Run Me to Earth by Paul Yoon (Simon & Schuster)

Imagine putting together a jigsaw puzzle that when finished will become a Chinese painting done in ink, in which the empty spaces are as meaningful as the brush strokes. Imagine being caught by its slow beauty and subtlety, then feeling the awe that comes when all the pieces are at last in place. This is what happens while reading Paul Yoon’s Run Me to Earth, a novel that’s breathtaking in what—and how much—it reveals.

Three children serve as couriers for a makeshift hospital in an abandoned French villa, a refuge for people who are unlikely to survive. “The three orphans,” as they’re known to all now, ride motorcycles through fields made deadly by unexploded ordnance, bombies buried in the earth. Two boys and a girl, bound together by their early lives in a Laos village, where the houses were so close together that the sounds from one family’s daily living also belonged to their neighbor, live in the moment. They ride through the possibility of death every day to bring medicine and supplies back to the doctors who tend to the nearly-dead. Through war the three have become nomad children who know how to kill with a needle of air plunged into a vein, with the quick slash of a scalpel, or with the pistols they always carry with them. They’re certain they will never die; they “have learned from the dead” where to find the safe paths they’ll  take for their motorcycle journeys.

An old woman whom everyone calls Auntie directs the network of couriers that span the bombed country, a childhood friend of the doctor who’s head of the hospital where the children live and work. She’s the one who engineers escapes into Thailand. She’s the one who will eventually clean and bury the severed head of one of the three orphans. She’s the one who sends a young orphan across the Mekong river, into a Thai refugee camp, a girl laden with “the intensity of a promise”—to find the child who made it to a world of safety.

That young girl, who becomes part of a Lao family that makes a life in upstate New York, learns in a small town ballpark not to recoil from the sight of the hurled baseballs that are the same size and shape as a bombie. As an adult, she travels in search of the survivor, bringing with her a tangible trace of the lives those three courier-children once shared, back when they were centaurs, half-human, half-motorbike, believing they were immortal.

Paul Yoon has created a masterpiece of loss and yearning, the story of the one who left, the one who went back, the one who went off the path, and the one who became burdened with the promise she made to someone she’s met only once. Every small detail of this spare novel is resonant with meaning; every description brands its poetry into memories so tangible they become the readers’ own: “Rain spraying on the windows,” a “moon the color of fire,” “the paling dark.” Run Me to Earth becomes the circle drawn in pencil on a scrap of paper that’s carried to the survivor, haunting, permanent, and never-ending, one that should be started again immediately after it’s finished~Janet Brown

Hong Kong Local: Cult Recipes from the Streets that Make the City by ArChan Chan (Smith Street Books, Simon & Schuster, Australia)

The eye-popping colors and explosive graphic design on the cover of Hong Kong Local: Cult Recipes from the Streets that Make the City immediately announce this is a cookbook that breaks the sound barrier.. ArChan Chan has taken this category into a new arena that she’s steeped in unrestrained exuberance.

Born and bred in Hong Kong, Chan knows her territory and cleverly takes it from the realm of “food paradise” to a 24-hour all-you-can-eat buffet. Dividing her book into Early, Mid, and Late, Chan guides her readers through the culinary delights of a day in Hong Kong, showing how they can bring the food of that city into their own kitchens.

The recipes in Hong Kong Local aren’t the haute cuisine extravaganzas that Hong Kong feeds its high-end residents and plutocratic travelers. These dishes are street food offerings that can still to be found in the city’s dai pai dong and show up in congee shops, yum cha restaurants, and cha chaan teng. They’re uncomplicated and almost minimal, but all require the freshest ingredients and “a high level of attention and care.” 

Opening the book to Early, readers can begin their days with congee, Chinese doughnuts,and fresh soy milk. Heartier appetites are appeased with milk tea, beef noodles and sticky rice rolls while traditionalists are taken to the delights of dim sum: steamed pork ribs, dumplings, and sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves. 

Still hungry? How about a pastry? Egg tarts, pineapple buns, coconut tarts, sponge cake?  Hong Kong french toast--or soup? 

Moving on to lunch in Mid, Chan once again pays attention to appetites of varying capacities, with choices that range from snacks (bao and pork) to noodles, pepper steak, and fried rice, with mango soup, custards, and smiley cookies for dessert, washed down with a red bean crushed ice drink. This section moves along briskly; Hong Kong lunches aren’t lingering affairs--time is money, there’s shopping to be done,  business deals to close, and a number of people hovering nearby, waiting for empty  tables.

