Of Monkey Bridges and Banh Mi Sandwiches by Oanh Ngo Usadi (O&O Press)

When Oanh Ngo Usadi and her siblings talked about winning the lottery, their father told them “We already won the lottery by being here in America.” He was a man who had lost his successful businesses and his Saigon home after Vietnam was reunified, who took his family to live in the countryside and then got them on a boat to another country. “Turning back is not an option,” he told his family and they never have.

When Saigon fell, Oanh’s father said, “This is our home. We’re staying here.” Even when he was forced to take them to live as peasants in a rural province, this man gave his children the gift of appreciating what they had--a taste of the first durian produced by their orchard, the color and fragrance of the blossoming trees, the celebration of Tet. But he was foresighted enough to bring gold and jewelry that would ensure safety in the future, stitched into the clothing that his children wore when they left Saigon.

Oanh and her brothers learned to use an outdoor privy, to think of wilted banana leaves as toilet paper, to cross bridges made of logs that were tied together with vines, “monkey bridges,” called that name because using them made people stoop like monkeys. They learned never to waste rice and to listen for interlopers when their father used a forbidden radio to hear news from broadcasts of Voice of America. 

After being held at gunpoint by an envious neighbor and nearly killed when robbers came to steal the community’s supply of valuable fertilizer, Oanh’s father realized it was time to leave Vietnam.  On a small fishing boat crowded with almost 160 people, engulfed in the odors of “sweat, vomit, urine, the sea,” after three days of “misery and boredom,” he brought his family to a holding site in Malaysia and eventually to the United States.

In Port Arthur, Texas, Oanh took on a new importance when she picked up English more easily than her parents. She was the one who took the rent each month to the curmudgeonly landlord and told him about any needed repairs. She was the one to successfully plead her own case when the school she attended tried to demote her from 5th to 3rd grade. Within three years she no longer needed ESL classes and she had learned how to stand up for herself.

Her parents found jobs in a relative’s bakery but her father had dreams of going into business for himself with a banh mi sandwich shop. “I’m going to give McDonald’s a run for its money,” he told his family and when he brought his dream to life, it was a family affair into which everybody poured their energy .

His other ambition was that his children go to college and that he would pay for it. Oanh’s older siblings began to study SAT handbooks and when Oanh explored the books for herself, she “fell in love with English.” 

“In a land of immigrants, a sense of belonging was possible. It just needed time,” she wrote in an essay before leaving for Rice University. Time was what her father gave her--a life of possibility and accomplishment.

A book that carries hope and fulfilled dreams, Oanh’s memoir is a tribute to a man who refused to turn back and who instilled persistence and ambition in his children. More than ever,  Of Monkey Bridges and Banh Mi Sandwiches is essential reading for us all.~Janet Brown

The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan (Del Rey)

真 - the kanji character for “TRUTH”. LuLing Liu Young has written this at the top of a sheet of paper followed by, “These are the things I know are true”. She then writes her name, the names of her two husbands, “both of them dead and our secrets gone with them”, and her daughter’s name Luyi. But there is one name she cannot remember. She only recalls being brought up by a nursemaid named Precious Auntie who once mentioned it. 

So begins Amy Tan’s tale of a Chinese-American woman and her immigrant mother in The Bonesetter’s Daughter. The first half of the book is told by the daughter, who has recently found a stack of papers she forgot about, clipped together in her bottom right desk drawer. The pages were all written in Chinese. Ruth recalls her mother saying, “Just some old things about my family. My story, begin little-girl time. I write for myself, but maybe you read, then you see how I grow up, come to this country.”  

Ruth felt guilty for neglecting it and decided she would try to translate one sentence a day. It took Ruth an hour to translate the first sentence which starts out as “These are the things I know are true.” The next evening Ruth translated another sentence, “My name is LuLing Liu Young”. This took her only five minutes. This was followed by the name of her two husbands. Ruth wasn’t aware that there was another man in her mother’s life. 

Ruth later finds another stack of papers all written in Chinese and written in the same style as the stack she found in her desk drawer. “HEART” was written at the top of the page in Chinese. It takes Ruth about ten minutes to translate the first sentence. “These are things I should not forget.” So begins the tale of her mother and the nursemaid called Precious Auntie. 

Precious Auntie’s often told LuLing about her father. She told LuLing that he was the Famous Bonesetter from the Mouth of the Mountain, and was the man who found dragon bones in a cave and used them to treat any type of ailment. LuLing remembers when she was about six, her nursemaid handed her a scrap of paper and said with her hands, “My family name. The name of all the bonesetters”. She told LuLing, “Never forget his name”. Unfortunately, it’s a name that LuLing can’t remember no matter how hard she tries and it still torments her now.

