The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill (Soho Crime)

The Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotterill is the first book in a mystery series set in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic in the late seventies when the communist Pathet Lao took power. The story features a seventy-two year old man with bright green eyes named Dr. Siri Paiboun. He is a forty-six year member of the Communist Party and is also a surgeon. Comrade Kham, a high-level government bureaucrat, tells Siri that he has been appointed chief police coroner...of the entire country - a position he could not refuse even though he has never done an autopsy in his life. 

Siri’s assistant, Geung, a young man who has Down’s Syndrome, informs that Comrade Kham’s wife is waiting for him at the morgue. She is described as a “senior cadre at the Women’s Union and carried as much weight politically as she did structurally.” What Geung fails to tell him though is that Mrs. Kham is in the freezer. Dr. Siri’s nurse, Dtui tells him that she was brought in because she died an unnatural death. 

Senior Comrade Kham had already been informed of his wife’s death and came to the morgue the next day. Kham was confident about the cause of death. He told Siri that his wife was addicted to lahp, a dish that is often made with raw meat. Dr. Siri says he cannot issue a death certificate until he can confirm that the cause of death was by parasites. Comrade Kham said that isn’t necessary as he had her own surgeon already sign it. 

Siri begins to suspect foul play when Senior Comrade Kham rushes to have the body cremated and goes as far as saying, “Even a man of science needs to show sensitivity to culture and religion” as the Comrade Kham was a member of the committee that outlawed Buddhism as a state religion and banned the giving of alms to monks. 

A group of men came into the morgue bringing a coffin to remove Mrs. Kham’s body. This is when Siri sees an ominous shadow of a figure behind the men who has a striking resemblance to Mrs. Kham. He saw the outline of Mrs. Kham run at Comrade Kham with full force with a look of hatred but vanished when she hit him making Comrade Kham shudder with a sudden chill. 

Fortunately, Siri still had Mrs. Kham’s brain setting in formalin. He knew he should leave it alone but his scientific mind wouldn’t let it rest. What if Mrs. Kham had been poisoned or worse yet, what if she had been murdered? And recently there have been three other deaths by unnatural causes and it appears that Comrade Kham may have had something to do with that as well. 

Cotterill weaves an engaging story with characters you can care for. He blends the tale with a good dose of humor and action and adds a bit of shamanism and spirits into the picture as well. The government and people really come to life and leave you wanting more. Fortunately, there are fourteen more titles in the series! ~Ernie Hoyt

Travels with Myself and Another: A Memoir by Martha Gellhorn (Penguin)

Martha Gellhorn was an indefatigable writer, producing five novels, fourteen novellas, two collections of short stories, and a lifetime of reportage which has been reprinted in The Face of War and The View from the Ground. Although her life was full of glamour and adventure, Gellhorn rarely wrote about herself, except in a book that has redefined travel writing, Travels with Myself and Another. Even though Paul Theroux outdoes her in output, Gellhorn would dismiss him as one of “the great travelers who have every impressive qualification for the job but lack jokes.”

Many things infuriated Gellhorn--injustice, cruelty, stupidity--but on a personal level, nothing made her more incensed than having her name linked with that of the man she was married for less than five of her almost ninety years, Ernest Hemingway. Although Travels with Myself and Another is subtitled as a memoir, the most famous of her three husbands appears in just one essay under the initials of U.C. (Unwilling Companion), probably only because he provides extensive comic relief for a writer “who cherishes...disasters” and is immensely fond of black humor.

Gellhorn relishes mishaps in her journeys because that is where the story lies--and since her journeys are invariably far off the map, mishaps are always there, waiting for her acerbic descriptions. 

Of all the travels that she has chosen to relive, her journey to China in 1941 is easily the most hair-raising and hysterically funny. Gellhorn is determined to witness the Sino-Japanese War first-hand shortly after Japan joins Italy and Germany in the Axis. “All I had to do is get to China,” she says blithely, and as part of her preparations for this odyssey she persuades U.C. to go with her. Embarking from San Francisco to Honolulu by ship, a voyage that “lasted roughly forever,” Gellhorn and U.C. then fly from Hawaii to Hong Kong, “all day in roomy comfort”, landing at an island where passengers spend the night before arriving in Hong Kong. “Air travel,” she says, “was not always disgusting.”