Late  slows way down with moveable feasts in the company of family and friends that can easily last for hours--and Chan’s recipes reflect that luxurious abundance. Steamed whole fish with soy and spring onion, cheesy lobster, typhoon shelter crab, oyster omelette, nine different poultry dishes that include the traditional salted baked chicken, fried morning glory with fermented bean curd--this is siu yeh, the fourth meal, and Hong Kongers make it count.

Chan charitably concludes with basic recipes and a glossary of ingredients along with where to find them, for everyone who’s not lucky enough to have a Hong Kong auntie at their disposal.

Hong Kong Local covers a lot of different bases. It’s a cookbook, a culinary guide to Hong Kong, and a godsend to people who live far from the Cantonese restaurants of America’s Chinatowns and hunger for the food they remember. And for those who know and love Hong Kong, it’s filled with neighborhood photographs that tease with their lack of captions and beckon with the welcome that this city is famous for. ArChan Chan’s recipes and Alana Dimou’s photographs provide the cheapest ticket to Hong Kong that’s ever been offered.

Chan, who left Hong Kong to perfect her culinary art in Australia, and who now is a noted chef in another food city, Singapore, is clearly homesick. Hong Kong Local is an invitation, a love letter, and a dazzling collection of burnished memories.~Janet Brown

In Search of Japan's Hidden Christians : A Story of Suppression, Secrecy and Survival by John Dougill (Kodansha)

The first Christian missionaries came to Japan in the 16th century, around 1549, and for nearly sixty years managed to convert over 300,000 Japanese. However, in 1612, by order of the Shogun, Christianity was banned throughout the country. If people were caught practicing this new religion, they were arrested and tortured. This sent the Japanese Christians into hiding. They called themselves Kakure Kirishitan.

For over two hundred years during Japan’s isolationist period, these hidden Christians continued to practice what they were taught even though they had no Bible and had no preachers to lead them. John Dougill wanted to know why did illiterate peasants continue to practice a form of Catholicism that was handed down to them from their parents, grandparents, and forefathers given the risk of death and persecution by the government. 

In Search of Japan’s Hidden Christians is the result of Dougill’s research. The book is part history, part travelogue as Dougill travels to the cities and regions where it all began, starting in Tanegashima and making his way to Kagoshima where the first Jesuit missionary, Francisco Xavier, brought the Bible to the Japanese. The journey would continue to Yamaguchi Prefecture, Nagasaki and the Goto Islands. 

Omura Sumitada was the first daimyo to convert to the new religion and was also the first to be baptized.  In 1580, he ceded Nagasaki to the Jesuits.  As the church was becoming more powerful, the Shogun realized the potential threat and in 1587, decreed that all missionaries were to leave the country. The Tokugawa Shogunate bans Christianity in 1612. Those who were caught still practicing the religion were arrested and tortured. However, many of the Kirishitans refused to renounce their faith.

The crucifixion of twenty-six Kirishitans was intended as a warning to others as to what would happen to them. “The impact of the crucifixions was not as the authorities had intended. Rather than intimidating the populace, the bravery of the martyrs’ deaths served to enhance the appeal of Christianity, as word spread that here was a faith worth dying for.” 

The government then changed their tactics and began to use the fumi-e. This was a picture which had the likeness of Jesus or Mary on it. Suspected Christians were to step on the image to prove they were not members of the banned religion. This was an effective method to get many Christians to apostatize.

Dougill ends his journey at the Dozaki Church located in the Goto Islands, the final refuge for the Christians who escaped execution, although they had to continue to practice in secret. On the island, there are still descendents of the Kakure Kirishitan who refuse to rejoin the Catholic Church, practicing their form of catholicism that was handed down from generation to generation. 

After Dougill completes his journey he comes to the conclusion that the “Hidden Christians were neither hidden nor as Christian as their name suggests. The faith had undergone many changes during the long years of persecution, as a result of which it had diverged so far from the original that it was often unrecognizable.” 

How strong is your faith? Would you be willing to die for your religion? Would you willingly go to your death as a martyr or would you publicly renounce the faith but practice it in private as many of the Kakure Kirishitans did? Although I am not an advocate of organized religion, I wonder how I would feel if I practiced a religion taught by my ancestors only to have someone tell me that I’ve been doing wrong all these years? What would you do? ~Ernie Hoyt

Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon (Simon & Schuster)

Isolation is a state that many of us have found ourselves in during this period of history. Whether we’re going though it alone or with our families, we’ve been sealed off from activities that in the past have made us happy—going to a library, roaming through a museum, meeting a friend for lunch, or even getting on public transit without feeling apprehensive.  

