range from fake medicines to nearly-perfect dollar bills, the byzantine labyrinths of Thai politics, a syndicate that exploits a vast army of beggars, Western mercenaries whose stock-in-trade is unbridled cruelty, and the involvement of Homeland Security in countries far from the United States.

Through Rafferty, Hallinan comes close to the bone in many of these novels, to the point that two of his underlying topics aren’t available through Google searches. The AT series that he refers to when discussing child pornograpy in an author’s note to A Nail Through the Heart doesn’t come up on Google and the Phoenix Program, the band of mercenaries who did the CIA’s dirtiest work during the Vietnam War and are introduced in The Fear Artist, appear only on Youtube clips and in Douglas Valentine’s book, The Phoenix Program, (which reputedly the CIA did its best to suppress and is now available only as an e-book). Hallinan’s third novel, Breathing Water, is a tutorial in modern-day Thai politics and the power of that country’s nouveau riche, and through all nine of his books runs the inescapable and highly lucrative connection between Thailand’s wealthiest men and the bargirls who draw thousands of men and their money to Bangkok and other Thai cities every year. 

Through the midst of the horror and the violence that Rafferty moves through, Rose and Miaow shine like beacons, bringing extraordinary life to what would otherwise be ordinary (although very well-written) thrillers. Eventually the two of them, especially Miaow, take over the hearts and minds of readers as thoroughly as they have Rafferty’s.

This series is launched with quips worthy of Raymond Chandler, all of them crisp and clever: a room “with the cosmetic appeal of a fever blister,” a drinker who rapidly “puts a pint of Singha into the past tense,” a woman of “40, clinging grimly to 28,” a man who looks as though he “watches colon surgery for laughs.” Cinematic descriptions of Bangkok--its weather, its street markets, its bar scene--are vivid and evocative. But what begins as classic noir deepens into something quite different.

Gradually a theme emerges with the panoply of daughters who shine through the darkness: Rose, whose father was on the verge of selling her into the flesh trade before she escaped into it on her own; Rafferty’s half-sister Ming Li who’s been carefully molded into a dangerous spy by their father; Treasure, a child with a monstrous father who is distorting her into his own image; and Miaow, the child who, Hallinan admits in his note to The Hot Countries, is the one he would choose if he could write about only one of his characters. As he ends the series with Street Music, he elaborates upon that. “Miaow, who on that very first page, was little more than a prop...became, for me, the heart of the series.” A child who was tethered to a bench and abandoned by her parents when she was four or five survives on the streets until she and Rafferty find each other three years later. Her character is fully formed by that time and as she gains the vocabulary, security, and confidence to express it, she takes center stage in the novels as confidently as she does on the stage of her elite school’s drama department. Through the prism of Miaow’s character, Hallinan finds depth and truth in other stories of the neglected and rejected figures of Thai society--the bargirls, the old sexpats, the ladyboys, and the street people--even the one who had abandoned her daughter by tying Miaow to that bench.

Hallinan leaves Rafferty where he found the man in the first place, with his family which has expanded to make Poke a floundering first-time father. Through the years, they’ve been through a lot together, author and character, guided by Bangkok residents like the curmudgeonly, kindly author Jerry Hopkins and are rumored to have become enshrined in a guidebook of their own, The Poke Rafferty Book by Everett Kaser (which is also untraceable online). In the legendary Patpong bar, the Madrid; in streets that are gentrified  and those that are slums; in the dubious street stalls of Bangkok’s Indian section and in the thinly disguised school for street children run in real life by Father Joe Maier in the slums of Klong Toei; in Bangkok’s answer to Central Park, the green and graceful oasis of Lumpini Park which at night is a sanctuary for those who have no other home--these are all places that Rafferty and Hallinan have made their own and have passed on to the rest of us. 

For thirteen years, readers around the world have looked forward to the next book in this series. Now that the last one is in bookstores, the only choice left for us is to go on our own and find Rafferty’s world in all of its grimness and glory. Bon voyage to us all.~Janet Brown

Chopstick Cinema : Exploring Asian Food and Film by Celeste Heiter (ThingsAsian Press)

There are three things that writer Celeste Heiter enjoys most in life - “Asian culture, gourmet cooking, and international films”. Heiter has combined her passions and created a weblog titled Chopstick Cinema in 2004 where she shares with readers “the process of choosing an Asian film, selecting recipes from where the country in which the film takes place, designing a menu, shopping for ingredients, setting the table, preparing the meal, enjoying the food while watching the film, and finally, writing a film review”. 

Chopstick Cinema : Exploring Asian Food and Film was compiled from her blog and is divided into ten chapters focusing on one Asian country and features ten recipes from that country. The recipes are for "nibbles, cold and hot appetizers, soup, salad, noodles, main course, two side dishes and dessert". Following the recipe, Heiter provides a review of a movie from that particular country. The cuisine and films Heiter focuses on are from China, Mongolia, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Japan, Cambodia, India, and combined countries of Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Heiter also lists alternate movie titles to choose from. 

The recipes provide a list of ingredients with measurements given in a combination of the Avoirdupois system (using pounds and ounces) and the U.S. customary units for volume (using teaspoons and tablespoons) with easy to follow directions. About the dishes, Heiter informs the reader that “some are classics prepared according to tradition; others are my own creations, based upon indigenous flavors and ingredients”. She also says you do not have to follow the recipes to the letter and provides suggestions for alternate ingredients.

The movies Heiter reviews in her book include “Raise the Red Lantern” from China, “The Cave of the Yellow Dog” from Mongolia, “Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring” from South Korea, “The Scent of Green Papaya” from Vietnam, “Rice Rhapsody” from Singapore, “Magnifico” from the Philippines, “Firefly Dreams” from Japan, “The Rice People” from Cambodia, and “Lagaan : Once Upon a Time in India” from India. 

I enjoy Asian cinema as much as I like watching Hollywood blockbusters and low budget B-films and I also love to eat Asian cuisine be it Japanese, Korean, or Southeast Asian. However, as I am not a good cook in the kitchen, I must admit I only browsed through the recipes. Chopstick Cinema will give you ideas of what to order when you go out to a restaurant featuring that country’s cuisine. 

And for those people who want to challenge themselves to make these dishes, Heiter suggests choosing three to five dishes for a party of four to six and to enjoy the meal while watching one of the films. If the amateur or professional cooks are afraid of not finding the ingredients necessary, Heiter lists a number of  sites on the Internet where you can order them.. 

