A Beginner’s Guide to Japan by Pico Iyer (Vintage)

Pico Iyer, a writer who has made a literary career out of being a nomad, has been running in place for the past thirty years. The man who made his name with Video Night in Kathmandu fell in love with a woman and her country, as he described in The Lady and the Monk, and Japan has been his base ever since. 

Iyer is famous for tossing out provocative ideas and then sliding past them with deep charm, moving on to another gorgeous description, another apt anecdote. In this latest book, he relies almost exclusively on glittering statements, which lead from one to another in a way that connects but does not elucidate. Sprinkled among what he calls “Observations and Provocations” are ten essays which peripherally address the brief passages that make up the rest of the book. “Salvos,” Iyer calls them, “Much of this book may infuriate anyone who knows Japan.” It’s called a beginner’s guide, he says, because it was written by one.

His book is traditional and contemporary, mirroring both the commonplace books of the 19th century in which ideas and brief descriptions were jotted down as they came to mind, and the status updates that besiege us all on social media nowadays. But more than anything else, it takes on the form of a pointillist landscape, with each dot of the brush making a whole picture only if the viewer stands back from it and looks from a different angle.

Iyer is happily enmeshed in irony--a travel writer who spends his time at home, a fiercely literate man who neither speaks nor reads Japanese beyond the level of a very young child. He would be in danger of living within his own fantasy were it not for his highly skilled art of paying attention.

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” Simone Weil’s quote is the one Iyer has chosen as his epigraph and it guides the thoughts that follow. Like a very young child, Iyer keeps his senses completely alive to the world around him, without preconceptions to run interference and get in his way.

Within his delightful and often startling observations (18th century samurai were advised to carry powdered rouge for moments when they might be “of bad color”) are concise thoughts that may well carry truth (“My friends in Japan are less inclined to try remaking the world than simply to redecorate its corners). It’s no accident that Iyer occasionally brings to mind the cleverness of Oscar Wilde. He claims that Wilde, born the year after Peary’s ships sailed into Japan, was as shaped by Japanese influences as were Van Gogh and Manet, backing up his assertion with witticisms from Wilde that buttress Iyer’s observations of Japanese life and culture.

This book is “fan-shaped,” Iyer says, and although each statement stands on its own, they all lead to the ones that follow. Manga proceeds to the use of robots, the possibility of artificial intelligence enabling communication with the dead, and the presence of Shinto in everyday life. ”Anime is the natural expression of an animist world.” 

Speaking Japanese is useless without thinking in Japanese, Iyer says, and fluency is no guarantee of acceptance for foreigners. In fact it can be quite the opposite, as Victoria Riccardi pointed out in Untangling My Chopsticks, when she admits she had to leave Japan before she began to hate it. In his silence imposed upon him by his lack of language, Iyer begins to understand his chosen country’s apparent paradoxes: the Shinto concert where every instrument was silent, “the space between absence and presence,” the idea of emptiness as luxury. “When you leave , what will you miss most about Japan,” a friend asks and Iyer replies, “All the things you don’t have to say or explain.” 

This is the power of his deceptively simple book, the unsaid, the unexplained, lurking beneath his terse and clever bits of wit and description. Living within a riddle, Iyer says, means being unable to imagine what will happen tomorrow. It’s that unpredictability within a world of predictable ceremony, ritual, and etiquette that gives Japan--through Iyer’s eyes--a compelling and irresistible luster.~Janet Brown

Spark by Naoki Matayoshi (Pushkin Press)

Naoki Matayoshi’s debut novel 火花 (Hibana) was published in 2015 by Bungei Shuju. It’s release took the Japanese literary world by storm. The book went on to win Japan’s most prestigious award for literature - the Akutagawa Prize. The book was also adapted into a Netflix Original Series.  Matayoshi is well known in the entertainment world for being an avid reader but it still came as a surprise to everyone when he won the award. 

It is now available in English as Spark, published by Pushkin Press and translated by Alison Watts.  English readers can enjoy a story about a subject close to Matayoshi’s heart, the art of manzai. Manzai is a Japanese form of comedic dialogue, often performed by a duo, one playing the straight man while the other provides comic relief.  

The story opens as the manzai combination, Sparks, takes the stage during a summer fireworks event in Atami. The comedians were going through their routine although nobody was paying them any attention. Near the end of their routine, a loud BOOM went off signalling the start of the fireworks so the pair just went through the motions, hoping to leave the stage as quickly as possible once their allotted time was up. Another comedy duo, The Doofuses, was scheduled to take the stage and Tokunaga, the funny half of Sparks decided to stay and watch their routine. 