Some of us have also known the isolation that comes from spending long periods of time in another country where we don’t speak the language and where we sometimes take refuge in memories of a world where once we were understood. But what happens if we find our memories too painful to revisit for more than a moment or two? Where to go then?

When Yohan disembarks from a ship on which he was the only passenger, he leaves behind the sailors from his country with whom he exchanges goodbyes in Korean, “not knowing when he would ever hear it again.” He enters a place that’s filled with a warmth he’s never felt in his life, bringing with him only a letter of introduction to a man he’s never met, and an umbrella tossed to him by a girl he’s never seen before, a gift of silent welcome as he walks into a new world.

Yohan, still young, has come from two years spent in an American prison camp in South Korea, leaving it a year after the war ended. Refusing repatriation to the Northern mountain village that once was his home, he’s sent to Brazil with the basic skills he learned while he was imprisoned, “mending the clothes of the dead.”. 

Working with Kiyoshi, a Japanese tailor who has already gone through the process of “adjusting to a foreign rhythm...pretending to understand,” Yohan is quiet, doing simple tasks and exploring his new city while running errands for the tailor shop. He avoids memories--of finding his childhood friend Peng on a military train, of guiding him through the prison camp after Peng is blinded in battle, of watching his only friend release his hold on life and float away while the two of them are taking baths in a treacherous campside river. 

He vividly sees himself on the train with Peng, glimpsing a family who rummages through devastated houses, burrows into a field of frozen wreckage and emerges with their hands cold, glistening, and seemingly empty. “Snow hunters,” Peng says, as the train carries the boys away from a world that will never belong to them again.

Slowly Yohan gains his footing in this new country, learning enough words to guide him into friendships where he can exist with minimal speech: with Kiyoshi, with Peixe,a crippled man who tends the city’s cemetery, and with a boy and a girl, Santi and Bia, two youthful nomads who have only each other, who vanish without explanation but always return.  Bia is the girl who tossed him “the gift of an umbrella in the morning rain,” a present that Yohan keeps while slowly becoming part of this foreign place through the companionship of other outsiders. With one question of three short syllables, he finally abandons his memories of empty snow, his life lived in the present tense, and “enters the future.”

Snow Hunters is a gift that shows how isolation can melt away through the acceptance of a new way of life. Its quiet poetic language and delicate celebration of small pleasures are enhanced by an unlikely and tentative love story, giving hope to anyone lucky enough to read Paul Yoon’s wise and reassuring masterpiece.~Janet Brown

The Chrysanthemum and the Fish by Howard Hebbitt (Kodansha)

Trying to understand the humor of a country whose language you don’t share can be close to impossible. Even if you have studied the language for years, the use of slang, puns, and plays on words may be hard to understand but Howard Hibbett has decided to take on this monstrous task by giving us a history lesson in Japanese Humor going all the way back to the seventh century and working his way up to the Tokugawa Era in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Arthur Koestler, who wrote about humor in the Encyclopaedia Britannica said, “the humour of the Japanese is astonishingly mild and poetic, “like weak, mint-flavoured tea.” In contrast to what Koestler said, Hibbet shows how Japanese humor can be just as ribald and funny as any other nations in his book The Chrysanthemum and the Fish.

Hibbett begins his treatise by talking about “cheerful vulgarity” from an early episode in the Kojiki which translates to “An Account of Ancient Matters”. It is cited as Japan’s oldest literary work and includes stories, myths, legends, songs, oral traditions and more. One of the earliest episodes of laughter and humor is related in “Amaterasu and the Cave”

Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess, has a quarrel with her younger brother Susano’o and hides herself in a cave thus depriving the world of light and plunging it into darkness. It was Ama-no-Uzume, the Goddess of Mirth who was able to attract her out of the cave. She did this by turning over a tub and started dancing on it and tearing off her clothes in front of the other kami (deities) who laughed so loud that Amaterasu was drawn out of her cave. Hibbett makes the argument that this episode “illustrates the link between laughter, religion, and regeneration.”

Hibbett continues to inform us of the evolution of humor from the Kojiki to the early humor in rural villages which are said to be “uninhibitedly coarse”. “Fleas, farts, barnyard sex, and other inelegant themes are among the usual topics of these artless stories.” The village humor would be akin to the American “dirty jokes”. 

The myths and humorous stories would give rise to rakugo in the 9th and 10th centuries. Rakugo is a form of verbal entertainment which was invented by monks to make their sermons more fun and appealing. A rakugoka, a lone storyteller sits on a cushion and relates a long and comical story between two or more characters using only the tone and pitch of his voice and a slight turn of his head to depict the differences in who’s speaking.