On a sad note, Heiter passed away in 2016 but you can still find more of her recipes and read more of her film reviews on her Chopstick Cinema weblog. A great collection for the gourmand and Asian film connoisseur. and although I may not try my hand at cooking, I will continue to browse her blog and read her reviews and check out what other culinary delights and movies I’ve been missing out on. ~Ernie Hoyt

Available from ThingsAsianBooks

Siam: or The Woman Who Shot a Man by Lily Tuck (Overlook Press)

Claire flies to Thailand on her wedding night, a naive New Englander of twenty-five, in love with the dashing Army officer whom she’s just married.  “The plane never caught up with the sun” but even so, when it lands in Bangkok, “it was bright day,” and Claire is surprised that she and James have lost their first day of marriage somewhere above the International Dateline.

This is only the first of many things that surprise her in her new home. Her questions are unending and she meets only one person who seems as though he would give her the answers she wants, the American Silk King who’s created a luxurious life for himself in a puzzling city. At one of his famous dinner parties, Jim Thompson leads Claire through his drawing room filled with art, antiques, and vases of fragrant blossoms. He takes the time to explain the meaning behind his precious objects before Claire has formed her questions and promises to show her more of his collection when he returns from a trip to Malaysia’s Cameron Highlands. But he never comes back;  the mystery of his disappearance preoccupies the Thai press and completely occupies Claire’s attention.

This serves to distract her from the other mysteries in her life: what takes her husband on his weekly trips to a secret airbase on the Thai border and keeps him there for days, what relationship exists between her cook, maid, and houseboy, who are the people who inexplicably show up in her kitchen, and did she really see a horse in the jungle that constitutes her back garden? Her trips to the nearest market make her “afraid that she will lose herself among the mangoes,” and her tall blonde visibility makes her wish that she were small, dark, and graceful instead.

Taking refuge in Thai language lessons and in books about the country’s history only partially distracts her from everything around her that seems unknowable. It’s what became of Jim Thompson that becomes an obsession for Claire, a mystery that seems potentially solvable, yet while she searches for puzzle pieces that might fit together, life insists on throwing fresh conundrums at her. Why does James insist that she learn to shoot a pistol? Why does the pretty wife of James’s “useful friend” Siri demand that James teach her how to swim and is she flirting with Claire’s husband?  Is James flirting back?

As her life becomes more enigmatic, Claire begins to mistrust what she sees. Nothing seems solid. Objects, and people too, disappear for no reason. The more Thai she learns, the less she understands and her position in the world around her becomes more tenuous. Then one night she knows she hears the sound of sharp blades slicing through the window screens not far from her bedroom and in an instant her life implodes.

In her compact and surrealistic novel, Lily Tuck explores what it’s like for an American woman to be immersed in a world of savage contrasts: opulence and poverty, immediate gratification and complete incomprehension. Claire’s shadowed world is formed by curiosity and ignorance, fear and clumsy attempts at bridging cultural divides. Her paranoia will be recognized by any woman who has plunged into a new country with no preparation and little support, and every last one of them, if they’re honest, will admit to having shared a small portion of Claire’s terror and madness.~Janet Brown

Mindanao : From Samal to Surallah by Ronald de Jong (ThingsAsian Press)

Mindanao is the Philippines second largest and southernmost island. It is here where freelance photographer and writer Ronald de Jong makes his home. In Mindanao : From Samal to Surallah, Jong is your virtual tour guide “for those travelers who are not familiar with southern Filipino culture.” 

For the uninitiated, Jong informs you that the safest areas to travel in Mindanao are Davao City and its surroundings, the Sarangani Bay area, and the province of South Cotabato. We are told the greatest way to explore the island is by car or motorbike along the Maharlika Highway, also known as the Pan-Philippine Highway. 

The road is over 2000 miles in length and starts from Laoag City on the northern island of Luzon, passes through the Visayan Islands of Samar and Leyte, and continues to the city of Zamboanga in Mindanao. Jong will take us on a journey following the Davao-General Santos-Koronadal Highway which is a small part of the Marhalika. “Passing through this toll-free portion of the Pan-Philippine Highway will take you down small-town roads, city streets, mountain passes, rice fields and plantations.

Jong is very thorough in his guide as he provides background information on each area such as which tribes are you likely to encounter, a bit of the history of each destination as well as giving us shopping tips, resort recommendations and what there is to see and do. 

Our trip starts on the island of Samal which is also known as the Island Garden City. Around this area, one can get close to nature by seeing caves, mangroves, natural rock formations, swamps, and coconut trees. Or you can enjoy staying at one of the resorts along the coast where you can go jet skiing and windsurfing.  It is also one of the Philippines top diving spots. 

From Samal Island, it is a short trip to Davao city which is also known as “the window to Mindanao”. For the more adventurous traveler, you can climb Mount Apo, Philippines highest peak at 9.692 feet. Continuing south, you will find yourself in Surallah where you can go river-rafting on the Davao River or spelunking in the Marilog District. 

I also find that one of the best ways to discover the culture of another country is to experience the local cuisine. Jong does not disappoint as he provides us with a menu of the different types of street food one can try. Some of the dishes Jong introduces have the most colorful names such as a skewer of crispy chicken wings which are known as PAL, named after the Philippines Air Lines. Another dish called isaw (grilled or deep-fried pig or chicken intestines on a skewer). They are known locally as IUD because of its shape. The serious gastronome can try balut which can be described as “eggs with legs”.  It is a cooked, fertilized duck egg where you can see the embryo of the duck.  

Mindanao is more than just a guide to the island. It is also a photo essay featuring beautiful full color pictures taken by Jong himself. The place has something for everyone, from the package-deal tourist to the budget-conscious backpacker. If you’re longing to get off the beaten path and want an adventure worth remembering, Mindanao might be the place for you. Jong certainly makes me want to go. ~Ernie Hoyt

Available from ThingsAsianBooks

Makai by Kathleen Tyau (Beacon Press)

“So many secrets,” Alice Lum admits.  She’s immersed in them and has been since childhood: her father’s pipe, “not the tobacco one,” that he smokes only when he’s in a room downtown or behind a locked door in his house; the reason behind the behavior of her best friend’s husband; the knowledge of who her own husband truly is; and her private secret, divulged only at the end of her story--of how she survived the Big Water that swept her and her daughters makai, to the sea.

Alice is the daughter of Chinese parents in Hawaii, a place where people have come from all over the world to live: Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, haole from the Mainland, forming a culture that blends with the Hawaiians. But there is little intermingling with one notable exception, Alice’s best friend, Annabel Lee, an unconventional beauty who makes her own rules. Annabel is half-Chinese, one-fourth Hawaiian, one-fourth Scotch with a great-grandfather whom she claims is Robert Louis Stevenson. A dreamer, “Annabel taught me how to dream,” Alice says wistfully. Of all the dreams Annabel gave her, only one comes true--her marriage to Sammy Woo who originally had his eye on Annabel, not Alice.

