Above Us the Milky Way by Fowzia Karimi (Deep Vellum Publishing)

Near the end of 2020, a bookseller pulled this book from a shelf and showed it to me. Everything about it was beautiful: the gold dots on a deep blue unjacketed cover, the weight of the paper as I leafed through its pages, its typeface, the way that it used photographs and drawings in a way that seemed part of its text. I turned back when I was two miles away from the bookstore and brought it home, with no real sense of what it was about. I wasn’t even sure that I would ever read it, but the sight of it on my table made me happy.

Two weeks ago I picked it up and began to read, an experience so weighted and rich, so rooted in horror and loveliness that I made my way through it slowly, every day. When I finished it, I pressed it hard against my chest in an involuntary gesture that wasn’t a hug; it was an attempt to make it part of me in a physical way, as it had already claimed my heart and my imagination.

Is this a novel? Is it a memoir? Fowzia Karimi teases with those questions, claiming it is neither one. It is, the subtitle says, An Illuminated Alphabet, one that Karimi says should be read in a random way, not as a linear narrative. Within the order of the alphabet, each letter forming its own chapter, an illumination casts its beam upon the magic of childhood and the cruelty of war, upon the nature of memory--where it lives and how it is revealed--upon the way in which lives are lived in two places at the same time. 

If there is a narrative, it’s circular, tracing the journey of a family with five daughters who left Afghanistan for the United States when the girls were quite young. But there is no arc, no resolution, no named characters. There’s Father, Mother, the sisters, and a multitude of family members who were left behind, living and dead. 

In their new country, the sisters are one as much as they are five: the sister who sleeps, the sister who walks through the night, the sister who dreams, ths sister who gives, the sister who who loves the sea. Their faces are seen only dimly in family snapshots; in drawings of them only the back of their heads are given. Karimi herself, in her author photo, shows only the back of her head and shoulders. And yet through their memories and their dreams, the games that they play and the chores that they do, they become visible, girls who are both wild creatures, exemplary daughters, creative beings, and nomads by blood and through practice. 

Anchored by stories and memories, the family lives outside of the present because they know they could return to their first country at any moment.  They have no future because the war has devoured everything they’d known in the past. They live “between what had been and what might have been.” 

What they know about the events within the country they no longer live in is terrible. The stories of the dead live within the sisters: those who were buried alive in pits, those whose bodies were tortured, those who were cut in half by gunfire. The girls know and live with these histories that co-mingle with their memories of balloon-sellers, fruit vendors, festive birthdays with tribes of cousins back in their first country.

Karimi’s goal is to “explore the correspondence on the page between the written and the visual arts.” Her small paintings bring objects into the text: a butterfly on one page, a severed finger on another, all rendered with the careful lovely attention of a botanical drawing. Like signposts, they keep readers from growing numb. They and the words that they accompany keep us awake, keep us alive, keep us connected to what we might not ever know, what we might prefer to ignore; the complex and knowledgeable life of children, the bright and bloody history of a country that has long lived with “fire in the sky, limbs in the trees, blood in the streets.”~Janet Brown

Japan's Longest Day by The Pacific War Research Society (Kodansha)

For Americans, December 7, 1941 will always be “a day which will live in infamy”. It is the day Japan attacked Pearl Harbor which resulted in bringing the United States into the Second World War. Four years later, Japan would have its own day which will “live in infamy”. That date would be August 15, 1945.  “For one day in August 1945, while the world waited, Japan struggled to confront surrender - or annihilation. This is the story of those twenty-four hours.” It is the day when the Japanese heard the voice of their Emperor for the first time as he gave a speech announcing the surrender of Japan to the Allied Forces. 

Originally published as Nihon no Ichiban Nagai Hi in 1965 by Bungei Shunju Ltd. It was compiled by the Pacific War Research Society, a fourteen member group led by Kazutoshi Hando who passed away this year on January 12. Japan’s Longest Day reconstructs the last twenty-four hours before the Emperor of Japan’s broadcast announcing the surrender of Japan to the Allies and putting an end to the Pacific War. 

On July 26, 1945, the nations of the United States, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union issued the Potsdam Declaration, the statement was an ultimatum outlining the terms for Japan’s complete surrender. It stated that “if Japan did not surrender, it would face ‘utter and prompt destruction’”.

The Emperor and other members of the cabinet including the Prime Minister realized that the war was lost but the problem was how to bring the war to a close. The Imperial Army “would admit neither defeat nor surrender - and it continued to insist that it, and it alone, knew what was best for the country.” The country was at an impasse. The top members of the government and the military leaders could not decide on what action to take. 

Many young officers and soldiers believed it was a dishonor to surrender and planned a coup d’etat. They shot a high ranking officer who was guarding the Imperial Palace and started a rebellion against the government, rationalizing that the cabinet members were being traitorous to the Empire of Japan and to the Emperor himself. Other members raided NHK, Japan’s national radio station to prevent the broadcast of the Emperor’s speech. Fortunately for Japan, their efforts failed and the announcement was made at noon on August 15, 1945. 

I couldn’t help but see the parallels to the military uprising and the current situation in the U.S. which lead to the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. It certainly seemed to be a case of history repeating itself. As George Santanyana is credited as saying, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If more American citizens were aware of world history, perhaps the attack on the Capitol may never have happened. In Japan, it was the military trying to incite younger soldiers to rebel against their own country and to spread false rumors of senior cabinet members being traitors. Now in the twenty-first century we had a sitting President accused of “incitement of insurrection” because he did not agree with masses that showed he lost the presidential election. 

