Welcome to the Bangkok Slaughterhouse by Father Joseph Maier (Periplus Editions)

There are few heroes, let alone saints, among Catholic priests nowadays, but Father Joe Maier qualifies as both, although he would vehemently deny that. For over fifty years, he has lived and worked in Bangkok’s most notorious slum, one where other foreigners fear to tread. 

Now in his 80’s, Father Joe entered a seminary when he was a high school freshman and was sent to Thailand in 1967 by his order soon after he was ordained at the age of 28. A young rebel who protested the Vietnam War, this Grateful Dead fan was given one of the “most remote and undesirable assignments,” as his friend Jerry Hopkins says in the book’s introduction. He ended up in a hovel surrounded by a community of hovels, in the part of Bangkok where livestock are slaughtered by residents who are not prohibited from this work by Buddhism. Many of them are Catholic, so Father Joe wasn’t there to proselytize and win converts. His job was to take care of people whose religious beliefs mirrored his own.

In 1971, he guided Mother Theresa through his parish of Klong Toey. She told him “to stay in the slums, where the need was great.” He’s still there.

Every month or so, Father Joe wrote stories about his community for the Bangkok Post, which were collected and published in this book. They are heart-wrenching without being maudlin. Father Joe lives among people who have no time for sentimentality and little time for grief. He tells about them with a straight-to-the-chin approach, laced with a degree of humor and a lot of love, presenting them as heroes, even when they fail.

First he shows the children: nine-year-old Note who was born with AIDS and whose best friend is Galong, a thirty-five-year-old man who was born with Downs Syndrome and is mentally younger than the boy who takes good care of  him; Miss Naree, who at the age of eight, and with very little money in her hand,  took her friends on an unsanctioned outing from Father Joe’s Mercy Center for a visit to the zoo on the other side of the city; twelve-year-old Pim who was arrested as a drug courier, whose life was threatened by the man she testified against, and who was released into the care of Father Joe’s staff of nuns and volunteers.

The Mercy Center is a refuge, a place to live for mothers and children with AIDS, where adults with AIDS who can no longer take care of themselves are cared for, where 250 children who have no other place to live are given a safe home. It houses a preschool with over 500 students, a “successful slum women’scredit union”, a jobs program for disabled Khlong Toey residents, an AIDS hospice--and a house for Father Joe. A stipulation that came with a huge donation said the funds would be given only if he moved out of his tin-roofed shack in the middle of the slum, for health reasons. 

Father Joe ends with a stark view of his Slaughterhouse community. Khlong Toey is a village where nobody owns the land they live on, where a fire in one house can destroy thirty others in a few minutes, where truck drivers deliver livestock and buy drugs, where selling amphetamines for high-level dealers is the easiest way to keep a family afloat. He singles out heroes who have defied the odds: Miss Froggy who grew up in the Slaughtehouse and stayed on as a teacher and community activist, Miss Kanok-tip who heads a group of other disabled women in the Five Kiosk Workforce, selling snacks and soft drinks from streetside stalls, running their own businesses; Samlee whose uncle kept her in school up through high school graduation even though the family lived under a bridge and who now teaches kindergarten, making sure her own children have an education. He never mentions his own efforts.

It’s left to his friend Jerry Hopkins to tell us who Father Joe really is—a man who enjoys a cold Heinekken, who hasn’t “cut the four-letter words from his conversational vocabulary,” who lived in a squatter’s shack for twenty years as he “focused on redemption, the act of being set free, or saved” in this life, this world, not the next. Still a maverick, he told CNN “Buddhists and Muslims taught me how to be a Christian.” When guiding visitors through the Slaughterhouse, he laughs as he says of himself and of “those for whom his dreams were built,” “We’re mad. Barking mad.” But his is divine madness, in the truest sense.~Janet Brown

* * * * *

All proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Human Development Foundation, a non-denominational, community-based organization that gives aid to over thirty slum communities in Bangkok.

www.MercyCentre.org

BPO-Sutra : True Stories from India's BPO & Call Centres edited by Sudhindra Mokhasi (Rupa & Co.)

BPO-Sutra is a book best described by its sub-title, “True stories from India’s BPO & Call Centres”. The book is a compilation of stories told by ordinary people who work in the BPO and call center industry. Editor Sudhindra Mokhasi highly recommends reading the glossary first to acquaint the reader with all the jargon associated with BPOs. What’s a BPO? BPO stands for Business Process Outsourcing. It is a method of subcontracting various business-related operations such as tech support and payroll to third-party vendors. 

Aside from BPO, in order to truly appreciate the stories, the reader should familiarize themselves with the meanings of the acronyms ISP, AHT, COPC certified, SME, NCNS as well as some other terms used in the industry such as cold calling, call escalation, call monitoring, captive center, offshoring, etc. 

The meanings of the acronyms are as follows: ISP (Internet Service Provider), AHT (Average Handling Time), COPC certified (Customer Operations Performance Center) which is an organization the evaluates and certifies BPO companies that meet and maintain certain standards), SME (Subject Matter Expert), NCNS (No Call No Show) - a term used for employees who don’t call or show up for work. 

Cold calling refers to the practice of making random calls to people to promote a product or service. Perhaps one of the most hated aspects of the business as cold calling refers to telemarketers. 

Call escalation is when the call exceeds the amount of time allotted to the agent to deal with the customer to resolve issues. If the call goes beyond the allotted time, the call is then transferred to a supervisor or manager. 

Call monitoring is a practice where calls made or received by agents are monitored by quality analysts and managers to assess the quality of their call agents. 

A captive center is not a prison, it is a company-owned offshore operation where the work is also done offshore by the people hired by the company. The practice of offshoring is when one country has their work done in another country where labor costs are usually cheaper, saving the parent company hundreds, thousands or millions of dollars. 

In the early years of the 2000s, many U.S. companies were offshoring to India. Major corporations such as General Electric and British Airways proved that offshoring office work to India was a viable option. “More importantly, the world had suddenly discovered that there were millions of English speaking smart Indians. It couldn’t have been a better time.”

The stories are separated into six self-explanatory categories related to BPO life - Calls, Work, Travel, Home, Scams, and Parties and Weekends. The book invites the reader to “join us as we party One Night in Every Call Center.”

It’s almost a given that most Americans hate telemarketers and do not like dealing with call centers, however, this book gives the reader an insight to how the call centers work and by whom they are run. It is a highly informative introduction to the common practice of Business Process Outsourcing. 

One of earliest BPOs to be established were the call centers and this book gives the reader an indepth look as to what goes on inside such a place. The editor reiterates how call centers are numbers obsessed. “Everything in operations is converted to a metric, metric and monitored. Take Average Holding Time (AHT) for example. AHT is used as a measure for effectiveness of an agent. Tough luck if you get a dim customer.”