The Edo Era would introduce gesaku, a term used for “playful writing” and many of the books originated in the Yoshiwara District, the Pleasure Quarters during this time.The books satirized brothel society often making fun of the samurai who would frequent the area. Also spawning from the Yoshiwara District were these witty adult comic books called kibyoshi or “yellowbacks”. “Yellowbacks combined text and illustrations in almost equal proportion - to satirize the manners and morals of the day.”

Japanese humor is still alive and well in the 21st century. Many Japanese comedians have been able to translate their jokes and stories into English and have performed abroad without embarrassment. Even if some things get lost in translation, the comedians can laugh off the misunderstandings. As the old English proverb goes, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you.” ~Ernie Hoyt

Chasing Hepburn by Gus Lee (Harmony Books, Random House)

There are some books that are meant to be inhabited, read again and again over the years in order to live a certain kind of life that can be found only in their pages.  They defy being placed in a cage of words built by a review. They range too wide, are too rich, and are so vivid that they take up residence in the personal world of their readers. 

This is the sort of book that Chasing Hepburn is, the story of a vanished China, a family history, and a love letter to a woman who was as indomitable as she appeared to be fragile. Gus Lee knew his mother for only a short time in his life. He’s made up for that loss by mining every memory of her that he could find, to build a portrait of her that is impossible to turn away from, or to forget.

Da-tsien was a brilliant beauty with big feet, a legacy from her father who refused to let them be bound into stubs. Her mother saw this as a barrier to her daughter’s successful marriage in the future but without her father’s interference, Da-tsien would never have saved her family during the turmoil and danger of wartime China. It’s possible she never would have realized her greatest dream--to have a son. 

“She was a dreamer who fell in love with a rogue,” Lee says, and throughout Chasing Hepburn, it’s clear where his sympathies lie. He loves the girl who escapes from her chaperone to ride on the back of a wild boy’s motorcycle in Shanghai of the 1920’s, who chooses someone who’s friends with both a son of the powerful Soong family and one of the city’s leading gangsters, and who marries him in spite of objections from family--both his and hers. Zee Zee and Da-tsien are bound together for life, although she is forced to share him with his other passions--flying planes in warfare and his obsession with the American actress, Katharine Hepburn, whom Da-tsien also admires. 

Their marriage is more like a tempestuous love affair, marked by separations dictated by the history of their time. Zee Zee is a restless warrior fighting against the Communist forces that Chiang Kai-shek battles, Da-tsien has become a woman whose flair for adventure is temporarily quenched by giving birth to daughters while she yearns for a son.  Her inner flame is never extinguished by maternity; it lies dormant until Shanghai is invaded by the Japanese and Da-tsien, alone, sets off with her daughters on an odyssey across war-time China to reach her husband who has been sent to America.

On her over-sized feet, with her unflagging courage, she brings her children to safety and to her husband who has in his absence gone to Hollywood as a Chinese war hero. Feted and praised, he has realized a dream. He has met and fallen in unrequited love with Katharine Hepburn while his wife and children journey through war and peril to reach him. 

This is not Da-tsien’s happy ending. This comes later, when she finally gives birth to the son who will bring her and her story to the world of readers.

Although Lee gives short shrift to his father, Zee Zee becomes almost as irresistible as Da-tsien, even when he turns into a domestic tyrant in the family’s American home. Falling in love with Amy Tan’s legendary mother , Daisy, long after Da-tsien’s death, the two of them travel together to China where they’re forced to pretend they’re married in order to sleep in the same bed. “We do things ” Daisy tells her daughter, “that you haven’t even heard of.” But it is the spirit of Da-tsien that Zee Zee  welcomes to his bedside as he lies dying at the age of ninety-one and it is Zee Zee who gives his son the stories of Da-tsien as a rebellious girl and a woman who loved a difficult man with all of her fierce heart.

Lee has the incomparable gift of interlacing China’s history with the love story of his parents, making Chou Enlai, T.V. Soong, and Shanghai’s notorious member of the Green Gang, Pan-da come alive on the page, evoking admiration and sorrow. Chasing Hepburn is a book that can easily become an addiction of the best kind.~Janet Brown

In the Cities of the South : Scenes from a Developing World by Jeremy Seabrook (Verso)

Slum - the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it as “a densely populated usually urban area marked by crowding, run-down housing, poverty, and social disorganization.” The word conjures up images of the shantytowns of Johannesburg, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and even the ghettos of almost any large city in the U.S.  It is often believed to be a haven for criminals and gang members, where disease and pestilence run rampant. 

Jeremy Seabrook has compiled a book on the expanding cities of South Asia including Bangkok, Bombay (Mumbai), Dhaka, Manila, Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh and Kuala Lumpur. The cities and their governments are experiencing a trend in industrialization and urbanization which is also the leading cause of creating the slums. This has all been done in the name of development. 