Luling writes in her notes, “Precious Auntie, what is our name? Come help me remember. I’m not a little girl anymore. I’m not afraid of ghosts. Are you still mad at me? Don’t you recognize me? I am LuLing, your daughter.”

The Bonesetter’s Daughter is as much a mystery as it is a human tale of the relationship between a mother and daughter. It is about family and family secrets and the immense power of love and what a mother will do to ensure the happiness of her child. What is the family secret? What is Precious Auntie’s real name? Amy Tan sets the tone and pace of the story that draws you in and keeps you there until all your questions are answered. ~Ernie Hoyt

Family in Six Tones by Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao (Penguin Random House)

Lan Cao’s life has been shaped by loss and love. At the age of thirteen, she lost her country when she  left Vietnam and came to America as a refugee. When she was almost forty, she became a mother, who from the very beginning, believed she and her daughter were “sinewed together.” Both experiences were “volcanic, invasive,” “steep paths filled with detours and stumbling blocks,” presenting her with new cultures to learn.

Harlan was a child with a father who gave her long generations of roots in America and a mother who “bequeathed Vietnam to her.” With different native tongues and separate codes of behavior, Harlan and Lan were bound to clash.  American confidence faced off against Vietnamese values, while mother and daughter struggled within a relationship that included Lan’s “shadow selves.”

Lan came to the U.S. as a child shaped by war, with parents whose past history outweighed the present and who could give her no guidance within the new life they all wrestled with. At home she was completely Vietnamese but once she walked out of her house, Lan carried the weight of becoming successful in America.

And she was. A graduate of Mount Holyoke, she went on to study law at Yale, to work at a Wall Street law firm, to achieve an academic career, and to become the author of two well-received novels. The American Dream was hers, although Lan points out this dream demands a crippling amount of work, work that her daughter would never have to face. “Americans can make their own dreams.”

As the only child of two law professors, Harlan lived a life that was idyllic in its affluence and rigorous in its training, with a notebook “full of fifth grade math that I had to do when I was just turning five.” She could “see sounds and feel letters and taste smells.” Words had colors and she was often accompanied by a purple cat that only she could see. Her best friend when she was at home was a little girl named Cecile. Cecile lived inside Harlan’s mother, a child with no body of her own.

This was one of Lan’s “shadow selves,” along with a horrifying creature that Harlan called “No Name.” These personalities emerged when Lan had seizures, in moments that nobody ever talked about and that Harlan first witnessed when she was four.. Like the purple cat and names that had their own unfading colors, this was a normal part of Harlan’s life. 

When Lan was four, she knew that her father carried cyanide pills in the hem of his military uniform. If he were captured, he would choose his own death. She grew up hearing stories of her uncle who attacked the enemy naked, at night. He and his comrades knew who to kill in the pitch darkness—any man who was wearing clothes.

But while Lan went from a life of war and struggle to one of success and comfort, Harlan’s successful childhood became a terrifying adolescence, when her father died and she became sexual prey to boys in her high school. Each of them convinced of the other’s invulnerability and perfection, Lan and Harlan became “two deaf best friends having one long conversation.”

Those conversations are made public in their two-person memoir that is scalding in its honesty and so piercing in its pain that it is difficult to read. But it ends with understanding and compassion. “I watched my mother’s heart bleed from the inside out,” Harlan concludes. As she looks toward a life of “perfect confusion, loneliness, deep  friendships, and loneliness,” she says “I’m ready.” “The stars were not aligned for us,” Lan says of her life with her daughter. “But forever here.”~Janet Brown

The Seed of Hope in the Heart by Teiichi Sato (Teiichi Sato)

“As long as I have the seed of hope in my heart, I can live anywhere. No matter what comes up, no matter how hard it gets along the way, we have to move forward for the future. For this reason, even if your hometown has been utterly destroyed by an unexpected tragic event, or something similar has happened to you, even if you have lost everything, have strong souls, look up at the sky, and move forward. Then, you really sow the seed of hope in your heart. Eventually, you can reap happiness…”

March 11, 2011, a date that will forever be etched in the Japanese psyche. At 2:46pm on Friday, an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0 hit the Tohoku region of Japan, the most powerful quake to hit Japan and the fourth largest quake in the world. The quake caused a tsunami which wiped out many coastal towns and caused the accident at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant.

Teiichi Sato is an ordinary man. He owns and runs a seed shop in Rikuzentakata City, a small town in Iwate Prefecture. He was a successful business one day and in one moment, he lost everything - his shop, his house, official documents and more. Sato gives a first-hand account of that fateful day. 

Sato states the purpose of The Seed of Hope in the Heart is “as a record of the tsunami for posterity, for the repose of the souls of the victims, to prepare for next disaster, as a survivor’s Bible, and as a small token of my gratitude for the kind support of from everyone, I have written this book while rebuilding my seed shop.”