The stories range from the hilarious to the absurd. There are some pieces that are moving and some pieces that will just make you shake your head. You will laugh, you will cry and you definitely will not be bored. Remember, the next time you receive a call from a telemarketer saying his name is Sean, chances are he’s an Indian speaking with an American accent to try to sell you products or services for a multi-national corporation. ~Ernie Hoyt

City Gate, Open Up by Bei Dao, translated by Jeffrey Yang (New Directions Books)

Few books have surprised me as much as Bei Dao’s memoir of growing up in Beijing in the 1950’ s and 60’s. I picked it up certain that I was going to be faced with another “misery memoir,” tales of cruelty and deprivation during China’s Great Step Forward and Cultural Revolution. Instead this book recreates Beijing as it once was, an account steeped in the world of the senses and told through the point of a view of a child. 

When he returns after a thirteen-year absence in 2001, as his plane prepares to land in the city that had been his home, he’s dazzled by the light that sprawls below him, “like a huge, glittering soccer stadium.” In the houses of his childhood, there was no lighting stronger than 14 watts and some bicyclists when traveling at night lit their way by carrying paper lanterns. The darkness was a time for playing hide-and-seek, telling stories, acknowledging the presence of ghosts. The new glare of fluorescent light immediately makes him “a foreigner in my own hometown.” 

His hometown from the past is rebuilt with the precision and beauty of a poet, which is what Zhao Zhenkai has become famous for, writing volumes of poetry under the pen name Bei Dao. History is a dim background to the sense memories that Zhao uses to reconstruct his neighborhood in Beijing, a place filled with the smell of coal smoke and dust. The seasons are marked by other odors: winter is characterized by the smell of white cabbage, which every family buys in amounts of almost four hundred pounds, peeled, sun-dried, and stacked as a bulwark against months of cold and hunger.  Spring is announced by the blossoms of apricot, pear, and peach trees, their fragrance “so intense it made people dizzy, lulling them to sleep.” Summer has the faint perfume of the yellow flowers of pagoda trees followed by autumn’s smell of chalk dust and fallen leaves with their “bitter aroma of strong tea.”

His neighborhood rings with village noises: the crowing of a neighbor’s rooster,  the cries of  street vendors, the sounds of wagon wheels and horses’ hooves on the pavement, the “ruckus” of cicadas, those “pure noisemakers.” One night another boy takes Zhao to a a dark street where he hears the “disordered cilp-clop”  of a herd of donkeys that will soon be food for the carnivores in the zoo.

Food is a recurring theme that takes on greater strength with each chapter. Childhood treats of frozen icepops and White Rabbit candy with its edible rice-paper wrappers, along with the horror of cod liver oil that’s doled out every morning, give way to a savage hunger. Discarded vegetable trimmings that Zhou gathers to feed his pet rabbits are confiscated by his mother and turned into the family’s supper. Later, before the rabbits die of starvation, his father kills them to provide a feast that Zhao and his siblings tearfully refuse to eat. Boys dive for freshwater clams in a city lake to augment the cabbage and yam diet that has made the neighborhood swell with dropsy.

Childhood games of shooting marbles, rolling hoops, and spinning tops become subsumed in the excitement of lighting firecrackers that turn into battles  with gangs of boys besieging each other, “as if we were preparing for a war.” “The day the Great Cultural Revolution Broke out, I remembered the pungent smell of my first firecracker.”

And when life changes forever on June 1, 1966, “countless boys and girls served as the source of that energy.” At first the Cultural Revolution feels like a game that frees students from facing examinations. “All classes were dismissed, the term over; I cheered with relief, flitting about like a joyful sparrow,” Even when he and his family take his parents’ cache of banned books from the attic and burn what Zhao had regarded as his treasure, he feels “a stealthy thread of delight.” 

“I became king of the children,” and Zhao leads his neighborhood gang to the home of a man rumored to have once fought with the Kuomintang. Gleefully they  shave his head and imprison him in a basement for days. “After that, bumping into him on the street was like meeting a ghost.”

What had been a childhood that echoed Dylan Thomas’s memories of Christmas in Wales is warped into Golding’s Lord of the Flies. “His bold vision,” Zhao says, had been a ruthless reality for us.” “The stench of blood spread across Beijing” and violence shattered the city that had been a childhood idyll. 

But in 2010, I experienced three seasons in the same area that Zhao grew up in. In the evening, little stone houses on narrow streets gleamed with dim squares of light, trees furled in emerald canopies along the lake where he used to play, old men in an outdoor market sold bamboo cages that held crickets, on weekends women held bouquets of balloons for sale. And everywhere there was food in glorious abundance: piles of fresh pineapple, stalls where women made pancakes to order, bakeries filled with cakes and cookies, and the omnipresent smell of grilled lamb skewers. Everywhere I went I saw children, eating.

What was lost? What’s been gained? Who can measure this? But thanks to Bei Dao/Zhao Zhenkai, we can remember a world we’ll never know..~Janet Brown 

Soldiers in Hiding by Richard Wiley (Picador)

Soldiers in Hiding is narrated by Teddy Maki, a Japanese-American, who currently lives in Japan. Maki is the host of his own television program titled Original Amateur Hour. When Teddy sees a news item about a lost Japanese soldier coming back to Japan, he begins to relate how he and his friend Jimmy Yamamoto ended up in Japan in the first place.. 

Teddy Maki and his close friend Jimmy Yamamoto started a band after high school and they were quite successful. Jimmy managed to get an agent to book shows in Japan. Their Japanese agent called himself Ike and Jimmy and Teddy were his only clients but Ike managed to get the two many gigs and the two arrived in Japan in the winter of 1941. Ike also encouraged Jimmy to pursue his sister Kazuko in a romantic way. 

Jimmy and Kazuko got married at the end of November after a very short courtship. A week after the wedding Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Although Teddy could speak Japanese, he was not proficient at reading. He could read a little and made out the words for America, recognized the face of Admiral Yamamoto and saw the kanji character for war.

Teddy and Jimmy are stuck in Japan. They have no way of going home and no one can guarantee their safety in Japan. It was Kazuko’s words that made the two realize the seriousness of the situation. She says, “That’s what you’ll have to do. Enlist. You are Japanese before you are American. Enlist and fight!” What can the two Americans do but enlist in the Japanese Imperial Army and fight against their own country.

As Teddy and Jimmy can speak English fluently, they are attached to detail to guard and question American POWs. Their commanding officer is Major Nakamura. There was one P.O.W. who didn’t cringe under Nakamura’s gaze. This infuriated the Major who ordered his men to tie the P.O.W. to a post in the middle of the camp. When Major Nakamura discovers that Jimmy had been giving the soldier chocolate, he orders Jimmy to shoot the man in front of all of the other prisoners. 