Seabrook focuses on the people’s daily lives who live in these less than ideal habitats.The slum-dwellers are often depicted as dirty, worthless, idle alcoholics and prostitutes who do not contribute anything to society. In the Cities of the South shows that not all slum dwellers are the scourge of society nor are all slums dangerous as Western media portrays them as many of the inhabitants come from the same rural areas and find a sort of comfort and sense of security with each other. 

Many of the people who live in the slums come to the city seeking jobs because they cannot make a living in the country. Traditional occupations like fishing and farming have become impossible as the land gets developed for a consumer society. The people have no choice but to move into the city because they cannot feed their families and the only opportunity to make money is in the city.

In Bombay, Seabrook talks to the people who live in Dharavi, one of the biggest slums in the world. The Prime Minister’s Grand Project was to replace much of the slum housing with multistorey apartment blocks. “The people who lived in the jopris (huts) were promised they would be given the first option to buy the flats that were to be constructed on the site of their then houses.” 

Unfortunately, the reality is far from what they expected. There are approximately 600,000 people living in Dharavi. The apartments were completed but were a lot less than the original plan and the space was much smaller than then huts that were demolished. It also cost twice as much then was originally quoted so many of the people were worse off than before. 

Seabrook often makes comparisons to the expanding cities of South Asia with the industrialization of his native U.K. The rampant corruption of government officials, the use of child-labor, the influx of multi-nationals - all in the name of progress and development. Unfortunately, the only aspect of progress not taken into consideration is the human factor.

Who are we as Westerners to criticize the Third World countries in their desire to become more developed. We should not make assumptions about the people who live in the slums. Many are not there because they want to be, they just had nowhere else to go. Seabrook manages to give these people a voice to show us that they are human just like us and are only struggling to survive. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Magical Language of Others by E.J. Koh (Tin House Books)

Eun Ji Koh, California-born with Korean parents, is steeped in different languages from the very beginning of her life. Her father’s mother, who cared for her when she was small, came from Korea but had been born in Japan and lived there for her first decade. Although Koh hears her grandmother speak Japanese when they’re at a Japanese shopping center, she herself learns only a smattering of words in that language; her grandmother wants to “secure me with English.” Much later, long after that grandmother died, Koh learns from a DNA test that she herself is part Japanese, a fact to which her parents claim ignorance, speculating that perhaps this came from “a violence we didn’t know about.” But Koh, even before discovering this part of her heritage, plunges into total immersion at an international language program in Japan. At seventeen, she absorbs Japanese as though she’s trying to reclaim the grandmother who loved her. By the end of the summer, her teacher is in tears. “Who will talk to you in Japanese again...you will look for it everywhere, anywhere you go. Your hunger will teach you what you’ve lost.”

But Koh has already learned the language of loss and hunger, cloaked in letters written in Korean, the simple version that’s all she understands. When she is fourteen, her father takes a high-paying job in Seoul. He finds a comfortable house for his children to live in and then flies away with his wife, believing “it was better to pay for your children than to stay with them.” Koh, who just recently has entered adolescence is now under the care of her nineteen-year-old brother. Her parents would not return to the US. for seven years.

Every week Koh’s mother sends her a letter, using the Korean that she hopes her daughter will understand, “kiddie diction,” flecked with bits of English to help clarify her messages. They veer from the maternal to the childlike and in them Koh is addressed as a daughter and as her mother’s parent, reflecting the “Korean belief that you are born the parent of the one you hurt most.” Koh’s way of delivering pain is silence. Although she speaks to her mother on the phone, she never replies to these letters.

In college at a poetry workshop, Koh discovers another language. On her second class she hands her teacher forty poems that she had written the night before, poetry about her mother. Her teacher responds with “I wish I could do that,” and then after reading them, “There’s no magnanimity.” Another poet tells her to be “relentlessly forgiving...choose love” in her poetry and in acquiring this new language, Koh’s life takes on a deeper dimension. She learns the “difference between having a life and being a life.” She translates her mother’s letters into English, faces the truth of her abandonment, and then faces her parents when they finally return to the U.S.

Koh’s poetry breaches the surface of her memoir in stunning sentences and her blazing honesty vouchsafes details that are both painful and evocative. This is a book that will break hearts and then put them back together, piece by piece. 

“Languages, as they open you, can also allow you to close,” Koh says. In this beautiful book, she proves that language can also reopen its users after it has closed them, and lead them into gleaming new landscapes of pleasure and clarity.~Janet Brown

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