Fortunately, for both Japan and the United States, the two countries chose the path of reason. Japan became an international economic power and with the swearing in of Joe Biden as our new President, the future's looking bright for the U.S. as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai (Back Bay Books)

“One child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world.” These are the words spoken by a young Pashtun woman who was born and grew up in the Swat Valley of northwestern Pakistan, near the Afghan border. She is famously known as “The Girl Who was Shot by the Taliban”. What was her crime? She was shot for going to school! I Am Malala is her story. 

On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, Malala’s school van was stopped by two men. One of the men got up on the railboard and asked, “Who is Malala?”. Nobody answered but many of the other girls looked at her. Malala was the only one who didn’t cover her face. Then, the man lifted a gun and shot three times. One bullet went through Malala’s eye socket, the other two bullets hit the girls sitting next to Malala, one in the hand and the other in the left shoulder. The next time Malala would wake up, she would be in a hospital. 

I Am Malala is an autobiography of Malala Yousafzai, the youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. She advocates the rights of all children to an education. She was the co-recipient of the prize in 2014 with Kalish Satyarthi, another children’s rights activist from India. 

Malala takes us to the beginning, before the Taliban. She starts off her story by saying, “When I was born, people in our village commiserated with my mother and nobody congratulated my father.” We, as Westerners, would celebrate the birth of any child, boy or girl but Malala was born “in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.”. 

Fortunately for Malala, her father was an advocate for education and also ran a chain of schools. He encouraged his daughter to go to school and study. Malala was inspired by her father and strived to do her best. Then in 2009, the Taliban came to the Swat Valley. Girls were told not to go to school, however, Malala was determined to get an education. She told one of her friends, “The Taliban have never come for a small girl.” Little did she know how much her life would change when they did.

It’s been said that, “Money is the root of all evil”. I would substitute money with organized religion. Christianity had its Crusades. The partition of British India led to violence between Hindus and Muslims. Even Islam had their wars between Shia and Sunni, and currently, the Taliban’s misinterpretation of the Quran pits Islam against the world.

Malala’s story is a powerful story but it is not just her story. It is about the thousands, maybe millions of girls who also want to get educated and live a better life. Malala will inspire you and will enforce the truth about “the pen is mightier than the sword”. Malala’s words are far reaching and more powerful than the lone Taliban and his cowardly act of shooting an innocent girl. Malala inspires us to speak out against the injustices of the world. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Disaster Tourist by Yun Ko-eun, translated by Lizzie Buehler (Counterpoint)

“News of the deaths moved fast that week,” but soon fatalities from another calamity spawned by the natural will supplant this current crop of corpses. Volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes--”Disaster lay dormant, in every corner,” and a travel agency called Jungle has learned how to profit from that universal truth. As soon as destruction arrives, be it fire, flood, or some other natural horror, Jungle puts together a travel package to that area and disaster tourists, prompted by a voyeuristic altruism, sign up to witness other people’s suffering.

Yona, young and pretty, has spent ten years working for Jungle. Suddenly her manager threatens her job security by making persistent sexual advances and Yona eagerly takes an opportunity to escape his unwanted attentions. 

She’s sent to Mui, a small country off the coast of Vietnam. For years it has profited from a desert sinkhole that once swallowed up a substantial number of its residents. Unsure that Mui is still pulling its weight as a disaster destination, Jungle wants Yona to evaluate its profitability.

Through a series of comic travel misadventures, Yona finds herself stranded in this country and is drawn into a local plot to capitalize upon its flagging natural disaster. The ground near the original sinkhole is deliberately being weakened by an ambitious building project. A long series of oddly coincidental traffic accidents involving construction trucks and pedestrians provide a generous number of dead bodies that, Yona is told, will be the only “victims'' of the revived and expanded sinkhole. This new horror, which is being carefully scripted by an imported screenwriter, will revive Mui’s flagging disaster tourism and enrich the country’s leading citizens. 

But Yona falls in love with the man who’s been hired as her guide and he shows her life among the less privileged citizens, scorned by the more fortunate as “crocodiles.” When by chance she reads a finished copy of the script, she realizes the true horror of the scheme she’s been part of and puts herself among the threatened population of “crocodiles.” Then nature intervenes…

Beginning as a comic satire, The Disaster Tourist skillfully expands into a thriller, a horror story, and finally a threatening fable for our time that strikes hard and deep. Seoul novelist Yun Ko-eun says in her afterword, “Sometimes I imagine scenes so euphoric that they grow absurd.” While her invention of Jungle is far from euphoric, except for those reaping its financial success, the absurdities come quickly: the ill-fated use of a train’s toilet at the wrong time, the loss of a passport (every traveler’s nightmare), the fortuitous events that bring Yona back to Mui and into a job she thinks will be her way out of a difficult situation at Jungle. Then the tension begins to ratchet up and when disaster strikes, it holds both tragedy and a strange salvation.

Winner of three Korean literary awards and author of previous novels and short story collections, Yun Ko-eun sees the publication of her first English-translated novel as being “a constellation of coincidences,” that came into being because her translator and her writing “exchanged cosmic winks with one another.” Here’s hoping for many more of those winks to take place--hers is a voice we need to hear at this point in our history.~Janet Brown

Drunk in China by Derek Sandhaus (Potomac Books)

After swallowing his first sip of baijiu in his introductory days as an American expat in China, Derek Sandhaus finds himself choking, gasping, worrying about potential blindness and brain damage, while threatening  to  “consult a war crimes tribunal.”  But baijiu is an integral part of Chinese business, social, and political life. Sandhaus quickly learns he won’t achieve any sort of success in his new country  without learning how to stomach its most popular variety of liquor. 

