I Love You So Mochi by Sarah Kuhn (Scholastic)

Sarah Kuhn is a third generation Japanese-American living in Los Angeles. She brings to light a problem facing many children who are considered hafu, a coin termed in the seventies describing people who are the offspring of a Japanese and an American parent. It’s a question of identity. Contrary to what a lot of people believe, hafu is not a derogatory term. I proudly call myself a hafu as my mother is Japanese and my father is American. Your Japanese relatives will consider you a gaijin or foreigner and your American side will sometimes say you’re not American enough. 

I Love You So Mochi explores this theme in a light-hearted and humorous way. Kimiko, Kimi-chan for short, is a senior in high school. Her mother is Japanese and is a successful artist. Her father is a fourth generation Japanese-American. They live in Culver City, California. Kimiko had just been accepted to the Liu Academy, a prestigious art institute but Kimiko had not informed her mother that she had dropped out of her Advanced Fine Art class. Her friend tells her, “The longer it takes to tell your mom you dropped the class, the more she’s gonna blow like a full-on rage volcano. It’s Asian Mom Math”. 

Something just resonates with me about her friend’s use of “Asian Mom Math”. Perhaps it’s not true for all Asian Mom’s but you know when they call you by your full name, you’re in big trouble or else they will scold you in their native language. Many hafu kids feel pressured to live up to their mother’s high expectations and when you let them down, the look of disappointment is sometimes worse than just being yelled at. After Kimiko’s mom finds out about her daughter dropping the class, they have a big fight and mom gives that look of disappointment followed by the silent treatment.

Before Kimiko has her big fight with her mother, she receives a letter from her estranged grandfather. Kimiko’s mother hasn’t spoken to her parents in years and Kimiko has never met them. The grandfather has invited Kimiko to spend her spring break at their home in Japan which is located outside of Kyoto. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to get away from her mother and also to “find herself” and learn more about her Japanese heritage. 

Kimiko’s impression of her first day in Japan - “Crap. Did I really just travel halfway around the world on a whim to a place I know nothing about?”. On her journey of self-discovery, Kimiko meets Akira. A cute boy she sees dressed as a giant mochi mascot. 

Mochi are “rice cakes”, they are not to be confused with “rice balls” which are onigiri. Kimiko came to Japan not only to meet her grandparents but also to discover what it is she’s really passionate about. Now she is distracted by her feelings for a boy who seems to like her as well. 

Will Kimiko find the answers she’s looking for? Is her time spent with Akira just a spring-break fling? And what will she say to her mother when she flies back home? This story will take you back to those awkward years when you’re no longer a child but not quite an adult and have to learn responsibility and make your own decisions, right or wrong. You may even find yourself having a craving for love and mochi! ~Ernie Hoyt

You Don't Belong Here by Elizabeth Becker (PublicAffairs)

“Go! Go! Go!” The command echoed through the cargo plane as soldiers jumped from an open door in the first offensive airborne assault of the Vietnam War. Among all who leaped into the sky, perhaps only one of them had already completed 84 jumps, a French photographer named Catherine LeRoy.

Someone took her picture as she stood in line, waiting for her turn. Her eyes were wide, excited, and completely alive, her jaw was set, two cameras were draped around her neck. As she fell, she photographed the bodies in parachutes, hundreds of them, and she was one of the guys.

This is what LeRoy wanted. The only woman photographer for two years In a world of men, she proudly announced “They forget I’m a gal.” In fact, she was so little that often the troops forgot she was there at all. “Timid, skinny, very fragile,” her mentor Horst Faas described her after their first meeting. She was young too, arriving in Saigon on a one-way ticket soon after she turned 21. 

Her goal was to become “a man amongst men,” although she was able to personify French female chic when she chose to. Told by other photographers, “This is for boys,” she almost lost her press credentials because she became “too loud, too coarse.” But her photographs were what saved her, along with her unflagging courage. From the hills of Khe Sanh, she took intimate battle portraits of the troops. “Where were you,” one of them asked her when he saw his face in the papers, “I didn’t even see you.” But she saw them. She loved them, and she stuck with them.

When she left Vietnam after almost three years,  she was exhausted. She’d been captured by North Vietnamese troops during the battle of Hue, was allowed to take their photographs, and was released in a matter of hours. She had been hit by mortar fire, was carried off in a stretcher with 35 holes in her body, and came back to take more photos. “I follow this profession out of love,” she said.

She returned to Vietnam to witness the fall of Saigon, photographing the rising of North Vietnam’s flag in the Presidential Palace. She died of cancer before she was forty, leaving a book as her legacy, Under Fire: Great Photographers and Writers in Vietnam. 

Frances Fitzgerald arrived in Saigon when she was 25, in the same month of the same year as Cathy Leroy, although the two of them might never have met. The daughter of a CIA deputy director, Fitzgerald had money and connections, as well as a burnished beauty. She flew in on a round-trip ticket and planned to move on to Singapore but soon after her arrival she met the Washington Post reporter, Ward Just.  The two of them immediately embarked on a relationship that would last for years, one that gave Fitzgerald instant access to information and a shield from the sort of gossip that had tried to demolish Catherine Leroy. 