Jimmy got as far as pointing his rifle to the man’s head but then put his gun down and said in English, “No.” This is the last straw for Major Nakamura who takes out his pistol and shoots Jimmy Yamamoto point blank in the head, killing him instantly. The Major then orders Teddy to kill the man, he says “Save yourself. Shoot him.” Looking down at Jimmy’s dead body, Teddy feels he has no choice but to follow the Major’s orders. 

The war ends and years pass. One day, there’s a breaking news story on television. A former Japanese soldier, Ike, was found and is coming home to Japan. Welcoming Ike back to Japan is another soldier from Teddy’s past - Major Nakamura! This sets a fire in Teddy’s mind as he wants to ask the Major directly, why did he kill Jimmy Yamamoto, and he wants to interview the Major on his popular television program. 

Was Major Nakamura justified in executing Jimmy Yamamoto? Would Teddy Maki have suffered the same fate as Jimmy if he did not shoot the POW? And does Major Nakamura feel any remorse about what he did during the war? This is an intense story about ethics and where one’s loyalty lies. It is also about survival during times of war and its immediate aftermath once it ends. 

As the old adage goes, “In war, no one wins!” ~Ernie Hoyt

The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad (Virago)

Asne Seierstad is a Norwegian journalist. In the fall of 2003, she spent three months in Afghanistan reporting for many Scandinavian newspapers. She first met Sultan Khan in November of that year. Sultan Khan (not his real name) is the owner of a bookstore in the Afghan capital of Kabul. He is The Bookseller of Kabul.

Seierstad had spent six weeks with the Northern Alliance “in the desert by the Tajikistani border, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, in the Panshir Valley, and on the steppes north of Kabul”. She was following their offensive against the Taliban. She “slept on stone floor, in mud huts, and at the front, travelled on the back of lorries, in military vehicles, on horseback and on foot.” After the fall of the Taliban, she went to Kabul with the Northern Alliance where she discovered a small bookstore. 

Seierstad became a regular visitor to the bookshop and enjoyed browsing for books and talking to the proprietor, an Afghan man who says he felt let down by his country time and again. She listened to him talk about running his bookshop before, during and after the reign of the Taliban. “First the Communists burnt my books, then the Mujahadeen looted and pillaged, finally the Taliban burnt them all over again.”

Talking with Sultan Khan gives Seierstad the idea of how interesting it would be to write about his family. She makes the proposal and at the beginning of February, she spends four months living with the family. As a woman, she was able to get close to the female members of the family and as a Westerner she was able to move freely amongst the men and women of the family. 

Seierstad says, “If I were to live in a typical Afghan family it would have been with a family in the countryside, a large family where no one could read or write, and every day was a battle for survival.”  

Seierstad reminds the reader that she didn’t pick this family to represent the average Afghani household. It is about one Afghan family, one that would be considered middle-class by Western standards as many of the children were educated, most could read and write and they always had enough money so didn’t face the fear of starving. She chose them because they inspired her. 

After the publication of the book, Suraia Rais, the second wife of Shah Muhammad Rais,the real-life Sultan Khan, sued Seierstad for defamation of character. At first, the courts rule in favor of Rais but Seierstad appealed the ruling and after an eight year legal battle, the Norwegian Supreme Court overturned the lower court's ruling citing “the family was well aware of the nature of the book project” adding that Seierstad was found “not to have acted negligently, and the content of the book was essentially deemed true.” 

It appears the family were unhappy with the way they were portrayed. Sultan Khan was portrayed as a dictatorial patriarch whose word is law and his second wife probably didn’t enjoy being described as spoiled and entitled. As a journalist, Seierstad manages to be objective about her subjects, she says “the manner in which they were portrayed was not “ideal” but she represented the family in a “respectful” way. 

She praises Rais for selling his books when it was dangerous to do so and believes he is an Afghan hero but says he is also an Afghan patriarch and one of the things that continued to irritate her was “the manner in which men treated women. The belief in man’s superiority was so ingrained that it was seldom questioned.” 

I also believe that Sultan Khan, Shah Muhammad Rais is a hero. As someone who promotes reading and education, he and his customers will be the future of Afghanistan. I only hope that peace and stability will one day come to their country. ~Ernie Hoyt

Stilwell and the American Experience in China: 1911-1945 by Barbara W. Tuchman (Random House)

Joseph Stilwell loved China. From his first visit in 1911, when he spent seventeen days traveling through a country that was racked with revolution, he soaked up everything he could with complete gusto. 

By the time the Qing Dynasty was replaced by Sun Yat-sen’s Republic, China was a country that still lived in the Middle Ages. While western countries applauded a new age of freedom and democracy under the new republic, the fledgling government was faced with a population of 400,000,000 that was 70-80 per cent illiterate, in a country that was largely without sanitation, running water, electricity, or a transportation system that wasn’t “conducted by human muscle.” When Stilwell returned to China after World War I, little had changed but the reigning players. Sun Yat-sen was dead and three warlords battled for supremacy against the Nationalist forces of the Republic, the Kuomintang, led by Sun’s protege, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. By 1928, Chiang’s forces had prevailed, the General was in control of the government, while Japanese influence was making itself known in Manchuria. 

The stage was being set for a military, political, and psychological disaster that would take place over many blood-soaked years and would drag China into the 20th century. The three main players were the Generalissimo, President Franklin Roosevelt, and the stubborn Yankee soldier. Joe Stilwell.

When the Japanese invaded China, the Domino Theory was born. If China fell, so would all of Asia. Southeast Asia was already being devoured by Japan and within China, two battles were raging, one against the Japanese and one against Communist rebels who had broken with the Kuomintang. Although Roosevelt was reluctant to send troops to Asia, Pearl Harbor drew him into war, with the defense of China becoming a paramount issue. Stilwell, who had made a name for himself both as an unconventional military tactician and a knowledgeable Old China Hand, was designated as commander of Chiang Kai-shek’s troops. Unfortunately nobody had clarified that point with the Generalissimo.

Roosevelt’s family fortune was based on the China Trade;  his mother’s family kept a home in Hong Kong and Roosevelt’s Hyde Park home was sprinkled with looted Chinese treasures. “Because his ancestors had traded with the Chinese he had always had the deepest sympathy with the Chinese people,” he claimed. His point of view was colonial and his naivete was crippling, leading to the Lend-Lease Act that guaranteed an unrestricted flow of war materiel into China, $700 million dollars worth to start. For years China received all that it asked for under the U.S. aim of creating “Chinese military self-sufficiency”.

However, “the American purpose was not the Chinese purpose.” Chiang had no intention of launching offensives against the Japanese Army; his goal for China was to “strengthen itself with American arms and money.” To Chiang, the primary danger wasn’t the Japanese but the Communists. His strategy was to let the Allies do the fighting. He was saving the Lend-Lease money and weapons and his soldiers for the battle that would come later, against the forces of Mao Tse-tung.