Not a woman who prefers to wallow in luxury, Gellhorn is soon flying out of Hong Kong into China “at 4:30 am in a high wind in a DC2,” part of China National Aviation Company’s fleet, which Gellhorn describes as “flying beetles.” “Cold to frozen,” she returns three nights later to the comfort of the hotel where U.C. holds court. Gellhorn spends her days exploring Hong Kong’s “cruel poverty, the worst I had ever seen,” visiting opium dens, brothels, child-labor sweat shops, and meeting Emily Hahn (“with cigar and highly savvy on the Orient”) and Madame Sun Yat Sen (“tiny and adorable and admirable”).

As a war correspondent for Collier’s, Gellhorn insists upon getting as close to the war as she can. Traveling by plane, truck, boat, and “awful little horses”, she and U.C. find the troops of the Chinese Army and their hard-drinking generals (who almost vanquish U.C. in their alcoholic prowess), Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang  (“who,” Gellhorn fumes, “ was charming to U.C. and civil to me”), and, through a cloak-and-dagger encounter in a Chungking market, Chou Enlai (“this entrancing man,” Gellhorn confesses, “the one really good man we’d met in China”).

Although she and U.C. barely escape cholera, hypothermia, food poisoning, and the hazards of drinking snake wine, by the end of their journey Gellhorn contracts a vicious case of “China Rot,” an ailment resembling athlete’s foot that’s highly contagious. U.C.’s commiseration is heartwarming: “Honest to God, M., you brought this on yourself. I told you not to wash.”

On their last night, hot and steaming in the humidity of Rangoon, Gellhorn is overwhelmed with gratitude that U.C. has stuck with her through “a season in hell.” She reaches out, touches his shoulder, and murmurs her thanks, “while he wrenched away, shouting “Take your filthy dirty hands off me!” “We looked at each other, laughing in our separate pools of sweat.”

“The real life of the East is agony to watch and horror to share,” Gellhorn wrote somewhat melodramatically to her mother. Years later, she concludes “I was right about one thing; in the Orient a world ended.” From Gellhorn’s sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued point of view, that ending was nothing to mourn.~Janet Brown

The Crocodile Fury by Beth Yahp (Angus & Robertson)

The Crocodile Fury is Beth Yahp’s first novel and is set in her native Malaysia. It is the story of three generations of women - the grandmother who was a bonded-servant to a rich man and worked at his mansion before it was converted into a convent, the mother who works in the convent’s laundry room, and the girl who narrates the story. 

The narrator has spent most of her life in the convent. “The convent is on a hill on the edge of the city, next to a jungle reserve which swallows and spits out trucks full of soldiers every day.” This is where the narrator begins her story. She also talks about the tribe of monkeys led by a one-armed bandit who often leads raids into the kitchen of the convent to steal food. 

It is the convent where the parents of the wealthy and the poor send their girls. “Young girls are brought in who are too noisy or boisterous or too bossy or unladylike or too disobedient or worldly, or merely too hard to look at, or feed.” The homely girls are taught to sew and weave while the noisy, boisterous girls are taught to become honest, obedient and humble young ladies. 

The narrator is a charity student. The narrator was raised mostly by her grandmother. She tells us that her grandmother believes in ghosts and demons.  “She is old now, so sometimes she mixes them up. When she was younger she had an extra eye.” When the narrator asks her grandmother, “Where? Where?” Her grandmother tells her she can never be sure. Her grandmother’s extra eye “suddenly opened when she was hit on the head with a frying-pan ladle.” This gave her the power to see the demons and spirits and the ability to talk to the dead. 

Yahp’s prose flows smoothly and is a delight to read as she makes the jungle surrounding the convent come alive but the story itself goes all over the place. At times, it is very difficult to follow as the narrator will talk about her grandmother, then her mother, then about herself and back to her mother or grandmother making it hard to follow the chronology of events. It is also difficult to feel any empathy towards the characters. 

The grandmother comes off as demanding and unforgiving. The narrator with her repetitious pronouncements about her mother “before she was a Christian” was irritating at best. In fact, all the characters seem to be caricatures of people as none of them are given any names. They are only known as grandmother, mother, the bully, the rich man, the lover, the lizard boy and so on. 

The story is told with a blend of spiritualism, mysticism and the mundane so you can never be sure if the narrator is telling a true story or is just remembering a dream she had or a vision her grandmother saw. 