Tokunaga is impressed by one of the members of the Doofuses and is even more surprised when the person invites him out to drink after the show. Tokunaga discovers that Kamiya is four years older than him, making him a sempai, his senior in Japan’s hierarchical society. Tokunaga becomes his kohai or junior. Tokunaga decides right then and there to be a disciple of Kamiya. He believes Kamiya has that certain something that’s necessary to survive and succeed as a manzai artist. 

Their friendship progresses from a mere sempai-kohai relationship to becoming a bond where they can speak to each other as equals. We follow the careers of both the Sparks and the Doofuses with the Sparks becoming more popular, landing spots at various theaters and also on television shows giving them more exposure. 

After ten years in the business, Tokunaga’s partner, Yamashita, marries his girlfriend and says his wife is pregnant with twins so their manzai partnership is over. The Doofuses on the other hand don't find the same success and Kamiya would disappear for months at a time. Tokunaga continues to have faith in his senpai and believes that Kamiya is always pushing the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable and respects that.

Naoki Matayoshi knows firsthand what it’s like to be a struggling manzai artist as he is a veteran manzai-shi himself. He is the “funny man” half of Peace and performs alongside Yuji Ayabe. Armed with his knowledge of how the manzai industry works adds to the realism of the discussions Tokunaga and Kamiya have when they get together.

After winning the Akutagawa Prize, Yuji stops calling Naoki by his name and refers to him as Sensei. As a combination, Peace has gone on hiatus as Ayabe went to the U.S. to study English with the hopes of landing a role in a Hollywood film. Matayoshi continues to appear on television and continues to write as well. I find Peace’s brand of comedy quite entertaining and hope that they will perform as a duo once again in the near future. ~Ernie Hoyt

Stories of the Sahara by Sanmao, translated by Mike Fu (Bloomsbury Publishing)

Every once in a while, but not often enough, a book makes me want to meet the writer, sit and chat, become best friends. Failing that, I read whatever I can find about that author, trying to fit the jigsaw puzzle pieces of her life together to make a whole person from those fragments of information. 

This is what happened when I finished the last page of Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara. The kohl-encircled piercing stare gleaming from the determined face of a slender woman dressed in black, standing within a blurred desert street scene, gives little away.  Nor did I learn much about her background in her vivid essays where she figures prominently but usually as an observer. 

How did this young woman from Taiwan end up married to a Spaniard, living in the Sahara? Sanmao doesn’t say. She begins her book with “I desperately wanted to be the first female explorer to cross the Sahara,” but gives no clue as to how this ambition came into being. other than blaming the National Geographic. She doesn’t even say if her ambition was realized. Instead she gives vivid glimpses of life in a desert outpost, living among Sahwari villagers, with a Spanish military camp some distance away. Her husband Jose persuades her to marry him, but she does so only after exploring for three months, “running around the tents of the native nomads with my backpack and camera.” She mentions that she knew Jose in Madrid, but how they met is never divulged. The only reason why Sanmao writes about their wedding, I suspect, is because it’s great comic fodder, as is her description of setting up a household, repurposing an old tire and boards from crates that once held coffins. 

Her satirical humor is turned only upon herself and, peripherally, upon Jose. During her year in the Sahara, she is acutely aware of how her neighbors live, and she reports on this with deep respect, even when she finds the events horrifying.

Her story of the ten-year-old bride who lives next door and has become her friend, the slave who can neither hear nor speak but communicates through pantomime and gifts, the Spanish soldier who is haunted by both his slaughtered battalion and the hate he has for the tribesmen who killed them, the rebel and his lover who were destroyed by politics--all are described with compassion, along with cool, dispassionate details. Even when she tells about the night Jose was caught in a quagmire and the men whom she flags down for assistance decide to rape her instead, Sanmao is almost matter of fact in her narrative, as though this had happened to someone else. She sees no villains, simply people who exist in a different, inexplicable, and fascinating way of being, within their own world.

She is clearly in love with the desert, which she reveals in brief snapshots. Its yellow dust filling the sky during sandstorms, its pale orange light at sunrise, even its “heat that made you wish for death,” its nights of “frozen black,” all are unveiled in swift descriptions that she  sweeps tnto the fabric of her stories, making the Sahara as irresistible as the tales themselves.