Alice grows up steeped in Chinese culture. Her father practices traditional medicine and her mother’s philosophy is “act rich so prosperity can find you.” Alice is a good Chinese daughter until she is sent to boarding school and finds a different way to behave after meeting Annabel. When World War II erupts with the attack on Pearl Harbor, her life becomes even more unfettered. “Days like mountains...Nights like water...We learned to live in the dark.”  Alice’s mother cautions her to let people know she’s Chinese, not Japanese and her brothers go off to war along with Sammy Woo. Annabel and Alice take jobs as accountants during the day and dance instructors at Arthur Murray at night. “We’re career girls,” Annabel insists as she plans her future escape from the islands. Alice too is in her plans, but Alice wants a life with Sammy.

Sammy is different, an orphan who treasures the jade bracelet passed to him by the mother he never knew. His friends tease him, “Sure you not Japanese, Sammy,” a joke that Sammy fails to appreciate. He loathes the Japanese. 

Years into their marriage, Alice receives a visitor, Sammy’s aunt, who brings an explosion in an envelope, adoption papers proving that her nephew isn’t of her blood. He’s the son of a Japanese couple who gave him up at birth. “That makes my girls only half-Chinese...I am the only one who’s Chinese all the way,” is  Alice’s stunned reaction. In shock herself and frightened of how Sammy will react to this news, she holds it as another secret, waiting for the right time to divulge the truth.

Life conspires to forestall the right time. Alice’s oldest daughter falls in love with Annabel’s only son and Annabel, long divorced from the husband who left her for a man, returns to her old home. Suddenly all the secrets converge and spill over, old resentments rise to the surface, and bloodlines fade into unimportance.  And in the end, the secret of Alice’s inner strength is disclosed when she tells how she and her daughters were saved when a flood swept them out to sea.

A beautiful patchwork of memories and history, stitched together as skillfully as one of Alice’s pieces of fabric art, Makai casts a bright spotlight upon Hawaiian life and culture, revealing its complexity and beauty. A story of friendship in all its complexities, it asks through Alice, “Is this what it means to love? To hide and worry and want,” and ends with the assurance of “One inch, one layer, one life at a time. MIne.”~Janet Brown

A Year with the Local Newspaper by Anthony S. Rausch (University Press of America)

A Year with the Local Newspaper is an interesting concept. It has the subtitle of Understanding the Times in Aomori Japan, 1999. Anthony S. Rausch has lived in Hirosaki City for over ten years working as an English teacher. He refers to Hirosaki as his furusato or adopted hometown and by extending the boundaries, includes all of Aomori Prefecture as his home. He has studied Japanese and has read many books on Japan and has kept abreast of the national news, but he still feels like he was never “in the know” or “out of the loop” when it came to local news. 

Rausch tells his students there are many different ways of improving their English. One of his suggestions is to “read real English in real newspapers.” He explains to his students, “Pick a town and make it your adopted hometown; then go online everyday and imagine you are reading your hometown newspaper.” He tells them by doing so, they “will gain new vocabulary, strengthen your English skills and gain a pretty good “feel” of a whole new place.” 

Rausch then has an epiphany. He realizes that he has not been following his own advice that he’s been giving to his students and so he makes a New Year’s Resolution for 1999 - to read the local newspaper each and everyday for the entire year. Rausch chooses the TooNippo, one of the two local newspapers that is distributed in the Tohoku area. By taking on this project, Rausch hopes to make sense of Aomori. He says, “If I could make sense of Aomori by reading the newspaper, then could I not help others to make sense out of Aomori by reading the newspaper to them?”

Rausch doesn’t just want to write a guide book for the Tohoku area. His main goal is to describe, analyze, and interpret what “local” life in Aomori Prefecture is like. The first part of the book includes articles that describe a typical year in different ways either by weather, season, or festivals. Rausch also spends an entire chapter on winter in Aomori as the prefecture is considered snow country and 1999 saw one of the worst winters in Aomori in many years. 

The book becomes more of a college text when Rausch begins to describe the “peripherality” and “revitalization” of Aomori often comparing urban and rural living habits. As Aomori Prefecture is mostly agricultural, many of the chosen articles focus on the local industries such as rice planting, apple growing, and fisheries. 

As much as I found the initial concept interesting, being a recent transplant to Aomori Prefecture myself after spending twenty plus years in Tokyo, I found the execution rather lacking and the book itself poorly edited. The many grammatical and typographical errors became more of a distraction and it was often difficult to understand what Rausch was trying to convey. 

This book focuses on the year 1999 and as it is currently 2020, many of the articles are irrelevant today. It’s interesting as a recent historical record describing the construction of the new Aomori Shinkansen station or the controversies surrounding the expansion of the Ajigasawa Ski Area and the hosting of the Asian Winter Games in 2003 but will only appeal to a limited audience. ~Ernie Hoyt

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung (Catapult)

One of the first stories Nicole Chung begged to hear when she was a little girl was the story of her adoption. Born premature to parents who had recently moved to the U.S. from Korea, Chung was told that her birth parents gave her up for adoption because they knew that would give her a better life. The people who brought her home were her mother and father from the time she was two and a half months old, still an infant who, at under six pounds, weighed less than many newborn babies. From that beginning, Chung was bathed in love that came from parents “who had chosen her,” she explained to friends when they asked why she didn’t look like her mother and father.

But in the small Oregon town where Chung grew up, there was nobody who looked like her, and once she was in school, a boy on the playground cruelly made this an issue by squinting his eyes at her and chanting “Me Chinee, me can’t see.” When Chung told her parents, they told her if she ignored her tormentor, he would stop. Instead his friends joined him in taunting her and her classmates pulled back from the child who was different. Chung’s Second Grade teacher remarked on her report card that she seemed unhappy but since Chung’s torture only took place on the playground when no adults were around, nothing was done about it. 

Suddenly Chung felt a deep separation, not only from her classmates but from her parents. At family gatherings, when she heard her cousins being singled out as resembling other relatives, she knew she was an outsider, loved and cherished but not one of the clan. Not until she was ten, on vacation with her parents in Seattle’s International District, did Chung see people who looked like her; she “couldn’t count all the Asians.”

Still she was loved, she made good grades, and she learned to find a refuge in books and in her own writing. But in the books she read and in her own stories, the heroines were always white girls. 

When Chung left her hometown to go to college, she found a world in which she was one of many Asian girls. The man she married was Irish and Lebanese. Being different was no longer a burden and a stigma. But when Chung learns that she’s pregnant and her doctor asks for her family medical history, she believes that, if only from a health standpoint, it’s time to find her birth parents.

Her quest is as emotionally difficult as her lack of knowledge ever was. Chung discovers she has two sisters, sharing a mother with one and both parents with the other, and she learns that her birth parents had told her sisters that she had died when she was born. Rapidly she and her full sister forge a connection through letters and Chung learns the dark secrets of her birth family--the cruelty and the violence that her birth mother inflicted upon the sister who is becoming her closest friend.