And the “crocodile fury”? The crocodile is a metaphor for man and his hunger to satisfy his lust for power and love. The fury is when the “crocodiles” cannot contain their own anger. All in all, the descriptive depiction of the convent and the characters that pass through there make for a story that is at once confusing and beautiful at the same time. ~Ernie Hoyt

Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910-1960 by Julia Maria Schiavone Camacho (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill)

A multitude of ironies pervade the history of the Chinese Mexicans, perhaps most strongly the reasons that helped to bring their ancestors to Mexico in the first place. Before he was toppled in the Mexican Revolution, President Porfirio Diaz held dictatorial power in his country from 1876 until 1910 with a brief hiatus and he advocated Chinese immigration. His reasons were highly pragmatic, not humanitarian. While the US was busily deporting their Chinese residents, Diaz saw them not only as a cheap labor source but as a way to “whiten” the complexion of his compatriots, many of whom were indigenous or mestizo (of mixed European and indigenous blood.) Himself a mestizo, Diaz knew well the handicaps that came from this background and believed dilution of this ethnic group would lead to greater acceptance of his country on the world stage.

With the onset of the Mexican Revolution in 1910 came a strong backlash against the Chinese residents,  who had flourished under Diaz’s program of giving them integration into Mexican society.  Chinese laborers had swiftly become merchants and businessmen, “the first petit bourgeois class.”. Many of them became fluent in Spanish and established families with Mexican women. Some became naturalized citizens of Mexico. They shared cultural similarities with their Mexican neighbors; the importance of extended family, the honoring of the dead, and a fluid approach toward monogamy were touchstones of both countries.

However the Chinese propensity toward “frugality and economic discipline” made them a target when the Revolution began. Under the banner of “They’re stealing our jobs. They’re stealing our women,” racist policies were launched by anti-Chinese activists. Violence erupted against not only the Chinese but against those Mexicans who were their friends. Although the courts at first supported the Chinese, anti-Chinese policies became law and the Chinese were vigorously expelled in the 1930’s, eerily mirroring modern-day US immigration policies against Mexican refugees.

But the Chinese in Mexico had not only established economic roots, their children had known only Mexico from birth and their wives were fully Mexican. The expulsion of these families was an uprooting that was abrupt and cruel. Once within China, men were reunited with the women they had taken as wives before their emigration to Mexico and the wives they brought them were viewed as concubines by Chinese society. The half-Mexican children were unaccepted by villagers; living without the local language and without status, the culture shock of the Mexican families was immense. The wives banded together and the more sophisticated of them began to appeal to Mexican diplomats in China and Hong Kong. They wanted to go home.

Laws at that time were based upon women taking the nationality of their husbands upon marriage and many of the Mexican wives became delighted that they had never been legally married. Still the process of repatriation was tortuous and lengthy. While women waited for a homeward passage, their children began to learn how to be Chinese, while being encouraged by their mothers to long for their old lives in Mexico.

Some of the families found more congenial homes in Macau and Hong Kong, which as colonies, were less xenophobic toward immigrants than villages in rural China. Although many of the colonies’ residents found refuge in the Catholic churches and in Macau’s Portuguese community and didn’t return in the first wave of repatriation, Mao’s victory made them uneasy and the specter of Communism during the Cold War helped to facilitate their return to Mexico. In 1960, after almost thirty years in Asia, 267 Chinese Mexicans came back to Mexico, with 70 more waiting for their turn. Even in the 1980’s, Chinese Mexicans were still coming home from China.

But they came back faced with the gulf of being “between cultures,” especially the children of the expulsion who were now adults. For years they had known Mexico only through the culture embodied within their mothers and in dim memories of their own. In China they had been seen as Mexicans, now back in their homeland they were Chinese. Even so, one man who had left Mexico when he was four and returned to his original hometown as an adult told Schiavone Camacho, “Mexico delights me. Navojoa delights me.” 

After a difficult readjustment on the part of both the repatriated and the Mexican government, the Chinese Mexicans have strengthened the position of mixed-race citizens in Mexico, thus defeating Diaz’s original hope that they would help to eliminate that category by turning Mexico white.

Now their culinary history lives on, both in Asia and in Central America. In Hong Kong bakeries sell “Mexico buns,” introduced by the Mexican wives of expelled Chinese. In Mexico Chinese restaurants flourish. And in Mexican cities and towns, through their knowledge of two countries, “Chinese Mexicans have expanded the idea of Mexicanness.”`Janet Brown

Sweet Daruma : A Japan Satire by Janice Valerie Young (iUniverse)

Sweet Daruma is an irreverent story set in Japan as told through the eyes of Magda who leaves her native Canada and her globalization-protesting boyfriend to teach English conversation...or so she thinks. 

Magda is met at the airport by a man who calls himself September, his actual name being Jun which sounds like “June” in English. He changed his name because he felt Jun sounded too “trite”. Magda is whisked off to use her English abilities right away, but not at a conversation school. September takes her to a site on the Chuo Line and says there is man who is trying to commit Chuocide, suicide by getting hit by the Chuo Line railway. 