Baiju is an acquired taste that at first presents challenges to the most seasoned drinker; Chinese friends tell Sandhaus he’ll have to drink at least three hundred glasses before he’ll begin to enjoy the experience. A quick learner, he rapidly achieves that pinnacle after a mere seventy tipples. Soon his newly acquired affinity leads him to explore the culture and history of baijiu in a rollicking, hard-drinking odyssey that takes him across China .

Nine thousand years ago, Neolithic Chinese created “the world’s oldest alcoholic beverage,”  a rice-based form of homebrewed beer that rapidly became a household staple. With the Qin empire came grain alcohol  which the Emperor wisely decided to tax, thereby providing a hefty source of government revenue. Under his encouragement, a more sophisticated form of alcohol production and consumption spread across China. 

Later, influenced by Mongolia’s fermented mare’s milk, distilled grain alcohol began production in China and drinking baijiu, cheap, strong, and made from sorghum, became the national pastime. Today it accounts for roughly 90% of China’s liquor sales and is the bestseller among all the world’s liquors. Almost 3.4 billion gallons are produced annually, with their strengths ranging from 52 to 140 proof.

Until recently baijiu figured heavily in corruption scandals. “The Chinese government’s annual liquor tab for lavish banquets reached 600 billion yuan ($94.5 billion USD),” in 2011, “roughly three times that year’s stated national defense budget.” On a lower level, bribes were sweetened with bottles of baiju that could cost up to $200 USD. When Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign began, baijiu sales plummeted.  

Globalization has also taken its toll on baijiu’s popularity. Foreign liquors have become fashionable with the affluent new generation in China, especially among the young women who have broken tradition by having a drink themselves and who, perhaps wisely, have turned away from the incendiary properties of baijiu. Hoping new markets will restore their booming and profitable sales of the recent past, baiju manufacturers are going international, with the target of conquering elegant bars around the world. 

To assist with that goal, Sandhaus has cofounded a new baiju label, Ming River Sichuan Baijiu, that’s been distilled with Western palates in mind, edits DrinkBaijiu.com, and has sprinkled enticing recipes for homemade baijiu cocktails throughout the pages of  Drunk in China. 

Who knows? Sake and mezcal have risen from obscurity to become staples in almost every bar on the planet. Why can’t baijiu achieve that same popularity among the trendy--and intrepid--drinkers of the world? ~Janet Brown

Phra Farang : An English Monk in Thailand by Phra Peter Pannapadipo (Arrow Books)

There comes a point in time in many people’s lives when they begin to question their own values and direction. Perhaps they feel a need to buy an expensive sports car or need to change professions. Perhaps they will give up everything they own and live as an ascetic. Some may call this a mid-life crisis. Others may call it a spiritual awakening. Whatever it is, it is a time when a person makes a decision that can change his or her life. 

Peter Robinson reached this point in his life. He was a successful businessman living in comfort in London. He had a nice house, fancy clothes, and had enough disposable income to indulge himself in various pursuits. Peter says, “Sometimes I used my money wisely, occasionally generously, usually wastefully, to help me try to achieve happiness, or at least the ultimate ‘good time’” He never found it.

Phra Farang is Peter’s journey of leaving the world he knows behind. Once he is ordained, he is known as Phra Peter Pannapadipo. Phra Peter shares his story of the ten years he spent as monk meditating in various monasteries in Thailand and tells of his trials and tribulations of trying to follow the teachings of the Buddha. 

Phra Peter says his most often asked question is, “Why did you become a Buddhist monk?”. He thinks “they expect my answer to reveal some personal inadequacy or character flaw, a dreadful tragedy in my past, or some other dark secrets.”  None of the reasons cited influenced Phra Peter in choosing his path. He says, “If that had been the case, I’d have joined the Foreign Legion.” 

The catalyst in setting Phra Peter on his path to becoming a Buddhist priest was the death of his older brother. His brother David was only two years older but was the embodiment of success. He had a lot of money and knew how to enjoy it. He lived in Paris, had a chateau in the countryside, a Ferrari, a yacht...and yet, he was dead at forty-two. 

Around the same time as his brother’s death, Peter had made his first trip to Thailand. He was not interested in the beaches or the nightlife but checked out as many monasteries as he could, even the ones that were in little out-of-the-way places. He was impressed with the calmness and tranquility and the sense of purpose at the monasteries that he was determined to learn more. 

Thus begins the transformation of Peter Robinson to Phra Peter Pannadapido. The Thai embassy put Peter in touch with a monastery in London called Wat Buddhapadipa. In a short time, Peter would make the first of hundreds of visits to the temple to study and would continue his studies in Thailand. 

Phra Peter Pannapadipo shows great courage in giving up his comfortable life to ordain as a Buddhist monk. He knows he’s often seen as a novelty to the eyes of many Thais who call him Phra Farang, farang being the Thai word for “foreigner”. His friends and family don’t understand him but that doesn’t stop him from practicing what he believes to be right. The path of monkhood might not be for everybody but it was the right choice for Peter and he may inspire you to find your own spiritual awakening. ~Ernie Hoyt

Border Town by Hillel Wright (Printed Matter Press)

The popularity of Japanese animation has grown exponentially since the time of Speed Racer and Marine Boy. Thanks to movies released by Studio Ghibli and directors Hayao Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai, and Mamoru Hosada, the movies have not only helped the animation industry but the manga industry as well. Hillel Wright uses manga as a backdrop to his story which focuses on the life and loves of the fictional manga artist.