Life rarely provides fully happy endings and the story of Chung’s search is no exception. There are questions for which she will never have answers and she learns that although she’s in the nineteenth generation of her father’s family, she will never be included in the family history. In Korea she simply doesn’t exist.

Her memoir is a piercing look at the racism directed toward America’s model minority and the double-edged sword of bi-racial families formed by adoption. Chung shows the importance of blood relatives as well as the happiness that can come from parents who have chosen their child. “Being adopted,” Chung concludes, “probably saved my life.”~Janet Brown

Megumi by Shigeru and Sakie Yokota (Headquarters for the Abduction Issue, Government of Japan)

Megumi is the story of Megumi Yokota written in manga form and translated into English. It was first serialized in the January through July 2005 editions of Manga Action. It is a story almost every Japanese is familiar with. It is a parent’s worst nightmare. One that Shigeru and Sakie Yokota are still living with. 

Megumi is the daughter of Shigeru and Sakie. On November 15, 1977, Megumi disappeared without a trace. She was last seen walking home from school after badminton practice. She was thirteen years old. However, there was no ransom demand from her kidnapper or kidnappers and for twenty long years, Shigeru and Sakie wondered what happened to her. Where is she? Did she run away? Was she in an accident? Is she okay? And the major question remains which they refuse to ask themselves - Is she still alive?

Twenty years later, on January 21, 1997, Shigeru Yokota came home and told his wife something strange happened that day. Shigeru received a call from a man named Tatsukichi Hyomoto who was a secretary to a member of the House of Councillors who told him, “Megumi is alive in North Korea.” The Yokotas thought their nightmare would finally be over. Unfortunately, it was just the beginning of a new nightmare. 

Hyomoto visits with Shigeru Yokota and tells him that back in January 7 of 1980, the Sankei Newspaper featured an article about couples disappearing off the coast of western Japan. Hyomoto has Shigeru read an article from a magazine called Modern Korea written by a man named Kenji Ishidaka from Asahi Broadcasting. He had Shigeru compare the article with an article from the Niigata Nippo describing his daughter’s disappearance. The contents and similarities were too hard to ignore. 

On February 3, 1977, the story of Megumi Yokota’s abduction appeared on the front page of the Sankei Shimbun newspaper and in a magazine called Aera. The articles published a photo of Megumi and printed her full name. On that day, Shigeru said, “Everything changed.” The story of Megumi Yokota was no longer about an unsolved kidnapping case. It has now become a political issue between Japan and North Korea. 

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi met with North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Il on September 17, 2002 at the Japan-North Korea Summit meeting where he admitted to North Korea abducting in Japanese citizens and sending shock waves throughout Japan. More victims started coming forward and pushed the Japanese government to demand that North Korea send their citizens back to their home country. 

The abduction issue continues to be a major issue between Japan and North Korea. The isolationist country went so far as to tell Japan that Megumi Yokota had died and had sent her bones and ashes as proof. However, a DNA test found that the bones did not belong to Megumi. It’s a gripping and true story that continues even today. The Yokotas still pray for the return of their daughter to her rightful homeland. I keep wondering why the United Nations doesn’t get more involved in resolving this issue. This is not a Japan - North Korea problem. It is a crime against humanity and needs to be dealt with as such. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Honorable Visitors by Donald Richie (ICG Muse)

Japan - the Land of the Rising Sun. A country that remained closed and isolated for over two-hundred years. It was a policy mandated by the bakufu under the Tokugawa Shogunate and was termed sakoku which literally translates to “closed country”. The only people allowed in were some Portuguese Jesuit missionaries and Dutch traders at designated ports. One of the main reasons for this extreme policy was “an effort by the Japanese government, the Tokugawa shogunate, to legitimize and strengthen its authority.” 

It wasn’t until Commodore Perry with his Black Ships forced the government to open their borders that slowly Japan would see an increase in foreign visitors. In Honorable Visitors, Donald Richie has compiled a book of Japan’s earliest and most prominent visitors including such luminaries as Isabella Bird, Ulysses S. Grant, Rudyard Kipling, Aldous Huxley, Charlie Chaplin, and Truman Capote to name a few. 

Richie’s criteria for inclusion in this book was “determined by the fact of the writing.” He chose people in which “some image of Japan emerged (whether the writer liked the place or not), one that reflected thought and consideration, one that defined not only the country, but also the writer.”

Isabella Bird visited Japan in 1878 when she was forty-seven years old. She was already an acclaimed travel writer having written books about her travels through the Sandwich Islands and living as a woman in the Rocky Mountains. In the early days after Japan opened its borders, visitors were recommended to see popular tourist sites such as Nikko, Hakone, Kyoto, and Kamakura where a fair amount of English was spoken. Bird was not interested in just seeing the famous sites, she was looking for “authenticity”. She was one of the first people to travel to the far north and to Hokkaido where she met the Ainu people. The notes from her journey became her masterpiece of travel writing - Unbeaten Tracks in Japan. 

In contrast to Bird, Pierre Loti, a French native who became popular for his books upon finding love exotic places, could be described as the “bad tourist”. From his writings, it doesn’t appear that he came to Japan to experience it or learn about it. His main goal was to find another woman to add to his list of conquests and to buy as many trinkets as he could for a cheap price. It’s unfortunate that there are still “bad tourists” in this day and age who only come to Japan to look for a playmate they think is demure and subservient to them. 

Each story is unique in the way each writer views Japan. I believe everybody has their own ideas of what they expect when visiting a foreign country. Sometimes those expectations are met, sometimes what’s expected and what you experience can change your way of thinking. Richie’s choice of writers gives the reader an impression of what Japan was like, either good or bad, from the eyes of its earliest visitors. I believe we can learn from the early adventurers in how one should conduct themselves abroad and to be open to all kinds of new experiences. This book certainly makes me want to explore my adopted home country of Japan even more. ~Ernie Hoyt

The World Eats Here by John Wang and Storm Garner (The Experiment)

John Wang grew up in Texas but his culinary horizons extended far beyond Tex-Mex cuisine. His childhood summers were spent in Taiwan where he learned to love that country’s night markets, where people of all economic backgrounds came to eat in an atmosphere of “ineffable electricity.”

When he moved to New York as a high-powered attorney, he was shocked at how few people could afford to eat the city’s legendary food. “Affordabilty,’ he decided, “was the single greatest equalizer,” and his dream was to recreate the night markets he loved as a child, with their diversity of meals and their reasonable prices. 

In 2015 he created the Queens Night Market, where the average dish was no more than five dollars, with a few soaring as high as six. “The target demographic was literally everyone.”