Magda discovers that she has joined the Anne of Grey Tokyo Emergency Response Team named after Lucy Maud Montgomery’s “Anne of Green Gables”, a book that is popular with many Japanese. From there, Magda meets the colorful characters she works with and has one zany adventure after another. How all these characters intertwine borders on the absurd.

Anne Lajeunesse is a fellow Canadian who “had been in Japan long enough to know that those who accused her of treating Japan as if it were a giant theme park for Westerners had obviously never lived in Japan”. She is the owner and creator of the Anne of Grey Tokyo Emergency Response Team. 

Kate is another Canadian who also works for the Anne of Grey Tokyo Emergency Response Team who tells Magda that one of the first things Magda should do is “Go out as soon as you can and get a vibrator” because she continues, “You won’t be having any sex during your time in Japan.” 

Magda must deal with the owner of a dry cleaner called Morimoto, a couple of wannabe Yakuzas, a pair of yamambas (a fashion trend set by Japanese high school girls in the mid-’90s where they applied dark tans and white lipstick), who are also amateur entrepreneurs selling their own urine, two militant English language school teachers and a mute, one-armed monkey named Kagemusha. 

Hirohisa is a former Christian who lives in the same building occupied by the Anne of Grey team and is also the owner of Kagemusha. He is currently designing stackable apartments that are shaped like a daruma, a hollow round doll that is often displayed for good luck or good fortune. It is an act committed by Hirohisa which sets off a series of events in which all the characters would cross paths. 

A satire is supposed to be humorous but the book reads more like an expat airing their grievances about everything they don’t like about Japan - the crowded trains, the gropers, the over-saturation of English conversation schools, enjo-kosai (teenage prostitution) and the like. It’s as if the writer wanted to exaggerate everything that is bad about Japan and weave it into a story. Sometimes it works but most of the time it falls flat. 

I really tried to enjoy this story but found many of the Japanese pop cultural references to be dated and obscure. The writing is simple and easy to understand but many of the situations are beyond absurd, rendering this satire into a piece of juvenile fiction a high student may have written for their creative writing class. ~Ernie Hoyt

Without You, There is No Us by Suki Kim (Broadway Books)

Imagine being “in a prison disguised as a campus,” constantly under guard and on guard, in the company of “thirty missionaries disguised as teachers,“ as “a writer disguised as a missionary disguised as a teacher.” Imagine living without freedom of movement, without the ability to call friends and family, without writing uncensored letters or emails, without heat in the winter or the privacy that comes with closing a bedroom door and knowing there is no surveillance waiting there. Imagine living this way for almost five months, teaching young men from the highest social class of their nation who have never used the Internet, rarely leave the campus and then only under tight supervision, who have been trained all of their lives to be unswerving soldiers in the service of their revered leader.

Suki Kim chooses this. Her life has been shadowed by North Korea from the time she can first remember. Living in Seoul until her family came to the US when she was fifteen, she grows up hearing stories of her mother’s older brother who was captured and taken to the north when the country was first divided and about her father’s teenage cousins, young nursing students who disappeared during the war and were never seen again. Division and separation is a common thread that is always present; unification of the country is a prevailing hope among Kim’s family and other members of the Korean diaspora. 

Kim comes to adulthood with a feeling of homelessness, one that oddly disappears during her initial visits to the capital of North Korea, Pyongyang. From the privileged, cushioned viewpoint of being part of a delegation and then as a journalist, Kim is comforted by the “sense of recognition” that she finds there, the feeling that she’s in touch with her past. When she’s given the opportunity in 2011 to teach English in Pyongyang, at a university recently established by Korean evangelical Christians, she grabs it.

Kim enters as the spy that her employers and the North Korean government vigilantly guard themselves against. Gathering material for a book is her goal and she comes equipped with unobtrusive, easily concealed thumb drives on which she puts her notes. To her colleagues, she’s a good Christian girl and Kim, through the way she dresses and the way she speaks, maintains that illusion. Even when she encounters a man who had been her guide when she had first come to Pyongyang as a journalist, even when a reporter she had worked with shows up at the university on assignment and immediately recognizes her, even when the man she is in love with writes indiscreetly in his letters to her, Kim remains undetected.