This is the fifth and final edition to date of Sato’s self-published book which he decided to write entirely in English. Sato tells his story in English because he says, “If I wrote this Japanese, it would be too sad. I would be so emotional that my sentences would be ambiguous”. Sato tells us that by writing in English he could suppress his feelings and keep his mind busy by looking up the meanings of words he doesn’t know. 

He also wanted to write in English to tell his story to people overseas. He wanted to share his story about being a victim. He “wanted to talk about my experience of that awful tsunami”. It’s a harrowing account of one man’s experience of being a self-employed and fairly successful business with his own seed shop reduced to being a beggar. He was left with virtually nothing. 

But Sato’s story doesn’t stop there. He discusses what he did and what he accomplished on his long road to recovery from wanting to die and ending his life to starting over. He discusses the Kesendamashi or spirit of the Kesen people and how he overcame obstacles and government red-tape to re-open his store. The most amazing story is how Sato manages to re-open his shop in the tsunami-affected area a mere six months after the disaster. This is a story about the human spirit of survival .~Ernie Hoyt

What Could Be Saved by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz (Simon & Schuster, forthcoming, January 2021)

Cushioned by affluence in a city that they don’t understand, safe in Bangkok during the turbulence of the Vietnam War, the Preston family lives in a world of secrets and lies. The five of them rest securely in their comfort zones until the day the only son, a boy of eight, sinks below Bangkok’s surface in an inexplicable and unsolvable disappearance.

His parents and his two sisters return to Washington D.C. without him, back to the privileged lives that family wealth has provided, each one broken by Philip’s disappearance in ways none of them will acknowledge. The father dies, the mother embarks upon a journey toward dementia, her memories “swallowed, ingested, made null,” as thoroughly as her son had been. Bea, the oldest sister takes refuge in perfection. Laura, the youngest of the three children, escapes into a series of Ghost Paintings that have taken over her art. Then an email arrives. Forty-seven years after he vanished, Philip has resurfaced, the eight-year-old boy now a stranger in his fifties.

“It’s always a problem sending a man to a hot climate. You’ll never know what you’ll get back.” Words spoken to Philip’s mother by the man who will become her lover echo ominously when Laura gets on a plane to bring her brother home.

Written with slow and tender skill, a terrible story comes gradually into light, with secrets emerging like fragments of a jigsaw puzzle. “We were trained not to ask,” Bea says to her sister and a woman who had been their father’s colleague in espionage admits that in “our line of work...we don’t tell much. It’s part of the training.” “We’ve kept far too many secrets,” Laura replies, while left with a  whole new one all her own, one that’s “capable only of destruction, that needed to be kept.”

A photograph of a Vietnamese boy is used in propaganda that Philip’s father creates as a weapon of war, naively believing that misinformation passed on to Hanoi couldn’t endanger a boy in Thailand. Caught in their separate liaisons, neither parent remembers that Philip waits alone on a street that’s far beyond the expat bubble, a child who becomes prey in an act of revenge that’s every family’s nightmare. 

Floating in a river of darkness that’s eased by drugs, his body cared for only so it can be torn and hurt by nightly visitors, Philip becomes another person, divorced from his past. Once he’s too old to be valuable to his captors, he falls into yet another life, one that demands honesty and clarity, “like bits in a kaleidescope, falling randomly...into a new disorder and a new beauty,” one that has been denied to his sheltered sisters. 

O’Halloran Schwartz is a master of subtle horror, with an eye for beauty, a gift of gentle satire, and a disdain for subterfuge. In a time when readers most need hope, she extends it in a story that transcends a happy ending. When Philip concludes, “What’s happy? What’s an ending?” his words hold solace, not cynicism, in a novel that promises to be a literary highlight of 2021.~Janet Brown

Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

When his girlfriend gets a teaching job in the north of Thailand, author and fictional protagonist of Fieldwork, Mischa Berlinski, decides to tag along and make his living by writing freelance articles for various English language publications. Mischa was in Bangkok working on a story for a Singaporean arts magazine about an up-and-coming Thai sculptor. He meets his friend Josh O’Connor, who has been living in Thailand for the past ten years. 

Josh’s stories are so incredibly intriguing that Mischa always calls him when he is in Bangkok. Tonight would be no exception. They meet for food and drinks at an outdoor food booth that specializes in fish. During the meal, Josh tells Mischa he needs someone “who really knows the up-country” and begins to tell a typical Josh story.  