Located in a park that once held the 1939 World’s Fair, near the home of the New York Mets and the site of tennis’s U.S. Open, the location was close to perfect. Open every Saturday night in the summer, Wang’s dream drew an average of 15,000 visitors per day until Covid-19 regulations closed it for the summer in 2020.

Writer and filmmaker Storm Garner fell in love with the Night Market in 2014 when it was still in its planning stages and offered her talents from the start. In 2019 she and Wang were married. By then Garner had interviewed many of the vendors on camera for an oral history project, which formed the nucleus for The World Eats Here.

New York City has more than 150 nationalities and over 120 of these live in Queens. More than 90 of these countries found a home in the Queens Night Market with its 300 vendors. The World Eats Here features 52 of them, telling their stories and sharing 88 recipes, with almost half of both the vendors and the recipes coming from countries in Asia. 

“What are you doing with your expensive degrees?” the Singaporean parents of a Columbia Business graduate asked their daughter when she began selling noodles at the Night Market. “Sharing...a passion for food... the beauty of food and culture,” a Malaysian vendor with an MS in nutrition says.  Indian food “can be amazing with just a few ingredients instead of twenty-five spices” says a banker who spends her Saturday nights proving this is true.  A former chef at Cafe Boulud with a degree in French culinary arts dreams of having “Korean fried chicken at baseball games instead of hot dogs” and a university professor raises money for his Bengali community by manning a food stall on Saturday night.

From Tibet to the Philippines, mouthwatering and uncomplicated recipes beckon to even the most apathetic cook. Son-in-law eggs, (a naughty pun in its native country of Thailand), Burmese tea leaf salad with careful instructions on how to ferment the tea leaves, a hearty breakfast sandwich from Singapore called roti john, and pandan key limeade from Malaysia or avocado smoothies from Vietnam to wash down Hong Kong’s curry fish balls, these and so many other dishes come tantalizingly within reach.  Even though the Queens Night Market may be closed, this book brings it to home kitchens, along with the philosophy of the “floating plate” imparted by the mother of a Pakistani cook who’s a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America that forbids returning an empty plate to anyone who has given you food. Dinners at home will never be the same again after The World Eats Here is in the house. ~Janet Brown

Original Letters from India by Eliza Fay (New York Review of Books)

Eliza Fay was twenty-three years old and a newlywed woman when she and her feckless husband set off to improve their fortunes in India. In 1779, England was still embroiled in the Revolutionary War, in which France had joined forces with the American colonists. None of this turmoil enters Mrs. Fay’s sprightly piece of early travel literature. Instead she concentrates upon seeing Marie Antoinette at the theater, deciding that the ill-fated queen had “the sweetest blue eyes that ever were seen,” the joy of drinking a pint of Burgundy at every meal, remarking “I always preferred wine to beer,” and the disgusting spectacle of asparagus in Lyon “covered with a thick sauce of eggs, butter, oil and vinegar.” 

Having nearly reduced a French cook to tears by demanding her asparagus be “simply boiled with melted butter,” Mrs. Fay crosses the Alps, which she’s surprised to learn consists of more than one mountain, and is delighted to discover the inhabitants make “excellent butter and cheese.” Clearly this is a lady who travels on her stomach.

Once aboard the ship that’s bound for Calcutta, Mrs. Fay turns her attention from the pleasures of the table to the dissection of her fellow passengers. The only other Englishwoman on the voyage is “one of the very lowest taken off the streets of London” and another passenger “has the most odious pair of little white eyes mine have ever beheld.” Bereft of decent food and company, she retreats to her cabin where she makes a dozen shirts for her husband and persuades him to teach her shorthand. 

Her ship reaches the Indian port of Calicut (called Calcutta by the British) at a time when the city was under the rule of a Muslim rebel with no love for the English. Mrs. Fay, her husband, and other passengers are placed in captivity for fifteen weeks but this grisly interlude does nothing to quench her spirits. When released at last and safely in Madras, she’s enchanted by its “Asiatic splendor combined with European taste,” its buildings painted with chunam, a powder made from crushed shells that’s applied like whitewash and glows like marble. She finally arrives in Calcutta after a journey of twelve months and eighteen days and immediately approves of its colonial elegance and beauty. Although it is here that her husband’s “imprudent behaviour,” which results in his fathering a “natural child,” puts an end to her marriage, Mrs. Fay finds that India “interests me exceedingly.” She left only to return three more times over the course of her life, dying penniless in Calcutta at the age of sixty.

Her observations are piercing and evocative, with an amazing adaptability for a woman of her time and place. She resigns herself to living in “a house of thieves” with servants who skim a profit from every domestic transaction in exchange for living in a “land of luxury.” She casts a scathing eye upon her fellow expatriates “languishing under various complaints” which they blame on the climate while their lifestyle would “produce the same effects even in the hardy regions of the North.” She winces at the “luxurious indulgence” of the lengthy dinners which begin at two in the afternoon and end with a repose between four and five. She finds something about the “Hindoos that interests me exceedingly” while writing graphic descriptions of local customs that she calls abhorrent. She travels about the countryside in a silk net hammock carried by two men or on a donkey while seated on “a sort of armchair with cushions and a footstool.” 

Mrs. Fay claimed to be happiest when she had a pen in her hand and it’s quite possible that these letters were written with a goal of future publication. She was far from the first Englishwoman to embark upon epistolary travel literature; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters from Turkey had become a publishing sensation sixteen years before Eliza Fay set off for India. But it’s Mrs. Fay’s letters, with their indiscretions and vitality, unpolished and irresistible, that are still read for pleasure centuries after they were written, setting a standard for modern-day travel writers who would find her travels difficult to emulate, assuming that any of us could survive them.~Janet Brown

Tone Deaf in Bangkok and Other Places by Janet Brown (ThingsAsian Press)

Can you imagine leaving everything you know behind? Your job? Your friends? Your family? That’s exactly what author Janet Brown does as she leaves her long time job of selling books in one of Seattle’s most popular bookstores and says goodbye to her two adult sons and moves to a country she is not overly familiar with and where she cannot speak a word of the language. 

In 1995, when the opportunity arose, Janet moved to Bangkok, Thailand in Southeast Asia to teach English. Every two years, she would go back to Seattle and spend some time with the people she loves. On her last trip, she makes a major life decision and says, “I’m carefully planning my final journey to Bangkok, where I plan to remain until the day I die.” 

Tone Deaf in Bangkok is a collection of her experiences of living abroad and traveling to other nearby destinations and is filled with beautiful, full-color pictures taken by freelance writer and photographer Nana Chen. She shares with us her difficulties in learning the Thai language, navigating the city by using local transport, finding a place to live, and falling in love with a man two years younger than her oldest son. 