What makes her dangerous charade bearable is her students.  She falls in love with them all, while always being aware that she must watch every word she speaks to them. Any deviation from the curriculum approved by “the counterparts,” English-speaking academics who scrutinize her lesson plans, can open cracks in the wall of isolation that’s been imposed on these young men and could possibly endanger their futures. Even the idea of showing a Harry Potter movie, something they’ve all heard of but have never come in contact with, is shot down as a danger, not by the counterparts but by the missionaries and  Kim comes to realize that slavish devotion to the Leader is quite similar to her fellow-teachers’ devotion to God.

“They’re beautiful” is her first impression of her students, which is rapidly followed by learning they’re all talented and well-practiced liars. They tell her about one man who managed to hack his university’s computer system and raised his grades in all of his courses. When this was discovered by the authorities, the student wasn’t disgraced  for his dishonesty but was rewarded for his expertise.

The Leader dies unexpectedly at the end of the semester when Kim is on the verge of going home. Overnight her students are transformed from begging her to return to ignoring that she’s still there. In their grief and uncertainty about the future, they’ve erased her--but she will soon betray them. Even though she’s changed their names in her stories about them, the confidences they have written to her in class assignments and that she discloses may well ruin their lives. Her book is both a horror thriller and a love story that ends badly, with Kim as the villain in the relationship. She’s the one who has cheated--and quite possibly has been destructive--for her own benefit, to advance her career.~Janet Brown

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin (Penguin)

Three Cups of Tea is the inspiring true story of a mountaineer turned humanitarian whose life work is educating the impoverished children of Northern Pakistan. His mission is “to promote peace...one school at a time.”

Greg Mortensen is a registered nurse and an experienced mountaineer. In 1993 he attempted to climb the world’s second highest mountain - K2, located in the Baltistan district of Northern Pakistan which borders Xinjiang, China. He decided to climb the mountain as a tribute to his youngest sister who died of a seizure before her twenty-third birthday. He planned to leave one of her possessions - a necklace, at the summit of the mountain. 

Mortensen never does make it to the summit and gets lost trying to return to base camp. He finds himself in a small village called Korphe, a place he has never heard of and doesn’t recall seeing it on any of the dozens of maps he had studied. It is here that Mortensen meets Haji Ali, the nurmadhar, the chief, who shows the lost mountaineer kindness and compassion. 

Haji Ali tells him the village has no school and shares a teacher with another village who comes to teach at the village three times a week. The rest of the week, the children are left on their own and practice their studies the teacher had given them. 

It is this revelation that sets Mortensen on a new goal. He says to Haji Ali, “I will build a school. I promise.” This man with no experience in fund-raising or how to go about building a school in a foreign country spends his time doing research and talking to people who may be able to help him. He works enough to make a fair sum of money to finance his trips back to Pakistan never once forgetting the promise he made to Haji Ali. 

What started out as a small promise to a man leads to the creation of the Central Asia Institute, which would help build more than fifty schools throughout Pakistan, many of them built especially for girls. Mortensen would also discover how business is conducted in Pakistan. Haji Ali tells him, “Here (in Pakistan and Afghanistan), we drink three dups of tea to do business; the first you are a stranger, the second you become a friend, and the third, you join our family, and for our family we are prepared to do anything - even die.”

Three Cups of Tea is credited to two authors, Greg Mortensen and David Oliver Relin, however the book is told in the third person through journalist Relin’s writing. Relin says, “I wrote the story. But Greg Mortensen lived it.” Once the story progresses, it appears as if Relin forgets his objectivity and almost deifies Mortensen into a man who can do no wrong. Many of the passages in the story may be irrelevant but the heart of the story stays with you long after you finish reading it. 

The journey from mountaineer to humanitarian is one that will inspire. Mortensen shows that by determination, one can accomplish anything, even build a school or two in one of the world’s most remote areas. With the rise of the madrassas (Islamic religious schools) teaching fundamentalist Islam and financed by a Arab shieks, Mortensen tries to raise his voice to tell people that the best way to fight terrorism is through education. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Fire Sacrifice by Susham Bedi (Heinemann)

The Fire Sacrifice is one of the first of six books selected by Heinemann Publishers for the introduction to their Asian Writers Series. The purpose is “to introduce English language readers to some of the interesting fiction written in languages that most will neither know nor study.”  The book was first published in Hindi in 1989 by Susham Bedi. It is also her first book. 

Guddo has left her native India and has spent the last ten years living in New York City. It is New Year’s Day. Guddo was brought up to believe that if the first day of the year is a happy one, there would be no major problems for the rest of the year, so she plans to perform the havan in her living room. The havan is “a ritual fire sacrifice, performed on auspicious occasions and for purification.” 