Unlike other women journalists in Vietnam, Fitzgerald had no need to scurry after work. She came to Vietnam with highly placed publishers as her friends. “Every article she sent was published: in the Daily Telegraph Magazine, Vogue, the New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic Monthly.” With a mother whose closest friend was Adlai Stevenson and a father who was a man with political clout, Fitzgerald had been given 100,000 dollars when she graduated from Radcliffe (a sum worth 830,000 dollars in 2019). She had the luxury of writing whatever she wanted. As Just said, “She was looking at things in a completely different optic,” not soldiers on the battlefield but the logistics of the war, “the aid missions that didn’t work,” the destruction of villages. Her focus was one that which Just would adopt himself, years later, in his novel A Dangerous Friend.

Fitzgerald’s landmark book on Vietnam, Fire in the Lake, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize for history, remaining a classic of its time.

She would return to Vietnam in 1974, reporting from Hanoi in a twenty-three-page New Yorker article, still wrapped in the privilege that allowed her to exercise her brilliant talent. Of the three journalists profiled in this book, she’s the only one who’s still alive.

Kate Webb also came to Saigon in 1966, eight months after Fitzgerald and LeRoy, when she was 23. Like LeRoy, she arrived on a one-way ticket with no assurance of a job. Even though she’d left Australia as a reporter with Rupert Murdoch’s Mirror, her offer to serve as a Vietnam correspondent for that paper was greeted with “general laughter.” She freelanced for her first year in Saigon until she made a name for herself with her report on the Tet Offensive which she described as  “a butcher’s shop in Eden.” After first rejecting her earlier with “What the hell would I want a girl for,” UPI finally hired her to report on “second tier” stories, not the battles but the “political machinations” of the South Vietnamese government and military. Like Fitzgerald, Webb looked for the “context,” the historical and political movements behind the drama of the war. When she was sent into the field, she wasn’t afraid to use “strong personal narrative,” her own and those of the soldiers. Webb ‘s goal was to replace the “impersonal language of an Army war report,” which she did with precision and without sentiment. 

Perhaps because of what had been done to Catherine LeRoy, Webb became a loner. In the competitive world she worked in she had “no enemies,” and was known as the kind of person who drank whiskey in opium dens. She hated being called a “girl reporter,” as much as she disdained women’s liberation. She was a journalist, pure and simple.

Then this journalist who believed in keeping a low profile became the story. Captured with colleagues in Cambodia, Webb marched with her North Vietnamese captors for 23 days and discovered when she was released that her obituary had appeared in the New York Times. The first words she heard as a free woman were “Miss Webb, you’re supposed to be dead.”

Suddenly the journalist who had always maintained her distance was a media star--and she was deathly ill.  Diagnosed with cerebral malaria, Webb was put into a coma and submersed in an ice bath, becoming, as she said later, a “living martini” for weeks.

In crucial ways, Webb never recovered. Her nerves were shattered and her drinking increased. UPI sent her to Hong Kong, where she was on the desk typing messages back and forth with a Khmer reporter the night Phnom Penh fell. When he told her he had to sign off because the Khmer Rouge had found him, Webb began drinking martinis without stopping until she was carried out of the bar at four the next morning. 

She filed stories from the USS Blue Ridge navy command ship when “more than 6,000 people, including about 900 Americans were flown out of Saigon,” as she wrote in her last report from Vietnam. She died when she was 64, of cancer, on an Australian farm, with the knowledge that she told her own story in her own words, with her own facts, in On the Other Side, ending it with the wish that she could have a beer someday with the men who had captured her. 

LeRoy, Fitzgerald, and Webb eclipse the author who wrote about them while inserting herself prominently in the opening and closing pages of You Don’t Belong Here. Although her writing is flat and mediocre, Elizabeth Becker deserves thanks for bringing the work of these journalists back into public attention. With luck LeRoy’s and Webb’s books may come back into print, joining Fitzgerald’s as an illumination of a time and place that we need to remember.~Janet Brown

The Stone Council by Jean-Christophe Grange (Vintage)

Jean-Christophe Grange is a French mystery writer. His novel The Stone Council was published in English by Vintage and translated by Ian Monk. It is a mystery and a thriller and also involves telekinesis, hypnotism, clairvoyance and other elements of the paranormal. The book was also adapted into a feature-length film in 2006 and was a joint production between France, Germany, and Italy. 

As a child, Diane Thiberge suffered a traumatic experience which made her adverse to being touched by anyone.  She is a single woman who works as an ethnologist living in France. Her specialty is studying the habits of predatory animals. She is also an avid practitioner of martial arts. 

Diane is fast approaching thirty and believes this may be the last chance for her to become a mother. “Turning thirty reminded her symbolically of one of her biggest secrets: never would she have a child. For the simple reason that she would never have a lover.” However, she was not giving up on becoming a mother. 