Border Town revolves around the wife of a character only referred to as the Old Man who is currently in his fifties. Ten years ago he married a Japanese woman twenty years his junior. The couple met while the woman was studying massage therapy in Seattle. Together, they moved to Japan where they have been living for the last twenty years. They have a young son named Ichiro who is now seven-years old. 

The Old Man’s wife is Fumie Akahoshi. She worked as a massage therapist in a small clinic in Shin Maruko, a small town in Kanagawa Prefecture located along the bank of the Tamagawa River. Although she was making a decent living, her real passion was art. She was happiest when she was drawing. 

Fumie becomes a famous manga artist after creating her masterpiece Chibi Hanako-chan. She started the manga as “her own private satirical war against the abuses of public trust perpetuated by charlatans in the ‘massage” business when a young masseuse, increasingly forced into more and more explicitly sexual acts at work, takes over the business from her quack of a boss, who she turns into her sex-slave and object of constant humiliation”. 

Fumie feels there are only so many corrupt massage parlors she can write about and has her character Chibi Hanako-chan evolve into “a kind of free-lance Erin Brokovich”. Her books shows Hana Chibiko-chan “taking on a panoply of Japanese social types - corrupt politicians, subway rush-hour gropers and grabbers, crooked business executives, doping athlete heroes, militarist goons, gay male fashion czars” and more. 

Fumie becomes even more famous than her husband who had gained fame by creating and writing a series titled We’re No Angels which he based on the Five Book of Moses. Fumie’s manga is adapted into an anime series and a full-length feature film, and later Chibi Hanako-chan becomes a video game character. 

The book that finally gets her in trouble is when she satirizes the entire Imperial family including the Emperor himself. The story angers many right wing militants who hire a yakuza assassin to terminate her. We follow Fumie as she stays one step ahead of the assassins and finds more romance abroad even though her life is in danger.  

Border Town has all the elements of a love story gone amok. Wright writes with a rye sense of humor. His story is full of craziness and absurdity with a good dose of realism to keep you interested in how all the characters are interrelated. If you love Japanese manga, have a twisted sense of humor and enjoy books by Tom Robbins or Thomas Pynchon, Border Town will be right up your alley. ~Ernie Hoyt

Ship of Fates by Caitlin Chung (Lanternfish Press)

“There once was a girl whose name was etched into the water so that she might never feel lost.” Who is this girl? Is it the one who fled China, riding the back of a whale that had a fortune in gold within its belly? Is it Mei, small and Chinese in the white city of San Francisco who persuades the owner of a gambling hell to hire her as a card dealer and who has a secret game going of her own? Is it Madame Toy, an entrepreneur in the flesh trade, with her “intrusive face, contradictory to her beauty”? Is it Annie, the girl who has just arrived from China, bearing the good luck that comes from having an eleventh toe, who loses all good fortune when she falls in love with a man who has only nine toes on his feet? Is it Annie and Jack’s daughter, Juniper, whom Mei sees as an escape from the curse she is bound by? Or is it the Lighthouse Keeper, enigmatic and solitary, who embodies all of the stories and none of the answers?

Caitlin Chung, in her slender debut novel, carries the strength and beauty of Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales all the way through Ship of Fates. Underpinned by the history of the California Gold Rush, Chung’s story weaves through and beyond that reality, bearing echoes of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, with a poetic command of language that gives this novel a kinship with Steinbeck’s The Pearl. In common with its mythic premise of purloined Chinese gold being flung into the waters of California, the story has the beauty and mystery of a soap bubble, floating in brightness before it vanishes. 

It’s Chung’s poetry that makes her book soar, with her sense of magic realism giving it an irresistible luster.  Readers may have to go back to it more than once before grasping the intricacy of its plot but when caught in the web of language, they are certain to happily suspend any disbelief. Watching Jack and Annie disappear as Juniper takes on her full beauty is an image any parent will understand. Everyone will recognize the truth of “A fate is made of water, made to fit itself into the last spaces left open in a life.” And slowly all of the world is facing “a happy ending turned sad, an enchantment turned into a curse.”

In this time of disease and political turmoil, more than ever we need fables and poetry to soften the harshness of what we face every day. Caitlin Chung, in a little over one hundred pages, has given us exactly what we need. And as she works this magic, she celebrates the history and the beauty of the San Francisco Bay Area, rescuing it from the depredations of tech development that have intensified extremes of wealth and poverty, to reveal a city of lapidary beauty surrounded by the magnificence of the natural world,  its “bay opened and fanned out like a deck of cards...with nothing but the lazy flight of gulls to pass the time.”~Janet Brown

鬼滅の刃 by 吾峠呼世晴 Kimetsu no Yaiba by Koyoharu Gotouge (Shueisha)

One of the most talked about literary phenomenom to hit Japan is a manga series titled Kimetsu no Yaiba, known to English readers as Demon Slayer. It was first serialized in the weekly periodical Shonen Jump before becoming available in the graphic novel format in twenty-three volumes. The manga appeals to all demographics - Elementary, junior and high school students, office ladies, salarymen alike.

The English version is published by Viz Media and was simultaneously published by Manga Plus which is an online manga platform. This series has spawned a television anime program, spin-off stories, a video game, a full-length feature film and even a stage play. 

The full length movie, “Demon Slayer : Mugen Train” which was adapted from volumes 7 and 8 set a new box office record becoming the highest grossing film of all time in Japan surpassing Studio Ghibli’s “Spirited Away” and James Cameron’s “Titanic”. Mugen translates to “infinity” or “unlimited”. The film was released on October 16, 2020 and is still being shown in theaters throughout the country. Due to its immense popularity, Kimetsu no Yaiba was also voted as one of the buzzwords for Japan in 2020. 