Guddo has invited a number of close relatives to her home - her two daughters and a son-in-law, her two sisters along with their children, and the husband of one of the sisters. This is the first time Guddo has had a chance to perform this sacrifice in the U.S. She feels as if this is the first time in ten years where she can sit and relax and not be concerned about anyone else’s trouble. 

As she reflects back on her life, she wonders if she made the right choices. She had a nice comfortable life in India. She and her husband had good jobs, servants to help around the house and friendly neighbors and relations. This idyllic life was shattered when her husband succumbs to a disease and the pharmacies in India do not have the medicine that will help him. Guddo becomes a widower and her life changes dramatically. 

Guddo’s two daughters are still in school and her son has not yet graduated high school. It is Guddo’s belief that she must continue to work and marry off her daughters and find her son a nice bride before she can give any thought to her own life. Her beliefs are steeped in the tradition of putting the family and children first. 

One of her sisters had emigrated to the U.S. seventeen years prior and suggested Guddo and her son should come and live here as well. For the average Indian family, the U.S. is looked upon as a land of wealth and opportunity. They believe that once they find a place to settle, life would be easy and carefree and getting a job would be a breeze. However, the reality is far from what Guddo imagines. 

The Fire Sacrifice gives a voice to the immigrant story of Indians as they seek success and fortune in a new world in the hopes of giving their children a better life while trying to keep a balance with their traditional Indian values. Those same children grow up more American than Indian and many of them reject or resent those Indian traditions. 

Leaving a life you know to live and work in a foreign country is not an easy task. There may be the language barrier, culture shock, and misunderstandings of certain cultural values. Bedi brings to light all the problems that face an immigrant in a new country. What you imagine and what is real can be painfully different. ~Ernie Hoyt

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (Riverhead Books)

The Greeks had a word for it, tragodia, tragedy. We have apps for it instead. Almost every day, brought to our screens by social media, another unspeakable sadness blazes into our collective consciousness, burns bright, and is promptly extinguished by the next one. We can’t keep up, let alone turn it into art that will bring us to action. We have no Sophocles. But we have Kamila Shamsie, who has taken Antigone and brought it into our own time, shockingly and unforgettably, in Home Fire.

Beautiful twins, orphans, cared for by their older sister--the boy runs away to the unexpected emotional support of a dangerous path his father followed long ago, the girl studies English law, “knowing everything about her rights,” until the loss of her brother shows her how fragile those rights can become, erased by one rapid decision.

At first this novel seems almost like chick-lit, with an overlay of contemporary political realities. Then Shamsie turns her kaleidoscope to another character, then another, and the picture expands and deepens. A sister who is burdened by becoming a maternal substitute far too young, the brother who is seduced by the history and fraternity of jihad, his twin sister who finds a way to help him but discovers this may destroy her own happiness, the young man who gives her his future, the father who holds the fates of all four, encoiling them with his own ambition--through them, the puzzle pieces come together.

From America, where citizens emblazons “their political beliefs on bumper stickers” to England, where a boy feels he’s without a country until his father’s destiny claims him, to a deserted park in Pakistan where a young man and woman hold each other, waiting for the flames--the different facets blend into a whole. The truth sears. The moral righteousness of power becomes a scar that is inescapable and indelible.

“The personal is the political,” but it’s even more true is the political is personal, although it’s convenient to pretend it isn’t. The brilliant sister, the passionate teenage twins, the man who defies his family, the father who loses everything--all unite in a horrible “butterfly effect” that reechoes headlines and click-bait topic sentences that are easy to ignore. What we’ve overlooked on Twitter becomes a story which keeps us from turning away. 

If an old woman didn’t have a fondness for M&Ms, if a boy hadn’t taken a job in a neighborhood grocery, if a girl hadn’t said to a man in a railway carriage, “Do you live alone? Take me there,” if a politician hadn’t ignored the corpse of one of his countrymen, this particular tragedy might never have happened. Perhaps the ending would truly have been “two lovers in a park, sun-dappled, beautiful, and at peace.”

Only a skilled writer can keep contemporary issues within the realm of art, rather than wandering off into propaganda. Now more than ever, these writers are essential. By bringing humanity to what seems inhuman, by illustrating the cruelty of what’s perceived as justice, by showing how love in its many forms can be the greatest danger, Kamila Shamsie has given life to myth, a novel’s power to an ancient drama, and a terrible knowledge and understanding to everyone who reads her book.~Janet Brown

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin)

Grouchy Old Paul, the curmudgeon who constantly tops bestseller lists, is a man I stopped reading long ago. I grew weary of his world view that reeked of ugliness and assumptions, wondering why he left home if every place he saw only sparked more visions of the coming apocalypse. He was like a secular preacher howling constantly about the Book of Revelations.