Diane considers artificial insemination but this “meant doctors penetrating inside her with their cold, pointed, jagged instruments”. In her mind, “this would have been a sort of clinical rape.” She also thought about in vitro fertilization, but this still meant the doctors would have to invade her body in some way. Diane becomes depressed and nearly has a breakdown but after resting at her mother’s husband’s villa she decides to take a different approach and considers adoption. 

Diane adopts a five-year-old boy from an orphanage in rural Thailand. The people running the orphanage have no idea where he is from and have only heard him say “Lu” and “Sian” so they called him “Lu-Sian”. Diane decides to call him Lucien.  Once she’s back in her homeland of France, she gets into an auto accident and her little boy is left in a coma. The doctors tell her that his chance of survival is slim to none. However, one single doctor, Dr. Rolf van Kaen, says the boy can still be saved by using acupuncture and Eastern medicine. 

The boy is saved but Dr. van Kaen is later found dead. The cause of death - his heart inexplicably exploded. The police trace the unusual method of death to a tribe in northern Mongolia. The police also discovered that Dr. van Kaen was an East German and worked in the former Soviet Union at a nuclear power plant located in Siberia near the Mongolian border. 

Diane, with the help of an anthropologist, discovers that her son Lucien is not from Thailand. In fact, he’s not from Southeast Asia. The words he uses were determined to be Mongolian and used by a certain tribe called the Tsevens who also lived near the nuclear power plant and were victims of an atrocious accident. This confirms Diane’s suspicions that all the deaths are somehow related to this nuclear power plant, the Mongolian tribe, and her adopted son. 

The story takes you on a roller-coaster ride starting from a flight to Thailand, back to France, then Germany, Russia, and finally to Mongolia where the mystery reaches its conclusion. Fast-paced and absorbing, you will not want to set down the novel until you reach its end. You cannot help but root for Diane as she travels all over the country to save her son. I’m sure any mother would do the same. ~Ernie Hoyt

Vanishing Bangkok: The Changing Face of the City by Ben Davies (River Books)

Perhaps because it’s a metropolis that sinks farther below sea level every year or maybe because it’s where “the ordinary has little cultural value,” Bangkok sees little reason to preserve any building that isn’t a temple or a royal palace. Within its central business district, old neighborhoods have been decimated to make way for palatial shopping malls and towers of glass and steel that look as though they emerged from a scene in Blade Runner. Modern is already out of date; cutting-edge architecture is what Thailand’s capital yearns for. Every year the skyline grows higher, obliterating this city’s history.

But beneath the high gloss of 21st century Bangkok is a deeper layer that is difficult to find yet worth the search. It’s an underlying shadow city, ghostly but still alive, beautiful but disregarded, threatened by rampant development.

This is the face of Bangkok that Ben Davies reveals in Vanishing Bangkok: The Changing Face of the City. A photographer who has lived in Southeast Asia for decades, he began to explore hidden corners of Bangkok in 2014, launching a quest that would last for five years. In his search to capture the images of old buildings, he turned to a photographer from the mid-19th century for inspiration, a Scot named John Thomson, whose “pin sharp, carefully composed” images reminded Davies of still life paintings. This mood is what he wanted in his own work and to attain it, he found a camera that was reminiscent of Thomson’s time, one that used film and a variety of different lenses. His process of photography evoked old movie scenes, with his camera perched on a tall tripod and his head covered by a black cloth, helping him to focus on his subject. “Just to set up this unwieldy camera in a tripod could take ten minutes,” Davies says, “frequently exposures lasted for up to thirty minutes.” 

The results of his painstaking efforts are works of art. Each photograph fills an entire page in crisp black and white, with startling detail and clarity. His images are haunting and compelling, beautiful and sad. He shows the Art Deco splendor of Hualamphong Railway Station in its final days, before its vibrancy was dimmed by its new incarnation as a museum. Mansions that housed the aristocracy of another era are now devoured by vines and the twisted roots of banyan trees, surrounded by debris or tilting menacingly toward the waters of a canal. A perfect replica of an English country house stands on stilts above the Chao Phraya River, incongruous in its British elegance but not an anomaly. The wealthy of Bangkok happily adopted architectural styles from England, France, and Italy and incorporated elements from China and Portugal in more plebeian structures, which oddly are the buildings that most remain in use today.

The bottom floors of Bangkok’s old shophouses are grim-looking with their doors locked behind forbidding gates, but their upper floors hold the grace notes of Palladian windows and elaborate wood carvings. They still house businesses and families who have owned them for generations but know they may be the last to work and live within those anachronisms.

These photographs are poignant, showing a way of life that will probably soon disappear from sight and memory. A shrine to Kwan Yin that is one of the oldest in the city, where the faithful still bring their offerings and prayers; a grinding machine for traditional medicine that’s supplied a pharmacy for fifty years; an eighty-year-old welding shop where the owner tells Davies, “This is the house where I was born. I love everything about it; a barbershop on the banks of a canal where customers have come to sit in old leather chairs for one hundred years--all are still in use and all are doomed by progress.