Meanwhile Roosevelt’s romantic view and idealistic trust in Chiang Kai-shek’s China became American propaganda, merrily spread through the U.S press and adopted by the American people. For three years, hundreds of millions of dollars in money and weaponry were sent to China, and were taken by Chiang, not as a loan, but as a form of reparations for past Western crimes against his country. It slowly became clear that “ even the United States was not rich enough to fight in China.”

Pitted against Roosevelt’s absurd ignorance and the bottomless greed of Chiang Kai-shek was Stilwell. Nominally in charge of Lend-Lease largesse and ostensibly the military commander of all the troops in China, this straight-talking Yankee was miserably out of his depth. He had no diplomatic skills and had mortally insulted Chiang Kai-shek at the start of their ill-fated relationship by scoffing at Chiang’s order to provide one watermelon for every four men in Burma at the height of their losing battle against the Japanese. (This, according to Madame Chiang years later, was “bitterly and openly contemptuous” and poisoned any possible meeting of the minds between Stilwell and the Generalissimo.)

Stilwell lacked the polished skill of Lord Mountbatten who had delighted the Chiangs with flattery and a Cartier vanity case monogrammed in diamonds for the demanding Madame Chiang. He managed to offend Mountbatten as well,  by disdaining his lordship’s offer to divert Stilwell’s troops with the talents of Noel Coward. (Coward came and was an absolute flop with the GIs, leading Stilwell to announce “If any more piano players start this way, you know what to do with the piano.”)

Stilwell also labored under the New England creed that a man’s word was his bond and Chiang played upon that viciously, msking promises and then altering them to the point of nonexistence. In spite of the morass of corruption, greed, and lies that he waded through, “Vinegar Joe” continued to be convinced that the Chinese soldiers were capable of greatness, if only he were allowed to lead them. He proved that with the seizure of Mytkina in Burma, while leading Chinese troops in addition to those from the  British and American armies. 

It’s a tragedy that Stilwell’s passion for China led to the waste of his military talents during World War II. A year after witnessing the surrender of Japan, he died of abdominal cancer. On the day before his death, General Stilwell was given the only honor he had always wanted, the Combat Infantryman Badge, “reserved for the enlisted foot soldier who proved himself under fire.” 

A final honor that Stilwell would have relished came several days after he died. His widow was told she had a visitor at her California home, a man who identified himself only as “the Christian.”. She came downstairs to find “the huge figure and the cannonball head of Feng Yu-hsiang”, a Chinese warlord  who had fought with Stilwell.  Using her husband’s Chinese name, Feng said to her, “I have come to mourn with you for Shih Te-wei, my friend.”.~Janet Brown

Bangkok 8 by John Burdett (Vintage)

John Burdett’s crime thriller, Bangkok 8, takes all the cliches you can think of about Thailand and Bangkok in particular, and creates one of the most hilarious mysteries that blends traditional Thai culture with the fast paced life of the 21st century. There are corrupt cops, Buddhist practitioners, bar girls and kathoeys, which are best described as transgenders. There are also  Khmer thugs, drug dealers, the gem trade and snakes, lots of them.

This is the first book in a series featuring former yaa-baa, the Thai word for methamphetamine, user-turned detective, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, the son of a Thai bar girl and an American Vietnam War vet he has never met. His mother refuses to give him any information about his father. Sonchai’s partner in crime is Pichai. After killing their yaa-baa dealer, their mothers were able to get them an interview with an abbot of a forest monastery in the far north of Thailand. After six months, the abbot told them they were going to mend their karma by becoming honest cops. 

The abbot’s youngest brother is a cop named Vikorn who is the chief of District 8 in Krung Thep, more commonly known as Bangkok. Corruption wasn’t allowed to Sonchai and Pichai and If the two friends want “to escape the murderer’s hell, they would not only have to be honest cops but they would have to be arhat cops.” Simply put, an arhat is someone who has attained the goal of enlightenment. 

Sonchai and his partner have been assigned to follow an American marine driving a black Mercedes-Benz. The two lose the car for a moment but when they rediscover it, the marine is alone and doesn’t seem to be moving. Sonchai’s partner checks the car only to discover a large python is wrapped around the marine and is busily trying to swallow his head. There are also many cobras in the car and one of them has bitten Pichai in the eye causing his death. 

Sonchai is now determined to find who is responsible for his partner’s death and makes the claim that he will kill whoever was behind it. As the victim was a citizen of the United States and a Marine, Sonchai is told he would be working with an American FBI agent who turns out to be a beautiful woman named Kimberly Jones and who seems to be taken in my Sonchai’s charm. 

The further the two investigate, they discover the marine’s name is Bradley and finds that he is involved in the trading and selling of jade, more precisely, forged artworks of jade. It also seems that Bradley was involved in the illicit drug trade as well. If it wasn’t for the death of Sonchai’s partner, it would have been an open and shut case of a drug deal gone bad but the deeper Sonchai and Jones dig, the more the plot thickens as it leads to a man who is friends with Presidents and Senators and he is someone who has a dirty habit that’s not fit for print. 

The uninitiated reader may find offense at Burdett’s description of the Royal Thai Police Force which in his novel is ninety-nine percent corrupt with only Sonchai and his former partner being the only two true honest cops. Burdett says in his foreword, “I hope that any Thai cop who comes across these frivolous pages will see humor rather than slight. This is an entertainment within a very Western genre and nothing more. No offense is intended.” 

I’m not a Thai cop but even I can see that his story is full of humor and is not to be taken seriously and you can’t help but want to read about Sonchai’s next adventure. ~Ernie Hoyt

The China Option: A Guide for Millennials by Sophia Erickson (Travelers’ Tales)

After a two-month stay in Shenzhen where I wallowed in ignorance, I stopped reading travel guides to China. They’re useless for the sort of traveler that I am, the kind that stays in one place for as long as possible and tries to learn as much as they can during their extended visit. If it weren’t for the covid lockdown and a dearth of things to read, I probably never would have picked up Sophia Erickson’s guide on “How to Work, Play, & Find Success in China”. And that would have been a crying shame, as is the fact that her book wasn’t published until 2018, a year after my Shenzhen interlude. 

Although the target audience for Erickson’s book is easily fifty years younger than I, intended for recent college graduates who might want to take a job in China, I began to take notes by the time I reached the 55th page. At least two-thirds of the information she provides is valuable for travelers as well as for potential expatriates. If you aren’t planning to stay in high-end hotels that are branded with names like Hyatt or Hilton, if you aren’t planning to hire a guide, a car, and a driver, you really need this book.

Ordinary guidebooks will advise readers to get a VPN for their time in China. Erickson gives a list of the ones she considers most useful, as well as what they will cost, with the added caveat that this list is one that constantly changes. It does however provide a launching pad for an informed search.