Expats living in foreign countries are often asked the question “Why do you like living in your adopted home?”. Janet responds to this question by saying, “I babble something vague and incoherent about the light, the food, the people, the climate, and the lack of earthquakes.” If people ask her to go a little deeper than that, she responds with a variety of answers - “the beauty and ugliness that co-exist side by side, the warmth and humor behind the omnipresent masks of smiles, the irrepressibly free spirit of the city that is often regulated, but never with any lasting success.” 

There are many things Janet learns from experience. At a noodle shop as she reaches for the salt on the table, her friend and Thai mentor says, “Careful. That’s not what you think it is.” He hands her some fish sauce and takes away the bottle of sugar she was about to use on her noodles. She learns that black is the color of death and that she will soon need to replace her wardrobe. 

She discovers that women are expected to dress conservatively and do not smoke in public, an idea she finds ridiculous as an American. She was once asked if she was a “tomboy” and answers “I guess so” only to discover later that “tomboy” is a Thai euphemism for lesbian and that smoking in public is what prostitutes do. 

There is no mistaking the love-hate relationship Janet has with Bangkok. It entices her as much as it infuriates her. She takes us on a journey where we can smell the life of the city. Every one of her adventures will make you cringe or bend over with laughter. Janet will make you want to visit Bangkok and other parts of Southeast Asia. You will want to see for yourself what constantly draws her back and what makes her want to stay. Perhaps she will inspire you to become an expat. ~Ernie Hoyt

Available from ThingsAsian Books

Kingfishers Catch Fire by Rumer Godden (Viking, out of print)

“When Sophie had an idea, her child Teresa trembled.”

Sophie is a young British widow in India, with a very small pension and two equally small children. She is adventurous, sentimental, and in love with the Vale of Kashmir. Brought up as a sheltered English girl of good breeding, she is insouciant, viewing the world around her with “superficial eyes.” To Sophie the place she chooses to make her home is a haven surrounded by mountains, perched above a lake, picturesque as are the peasants who live nearby. 

“We shall live a poor and simple life. We shall toil...we shall grow our own vegetables and keep hens and bees, “ she tells Teresa, who has unfortunately been born with common sense and the gift of realism. Teresa observes and puts puzzle pieces together while Sophie is in love with beauty and crippled by her idea of what is necessary to live a basic life.

Her passion for lovely objects leads her to Profit David, a man who deals in beautiful expensive things and Sophie soon goes into debt buying a lamp with a shade that blazes painted kingfishers into light, a gleaming carpet, a Kashmir shawl. The villagers take note of her extravagance and deem her rich. Even the furnishings that Sophie’s upbringing leads her to regard as essentials are thoroughly luxurious to her neighbors: “A bed each. Even for  the children...Aie! She is rich!”

And she is inexplicable. Sophie and her children wear shoes in the house--”dirty!” and she has no husband. In India ladies do not live alone, unless they are “saints or sinners.” Sophie, living with only two servants and her little children, is neither and to her neighbors she seems mad.

Every community has its own politics and in the village near Sophie’s house the two leading families are wrapped in bitter competition. The village children are almost feral, spending their waking hours in the mountain fields, herding cattle. Sophie urges Teresa to make friends with them but Teresa knows better. For her and her little brother Moo, the herd children are dangerous.

Sophie moves in a graceful world of her own, unsettled only by the shape of a compass carved into the floor of her new house. While she works at settling in, blindly and blithely, the compass calls to her with its promise of places still to be seen. Her ignorance of the world around her is a path to disaster and when it hits, it focuses upon Teresa--and, less violently but with equal danger, upon Sophie.

British author Rumer Godden was taken to India when she was an infant, grew up there, and returned to it after completing her education in England. She embarked upon an unsuccessful marriage and when it disintegrated she moved with her two children to the Dal Lake in Kashmir at the start of World War Two. She stayed there for three years, starting an herb farm and “living, thinking and perhaps dreaming.” She left, as Sophie did, because of a disaster that was directed at her and her daughters. But before that occurred, she “wrote endlessly,” and like Sophie, she was obsessed with the beauty that surrounded her.

Godden’s love for India and her knowledge of it lifts Kingfishers Catch Fire well above the customary expat fiction, while gently excoriating the point of view of the customary expat. She presents a classic dissection of the dangers of romanticism and selective blindness, wrapping it in a mixture of the passion and unvarnished realism with which she saw the country she loved and eventually had to leave.~Janet Brown

Quest for Kim : In Search of Kipling's Great Game by Peter Hopkirk (John Murray)

Quest for Kim is author Peter Hopkirk’s attempt to follow in the footsteps of Kim from Rudyard Kipling’s novel of the same name. However, it is not a travelogue but more of a literary detective novel. The days of the Raj’s India are long past so Hopkirk’s journey takes him through the countries of Pakistan and India. He couldn’t have chosen a worse time to partake in this endeavor as the two countries were on the brink of war. 

Hopkirk does his best to leave the politics aside and focuses on his own journey. He wants to see how much of Kim’s India still remains. The trail has him starting from Lahore, Pakistan. He will continue on to Simla, Umballa, Delhi, and travel along the Grand Trunk Road. Hopkirk also sets out to show that the characters in Kim were based on or inspired by real people. 

You do not have to read Kim in order to enjoy this book as Hopkirk provides the necessary passages related to his quest. He admits that there are parts of the story that he would not be able to do justice to and advises the reader that it would be best to read the actions in Kipling’s own words. 

Hopkirk’s first order of business is to determine and argue if Kim was based on a true person and who that might have been. Hopkirk suggests that Kipling would also have been familiar with the story of two likely candidates. The first being a man named Durie who was the son of a British soldier and an Indian woman who traveled through Afghanistan “dressed as a Muslim”. 

The other likely person is a man named Tom Doolan, the son of an Irish sergeant and a Tibetan woman. The story goes that the Irishman deserted his post and ran away with the woman to Tibet, never to be heard from again. Then, years later, a young boy is seen in a market in Darjeeling with “fair hair and blue eyes, but who spoke no English”. “Around his neck, however, was hung an amulet-case containing papers which showed him to be the son of the missing soldier.”  This is the exact same way the chaplain of Kim’s father’s regiment discovers the identity of Kim.

Quest for Kim is a fascinating journey as we follow Hopkirk trace Kim’s journey and gives us the truth behind the real people the characters in the novel are based on. In his research, Hopkirk finds there really was an Afghan horse dealer who he surmises was the model for Mahbug Ali. Hopkirk makes a convincing argument that Colonel Craighton was based on the actions of Thomas Montgomerie who trained locals to “gather topographical and other intelligence in areas where it was far too dangerous for Europeans to travel.” 