And yet maybe not. In the heart of Bangkok, beneath one of the city’s busiest Skytrain stations, are two low-lying wooden buildings, their walls bordered by a wild ganglia of utility wires, their doors wide open to the street. Surrounded by gleaming shopping centers that sell imported luxuries from all over the world, these anomalies survive, bringing a vital reminder of Bangkok’s history to the fashionable, trend-ridden glaze that too often characterizes this city. Perhaps the beauty of Davies’ photographs will bring strength to the battle for preservation that has recently emerged in Thailand. Certainly the artistry of his work will claim the attention of historians and photography collectors for years to come.~Janet Brown

Ivan Ramen : Love, Obsession, and Recipes from Tokyo's Most Unlikely Noodle Joint by Ivan Orkin (Ten Speed Press)

Ivan Orkin was the first foreigner to run and own a successful ramen shop in Tokyo, (home to over 5000 little ramen shops). Not only was he successful, but he did this mostly on his own. He didn’t do any apprenticeships at other ramen shops, he didn’t take any Japanese food courses on how to make ramen. In fact, he didn't even know how to make ramen when he started, but he does have a background in fine foods and is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. Celebrity chef and self-proclaimed bad boy, Anthony Bourdain had this to say about Ivan, “What Ivan Orkin does not know about noodles is not worth knowing.”

He opened his first ramen shop, "Ivan Ramen" in 2007 in Roka Koen, which is a little off the beaten path, away from the major tourist areas of Shibuya, Shinjuku, and Tokyo station. His first shop was so successful that a few years later he opened a second shop in Kyodo in Setagaya Ward called "Ivan Plus". He also managed to get a book deal in Japan and his book アイバンのラーメン (Ivan’s Ramen) was published in 2008 by Little More. 

Ivan moved back to his hometown of New York and opened an "Ivan Ramen" shop in Manhattan in 2012. Ivan Ramen : Love, Obsession, and Recipes from Tokyo’s Most Unlikely Noodle Joint is his first book to be published in English and is his story.  The book opens with his humble beginnings working part time at a Japanese restaurant in his teens to becoming the success he is today. He even provides the original recipe for his Shio Ramen that he serves at "Ivan Ramen". You can follow his easy step-by-step instructions to make the ramen he serves in the comforts of your own home. 

I was fortunate enough to visit the first Ivan Ramen shop and have talked to Ivan Orkin in person. He was a very pleasant and friendly person and creates a homey atmosphere which makes it quite an enjoyable eating experience. His ramen shop is probably the only ramen shop that has ice cream on its menu as well. There are forty-three other recipes included in his book featuring different variations of ramen. However, one of my favorite dishes at his shop and a popular item on the side menu is his pulled-pork with roast tomatoes rice bowl.

Ramen in the U.S. has come a long way since the introduction of instant ramen and Cup Noodles. If you wanted a delicious bowl of ramen, you would have to travel across the ocean and satisfy your desire in Japan. But thanks to people like Ivan Orkin and other Japanese shops expanding into the American market such as Ippudo, Ichiran, Santouka, and Menya Jiro, you no longer have to plan a trip to the Land of the Rising Sun for a delicious bowl of ramen.

But beware, if you read this book on an empty stomach, you're going to have a craving for a nice bowl of ramen (and not the instant or cup noodles type)! ~Ernie Hoyt

How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C. Pam Zhang (Riverhead Books)

The Old West of the United States is a familiar icon. From childhood, Americans learn about the beauty of its desert canyons and grasslands, the gold that lay within its rivers, the uninhabited spaces that drew those who fit in nowhere else, who wanted the opportunity for reinvention, to find a place that would fit their definitions of home. Buffalo Bill, Annie Oakley, the Donner Party--these are the figures who haunt the West--the ones who made it, the ones who died trying, the ones who hammered the Golden Spike into the last piece of rail that connected East to West. 

C. Pam Zhang has taken this myth--of outsiders on their own, making their way through a landscape that is stark and sere, living on what they can hunt, and working their way toward the lives they hope to make that are beyond anything they’ve yet experienced. But these fugitives are orphans who were born to Chinese parents, traveling by themselves on a stolen horse, in the only world they’ve ever known.

Lucy and Sam each have been shaped by a different parent who has given them different dreams. Lucy learned from her mother the weapon that beauty can provide, the value of an education, the fragments of a distant culture found in a trunk that Ma had carried from an unnamed country. Sam has absorbed the essential attributes of being male, taught by a man who never knew his own parents, who was found by Native Americans when he was an infant, lying beside a dead Chinese couple. Ba needs a boy and he turns Sam from being his youngest daughter into his only son.

Lucy longs to reach Sweetwater, a town she’s only heard of, where she can live in the cleanliness and order that her mother had worked unsuccessfully to attain. Sam wants to keep going, far from anyone who might recognize the girl who hides beneath a boy’s tough exterior. But first they have to find a place where they can bury their father’s body that rots to pieces in their mother’s old trunk, waiting to be placed in the ground, anchored by two stolen silver dollars.

As they search, Lucy clandestinely buries the fragments of her father’s body that drop from cracks in the trunk. Even after she and Sam put the unrecognizable carcass within the grave they’ve dug, along with the stolen silver, Ba haunts her. At night his ghost tells Lucy the true story of who her parents had been and why each of them, in cruel and separate ways, had abandoned their children.