Easily as crucial as a VPN is Baidu Maps. Although it’s only available in Chinese, if an address is entered in its search field, arrows appear to show the direction in which the place lies. Since Google Maps is useless in China, this app is essential. So is Pieco, an app that offers a free dictionary and translation service. And WeChat is a lifesaver, “ a sort of hybrid of WhatsApp and Facebook” that’s a social necessity in China.

Erickson tells how and where to buy a Chinese sim card, how to open a Chinese bank account, and why life will be much easier if you have one. She explains why a Western credit card will often be useless, and gives careful instructions on how to set up AliPay and WeChat Wallet, which are needed in the multitude of places that only accept payment via QR codes. She even tells how to buy Bitcoin and why you might want to.

Some features of daily living in China are ones that travelers also need to know: the dangers of drinking fake alcohol (yes, you can go blind--or die), which hospitals are preferable in case of an accident, and the eight cities that “regularly meet” WHO’s air pollution standards. (Sorry, neither Beijing nor Shanghai make the cut.) 

Although this isn’t a travel guide, even expats leave town once in a while.  Erickson gives detailed information on train travel, from which kind of train to choose to how to buy a ticket, how to travel by bus, and the plusses and minuses of group travel. She tells how to get a three-month Provisional Driver’s License (no test necessary other than one for eyesight), and the essential permits for travel in Tibet--not to worry--the mandatory travel guide will take care of this, as well as finding the required private car and driver. She also gives a list of “reputable travel agencies” who will organize your Tibet trip.

Now all that’s needed is the ability to travel in China again. Here’s where being a millennial has its advantages. They’ll probably live to see that day. For us septuagenarians, all we can do is cross our fingers and try to remain optimistic that we’ll be able to take advantage of Erickson’s advice. Speed that day.~Janet Brown

Before the Deluge : The Vanishing World of the Yangtze's Three Gorges by Deirdre Chetham (Palgrave Macmillan)

After graduating from Harvard, Deirdre Chetham went on to study anthropology at Columbia University. She became interested in the Three Gorges “when China was taking its first steps toward economic and political opening”. As she was trying to decide on her thesis topic and where in China to do her field work, she made a chance meeting with an employee of Lindblad Travel, a luxury tour company whose ships often traveled along the Yangtze River.  The company hired Chetham who believed she was qualified to lecture on Chinese archeology. 

Since then, Chetham has spent more than twenty years traveling up and down the Yangtze River. She has “attempted to provide a glimpse of the history and the current situation of a remote area, as the people who live here stand on the brink of immense personal and social disruption”.

Before the Deluge was first published in 2002. The subtitle of her book is The Vanishing World of the Yangtze’s Three Gorges. It is the story of the planning and building of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. Chetham follows the project throughout history. A project that was first suggested by Dr. Sun Yat-Sen in 1919. He said the goal was to industrialize the nation and improve navigation. 

Chetham continues discussing the history of the dam from the beginning of its construction under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, followed by the Japanese occupation who surveyed the Three Gorges and came up with the Otani plan, a dam project that would continue after Japan’s anticipated victory. Chetham also hits upon the vicarious truce between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist government and the communist government as they banded together to oust the occupying Japanese. The nationalist government then invited the U.S. to help them on the project. 

Unfortunately, the Chinese Civil War started and construction of the dam was halted for another number of years. The plans for the Three Gorges Dam dam once again became national news during the eighties under Deng Xiaoping’s government. This time, progress seemed to be more or a reality than just a project on paper. 

Chetham had interviewed a number of people who would be affected by the construction of the dam but most of the locals seemed to view the project as yet another ambitious ploy by the Chinese government to show the world that China wasn’t an undeveloped country. They informed Chetham they survived the suffering caused by the Cultural Revolution, so a mass displacement would just be another hardship they would be forced to endure.

The dam was completed in 2006, four years after the publication of this book, and became fully functional in the summer of 2012. As of 2012, it has been the world’s largest power station in relation to installed capacity which is the amount of energy that a power station, or in this case, a dam, can produce. 

Before the Deluge is a fascinating history of one of man’s greatest projects ever undertaken. The environmental impact and the loss of archeological and cultural artifacts is still being debated today. The dam continues to raise the question for every developing country - should development in the name of progress take priority over the loss of culture and the displacement of a large number of its citizens? Do the benefits outweigh the negative impact on the people and the area? And most importantly, are the benefits of such a project sustainable? Only the future will be able to tell us. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Delightful Life of an Expat Crime Writer: Fifteen Journeys with Colin Cotterill and Dr. Siri (Soho Press)

Who would imagine that Hercule Poirot could ever be displaced by an unqualified coroner in his seventies who lives in Laos during the 1970s-80s? Or even more surprising, who would imagine that a middle-aged cartoonist with a background in physical education who lives in the depths of Thailand would become one of the English-speaking world’s leading crime writers? 

In 2004, Soho Press published a quiet little mystery called The Coroner’s Lunch that introduced Dr. Siri Paiboon, a medical doctor who becomes national coroner for the country of Laos simply because he is one of the few surviving physicians. Dr. Siri accepts the offer that he really couldn’t refuse and makes the acquaintance of his forensic team, a young nurse with a flair for foreign languages and an assistant with Downs Syndrome. Fortunately both Nurse Dtui and Mr. Geung have absorbed the finer points of Dr. Siri’s new profession. Siri’s contribution to the coroner’s office is a highly developed sense of skepticism and a distaste for bureaucratic obfuscation, which proves useful in the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos. He also learns that he has an invisible posse dogging his heels—a collection of spirits from the Great Beyond—who both help and hinder what becomes his real vocation. Siri is unable to view a cadaver without discovering its true cause of death and this leads him to amateur detective work, for which he has a natural flair. Joined by Chief Inspector Phosy and a friend of his youth, the irascible Civilai, Dr. Siri makes his way through fifteen books, solving crimes in a leisurely and amiable fashion.

The books that chronicle his crime career are permeated with the placid, unhurried pace of Laos time and many delightfully sarcastic jokes, along with those pesky spirits getting in the way. Over time, the characters grow older and happier. Siri falls in love with Daeng, a gorgeous septuagenarian noodle seller who learned the fine art of killing during the American War, and Dtui and Phosy become a couple. Even Mr. Geung finds love. 

Through the years, the books deepen with historical research, which has all but taken over the latest volume, The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot. When Dr. Siri is sent a package that contains a diary, with the first half written in Japanese and the second in Lao, this provides a serial drama, chapter by chapter, as Siri reads it aloud to Daeng every evening. Gradually an invisible character tries to dominate the book and Siri and Daeng go off to find why the journal ends so abruptly and who the writer truly was.