This book is definitely not your ordinary travel journal. It is a tribute to Rudyard Kipling’s novel, Kim, whom Hopkirk says first introduced him to the “Great Game” and became obsessed with the story. Once you read this, you may be inclined to read Kipling’s masterpiece or return to it if you have read it before. Perhaps it will inspire you to make your own literary journey of one of your favorite novels. ~Ernie Hoyt

Six Four by Hideo Yokoyama (Riverrun)

This is Hideo Yokoyama’s first book to be published in English. Fourteen years ago in the first week of the sixty-fourth year of the Showa Era or 1989, Prefecture D was in the midst of an investigation involving a large number of police officers. A seven year old girl named Shoko Amamiya was kidnapped and held for a twenty-million yen ransom. The case ended on a sour note as the police found the girl’s dead body five days after the perpetrator escaped with the money. He remains at large and his identity remains unknown. The unsolved case has been given the name Six Four. 

Yoshinobu Mikami has recently been assigned the position of Press Director in Media Relations, a branch of Administrative Affairs, after having served in the Criminal Investigation’s First Division in Nonviolent Crime. He also worked on the kidnapping investigation fourteen years ago. He was a member of the Close Pursuit Unit and had followed the victim’s father, Yoshio Amimiya, to the ransom exchange point. He has been summoned by Akama, the Director of Administrative Affairs and Ishii, the Secretariat Chief to their office. They inform him that the Commissioner General is going to pay them a visit the following week. 

The Commissioner General is the head of the National Police Agency (NPA) which is based in Tokyo. He is responsible for some 260,000 police officers. “To the regional police, he is like the emperor.” The plan is for the Commissioner General to visit the site where the body was found. He will make an offering of incense and flowers, then visit the father at his home to pay his respects. “To make an appeal inside and outside the force, and to give a boost to the officers still investigating the case. To reinforce our intention never to let violent crime go unpunished.” The timing is well-planned as the statute of limitations will go into effect in just a little over a year. Mikami realizes there is more to the Commissioner General’s visit when Akama says, “I do believe his appeal is intended more to reach an internal audience than the general public.” 

Mikami is assigned the task of getting permission from Amamiya for the Commissioner General’s visit. The first time Mikami goes to see Amamiya, his request is flatly refused but persuades Amamiya to change his mind on a subsequent visit. However, on the eve of the Commissioner’s visit, another kidnapping has taken place. The victim is a young girl and the kidnapper has demanded a twenty-million yen ransom. He has also given the victim’s father the same instructions as those given in the Six Four case. It becomes a race against time as the police have to determine if this is a copycat case or if it is the same person who committed the crime fourteen years ago. 

This is an exciting look into the inner workings of the Japanese police investigating process and the relationship between separate divisions within the force. It also sheds light on the politics and bureaucracy of the National Police Agency. It is also a high-paced mystery with an unpredictable outcome and will appeal to fans of Miyuki Miyabe and Keigo Higashino. Once I started reading, I could not put it down. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Wish in the Dark by Christina Soontornvat (Candlewick Press)

Three children roam the city streets of Chattana, on their own but linked together in a way none of them completely understand. Pong and Somkit were born to prisoners which has left both boys marked for life. Nok, the daughter of the prison warden who lost his position after Pong escaped for freedom, is intent upon capturing the fugitive and restoring her father’s lost honor. 

Chattana is a city of brilliant light, surrounded by absolute darkness. Years ago a fire destroyed the city and now all flame is forbidden. The city’s blazing light comes from the power of one man, the Governor, who carries illumination in his fingertips. Under his touch, bulbs flare into globes of colored brightness and only he can decide what areas will receive this gift. 

However he, Pong, and Ampai, a mysterious woman activist who is “a stirrer of hearts,” have one thing in common. All three wear identical bracelets given to them by the abbot of a monastery, who himself carried the gift of light. Their vastly different lives intersect when Ampai plans a protest march against the Governor’s absolute and crushing power with Somkit and Pong promising to help her. The two of them scavenge for the material needed for the protest and as they wander the city, Nok hunts relentlessly for the boy who destroyed her father’s career.

Where did the Governor obtain his ability to brighten the world?  What is the secret behind the scars on Nok’s arm, ones that could only have been inflicted by a forbidden fire?  What is the secret behind Pong’s talent for hearing sounds that nobody else can hear? These questions give this story mysteries that will entice even the most reluctant reader and will make it a splendid read-aloud choice for teachers and parents.

A Wish in the Dark is an intricate and resonant story with plot twists and political parallels that take it beyond the realm of the 8-12 age range that its publisher has assigned to it. While young readers will fall captive to the book’s fantasy and adventure, their parents will recognize the Governor who has turned the City of Wonders to the City of Rules, the City of Order, and who wants to raise taxes to build a “youth reform center.” As Chattana is thronged with people from the farthest corners of the countryside to march peacefully across the city’s bridge, memories of Selma, Hong Kong, and Bangkok come to mind and this story takes on a deeper dimension.

Thai-American Christina Soontornvat has drawn upon Thai culture and history, mixing them with the classic theme of Les Miserables. Within that framework she has placed unforgettable characters who battle against injustice in a novel that will speak to everyone from the age of eight up to eighty. No matter how old or how young its readers may be, they will all be heartened by its message of hope and persistence as they too find themselves wishing in the dark.~Janet Brown

Red Candles and the Mermaid and Other Tales by Mimei Ogawa (Nihon Tosho Kan Kokai)

Mimei Ogawa was born in Joetsu in Niigata Prefecture in 1882. He went to Waseda University and studied Russian and English literature. After graduating, he focused on writing children’s literature and is often cited as the Hans Christian Andersen of Japan. Red Candles and the Mermaid is a collection of some of his most popular stories. 

“Red Candles and the Mermaid” is a story of human greed and revenge It is about a mermaid whose only wish is for her daughter to live a happy life. She decides to let her baby be brought up by humans because she heard “towns where human beings live are beautiful. People are kinder and more gentle than fish and beasts.” The daughter is brought up by an old couple who makes and sells candles in a small coastal town.

The daughter pays back their kindness by painting pictures on the candles. They sell really well and the shop becomes very prosperous. Rumors spread that if the candle is offered to the local shrine, ships would be protected at sea. However, the now rich couple are persuaded by a man to sell the girl knowing she is not human. The daughter begs her parents not to sell her but her pleas fall on deaf ears. Still, the girl kept drawing and colored some of the last candles all in red.

Around midnight, a woman comes to the house wanting to buy a candle and is sold a red one. That night a huge storm came and a rumor soon spread that whenever there is a red candle burning at the shrine, a violent storm would come no matter how nice the weather. The candles became associated with bad luck. The old couple stopped selling candles and the town perished as well.

“The Cow Woman” is a story that incorporates Buddhist beliefs concerning the afterlife. The tale centers around a very tall and strong but gentle deaf woman. She has a son that she loves very much. She is very protective of him and she fears people making fun of him because of her disability and because the boy has no father. Even after her death, the mother continues to look after her only son. 