“A Josh O’Connor story is like a giant cruise ship leaving the port, and when you make a dinner date with Josh O’Connor, you know in advance that you are going to set sail”. Josh goes into his story about receiving a call from Wim, a functionary at the Dutch embassy who tells him about a woman who called and wants someone to inform her wayward niece that her uncle has died and has left her a small inheritance. The only thing is, the woman’s niece is in prison for murder.

Josh meets Martiya in prison but is met with an unexpected vehemence. Martiya believes Josh is just another missionary that wants her to accept the Lord Jesus. Once the misunderstanding is resolved, Josh informs her of her inheritance and asks if there is anything else he can do. Martiya is not interested in the money or bribing her way out of prison. The only things she asks for are pencils and papers so she can complete a paper she’s writing about life in a Thai prison. A simple request Josh grants her. The inheritance is to be given to charity to help and support the hill tribes of Thailand.

A year after talking with Martiya, Josh unexpectedly receives a package from the prison. Enclosed were two sets of manuscripts that Martiya wrote in prison with a request that they be properly typed and to submit them for publication. Josh calls the prison to talk to Martiya in person, only to be informed that she is dead. “She ate a ball of opium and killed herself”. Josh says it could be a great story, for someone who lives up North as he doesn’t have the time to pursue the story any further. What else could Mischa do but take up the story from there.

Berlinski weaves an interesting story that was inspired as he was writing a historical account of the conversion of the Lisu people of northern Thailand to Christianity. The Dyalo do not exist in real life but come to life in Fieldwork. Berlinski had interviewed a number of missionaries in Thailand which adds to the realism of Martiya’s encounters with them. The fictional Mischa takes up the story and does his research to find out more about Martiya van der Leun and how she ends up in prison. Who did she kill? Why did she kill the person? Why did she kill herself? The deeper Mischa delves into the story, the mystery slowly comes to light. 

If you weren’t interested in anthropology before reading Fieldwork, you may find yourself digging through other nonfiction titles related to the hundreds of tribes and people that you never knew existed! ~Ernie Hoyt

A Tiger's Heart: The Story of a Modern Chinese Woman by Aisling Juanjuan Shen (Soho Press)

Scarlet O’Hara meets The Ugly Ducking in this harrowing and unsparing memoir, a book so wrapped in desperation that it’s both difficult to read and impossible to abandon.

Born in a tiny village of fifty peasants, Juanjuan’s only hint of affection is the name her mother gives her, “Pretty.” But the little girl knows better. “She is just not lovable,” she overhears her mother saying. “I was simple, slow, and afraid of other people,” she describes herself. However Juanjuan is born at the right moment in history, in 1974. She turns six at a time when even a peasant girl can go to school and learn to find a refuge in books. “School was heaven, the only thing I enjoyed,” and she does well there, gaining a reputation for scholarship that even her dismissive parents are forced to acknowledge.

Juanjuan’s mother, beautiful and discontented, also finds that history has put her at an advantage. Deng Xiaoping has elevated businessmen from the villains of Mao’s time to the hopes of the nation and a village entrepreneur takes her as his mistress. His financial support helps Juanjuan to leave for the city of Suzhou where she has been accepted at a teacher’s college.

The only one of the 100 students in her village school to achieve this pinnacle, Juanjuan is smart enough to realize the path she’s been presented with has a dead end. Without money or influence, she’s sent to teach in a village even more dismal than the one she came from.  But she has a skill that opens windows for her. In college she learned English and she’s discovered that in that language, she’s no longer afraid. She follows a fleeting encounter with a foreigner that gives her a glimpse into another universe, the metropolis of Shanghai, and she becomes hungry for what this other world has to offer. Discovering  that sexual power can be a trap or an escape hatch,  Juanjuan chooses escape.

An affair with a handsome young teacher takes her to Guangzhou. An attraction to a factory manager leads her into a relationship with a man who mentors and fosters her advancement in the world of business. An infatuation with an Amway recruiter takes her back into poverty until her former mentor gives her a chance once again--and when she returns from the squalor of village life, Juanjuan knows how to get what she wants.

The only class she failed in college was a course in Moral Character and life has shown her that lacking this attribute is an advantage.  It’s the Roaring 90s when kickbacks are what smart people receive and “selling out your boss” is just good business. Juanjuan does all that--and then the Internet expands her dreams. 

Suddenly she’s sophisticated and successful, with an American boyfriend. Her affluence brings her closer to her mother and the secret of her unhappy childhood comes to light. Her boyfriend becomes her husband, Juanjuan becomes Aisling, and her acceptance to the University of Massachusetts becomes her graduation from Wellesley, magna cum laude.

As terrifying as it is inspirational, Juanjuan’s is a success story that is bloodcurdling and insightful. After reading this, who could resist a sequel to this odyssey, one  that tells how Juanjuan achieved her American success?~Janet Brown 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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