Suddenly the book becomes suffused with a kamikaze pilot, the Nanjing massacre, the Japanese occupation of Laos, and a fascinating but deeply disgusting pantheon of Japanese ghosts. Siri and Daeng have to work overtime to keep control of the plot but with fourteen earlier adventures under their belts, they’re more than equal to the task.

A man who has given the world fifteen volumes of Dr. Siri in sixteen years, Colin Cotterill is a master of the shaggy dog story, where the punch line is almost incidental to the plentiful and fascinating details. His characters have made these books irresistible, to the point that when the killer is discovered, it’s difficult to care. What draws his readers back are the members of this eccentric, delightful community—oh, and the titles help too. I Shot the Buddha. Curse of the Pogo Stick. Don’t Eat Me. (Cotterill was incensed when Soho said he couldn’t use The Devil’s Vagina for one of Siri’s mysteries. Whatever replaced it was much less memorable than the original, which was a direct translation of the name of a plant that grows in Laos.)

The real mystery at the heart of his latest book comes in a note of thanks at its very beginning. “This last book in the Dr. Siri series,” Cotterill says and ends his thanks with Sayonara. However since Dr. Siri is still alive at the book’s end, let’s hope the man meant “latest,” not “last” and that Sayonara is simply a form of homage to the Suicide Pilot. After all, Siri has the spirit world on his side and his creator has only “a number of deranged dogs,” a truth to which I can testify. I’m putting my money on the eventual reappearance of Dr. Siri.~Janet Brown

Seventeen by Hideo Yokoyama (Riverrun)

First published in Japanese as Climber’s High by Bungei Shunju Ltd in 2003. It was also adapted into a film of the same name in 2008. Seventeen is Hideo Yokoyama’s second novel to be published in English, his first being the crime/mystery novel Six Four. The story is set in two time frames - 1985 and 2002 and blends fiction with an actual event. Yokoyama uses his background as an investigative journalist and creates a story of a small-town journalist covering one of Japan’s worst airline disasters.

On August 12, 1985, Japan Airlines Flight 123 from Haneda Airport to Osaka crashed in a mountainous area of Gunma Prefecture killing the entire fifteen-member crew and 504 of the 509 passengers. It is considered one of the deadliest single-aircraft accidents in aviation history. In his foreword, Yokoyama relates what he witnessed at the crash site. 

“I arrived at the crash site after trekking for more than eight hours up a mountain with no routes or climbing trails. The terrain was steep, unimaginably narrow, and it was the rare lucky reporter who didn’t inadvertently step on a corpse. After sundown, I spent a night on the mountain, surrounded by body parts that no longer resembled anything human”.

Kazumasa Yuuki is a veteran reporter for the North Kanto Times, a local newspaper based in Gunma Prefecture. For years he worked the police beat. Although he is married and has two children, he is away from home most of the time and is estranged from his thirteen-year old son Jun. The story opens with Kazu getting off a train at the base of Mount Tanigawa, also known as the Devil’s Mountain. He was supposed to climb the Tsuitate Face with his friend Kyoichiro Anzai seventeen years ago and still wonders about the last words he heard his friend say, “I climb up to step down.”

Seventeen years ago, on the day Yuuki was getting ready to climb the mountain, a wire from the news service came in stating that, “It appears that Japan Air Lines Flight 123 has crashed on the Nagano-Gunma prefectural border.”  The newspaper office goes into turmoil and Yuuki is assigned as the JAL Crash Desk Chief. This tragedy brings the newsroom together and there are high hopes for the paper to get a real scoop before all the national publications. 

What follows is an adrenaline-filled chaos as Yuuki tries to organize and delegate assignments for the story and to coordinate with the other departments to get the story ready for print as soon as it is possible. We get a first-hand glimpse of the politics involved with various departments as well as the different factions supporting politicians on opposing parties. 

The story is more about how the news is handled and presented than it is about the crash itself. It isn’t only about the characters, but the ethics of what’s appropriate or not. Are the deaths of people in a major disaster more important to the media than the death of an individual that has little to no value to a newspaper? 

“There are big lives and little lives, aren’t there? Heavy lives and lightweight lives, and lives that are...not.” 

It’s definitely something to think about. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City by Juan Du (Harvard University Press)

To any traveler who goes beyond the Central Business District of Shenzhen and explores it through its vast spiderweb of subway lines, this city seems inexplicable. Once the central core with its dazzling towers is left behind, what’s left is a sprawl of disparate clumps of urbanity, like a gigantic follow-the-dots puzzle where the dots are connected only by a 177-mile subway line. Each clump feels unrelated to its counterparts, existing like its own little outpost, in a weird metropolis that spreads over 792 square miles. Conventional wisdom says Shenzhen sprang from a single fishing village with a population of 30,000. How and why did it spread, over the space of forty years, from this tiny nucleus into a bizarre and randomly-placed mushroom-crop of skyscrapers flung across an area that’s almost double the size of Los Angeles, with a GDP that in 2017 outstripped Hong Kong and Singapore?

The answer lies in debunking a creation myth that has been gleefully spread by everyone from the New York Times to the World Bank. Something from nothing is the classic Cinderella story and applying it to Shenzhen makes the emergence of this city almost miraculous. The truth however makes it much more interesting.

Hong Kong architect and academic Juan Du became intrigued with Shenzhen after she missed her flight out of the city. Wandering away from the affluent grounds of her hotel, she stumbled upon a village that was decidedly not affluent. The ramshackle buildings were no more than seven stories tall and children, accompanied by barking dogs, played noisily near long lines of vendors who were cooking over open flames. People sat on folding chairs, eating outdoors at a night market that was at least a century behind anything else Juan Du had seen in Shenzhen. 

When she began to investigate, she discovered that Shenzhen had over 300 of these villages spread across the city, all of them surrounded by skyscrapers. Between them they contained over 350,000 peasant houses that now offered affordable rentals to the city’s recently arrived labor force. How did these places come into being? 

The uncovered truth shatters the Shenzhen myth. In 1979 Bao’an County became the site of the city of Shenzhen. An area of 2020 square kilometers, with a population of 358,000, it contained over 2000 agrarian villages. Each of these provided a separate nucleus for urban development, which grew up around the farming communities, and each became known as an urban village. 

Even the crown jewel of Shenzhen, the glittering and wealthy area of Shennan Boulevard, is based upon humble origins. It originally was Country Road 107, built to connect the port to the market town that gave the city its name. Stripped of the mythical origin of a little fishing village, the legacy of Bao’an County is rich in regional history, with a longstanding economy built upon salt and oyster farms, as well as agriculture. What now appear to be random dots of modern development are actually based upon the villages that still prevail. Shenzhen’s “spatial development” has been shaped by “centuries-old agrarian spatial patterns,” which explains the confusing incoherence of it all.

But perhaps not for much longer--Shenzhen’s goal is to become a “comprehensive city,” with urban planning that will turn those unconnected dots into a full picture. To accomplish this, the urban villages are being subsumed into the whole, with Huanggang Village providing the desired prototype.