Who was this woman? Born in China in 1943, raised in Taiwan, a traveler who went to 55 countries in 14 years, who studied in Madrid, Berlin, and Illinois during the 60s --she was a child whose ambition was to marry Picasso, a young woman who left home in her early twenties and returned as a celebrity (and a Spanish citizen) when she was 38, a writer who sold 15 million copies of her 15 books and gave five hundred talks to audiences numbering in the thousands in Taipei, before she hung herself with a pair of silk stockings at the age of 47.

Jose died in a diving accident when the two of them lived in the Canary Islands. Sanmao took too many pills on purpose soon after she was widowed and years later still referred to him in the present tense, while admitting “I had never been passionately in love with him. At the same time I felt incredibly lucky and at ease.” Passionate or not, how could she resist a man who gave her a camel skull, complete with teeth, as a wedding gift? Passionate pales next to the love and understanding that comes with a present like that. Living without the man who had loved her from the time he was sixteen, who told the woman eight years older than he that he would marry her when he grew up, must have stripped much of the color from Sanmao’s life. She continued to write but “her later pieces are all veiled in melancholy.”

“Solipsistic,” a Chinese-American writer said of Sanmao in the New Yorker, “...myopic, not truly curious.”  If this is true, it was certainly lost in translation. Sanmao’s life was her art, and her beam of curiosity was laser sharp, at least as it’s conveyed by Mike Fu’s English interpretation from the original Chinese. We should be all be as myopic as this woman of many names--Sanmao. Echo Ping Chen, Chen Maoping--who lived a life of stories and offered them up with relish and charm.~Janet Brown

Born Into Brothels by Zana Briski (Umbrage)

“The most stigmatized people in Calcutta’s red light district, are not the prostitutes, but their children. In the face of abject poverty, abuse, and despair, these kids have little possibility of escaping their mother’s fate or for creating another type of life.”  ~Diane Weyerman

Zana Briski is a British photographer who went to India in 1995 and wasn’t sure what direction her life was going to take. She was taking pictures of the “harsh realities of women’s lives - female infanticide, child marriage, dowry deaths, and widowhood”. It wasn’t until a friend took her to the red light district in Calcutta where she finally found her reason for being. 

It took months for Briski to penetrate the tight-knit community of prostitutes and even longer for the workers to open up to her. Her persistence and patience paid off, although it was the children of the prostitutes that took to her right away. They were fascinated by the foreign woman and her cameras. She showed them how to use the cameras and let the kids take the pictures. That gives her an idea for her next trip to India. 

Briski spends the next few years fund-raising and generating support for her project. She asks for help from one of her colleagues who at first refuses but after she sends him video footage that she took and explained her idea, he was on the next plane to India. 

Briski returns to India with ten easy-to-use cameras and begins teaching a photography class for the kids. This then gives her the idea of recording the kids progress. Together with Ross Kaufman, they make a documentary film titled Born Into Brothels which is also the title to this companion book. The book includes the subtitle Photographs by the Children of Calcutta. The film was shown at the annual Sundance Film Festival and went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2005. 

The pictures in this book “are taken by children of prostitutes, children who have grown up surrounded by violence and clouded by a social stigma that denies them a right to an education”. The cameras “become windows to a new world” and for some, “a door to a new life”. 

We are introduced to eight of Briski’s brightest students - Avijit, Gour, Kochi, Manik, Puja, Shanti, Suchitra, and Tapasi. They range in age from ten to fourteen. Briski gives these children an opportunity to improve their lives through the use of photography and cameras. The vivid portraits compiled in this book are by these children and are the vision of India. It gives us a glimpse into the “real” India. 

Some of the kids are afraid of leaving their homes so their pictures are limited to their family, friends, and living accommodations. Others are more adventurous as they go out into the city to take pictures of whatever interests them. 

Thanks to the success of the film and support from people around the world, Briski sets up a non-profit organization named Kids with Cameras. The organization continues to teach impoverished and marginalized children the art of photography. It “builds platforms for the children to exhibit their work, telling us their stories and transforming the children and their audience through the processes of instruction, creation, and experience.” 

The pictures you see may change any bias you may have had about India and its people. The young photographers and many of their subjects are seen smiling. These images provoke one of the strongest human emotions - hope! ~Ernie Hoyt

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (Grand Central Publishers, Hachette Book Group)

Several years ago, I spent an excruciating afternoon in a Shenzhen historical museum. A newly born city, Shenzhen took on the entire Pearl River Delta region in its exhibits and focused heavily upon the opium trade that enriched the West and the Treaty Ports that humiliated the Chinese. This area of the museum was the most heavily laden with signs in English and as I read about the harsh and discriminatory treatment by Western countries toward the people whose country they forcibly occupied, I grew hot with national guilt. When I finally reached the area devoted to the cruelty of the Japanese invasion during World War Two, I almost cheered with relief at encountering a villain who wasn’t a flower of Anglo-European civilization, an ignoble reaction but a human one. Deflect that guilt.