“What makes a home a home?” “What makes a family a family?” These are questions Lucy and Sam ask each other long before they ride off to find the answers for themselves. Each child finds what they thought they wanted; each ends up far from where they had dreamed of being, aching for what they’ve lost.

C. Pam Zhang has wriitten a novel that’s built upon the lives and bodies of the Chinese in America. Within the poetry of the Western landscape, she has placed two children who will live there forever, as legends and as revealed history.~Janet Brown

Lanterns on Their Horns by Radhika Jha (Beautiful Books)

“Gau'' is the Sanskrit word for cow. It is also the word for the first ray of light, the eldest child of dawn. The nature of light is to move. That may be how the cow got included in the family of words rooted in the verb “gam”, for “gam” means to go. Like its ancestor, the first ray of light, the nature of the cow was to move and therefore it had to go somewhere. But the “somewhere” is what it forgot and in time there grew to be a difference between simply “going” and “going somewhere”.

So begins the introduction of Lanterns on Their Horns. The second novel by Indian writer Radhika Jha. It is the story of four main characters whose lives are intertwined because of a solitary cow. 

The story is set in the fictitious rural town of Nandgaon, a place that is cut off from most modern conveniences. There is no road leading to the town, there is no electricity, and the community must rely on one another to survive. It is located near the real town of Khandwa in Madhya Pradesh which is located in central India. The bond keeping the village together is their patel or Headman. He has authority over every aspect of village life. One of the rules of the village is, if you leave, you are not allowed to return.

A cow is found in the forest by Ramu, a poor farmer, who believes the cow is a gift from the gods. It also makes him happy as he will be able to give the cow as a gift to his modern and university educated wife, Laxmi. 

Laxmi is an outsider and is shunned by most of the people in the village as they know she is the daughter of a man who committed suicide. They believe that associating with her will only bring bad luck. It is the Headman who gives permission for Ramu to marry Laxmi because he felt Ramu had enough bad luck in his life already. 

The Headman is a strict traditionalist. He is also the proud owner of the town’s herd of cows.It was he who went against the government and blocked them from making a road to the simple town. He is adamant in keeping the status quo of the village. 

The person who brings change to life is Manoj Mishra, an idealist who believes he has the answer to eradicate India’s poverty. His plan is to inseminate cows in rural towns with sperm from a superior breed whose offspring will be able to produce larger volumes of milk and will lead the poor farmers to riches beyond their dreams. 

When Manoj manages to get permission from Laxmi to inseminate her “junglee” cow, it leads to confrontation between tradition and growth. It leads to a modern day conundrum. Should small rural towns and villages stick with tradition and forego modern conveniences or should they embrace growth, development and progress which as Nandgaon’s Headman believes will only lead to greed, theft, jealousy and no sense of community? ~Ernie Hoyt

The Song Poet by Kao Kalia Yang (Henry Holt and Company)

When Kao Kalia Yang was eight, she saw a crowd of people weep at a Hmong New Year celebration as her father sang poetry, his words and music “blending hardship and harrowing hope.” The songs he created gave shape to the story of leaving one country for another and evoked the beauty and loss of what had been left behind,  “a reminder, a promise, of home.” 

Across the United States, Hmong people heard about Bee Yang’s songs and begged that he record them. He made a tape with six songs that yielded a profit of five thousand dollars. Instead of putting that money into another album, he turned it into “grains of rice and strings of meat” to feed his children. Although he continued to write songs and recorded them on a basic tape recorder, he never made another album again. But his poetry surrounded the lives of his children, who “took it for granted that this would always be so.”

Instead, when Bee’s mother died, he lost his songs. His poetry vanished.

What stayed with him were his stories that he embedded in the memory of his daughter, a girl who became a writer herself (The Latehomecomer, reviewed in Asia by the Book in April, 2008). Listening to her father’s recorded songs and translating his poetry into English led her to the story of her father’s life, from his birth in the Laos mountains to his struggles in the United States.

Hmong song poetry is an art in which the singer “raps, jazzes, and sings the blues;” it holds “humor, irony, and astute cultural and political criticism.” Kao Kalia Yang tells her father’s story in his voice, in answer to his songs, entering his heart, mind, and history.

Bee Yang never knew his father, a man who “did not live to see his son yearn for a father, or struggle to become one.” A child of two shamans, Bee searches for his own answers in the words of the people around him, looking for beauty within what he hears in his village and what he sees in the natural world within which the Hmong people coexist. 

When war makes Bee and his family flee for safety into the jungle, he falls in love with beauty in the person of a young girl, one whose spirit challenges and sustains him as they reach the safety of a refugee camp, get on a plane to live in America, and work to raise their children by doing jobs that would cripple their hands, tear at their lungs, and lacerate their spirits.