“The Lord’s Bowl” is a story about beauty and practicality. A famous potter is requested to make a bowl for the Lord of the land. The official tells the potter the bowl must be light and thin. The potter makes the bowl as light and thin as possible. When the official presents the bowl to the Lord, he asks, “How do you decide whether the bowl is good or not?” The official responds by saying, “The more light and thin, the better. A heavy and thick bowl is vulgar.” Unfortunately, the Lord isn’t pleased with the bowl. The potter is brought to the castle and instead of the praise he thought he would receive, is reprimanded for not being considerate or practical when making the bowl. 

This collection of twenty-five short stories will appeal to children and adults alike. Ogawa believed that his stories were written for people who never forgot the innocence of their youth. The stories will take you back to a world you may have forgotten and will once again stir your imagination. ~Ernie Hoyt

One Last Look by Susanna Moore (Knopf)

“No matter how loud I scream, no one can hear me,” Lady Eleanor Oliphant writes in her journal. Wracked with seasickness in a cramped and dirty ship’s cabin, she’s two months away from England and faces another month at sea before her journey ends at Calcutta. A half-century after England lost its American colonies, it’s turned its attention to India, where Eleanor’s brother Henry has been named Governor-General.

Accompanied by his sisters Eleanor and Harriet, Henry travels in squalor that’s just marginally different from what his company of soldiers and 84 hunting hounds experience below deck. He weathers it with stolid aplomb, Eleanor is almost incapacitated with misery and disgust, and Harriet is “having a lovely time.”

All three are greeted with a heady mixture of luxury and the unknown, which they face in the same way they endured their 100-day voyage. In “rooms as spare as a gibbet...a trifle less fiery than a kiln,” even their lapdog has its own servant and five men are employed in the simple task of Eleanor washing her hands. Their meals are heavy and British, and the sisters’ daily schedules are dominated by periods of rest. “There are no locks on the doors,” Eleanor observes, “indeed there are seldom doors,” and the floors outside of the bedrooms are covered with servants, sleeping.

Eleanor becomes lethargic and relies upon a sedan chair; her chief activity is observing what surrounds her and writing about it all in her journal. Harriet hurls herself into her new life with enthusiasm, collecting a lemur and a gazelle as pets, and “making a life for herself,” always in the company of her jemadur who serves as a butler and interpreter. Both sisters learn to deny themselves nothing,as they take on the privilege and richness of the lives led by Indian royalty. 

Henry discovers that the commercial ventures of the East Indian Company are possibly more important than political concerns. His colonial government rests upon financial success. When he discovers that the government in Kabul threatens the four million pounds a year that flows to England from the subcontinent, he decides to overthrow the current leader and replace him with someone more acquiescent, someone “Indian in skin, but English in thought, English in morals.”

Meanwhile Harriet returns from a tiger hunt with the habit of smoking a hookah filled with sweet grass, tobacco, and cardamom. Eleanor, plagued with savage headaches, is introduced to opium by the mother of a raja. For Christmas that year, Harriet gives her an ivory opium pipe. Eleanof’s gift to her sister is a bejeweled lotus-shaped mouthpiece for her hookah.

When Russia threatens England’s presence in Afghanistan and the Crown’s hold upon India, Henry makes a disastrous move. British women and other civilians are captured and imprisoned, while 700 soldiers are slaughtered in a surprise attack. The Great Game is imperiled and Henry is recalled from his post.

He returns to England as a marquis, his sisters come back indelibly transformed. While Henry was absorbed in matters of strategy and empire, Eleanor and Harriet discovered India’s secrets as best they could and are now “most unprepared for London,” where there are “no pearls, no monkeys, no betel...no color...no smell.” Neither of them is able to escape the changes that India has cast upon them.

Susanna Moore has mined the letters and diaries of Englishwomen living in India during the Raj. Her research is staggering and her details of daily life in 19th century India, along with the debacle of British foreign policy in that country, is told with the assured voice of someone who experienced this time and place herself. Through the words of Lady Eleanor, Moore takes the convention of the historical novel, twists it viciously and veils it with enormous subtlety. The result is a book that is decadent but never sensational, a story that’s sensuous, languid, and illuminating.~Janet Brown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Available at ThingsAsian Books

A Dangerous Friend by Ward Just (Houghton Mifflin)

Sydney Parade comes to Saigon in 1965 as a civilian, believing that foreign aid is a form of nation building, and holding a devout faith in the domino theory. He’s employed by the Llewellyn Group, an organization formed by and connected to the U.S.government, existing outside of any chain of command. The Group is in Vietnam to facilitate the distribution of rice, the providing of vaccinations, the repairing of dikes, the building of roads and bridges and schools. Parade is told their victories will be reflected in the hearts and minds that their work will win, not in body counts, and he believes that. The man who tells him that does not.

Dicky Rostok is an ambitious cynic. His invisible agenda is based upon the principle that knowledge will give him mastery and power. His instrument in gaining this is Parade, whose family is loosely connected to Claude Armand, an owner of a rubber tree rubber plantation that’s close to enemy territory. 

“We’ve got to know things that the rest of them don’t know from a source of information they can’t figure out,” Rostock tells Parade, “And then Llewellyn Group will count for something. Not before.” Armand and his American wife are the ones whom Rostok is certain will give him the information that nobody else will have and it’s Parade’s job to get it.

The Armands live “between the lines.” To them the war is a nuisance that they would be able to ignore, if the American forces would only stop bombing their rubber trees. But the lines blur for them when an American plane is shot down near their home and a young American with political connections is captured. To deflect the glare of attention that this brings them, they give Parade information that will provide Rostok with his power while destroying lives, including their own.

“I will insist at the beginning that this is not a war story,” is the opening sentence of A Dangerous Friend, and the war remains peripheral throughout the novel. Instead it’s the story of people who give their hearts and lives to places they don’t understand, expatriates who believe that “when you have lived in a place and loved it that you belong to it.” But as Parade says to Madame Armand, “I’m thinking we live in different countries. I’ve invented one and you’ve invented another, and somewhere there’s a third that’s undiscovered.” Neither of them yet know what Parade’s father told him years earlier, “Thing about a foreign country, you never know what you don’t know.” They haven’t learned that acquiring this knowledge can be dangerous.

“There were many things that could be taken from you that were more precious than life.”  Rostok gets what he wants while other people lose their innocence, their homes, their faith.

Ward Just has written a companion novel to Graham Greene’s classic, The Quiet American. While both books show the destruction caused by ignorance mingled with power, Just’s novel is suffused with a love for Vietnam and for the people who believe it’s their home. It too deserves to be a classic.~Janet Brown