But Covid-19 has made desperate readers of us all and in desperation I purchased a cheap download of Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. It stayed untouched on my kobo until finally, in even greater desperation, I began to read it--and to my immense surprise, enjoyed it. 

This rail journey through Asia is a personal odyssey, retracing the train tracks that led Theroux to fame thirty-three years earlier in The Great Railway Bazaar. No longer a young man with a crumbling marriage, Theroux divulges the unhappy background that pervaded his former journey, admitting that his travel writing is the only autobiography he will probably  ever write.

“Travel for me,” he says, “is a way of living my life,” and is “one of the laziest ways of passing time.” Theroux is far from lazy on his journeys. He may be one of the world’s indefatigable note-takers, recording the details of conversations, meals, and his assessments of people he sees along the way that verge upon the novelistic. His descriptions of landscapes and of cities are precise and sensuous as he glides past them in a railway carriage. This is a man who never stops working. Lazy? Not at all.

When Theroux’s happy, his words glisten. When he’s miserable, he can make the skin on a reader’s eyeballs crawl. A man who has little love for Tokyo or New York, he is passionate about Istanbul, a city that is “grand and reimagined,” “a water world,” a city with the soul of a village.” His account of neighboring Turkmenistan, on the other hand, borders on the surrealist absurdity of nightmares, with its leader who renamed the months of the year and days of the week in a way that locals find impossible to remember.

His trip is punctuated by a literary pilgrimage, visiting Orhan Pamuk and Eli Shafek in Istanbul, Haruki Murakami in Tokyo, Pico Iyer in Kyoto, and in Siberia following the ghostly footsteps of writers who had been imprisoned in the Gulag Archipelago. But perhaps the most insightful conversation he has is with an IT manager in an Indian call center, who says the only way to solve that country’s population problem is through education, because without that, the only diversion people have is sexual intercourse.

Theroux’s preoccupations are not those of the usual traveler. Art, politics, and food are topics that he passes over rather quickly. Instead the man is a connoisseur of snow, “smutty and discolored in Hungary,” “the heavily upholstered world of deep snow” in rural Japan, “the icy-bright trees” and “trackless snow” that gave the appropriate solemnity to “the only intact gulag prison remaining in Russia.”

He is also a man who seeks out pornography as “the quickest insight into the culture and inner life of a nation,” and rates it on a demanding scale in almost any place where he spends more than a few hours. From the “grubby stuff” featuring “very fat people” in Hungary to Singapore’s Orchard Towers with four floors of women for sale, Theroux painstakingly investigates these cultures. When Murakami takes him on a tour of Tokyo, they end up at Pop Life, “six stories of porno.” 

As a solitary traveler, Theroux is far from the invisible figure of ghostliness that his age might confer upon him, a fate that he has anticipated. Even in Hanoi, he’s persistently offered female companionship and he seems to find it rather praiseworthy that he resists. But what attracts the most attention is that he travels alone and by train, when he could obviously be whisked about on a plane.

“Memory is a ghost train,” Theroux says and he is a master of recording and transmitting his memories. Only on a train are memories made so rapidly, seen through a pane of glass and then fading into the distance, captured in a conversation with another passenger who will never be seen again, pulling into a city that can be left on a whim. Paul Theroux has made this sort of travel into an art form, a niche of literature that belongs securely to him. There are no imitators, only Grouchy Old Paul, his notebook in hand, measuring and recording the loneliness of the long distance traveler.~Janet Brown

Almost Home : The Asian Search of a Geographic Trollop by Janet Brown (ThingsAsian Press)

Back in 1995, Janet Brown left her home and family and went to live in Bangkok, Thailand. She fell in love with the country and decided that was where she was going to spend the remainder of her life. However, blood-ties were stronger than the love of a new country and she found herself moving back and forth between the States and Thailand during the six years she called Bangkok her home. Bangkok “puzzled, infuriated, delighted, and engaged me as no other spot had ever before.”

Between the years 2001 and 2008, Janet lived in the U.S. but lived her life as she did when living in Bangkok. “I cooked jasmine rice and noodles with Thai chili peppers and fish sauce. I listened to Thai music, I rented Thai DVDs, I read the Thai-English newspapers on my computer.” If she had enough money to go on vacation, she would go to Thailand. 