“When I speak English, I become a leaf in the wind,” Bee admits, as his children become interpreters of life in America and he a storyteller of life in Laos.He watches his children grow away from him as they work toward the goals he has set for them; his dream of them becoming doctors, lawyers, successful Americans. He rages at his oldest son who, racked by bigots and bullies at school, drops out and follows his parents into manual labor.  But in spite of the gaps that yawn between his children’s lives and his own, Bee’s family holds together, bound by the persistence of his love.

Haunted by the memory of an adopted brother who was tortured into madness by Laos soldiers and died as “a collection of open pits, broken trees, and burnt houses,” Bee longs to return to his country and honor his brother’s memory. Although his oldest daughter gives him a plane ticket to Southeast Asia, he’s stopped at the border between Thailand and Laos with the warning that if he crosses into his homeland, he will be killed. Instead he and his wife climb to a Thai mountaintop and stare down at a country where Hmong people once fought against Communism and from which they are now exiled as a result.

In the country that has never been his own, Bee, old, deaf, and physically beaten down by factory work, proves that his spirit is unbroken when he stands up against unfairness in his workplace and walks away, never to go back. “I leaned on my children, who told me “...Everything will be okay.” They help him buy a house on a hill where he gardens, raises chickens, watches his grandchildren play. “Each breath I take, each song I hear, gives my heart something to sing about, silent songs…”

Kao Kalia Yang has reached into her father’s poetry and used it to illuminate his life, honoring him and the many men like him, who live “in this land as strangers, beneath the foreign sky,” so their children can find peace. In a time when immigration is threatened, this book is a potent reminder of what the US owes to these men and their families.~Janet Brown

Mayada : Daughter of Iraq by Jean Sasson (Dutton)

Jean Sasson has lived and worked in the Middle East for a number of years so when the opportunity presented itself to visit Iraq after the First Gulf War, she could not resist the temptation. As she was the author of a book that criticized then President, Saddam Hussein, she knew that no government official would issue her a visa. So, she wrote directly to the President and along with her letter she sent a copy of her book, The Rape of Kuwait. In her letter, she told the President that she didn’t agree with his invasion of Kuwait but was “concerned about the well-being of Iraqis living under sanctions.” She wanted to see for herself “how the Iraqi were faring.”

Surprisingly, she was contacted by Baghdad and told her visa would be granted through the U.N. Mission in New York City. Once Sasson was in Baghdad, she was adamant about being assigned a female interpreter and was introduced to Mayada. The two became fast friends and kept in touch. A year later, Mayada disappeared without a trace. No one answered her phone, she didn’t return any of the letters Sasson wrote her and then one day, Sasson receives a call from Mayada who informs her that she was in “the can”, a euphemism for prison. It wasn’t until Mayada escaped Iraq that Sasson could ask her what happened.

Mayada : Daughter of Iraq is part biography but mostly focuses on Mayada’s life after her arrest and what she and other women had to deal with during their incarceration. Sasson gives a voice to Mayada so she can tell the world the truth about Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath Party.

Mayada Al-Askari is the daughter and grand-daughter of a prominent Iraqi family. She lived a life of privilege even under the reign of Saddam Hussein who she has met on a few occasions. However, Mayada was arrested by the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi Intelligence Service and was taken to the notorious Balladiyat Prison. She wasn’t told why she was arrested nor was she given a trial. 

Mayada describes to us in graphic detail the torture she and the other women endure. It is not for the faint of heart. They suffer beatings, burnings, the cutting off of certain body parts and rape. These are just a few of the injustices that took place behind the prison’s locked doors.

A month after being arrested, Mayada was told that she would be released, again, with no explanations whatsoever. The other women made Mayada promise to call their relatives and children to let them know where they were being held and which guard to bribe for their release. They also said to her, “You must swear by Allah that one day you will tell the world what has happened in this cell.” 

It took courage for Mayada to come forward to keep her promise to the women who were left behind in prison. It’s a shame what despots and their willing partners are capable of doing. What still baffles me is why the United Nations let Saddam Hussein stay in power. It appears as if the United Nations have forgotten Lord Acton’s words, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We can only hope that Iraq doesn’t see another leader like Saddam Hussein in its future.~Ernie Hoyt

Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong (One World, Random House)

 “If you want to write about race, you have to do it politely, because then people will listen.” Cathy Hong Park understood this statement made by another poet of color; she’d been writing poetry  “for a roomful of bored white people,” submerging her identity and her feelings to fit into a narrative that didn’t see color, only whiteness. Flattened into a category that lumped all Asian nationalities into a model minority that exists only for some, she felt “as interchangeable as lint,” without a voice of her own. Steeped in depression, she found a path to this after watching Richard Pryor and taking to the stage herself as a stand-up comic, delivering sardonic truths that shocked audiences into listening. She no longer had to be polite, a state that seeped into her poems and pervades her essays in Minor Feelings.

In defiance of the approved standardized language, Hong Park explores and celebrates “bad English,” collecting it from websites that find humor in mistranslations of English in other countries. “I steal those lines and use them in my poetry,” she says, “bad English is my heritage.” She treats “English as a weapon in a power struggle,” “hijacking English...to slit English open so its dark histories slide out,” “finding a way of speech that decentered whiteness.”