The merchandise associated with this title is too numerous to mention - posters, calendars, cups, socks, badges, keyholders and cushions to name a few. You can also try to win limited edition plush dolls and other toys by playing crane games at game centers. 

The story is set in the Taisho era and centers on two members of the Kamado family, Tanjiro and Nezuko. They live with their family in the mountains. Their father has passed away so Tanjiro makes a living by selling charcoal to people living in a village nearby. His whole life is changed in one day when he goes home to find his entire family slaughtered. They were killed by a demon. His sister Nezuko survives the attack but becomes a demon but still shows signs of human emotion.

Tanjiro meets Giyu Tomioka, a hashira of the kistatsutai who are elite members of the Demon Slayer Corps. A secret society that has been fighting demons for centuries. Tanjiro begs Giyu not to kill his sister. He is determined to find a way to turn his sister back into a human. Giyu refers Tanjiro to a man named Sankoji Urokodaki, a former Demon Slayer Corp member who then trains Tanjiro.

Tanjiro sets off to become a formal member of the Demon Slayer Corp and makes a promise to his sister to find a way to change her back into a human. He faces a number of obstacles and meets new friends - Zenitsu Akatsuma and Inosuke Hashibira. The three of them set off to find and kill the strongest demon whose name is Muzan Kibutsuji. 

Kimetsu no Yaiba is a dark fantasy full of action, humor and romance. It’s a universal story of good versus evil and is also about love and friendship, courage and determination. Although the series ended at the height of its popularity, the spinoffs, merchandise and fanzines will continue to keep the story in the public eye. Its potential is mugen. ~Ernie Hoyt

Block Chain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang (FSG Originals X Logic)

“Famine has its own vocabulary, a hungry language that haunts and lingers,” Xiaowei Wang says, and a generous portion of China’s population had mastered that vocabulary, both before and after the birth of the People’s Republic. Seventy-one years later food is abundant but China’s food safety index is below that of Mexico or Turkey. “Feeding 22% of the world’s population on 7% of the world’s arable land is just plain difficult.” 

“Food safety is crucial for political stability,” a problem matched by the truth that 40% of China’s population (and 8% of the world’s population) lives in rural agrarian areas where farmers tend plots of land that are “smaller than two football fields.” Young people flock to the cities for better jobs, where their wages are eaten up by the higher cost of urban living. They replicate the conditions they came from in “urban villages,” pockets of squalor within the borders of glittering metropolises; the disparity between their lives and of their families at home when compared to urban residents is jarring and a potential political threat.  

China has found a solution to both of these problems by using high-tech solutions. Wang, while traveling through the countryside, discovers that although villagers may not have indoor plumbing, they receive 4G and 5G cellular service. Through their mobile phones, they’re connected to Taobao.com, an e-commerce site with a user base that’s double that of Amazon’s, with 600 million active users every month. Owned by the tech giant, Alibaba, Taobao connects villagers with consumers, provides delivery of their products, collects and disburses payments, and has made cash obsolete. Even for small transactions, payments are made through AliPay and WeChat (owned by Alibaba’s rival Tencent), over the phone. 

Through e-commerce, communities of subsistence farmers have become Taobao villages, selling everything from eggs to Halloween costumes over the internet to customers all over the world through AliExpress. Youths who migrated to cities are returning home; if they need capital to launch their online business, they can borrow money through Alipay.

It is, Wang says, “as if Amazon decided it suddenly wanted to offer assistance to an Appalachian coal-mining town by helping its citizens start candy businesses and offering them Amazon-backed loans.”

To combat China’s second political threat, safe food is available for those who can afford it. For $40 apiece, free-range, vegetable-fed, three-month-old butchered chickens with an ankle bracelet attached to one leg are delivered to affluent residences . A scan of a QR code on  the bracelet brings up the records of that chicken’s provenance, life, and stages of its shipment, from a livestream of its time in the farmyard to the results of the test it was given every two weeks, to how it was handled on its journey. Each of these records is linked to the previous one in a system that will reject any falsification that deviates from the required norm. It’s a block chain that takes the burden of trust from human beings and puts it into the code behind the chain--and Wang points out, into the coders who wrote it. The farmer who raised this expensive chicken grosses only about 14 dollars per bird but he has sold 6000 chickens, Wang assures readers.

Pork is an integral part of the Chinese diet and “China is the only country in the world to have a pork reserve,” similar to the wheat reserves in the US. Chinese pork is used in Western products--”from bloodclotting heparin to the protein powders in our smoothies.” In 2013 China’s WH Group bought Smithfield, legendary producer of American ham and expanded it into a mammoth collection of industrial pig farms that pose environmental problems to their neighbors.

In 2018 African swine fever hit China, killing pigs and prompting fears of a nation-wide pork riot. ASF arrived, it was determined, through human error. “Human farmers are inefficient in an optimized world,” so Alibaba turned to AI as a solution with the ultimate goal of replacing pig farmers and “the clumsy irrationality of meat machines” with bodies that are powered by artificial intelligence. 

Science fiction? No, Wang posits, a science future, in which humans may well be given a monthly stipend in order to fulfill their role--to buy things made by automated beings and enrich those who own it all, including the consumers.

Shenzhen native Naomi Wu calls herself the “Sexy Cyborg,” born human but “with cyborg body modifications, including breast implants that light up when she dons a special corset she’s designed and built.” A professional coder, an Instagram star, and a DIY maker at Shenzhen Open Innovation Lab, Wu’s ambition is to have a shop where 3D printers will produce body parts on demand for women who want to change their human form--an extension of what exists now as plastic surgery.