I had that response again as I read Pachinko, a novel that spans the relationship between the Japanese and the Koreans throughout the 20th century, beginning with Japan’s colonization of Korea and ending with the discrimination faced by Koreans whose families had lived for generations in Japan. Horrifying as this was, it evoked the same deflection: See. We aren’t the only ones.

Min Jin Lee has encapsulated this history of humiliation within a compelling family saga. A country girl from a Korean fishing village, married to a Christian minister from Pyongyang, is taken by her new husband to Osaka where he becomes a missionary. The two of them quickly learn that Koreans in Japan have no foothold within the country that rules over their own. Crammed into a ghetto where the housing is shacks built from scrap material because the Japanese refuse to rent to Koreans, the young couple do their best to live up to the advice the husband was given--be perfect. Even so, the young minister is imprisoned under a political protest and returns to his family only to die. His wife becomes a street vendor to ensure her children’s survival, and his sons are tormented in school by their Japanese classmates. 

An indiscretion in the wife’s past gives her an unlikely protector, a Korean who has risen in the Osaka underworld.  His care extends to her children and he keeps the family alive throughout World War Two. But not even his influence can erase the truth that the Japanese-born Korean boys will succeed in the country of their birth only if they deny their bloodline or if they become involved in the shadow economy of Pachinko, the pinball machine parlors that have spread across Japan.

In the family’s second Japanese-born generation, a son rises through education, finds success in America, and returns to Tokyo with a job in international finance that brings comfort beyond anything his grandmother has ever known. He soon discovers he’s a kind of freak, neither Western nor Japanese nor Korean. His roots are in pachinko, with its undertones of yakuza gangsters, and these roots run deep.

Lee brings stark and vivid details to her characters: the ink still visible under a child’s fingernails, when he appears on his birthday for an annual interrogation and fingerprinting at an immigration office in the only country he’s ever lived in, clutching his Korean passport and haunted by the threat of deportation; the odor of homemade kimchi that clings to the clothes of little boys who are singled out and bullied because they are different; the disbelief evoked by the Korean-American girl when she tells the women of her boyfriend’s family that she’s only eaten Korean food in restaurants because her own mother never cooked it at home.

Pachinko’s story of closeness and rejection, of success and disgrace, of being disregarded in a country of birth as well as in a country of origin, brings a little-known history into the light, illuminating a disgrace that is mirrored in countries all over the world. After reading it, we know we’re not alone in our crimes of colonization and exploitation, a knowledge that does nothing to mitigate our own failures. ~Janet Brown

The Red Thread by Nicholas Jose (Hardie Grant Books)

In Chinese legend, the Red Thread, also known as the red thread of fate or red thread of destiny, is “an invisible thread said to tie together all those whose lives will intertwine”. It is similar to the Western idea of a soulmate. In Nicholas Jose’s The Red Thread, Jose takes a known legend from the past and blends it with present day romance in Shanghai. 

Shen works at an auction house called Shanghai Art Auctions International. One of his regular suppliers has brought him some new items - a small figurine of a woman from the Ming Dynasty, a bowl with the mark of the Quianlong Emperor, and finally a book that was “bound traditionally in several loose stitchings that were sandwiched between red cloth boards and fastened with red silk ribbons, two on each side”. 

It was the earliest printings of a book titled Six Chapters of a Floating Life, except the supplier only had four of the chapters in his possession. The supplier says the name of the writer is Shen Fu, written in the same character as Shen’s name. Shen feels the book drawing him in but it is to be put up for auction along with the other two items. 

Shen takes the book home and starts to read it. On the day of the auction, when Lot No.41 comes up, the book by Shen-Fu, Shen decides then and there to withdraw the item from sale. It is also at the auction where he sees Ruth for the first time. 

Ruth is an Australian artist who makes contemporary traditional Chinese paintings. She left invitations to her own show at a gallery. Shen and Shen’s co-worker Ricky go to the show although Shen is not really interested in contemporary art. He is more interested in reading Shen Fu’s account of his life. 