Dark histories emerge in Park Hong’s essays, through words that decenter whiteness like scalpels. She charts the odyssey that she traveled at Oberlin with two friends,Taiwanese and Korean, the three of them becoming “indomitable forces” in their different art forms, possessing “the confidence of white men, which was swiftly cut down after graduation.” 

She illuminates the death of artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who was raped and murdered in Manhattan. Her death went unnoticed by the New York press and it was her brother and her husband who discovered the site of her murder after the police had given up a cursory search. Cha was killed just as her book Dictee was released, just before her photographs were to appear in a group show at a Village gallery. With her murder, she vanished, so thoroughly that Park Hong discovered Dictee only through a workshop with a visiting Korean American professor.  A mixture of “memoir, poetry, essay, diagrams, and photography,” Cha’s book pulls Park Hong into an unfamiliar truth, a truth she expands upon in a scathing essay that focuses a long-denied attention upon Cha’s life, death, and art.

She brings to light an activist who by rights should be famous, a woman who held Malcolm X as he died and who’s immortalized in a photograph of his death but remains anonymous. Yuri Kochiyama grew up in a U.S internment camp during World War II. She became a civil rights activist and was one of the seven who occupied the Statue of Liberty in 1977 as supporters of independence for Puerto Rico. She fought for a government apology and reparations for the survivors of internment camps and in 1996 proclaimed “People have a right to violence, to rebel, to fight back.” “At a time when identities can be walled off,” Park Hong says, “it’s essential to lift up the life of Kochiyama.” The scalding shame is that this life needs to be lifted up when Kochiyama should be a shining part of America’s historical fabric. 

Park Hong defines minor feelings as those emotions that don’t enhance and pay homage to the ruling system: “envy,  irritation, boredom,” the feelings that emerge with honesty and are all too often submerged “to protect white feelings.” 

These essays will not do that. Reckonings are not conciliatory actions and Hong Park makes it clear from the beginning that this is what her book is about. What her essays will do is propel white readers into an awareness that should have come our way long ago. It’s a launching pad. Make a leap.~Janet Brown

A Cab Called Reliable by Patti Kim (St. Martin's)

Patti Kim was born in 1970 in Pusan, Korea. Her family immigrated to the U.S. when she was four years old. She wrote A Cab Called Reliable as her Master’s Thesis at the University of Maryland where she earned a Master of Fine Arts Degree. Her thesis was then published in 1997 and became her debut novel and opened the path for her to become a writer. She says her books “aren’t autobiographical and yet they are, if you know what I mean.”

The story is set in the early seventies. Ahn Joo and her family are from Pusan, Korea where they used to live in a small room behind a grocery store. They moved to the States when Ahn Joo was seven years old and settled down in Arlington, Virginia. They currently live in an apartment complex called Burning Rock Court.

Ahn Joon is in the third grade and was on her way home from school when she heard her younger brother crying. She remembers her mother saying “it was wicked for a child to cry in public” and yet she would not scold her son, Min-Joo, who often cried in public. She was told that Min Joo was special.

Ahn Joo saw her mother carrying her crying brother get into a taxi. She decided to hide behind a tree and when the car passed by, she saw her mother’s face through the window in a blue cab that had “Reliable” written on the door. When Ahn Joo got home, she found a note her mother left her along with a box filled with four small cakes with white frosting.  In the note which was written in Korean, her mother said the cakes were for Ahn Joo, to eat them and enjoy them. She would come back later to pick up Ahn Joo. That was the last time Ahn Joo saw her mother. 

We follow Ahn Joo’s life as the years pass, from grade to the fourth, from the fourth grade to the fifth and on up until high school, sharing in her failures and successes. She still believes her mother may one day come back and get her but life goes on with just her and her Dad.

Her father sums up the life of the Korean immigrant. Even though it is just him and his daughter, he squeaks a living with a welding job. He saves up enough money to buy a food truck then progresses to becoming the owner of a grocery store in a mostly African-American neighborhood and makes sure his daughter gets the education she needs. 

Patti Kim’s A Cab Called Reliable brings to life what it is like for a Korean-American girl to grow up in the U.S. The struggle for identity and adjusting to a new environment and culture. The family dynamics may not be the same for every Asian immigrant family, but many of the problems they face are easily recognizable - the prejudice, the language barrier, family ties (both good and bad) and wanting the best for their children.~Ernie Hoyt

Homeland Elegies: A Novel by Ayad Akhtar (Little, Brown and Company)

Is it a novel? Is it a memoir? Is it an economic explanation of the current political realm in the United States? Ayad Akhtar provides his own explanation in the subtitle of Homeland Elegies. It is, he proclaims at the outset, a novel.  In a letter that prefaced the advance reader copies that were sent to booksellers and reviewers, he assures them “this is not a work of autobiography,” that his writing has the need to “deform actual events...in order to see them more clearly.” A quote from Alison Bechdel on the page that follows the dedication teases with “I can only make things up about things that have already happened…” And from the outset, readers begin to wonder what has already happened and what is made up.