Early in this book Wang meets a farmer who claims that the future is a human construct, that we exist only in the present and in the work we do there every day. At the conclusion, Wang finds a similar school of thought in Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, in which he calls for a liberation from “living for imagined futures.” Instead we should live for “a sense of purpose, a sense of being needed.” “Without a future, I must give myself over to the present,” Wang realizes.

After wandering through what could be the future of the world as it exists in present-day China, Wang concludes with “the tender, honest work of attempting to make meaning.” It’s a message that grounds and reassures readers who may feel dizzy with the infinite possibilities and the nagging sense of terror that gleam through the vision presented by Block Chain Chicken Farm. ~Janet Brown

A longer review of this book can be read at www.asiabythebook.com/voa/2021/1/6/a-primer-to-the-future

The Heaven Stone by David Daniel (St. Martin's Press)

The Heaven Stone by David Daniel won the 1993 St. Martin’s Press / PWA Best First Private Eye Novel contest. Set in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, it is the first in a series featuring ex-cop turned private eye Alex Rasmussen. During the time of the Cambodian genocide, Lowell accepted an influx of Cambodian refugees and currently boasts one of the largest Cambodian-American communities in the nation, second only to Long Beach, California. 

Bhuntan Tran, one of the refugees from Cambodia, was found ded in his own home. The local police believe it’s an open and shut case of a drug deal gone wrong as they found some cocaine at Tran’s house. However, Ada Stewart, a Chinese-American social worker, has doubts about the official report. She works with the refugee community and knows that Tran was holding down two jobs and had recently moved into his new house. She believes Tran was a model citizen and cannot accept that Tran was involved in anything illegal. She hires Rasmussen to further investigate the cause of Tran’s death.

Rasmussen had worked on the force for eight years before an unfortunate incident found him on the outs with internal affairs. This led him to resigning from the force and becoming a private eye. Thankfully, he still has friends on the force who sometimes give him a helping hand. 

Ramussen’s former colleague and friend told him the killing was done execution-style and may have been a professional hit with two shots to the back of the head at point blank range. This information makes Rasmussen uneasy. “Nothing takes heat off a killing—and therefore the police—like calling it gangland.” “Folks figure, Hey, play with fire you get burnt, victim probably got his due.” 

Tran was the only one of his family to survive the “Killing Fields'' of Cambodia. It was with the help of a non-governmental organization Tran was given the chance to leave the refugee camp in Thailand and start a new life in the U.S. Tran’s neighbors and employers said he was a hard-working, law-abiding citizen; they did not believe he was involved with drugs.

The deeper Rasmussen digs into the case, the less likely he is inclined to believe in the official police report. He also discovers that many Cambodians had hidden their family treasures and often used them to cut through the red tape and make their way to the land of opportunity. This is a story of the American Dream becoming an American Nightmare. 

David Daniel is a fresh voice in the hard-boiled mystery genre. His story will appeal to fans of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett as Alex Rasmussen joins the ranks of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. The story Rasmussen narrates keeps you guessing throughout as you try to determine who the killer is and what his motives were. And what exactly is the “heaven stone”? How does the “heaven stone” relate to the Cambodian community? You will be inclined to return to Lowell, Massachusetts by the time you are done reading. ~Ernie Hoyt

Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian (Penguin Press, April 2021)

Although the publishing world seems to believe that light reading takes place only in summer, along with a tropical cocktail sipped under a beach umbrella, that’s not really when readers need something clever and diverting. We hunger for froth and frivolity when the days are short and dark, when everyone seems on their way to a holiday party to which we are not invited, Never has the need for smart fluff been more acute than during this December when none of us are invited to a holiday party and all of us are close to climbing the walls that we’ve been encouraged to remain within.

Still we want something that’s as smart as it is amusing, maybe holding a subtle sting while leaving no permanent scars, not quite as vicious as Evelyn Waugh but with more bite than Candice Bushnell. Bonus points are given for any book that delivers this as a delightful surprise, with a stiletto, not a sledge hammer.

Welcome to Gold Diggers, whose title gives subterranean clues to its subtlety. What begins as a high school romantic farce involving middle-class Indian American teenagers in a quiet suburb suddenly is alchemized into a fantasy in which a mother pilfers gold that’s brewed into a liquid that will give her daughter success. When the boy next door becomes involved, things get out of hand. Success is accompanied by tragedy, as King Midas once discovered, and the teenagers who have benefited from the magical potion drift apart.

But this is only a hook designed to pull readers into a world of satire that unexpectedly emerges from what at first promises to be Teen Angst, Bollywood Style.  Suddenly Miss Teenage India and the high school debate champion are adults in the world of Bay Area high tech wizards; their friends work “for a Sherman Act-violating behemoth...always nursing side start-ups,” “helping robotic men build robots,” their incomes “supplemented with Bitcoin investments.” One of them is “a rarity in San Francisco, in that he had read a book  not ghostwritten on behalf of an investor or a CEO.” They search for prospective mates on an Indian marriage app and buy houses in the “sunny small towns of the Bay Area, “the upper-middle-class Indian American promised land,” homes “full of smart thermostats and smart fridges.” 