A community that had been in place since 1426, Huanggang was demolished and rebuilt as an urbanized historic village, touted as a “model village,” clean, modern, and sanitized beyond all recognition. It stands in brutal contrast to the village that Juan Du first encountered.

Baishizhou was notorious for being the “poorest, dirtiest, and biggest” of Shenzhen’s urban villages. Once five separate farm villages, it held approximately 200,000 people who lived in 2477 peasant houses. It was famous for having the lowest rent in the city and new arrivals flocked to it, attracted by housing that was cramped and uncomfortable. However, unlike the factory housing provided by employers like FoxConn, which was only a few kilometers away, the rooms in Baishizhou were unmonitored; they offered personal freedom.

Small businesses sprang up to cater to the needs of the new residents but gentrification was lurking on the edges. Surrounded by theme parks and luxurious hotels, Baishizhou became a prime target for the owners of art galleries, gourmet coffee shops, and craft breweries. When residents refused to make room for these new refinements, the city simply cut off their water and electricity. Now Baishizhou exists as an online video game created in the U.S. 

Shenzhen learned to become forceful in its relocation efforts after dealing with a villager who had owned both house and land rights for over forty years. She was the sole hold-out as her neighbors struck deals with the city.  For three years, as other houses were demolished and the skyscrapers drew near, her home stood alone in the midst of rubble, a “nail house” that remained hammered into place. She sold it at last for 12 million yuan and disappeared with her fortune. It was much cheaper to simply turn off the utilities.

But as the lights darken in the villages, they’re replaced with the blaze of 21st Century splendor. The new dream is to blend Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong into a single world-dazzling metropolis. Impossible? Tell that to Shenzhen.~Janet Brown

Animal's People by Indra Sinha (Simon & Schuster)

“I used to be human once. So I’m told. I don’t remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being.”

Animal’s People is set against the backdrop of one of the world’s worst industrial accidents as a model that took place in Bhopal, India in 1984 and was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize. 

On the night of December 2 and 3, 1984 at the U.S. owned Union Carbide pesticide plant, over thirty tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC), a highly toxic gas used in the production of a pesticide called Sevin which is Union Carbide’s brand name for carbaryl, which spread over the town of Bhopal, immediately killing thousands of citizens and continues to haunt the populace today as the company was never forced to clean up their mess. 

The story is narrated by a nineteen year old Indian boy, only known as Animal, whose faithful companion is a dog named Jara and lives in the fictional city of Khaufpur. He was born a few days before that night “which no one in Khaufpur wants to remember, but nobody can forget.”

Animal is an orphan as the gas killed his parents. He was brought up in an orphanage run by a French nun known as Ma Franci. The nun used to be able to speak Hindi and English but after the incident, she has forgotten all languages except her own. 

Animal makes his living by doing all sorts of scams throughout the city. The factory gases have affected his body so he can only walk on all fours, as an Animal. He spots three college-aged girls and practices one of his routines by having Jara play dead while he goes on a spiel about suffering from starvation to which one of the girls does something he does not foresee. 

She asks, “Did you teach him?” Animal says that for five rupees he can get the dog to sing the national anthem. She counters with, “Is begging fun?” Animal replies, “Is it fun to be hungry? No, so then don’t mock me.” This is where he meets Nisha who changes his life. It is Nisha who teaches Animal how to read. He also learns to speak the language of Ma Francie. 

Animal becomes infatuated with Nisha but he feels a bit of jealousy when he’s introduced to Zafar, an activist who has been leading the fight against the Amrikan Kampani (American company) . At the same time, a young American woman named Dr. Elli appears in Khaufpur and announces that she is going to open a clinic and it will be free to anyone who wishes to come. 

After spending her own fortune and going through a lot of government red tape, the idealist Dr. Elli opens her clinic only to be puzzled why nobody shows up. Unfortunately, Zafar believes the clinic is another one of the Kampany’s plans to divert being held responsible for an incident that happened almost twenty years ago. Dr. Elli realizes that people want treatment but they all refuse to come to the clinic. She expresses her exasperation to Animal, “These people have nothing. Why do they turn down a genuine and good offer of help? I don’t get it.”

Animal says he understands because they’re his people - Animal’s people. The story explores government corruption and multinational corporations exploitation of labor and resources. It is a novel that sheds light on the injustices of the world and how it affects the life of the ordinary everyday citizens who have no money or power to fight back. In this day and age of for profit enterprises, it takes a book like this to point out that there are more important things than money. ~Ernie Hoyt

Things We Lost to the Water by Eric Nguyen (Knopf)

Huong comes from Vietnam to New Orleans with two small children. She’s haunted by war, armed with a handful of words in English, hates the word “refugee” and feels a surge of bitter humor when she’s placed in public housing that has been given the name “Versailles.” With an academic husband whose field is French literature, she recognizes the irony. 

In Vietnam, “theirs was a house of love...it was all they ever needed. And with love they would survive.” When Huong receives a postcard telling her to make a new life because her husband will never join them, love is what makes her keep this truth in a hidden box, a secret from her sons--and that love is what keeps this novel from being a dark and tragic story.

Even though her oldest son searches for a different sort of family in a gang of Vietnamese street toughs and her youngest finds affection and mentorship in the gay community, even when her secret comes to light and divides her family, even when one single slap in the face sends her youngest away from home to eventually live in Paris, Huong keeps love alive in a persistent flame, along with her ability to create a stable center in an uncertain world.

“Huong likes emergencies. She thrives on figuring out how to avoid danger, how to stay alive….she would save them all if it came down to it.” And when Katrina falls upon New Orleans, she’s ready. She knows the art of survival, which she anchors with her love.

In a literary world that has provided countless stories of dysfunctional families, Eric Nguyen has written a novel filled with light, hope, and beauty. He presents Huong and her children through their different perspectives, in chapters that skirt despair in favor of radiance. An old Chinese shopkeeper gives the oldest son a bowl of soup and saves him from an act that would have changed his life forever. A used car salesman courts Huong by taking her to an orchard of fruit that she never expected to see in this new country and wins her heart with bunches of sweet, freshly picked longan and a taste of her previous life. The youngest son discovers who he is in a deserted swimming pool, where he and the boy who kisses him are “both stars, the two of them...Floating. Free.”

It’s unusual to find tenderness in a novel nowadays but Nguyen provides it, untainted by saccharine sentimentality. Huong and her children learn where the nature of home resides; “this had become her city,” Huong realizes after spending years in New Orleans, “the place she lived but also a place that lived in her.” And on their different paths, both of her sons find what lives within them.