At Ruth’s show, when he hears her say “When mosquitoes were humming around in summer, I transformed them in my imagination into a company of storks dancing in the air.”. These were the exact words that were written in Shen Fu’s Six Chapters of a Floating Life. The more Shen reads the book, he realizes that he and Ruth are living the life as described in the book. 

Their lives become more complicated when Han, a beautiful woman, enters their lives. In Shen Fu’s book, Shen and his lover are also mesmerized by a woman who comes into their lives and turns things upside down. Shen begins to believe that the reason nobody has ever found the last two chapters is because he and Ruth are living the life that was written in the book. 

The Red Thread is one of those stories that blends historical fact with fiction. Shen Fu was a writer in the Qing Dynasty and did write his autobiography and titled it Six Records of a Floating Life. It is also true that the last two chapters have never been found. Jose weaves a wonderful romance story of how strong the bond of true love can be. It makes you want to believe in fate and in finding your true soulmate. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Book Collectors: A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories that Carried Them Through a War by Delphine Minou (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Every day another headline cascades through social media. Another photo fills a screen and with one click, a new one takes its place. With so many disasters flaring across the world, Attention Deficit Disorder outranks Covid-19 as the leading malady of our time. “The world is too much with us;” turning away seems to be the only possible response.

When Delphine Minoui, an Istanbul-based journalist for Le Figaro, finds an image of Syria “without a trace of blood or bullets” while she’s browsing a Facebook page called Humans of Syria, she can’t turn away. The photo of two young men in a room full of books, one of them reading, the other examining a bookshelf, is captioned “The secret library of Daraya.” 

Minoui knows about Daraya. It’s a city that once had a population of 250,000 and now holds less than half that number, 12,000 rebels against the government of Bashar Al-Assad. Since 2012, Darya has been under siege, a place less than 1000 miles away from Istanbul but completely out of reach. A seasoned journalist, Minoui wants the story and she has the skills to uncover it. Through social media, she makes contact with the man who took the photograph, a co-founder of the library.

An active protestor since 2011, Ahmad Muaddamani and his compatriots see themselves as a third force: not jihadists, nor soldiers in the Free Syrian Army. Daraya is an unyielding center of active and peaceful dissent and by chance these dissenters find their primary means of defense.

One of them had walked into a destroyed house and found its floor was covered with books. At first his comrades thought he was mad for wanting to save these volumes, but they came to realize the books were a means of escape from the horror they live with. They understood Daraya needed these books; it needed a library.

They clean and paint a basement in a deserted building. They construct bookshelves. They scour the city for abandoned books in empty houses. Before these are put on the shelves, each one is numbered and inscribed with its owner’s name. “We’re not thieves,” Ahmad says, “Our revolution was meant to build, not destroy.”

The library they build is open six days a week from 9-5, It serves a daily average of 25 readers, who come in spite of a continuing deluge of barrel bombs filled with explosives and scrap metal, as many as 600 in a single month. They borrow The Alchemist, The Little Prince, Les Miserables, printed in languages that are not their own. When the library begins to offer classes in English, the readers come to learn. When it brings the outside world within its walls through videoconferences on Skype, discussion groups are born. The librarians publish a bi-monthly magazine, printed on a rescued photocopier; it holds tips on how to manage daily living during the siege, poems, news garnered from the internet, crossword puzzles with clues that hold grim humor. Ahmad finds a pdf of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He shrinks the text to fit four pages on a single sheet of paper and prints two copies. It becomes so popular readers fight to read it. It’s a mental survival guide in a city that’s been assaulted with chemical warfare while the world looked away, where a small UN convoy finally brings flour to people who have had no bread in years. The supply lasts less than a month and future convoys are barred from bringing more. Assad’s forces firebomb the fields that fed the city and Darya eats only vegetables grown in people’s yards and bulgur wheat that’s the last of the municipal reserves.

Then after 1350 days of siege, Assad drops four barrels of napalm on Daraya’s hospital. The city begins to die. Negotiations with the government ensure that its inhabitants will be safely transported to another city. 

Once it’s empty, Assad walks through Daraya’s ruins, “the deserted streets of a ghost city,” claiming to have restored “true freedom.” His soldiers strip the library and sell its books in the flea markets of Damascus. “Four years of saving Daraya’s heritage, swapped for a few coins.”

“So it’s over?” When Minoui asks Ahmad this question, he replies, “Of course not! You can destroy a city. Not ideas!” He and the other residents of Daraya hold tight to the words of the poet Mahmoud Darwish, “We nurse hope.” The rest of us need to stop turning away from hope as we click through to the next post on Facebook.~Janet Brown

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