Sanjena Sathian cleverly dissects the difference between immigrants who are “fresh off a private jet,” rather than “off the boat,” the phenomenon of massive bridal expos held in regional convention centers, high school parties with a buffet table laden with chaat, pitchers of mango lassi and mini cheese pizzas in an  “emptied three-car garage” the overwhelming need for “posh private school” graduates “to waltz into Harvard and Princeton and Vanderbilt and Georgetown.” But underpinning the satire and keeping it from turning into cruelty is a world of myth and history, a comic caper that threatens to end badly, and a love story that seems fated for disaster. Although Sathian seems to take a scalpel to the lives of a “model minority,” she actually directs it squarely into the heart of the exclusionary yet alluring American Dream, the one based on a Gold Rush and is still racing in that frenzied direction.~Janet Brown

Barefoot in the Boardroom by Bill Purves (Allen & Unwin)

In the early eighties, the People’s Republic of China created the Open Door Policy which was announced by Deng Xiaoping. It allowed foreign companies to set up businesses in the mainland. Special Economic Zones were created in the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian in the hopes of attracting direct foreign investments. Deng Xiaping believed the policy would help modernize China and boost its economy.

Bill Purves was born in Canada but currently lives in Hong Kong. In 1988, after spending five years in the British Protectorate and learning the language, Purves was looking for a new job and his eyes stopped at a small ad for a job opening in the classifieds. He sent in an application although he was not very enthusiastic about his chances of actually landing the job. “It seemed unlikely that I would stumble on a genuinely senior position in the classifieds, but in Hong Kong postage is cheap.”.  

Barefoot in the Boardroom is Purve’s first-hand account of living and working in the People’s Republic of China. He was hired as the General Manager by Gold Land Limited, a cast iron foundry located in a rural town in mainland China. Gold Land Limited is a joint-venture company between the government-owned danwei or ‘work unit’ and a company based in Hong Kong which was still a British colony at the time.

Purves shares his observations and gives us his impressions of the working conditions at the foundry for the two years he worked there. We share his trials and tribulations as he tries to apply Western management principles on a country that was still unfamiliar with sales and marketing. Product isn’t manufactured on a supply and demand basis as the factory’s quota is set by a government committee.

One of the ideals of communist China was to create an ‘iron rice bowl’ for its workers, “using each according to his abilities and providing for each according to his needs.” As Americans, we would call this “job security” or “job for life”. The result, according to Purves, has created a “vast and ineffective state planning apparatus and a tangle of social welfare policies and regulations.”

Another one of the biggest problems Purves noticed was the lack of any modern office equipment. There were no phones, no faxes, no copy machines. Without any phone lines or an intercom system, the managers of various departments would arrive at the General Manager’s office unannounced because there was no way to make an appointment. All copies of any documents had to be done using carbon paper. The factory used onion-skin paper so if an error was made which was prone to damage if an erasure was made. 

This crash course in how business works in the People’s Republic of China is surprising as it is eye-opening. The market and economy has improved vastly since the eighties but it is the pioneering efforts of joint-ventures like Gold Land Limited and others that set the country on the path to prosperity while still keeping in touch with it’s communist doctrines. Currently, most factories and their suppliers must follow the Global Supply Chain Compliance and if they don’t, I would have second thoughts about buying anything with “Made in China” printed on it. ~Ernie Hoyt

Wuhan Diary by Fang Fang, translated by Michael Berry (HarperCollins)

It began in Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market. Of the 41 patients in that city who first were treated for the virus that would bring the world to its knees, two-thirds of them had visited that market in December. By January 1, 2020 the market was closed and rumors that SARS had returned were sweeping Wuhan where city officials advised residents to wear masks and stay home. This was followed by the announcement that this new illness was  “not contagious between people. It’s controllable and preventable.” But by January 20th, officials admitted there were cases of  human-to-human transmission. Two days later the city was masked and streets had little traffic. On January 23rd,  Wuhan was under quarantine and the city of 11 million people would remain that way for 76 days.

In 2020 the Lunar New Year festivities began on January 25th  but in the weeks before that, “approximately five million people” had left Wuhan to travel during the long public holiday. The first cases outside of China appeared in the popular vacation mecca of Thailand on January 3rd, quickly spreading to Europe and eventually moving on to the US. In Wuhan, three days before the quarantine was announced, over 40,000 families had clustered together indoors for a public banquet and on the following day the city government had put on a “song and dance” concert. The virus couldn’t have appeared at a worse time.

Fang Fang, a prolific author in her sixties, began to keep a public journal of life under lockdown that she published on China’s social media platforms, always finding an outlet for her news reports even when the major media sites blocked her from posting. From January into March of 2020, she chronicled life in her city, candidly and in detail.

Wuhan, she reports, banned motor vehicles in the downtown area and shut down all public transportation. People who became ill walked from one overcrowded hospital to the next, desperately seeking treatment. Within days, Wuhan had built temporary hospitals which were quickly filled to capacity. Face masks were soon in short supply and people began to reuse disposable ones, washing them and disinfecting them with a hot iron. But, Fang Fang says, there was little need for mask wearing since people left home only to buy food and soon even those outings stopped. Neighborhood volunteers brought food to the quarantined. Families were cooped up together and there were no people on the streets. The city was “quiet and beautiful, it’s not a purgatory,” Fang Fang says, “until someone falls ill.”

“We need to get through fourteen days of isolation,” she says at the outset, and then “I need to bear another week.” This refrain quickly changes to her realization that “hunkering down at home and following this through to the very end” is the only way to survive. “There are too many sick people and not enough beds...The people don’t have enough tears to mourn all these deaths.” 

As translator Michael Berry says. Fang Fang’s reports were “dispatches from the future,” that were ignored by the West. Her posts were on “public platforms from the beginning, a virtual open book.” Berry began his translation on February 25th and by March, he says, “my life gradually began to mimic Fang Fang’s,” with one major difference. By April 8th 2020, coronavirus cases had fallen close to zero in Wuhan. In the US, deaths were raging in New York City. By December 13th of this year, US deaths had reached nearly 300,000. In Wuhan on December 11th, the Guardian reported, there had been no recorded cases of community transmission since May.