Akhtar, as is true of his narrator, was born on Staten Island to parents who had recently arrived from Pakistan, grew up in Wisconsin, suffered the death of his mother, and won a Pulitzer Prize for his play, Disgraced.  These facts, all given a new focus in Homeland Elegies,  distract and detract from the American life of a man who has achieved the American Dream while his fellow-countrymen disregard the truth that he is American, often quite brutally.

His novel, if indeed it is one, is an epic saga that sweeps from Partition to 9/11 to the Age of Trump, from a childhood of privilege to an unexpected  shower of wealth that comes his way during a stock market boom, of travels to visit relatives in Pakistan and ill-fated journeys in the United States. The narrator could easily be a successor of Huckleberry Finn, although one who is well-educated and born into Islam. But it’s the tease that weakens his story. When he steals a crucifix to wear around his neck after being assailed by a mob immediately after the Twin Towers fall, is this a skillful act of fiction or a confession? When he tells the love story that ends in his being given a case of syphilis, is this a form of satire or a mean way of settling a score with a woman who left him?  Does it matter? Should it matter?

Underpinning this narrative from the first chapter to the last is an astute assessment of how American politics have intertwined, with disastrous results that are so woven into the country’s fabric that they may never be repaired.  America is still a colony, the narrator is told by a university professor, but it is being colonized by the cult of the American self, with its need for all wishes to be immediately granted. This theory is expanded by different characters whom the narrator encounters throughout his life: the lesbian professor who points out that prevailing colonization and the exile we all face, at least economically; the Black Hollywood agent who explains how entrepreneurism was destroyed by the freebooting free-market deregulation of industry that led to the existence of Amazon and the cult of low prices at any cost; the Moslem financier who cynically turns consumer debt into a wealth-generating commodity and ultimately a weapon; the family friend who longs to return to Pakistan and excoriates American diversity by saying instead of the mythical melting pot, the nation is actually “a buffer solution, which keeps things together but always separated.”  Trump, the Black agent explains, is simply “a human mirror,” reflecting the mood of Americans who longed to achieve the richness that surrounded and eluded them, a mood that “was Hobbesian--poor, nasty, brutish, and nihilistic.”

And yet this theory, as carefully constructed and as plausible as it appears, turns characters into mouthpieces and plot devices, as much as the detailed accounts of racism that scar the narrator feel like reconstructed journal entries. None of this ties together in a way that is an established literary form; it’s only Akhtar’s considerable talent that pulls this book into a whole. This could be what, in a more innocent time, would be called The Great American Novel. But it’s also dependent upon a form that will probably never be successfully replicated. The taunting elusive nature of hybrid work fails to be satisfying in the long run.~Janet Brown

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer (Pantheon)

Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi is divided into two sections. The first half takes place in Venice, Italy. The latter half is set in Varanasi, India, considered a holy place by Buddhists and Hindus. It was where Buddha gave his first sermon. In Hindu mythology, the city is believed to have been founded by Shiva, the Supreme Lord who “creates, protects, and transforms the universe.” 

The year is 2003. Jeff Atman, a journalist in his forties, living in London has been commissioned to write an article on the Biennale in Venice which is an art festival held every two years in the “City of Canals” featuring the latest names in art and art installations. This year’s participants included Ed Ruscha, Gilbert & George, Jacob Dalhgren, Fred Wilson just to name a few. 

He was told by the editor of Kulchur Magazine to get an interview with the reclusive Julia Berman, “to persuade her - to beg, plead and generally demean himself - to do an interview that would guarantee even more publicity for her daughter’s forthcoming album and further inflate the bloated reputation of Steven Morison, the dad, the famously overrated artist.”

Everything changes when Atman meets Laura. He becomes obsessed with her and spends more time looking for her than he does gathering information for his article. The two have a mutual attraction and spend most of the rest of their time at the Biennale having sex or getting drunk, or a bit of both but the event has come to an end “when everything was so close to becoming just memory.” “Or the opposite of memory: a longing for something that would soon be impossibly remote.”

The next thing you know, you’re reading about another freelance writer who was asked at the last minute to do a travel piece on Varanasi in India. Dyer leaves it up to the reader to decide if this journalist is the same Jeff Atman that covered the Biennale as the story is told in the first person and not once does the writer’s name appear. 

Venice was full of fun and debauchery to satisfy one’s lust and longing. In contrast, the journalist in Varanasi who was only going to visit the country for a few days stays for months. The first few days he walks around, checks out the ghats, does research for the article he’s supposed to write, but the longer he stays, he forgets about the article and has his own spiritual awakening. His friends become a little worried as he seems to be going native as the days go by reminding one of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. 

In Venice, Jeff Atman loses his inhibitions and follows his desires whereas the unnamed journalist in Varanasi is faced with death, sickness, and poverty. Atman chooses to live life to the fullest. The unnamed writer is at first disgusted by what he sees but the longer he stays, he begins to develop an understanding of the Hindus love for Varanasi. Dyer writes two great stories and makes you wonder if his versions of Venice and Varanasi are two sides of the same coin or are they reflections of the same city? ~Ernie Hoyt

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