Almost Home is Janet’s continual search for where she can settle down, with Bangkok at the top of the list. Now at sixty, she “packed two suitcases and came home, to a city where I knew I’d remain for the rest of my life.”  Unfortunately, Janet says the Bangkok she came back to wasn’t the same. The times have changed and so has her city. The political situation was making living in Bangkok a dangerous prospect. Perhaps it was time to search for a new home. 

In Hong Kong, Janet found a place she would return to again and again- - Chungking Mansions in Kowloon. The place is a community in and of itself. It also has a bad reputation for being dangerous and full of drugs, but for Janet, she took to the mansions like a duck takes to water. Still, it wasn’t some place she would think of as a permanent home. 

Beijing was “beyond any easy pigeonholing of ancient traditions contrasted with modern luxury. It was a place that took everything that had happened within it for the past three thousand years and jammed it all together to make a hybrid city, huge and impossible to duplicate anywhere else.”  

However, Beijing didn’t quite have the hold on Janet as Bangkok does and she finds herself returning to her old haunting grounds. On her return to Bangkok, the political situation hadn’t improved and this time, there was a series of bombings. She knew she had to get away and took a short trip to Penang in Malaysia. Penang was quite a contrast from Bangkok and Janet found it to her liking….so she moved there.

Unfortunately, Penang was not as idyllic as Janet first imagined as she had to contend with bedbugs, listen to a cacophony of music and worst yet, being asked a series of personal questions in English where it got to the point of annoyance. After two months, Janet, who thought she could make her home anywhere, realized she made a big mistake and took the next train back to Thailand. 

Does Janet eventually find her home? Janet has traveled and lived in different countries in Asia, but something more than countries and newfound friends draws her to what she really considers home….and that would be living near her children who are now grown men. Janet says, “Although I’ve found my anchor among the people whom I love more than anybody in the world, wherever I am, I’m always almost home.” ~Ernie Hoyt

An Indiana Hoosier in Lord Tsugaru's Court by Todd Jay Leonard (iUniverse)

An Indiana Hoosier in Lord Tsugaru’s Court is a play on the title of the Mark Twain book, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”. However, author Todd Jay Leonard has not timeslipped to feudal Japan, it only seems like he has because he makes his home in rural Japan. Compared to living in Tokyo, you might as well be in King Arthur’s Court as Leonard feels “as though I have indeed been transported in a time machine to a different era and place.”

This book is actually a sequel to his other collection of essays about Japan titled “Letters Home - Musings of an Expatriate Living in Japan”. Both books started out as a column Leonard wrote for his hometown’s local newspaper, the Shelbyville News based in Shelbyville, Indiana. Thanks to the many readers of his column, Leonard set out to compile, revise, and edit many of his articles about his Japan as he saw it through his own eyes. 

Leonard has spent the last thirty years living in Hirosaki City in Aomori Prefecture, Japan’s northernmost Prefecture of Honshu Island. He had his first exposure to Japan when he was an elementary school student. One of his teachers who taught art at his school was Japanese. Leonard says he was intrigued by her - “She left her home and family - everything she knew and was familiar and dear to her - to come to my little town to teach American kids art.”

As a seventeen year old high school student, Leonard spent the summer in Tokyo on an exchange program and became even more fascinated by the country and its people, customs, and culture. As an undergraduate student at Purdue University, Leonard majored in Japanese history. 

In 1989, Leonard was offered a job to live and work in Hirosaki as an Assistant Language Teacher (ALT) on the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program. He worked as an ALT for two and half years when he was offered an associate professorship at a local university where he has taught for over ten years. He currently teaches at Fukuoka University in Kyushu, located in the southern part of Japan. 

Leonard’s book is divided into five sections. He starts off by telling us his top ten list of things Japanese. A subjective list of ten things that he loves and admires about Japan. This is followed by “Rites of Passage” where he talks about the customs and traditions of different life events. Next he focuses on “Japanese Festivals and Celebrations”. The fourth part is “political, educational, and social issues” facing Japan today and finally, “Cultural and Societal Miscellany” where he talks about a number of topics related to daily life of living in the country. 

As an expat living in rural Japan myself, I can relate to a lot of what Leonard says. I even agree with most of his list about things Japanese - the cleanliness and politeness of taxis and taxi drivers, public transportation whose timing is so precise you can set your watch to it, and a personal favorite of mine - no tipping. He does mention one of the major disadvantages of living in “snow country” and that is its harsh winters where some days are filled with the never-ending task of shoveling snow. 

This book is great as a general introduction to Japan and offers a bit more on what it’s like to live in a foreign country and learning about the cultural differences between Japan and the U.S. Perhaps even you will become a Japanophile after reading this. ~Ernie Hoyt

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