The tragedy is that every mistake, every cover-up, every shortage that had occurred in Wuhan was later replicated in the US. If Fang Fang had only been listened to, if Wuhan’s measures had been instituted worldwide, how different would life be now?~Janet Brown

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino (Abacus)

The London Times calls Keigo Higashino “The Japanese Stieg Larsson”. He is one of the most popular mystery writers in Japan. Over two million copies of his books have been sold and many of them have been adapted into successful films. 

The Devotion of Suspect X is the first English publication in a series to feature physicist and part-time sleuth Manabu Yukawa, translated from the Japanese by Alexander O. Smith. Yukawa has helped solve many cases for the police and has garnered the nickname of Professor Galileo, named after the famous scientist who supported Copernicus’s theory that the sun was the center of the universe and the Earth revolved around it.

Yasuko Hanaoka is a single mother with a daughter in high school. She divorced her abusive husband five years prior and currently works at a bento shop in town. Yasuko’s world is shaken up by the unexpected appearance of her ex-husband and she ends up killing him in self-defense.

Ishigami is a mathematical genius who currently works at a local high school. He has heard he scuffle and when he rings the doorbell after things quiet down to ask if he can help, he spots a body half-hidden underneath the kotatsu. He convinces Yasuko to let him help and says he will take care of everything, including disposing of the body. 

Detective Kusanagi is called to investigate a crime scene along the Edogawa River along the Tokyo side, across from Chiba Prefecture. The body had been left on an embankment wrapped in a blue plastic tarp. The body was stripped of all clothes, the face was smashed and the fingers were burned so the police could not identify the body by dental records or fingerprints. The police also found an abandoned bicycle nearby It was fairly new and both of its tires were flat. The police found prints on the bicycle. They belonged to a man named Shinji Togashi...Yasuko Hanaoka’s ex-husband.

Yasuko becomes the number one suspect for the police but she has a rock solid alibi completely arranged by Ishigami. Ishigami’s elaborate scheme even fools the police. Detective Kusanagi cannot find any holes in Yasuko’s alibi and yet still feels something isn’t right about the case. He decides to ask advice from his physicist friend, Manabu Yukawa. 

It turns out that Detective Kusanagi, Yukawa and Yasuko’s neighbor, Ishigami, all attended the same university around the same time. For reasons unknown to Detective Kusanagi, Yukawa focuses on his old friend and colleague Ishigami. Yunokawa is as brilliant as Ishigami and he’s interested in finding a flaw in Ishigami’s elaborate plan and helps the police in the process. 

Keigo Higashino doesn’t make you think of who committed the crime but how the crime was committed. The ending may surprise and shock you. The story is more than just a simple whodunit, it is a story of human nature and what lengths a man is willing to take to protect what he cherishes the most even if that love is not reciprocated. Could you make that same sacrifice? ~Ernie Hoyt

Self Portraits : Tales form the Life of Japan's Great Decadent Romantic by Osamu Dazai (Kodansha)

Osamu Dazai is the pen name of Shuji Tsushima, one of the most popular 20th century writers in Japan, although he is not as well known outside of his native land. He has quite a cult following and is still admired today. He was born in the small town of Kanagi in Aomori Prefecture, the northernmost Prefecture on Honshu Island, the largest of Japan’s four main islands. 

Osamu Dazai is the eighth surviving son of Gen’emon Tsushima and his wife Tane. His family was one of the wealthiest landowners in his hometown. He was highly influenced by Ryunosuke Akutagawa and was taken under the wings of Masuji Ibuse, author of “Black Rain”. 

Self Portraits is a collection of short stories based on various episodes in his life and is presented in chronological order. Ralph F. McCarthy who translated the stories from the Japanese also gives a bit of background information on the time and places of each incident. McCarthy says a more suitable term for these stories would be to call them “autobiographical fiction”.

In My Elder Brothers, Dazai relates how his father died when he was fourteen and how Bunji, the eldest of his three older brothers became the head of the household. Dazai says, “My elder brothers were all so kind to me and so grown up and sophisticated I scarcely felt the loss of my father.” “The eldest was like a father to me, and the second eldest like a long-suffering uncle, and I let myself be totally pampered by them.”

The basis for Female is about the first of Dazai’s suicide attempts. In the story, Dazai is talking to a friend about writing a story for a magazine. It is a story within a story. As the two near the climax of the story, the friend asks, “What happened?” “‘Let’s die’, I said. She, too…”. The friend interrupts, “Stop right there. You’re not just making this up.” At the end of the story, Dazai admits to his readers, “He was right. The following afternoon the woman and I attempted suicide.”. Unfortunately, the woman dies but Dazai survives.

Thinking of Zenzo has Dazai going to a gathering of Aomori natives in Tokyo, sponsored by the Tokyo branch of an Aomori newspaper. At the event, he plans to give a speech but takes a seat at the back and proceeds to drink continuously, gets very drunk and makes a fool of himself.

Canis familiaris was written while writing and living in Kofu, Yamanashi Prefecture, he is accosted by a stray dog who follows him home. Dazai has a fear of dogs but for some reason, takes the dog in. It becomes part of the family and becomes a farce as he tries to get rid of it.

Dazai may have been disturbed and he certainly did have a bad case of low self-esteem, but these stories based on his life will certainly bring a smile to your face. Tragic as his life may or may not have been (depending on how much of his stories you believe to be true), his legacy lives on. As more of his works become available in English, it is my hope that more people will come to know his genius. ~Ernie Hoyt

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