The radiant truth of those separate voyages toward that discovery is inspiring, humbling, and indelible. Nguyen, in his debut novel, has evoked a gentle yet realistic vision of family life as it could be and as it should be.~Janet Brown

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri {Riverhead Books)

Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station, originally published in Japanese in 2014 as JR 東京上野駅公園口 (JR Tokyo Ueno Eki Kouen Guchi) is set in modern Japan. It was published in English in 2020 by Morgan Giles and won the National Book Award for Translated Literature for that year as well. 

Kazu is dead, but it is through his eyes that we see the everyday comings and goings of people who live in or visit Ueno Park, one of Tokyo’s most popular public parks that houses many museums, shrines, and a zoological garden. As Kazu describes what he sees, he also talks about his own life and how he came to be homeless and living in the park. 

Kazu is philosophical from the beginning as he relates his story. “I used to think life was like a book: you turn the first page, and there’s the next, and as you go on turning page after page, eventually you reach the last one. But life is nothing like a story in a book. There may be words, and the pages may be numbered, but there is no plot. There may be an ending, but there is no end.”

Kazu was born in 1933 in Soma in Fukushima Prefecture. He is married to Setsuko and has a son and a daughter. In order to support his family, Kazu becomes a migrant laborer and goes to Tokyo to help with construction before the coming Summer Olympics which are to be held in Japan for the first time. 

After the Olympics, Kazu is sent to Sendai and continues to work as a migrant laborer to help pay for Koichi’s university tuition as he is studying to become a radiologist. His daughter got married and currently lives in Sendai as well. Kouichi had just passed his radiology exam but a few days later, Kazu receives a call from his wife informing him that their son has died. 

Tragedy seems to follow Kazu even after he returns to his hometown. Setsuko passes away at the age of sixty-five. His granddaughter Mari worries about him and suggests that Kazu come live with her but Kazu thinks it’s improper to live with a twenty-one year old woman and heads back to Tokyo. He leaves a note telling Mari not to come looking for him. 

The last station on the train line that Kazu takes ends at Ueno Station. This is where he has come to die but as he becomes one of the many homeless living in a tent village in Ueno Park and before he knows it, he has been living there for over five years. 

Tragedy strikes again when Kazu hears of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake which causes a tsunami that wiped out many towns along the coast of Northern Japan. One of the victims of the tsunami is his granddaughter Mari and her pet dog.After the sudden death of his only friend in Ueno Park, Kazu falls into despair and makes a grand decision that may shock the reader. 

Yu Miri writes about the harsh reality of the underside of Tokyo. She shows us what the government of Japan does not want to acknowledge. The invisible people, the marginalized, the homeless. She reminds us through the voice of Kazu that most homeless people do not choose to be homeless. We hear the voice of another homeless person saying, “I can’t believe I became homeless...Having passersby look at me like I’m something dirty…” We may feel the pain and agony of Kazu and wonder what direction we would have taken? ~Ernie Hoyt

Life isn't all ha ha hee hee by Meera Syal (Anchor Books)

Meera Syal is a British actor and writer whose parents came from India. She was born in Wolverhampton and grew up in the small town of Essington in Staffordshire. Her family was the only Asian family in the area and she uses this experience as a backdrop to her 1999 novel Life isn’t all ha ha hee hee which was also adapted into a three-part television mini-series in 2005. 

The story centers around three childhood friends who continue to have a strong bond as adults in their thirties living in London. They are Chila, Sunita, and Tania. Sunita is the oldest of the three. She dropped out of university and married her psychotherapist Akash and has two kids. Tania is an ambitious career woman working in television who speaks her mind and doesn’t think much of her Punjabi roots and currently lives with her Caucasion boyfriend, Martin. Chila is the youngest of the three and is just getting married to one of the most eligible bachelors and the man of her dreams - Deepak Sharma. 

Deepak used to be a ladie’s man and has a long history of having many girlfriends, including Tania. His family is happy that he has chosen a nice Punjabi girl and not one of the blondes he used to flaunt when he was younger, however, things get complicated when Tania makes a film about the love lives of ordinary Indian people, mostly using her friends and not exactly showing them in the best light. The premiere is a success but has unforeseen consequences. 

The bonds of friendship are rattled when Tania and Deepak share a passionate kiss after having an argument at the film’s premiere. They are seen by Chila, Sunita, and Martin. Martin soon leaves Tania. Chila and Sunita no longer speak to Tania but Chila refuses to bring up the matter with Deepak and Deepak takes no responsibility for his actions.

Although Tania’s film was successful and critically acclaimed, it’s consequences were not just relegated to her close friends but to the Indian community as well. The new production company which hired her wants her to make similar films but Tania no longer wants to make movies about “her people”. In order to appease her colleagues, she tries to get an interview with Jasbinder Singh, a woman whose husband wouldn’t grant her a divorce and doused himself and their children with gasoline and lit himself on fire in front of her. 

Chila gives birth to a son but refuses to let her husband see him. By chance, Tania meets  up with her two friends in the hospital and the three reform their bond as Deepak makes a surprise appearance and Chila’s son is nowhere to be found!

Syal gives us an interesting insight into the immigrant experience of how three modern day Indian women live with one foot in London while the other remains in the tradition of their Punjabi roots. All three women want to live independent and happy lives but they try their hardest to find a balance between where they want to be and where their husbands and relatives think they should be. 

The lives of these three women may be the same for a number of women who find themselves in the same situation where the man believes he is the head of the household and what he says is law as they all try to find a balance in pleasing their husbands and boyfriends but not at the cost of their own happiness. Men should take notes and learn to respect women and not treat their wives or girlfriends like second-class citizens. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Sweetest Fruits by Monique Truong (Viking)

Each of the women who loved Lafcadio Hearn called him by a different name.

His father named him Patrick. His mother added Lafcadio, to identify his birthplace, the Ionian town of Lefkada, on an island that bore the same name. But to her, he was always Patricio, “who was born hungry,” and until she took him to his father’s relatives in Ireland, this was the only name he knew. There he became Patrick. The gold earrings he had worn from birth were stripped from his ears, and his memories of warm sunlight, the hills covered with golden ginestra blossoms, the flavor of garlic, all faded away, but not “the dark and beautiful face--with large brown eyes like a wild deer’s.” He cherished the memory of his vanished mother, saying “I would rather have her portrait than a fortune.”

He left Ireland as soon as he could, finding his way to Cincinnati where he launched his writing career as a journalist. It was here that he met Alethea Foley, the daughter of a slave and a plantation owner who made her living as a talented cook in a boarding house and it was she who called the new boarder Pat.  The two of them traded stories, fell in love, and managed to circumvent miscegenation laws by getting married. Inevitably their union fell apart when the world intervened. Pat made his way to New Orleans where he was became a writer who was known as Lafcadio.

As Lafcadio, he met the reporter who would become his biographer, Elizabeth Bisland, a journalist who achieved fame by racing Nellie Bly—and losing—in traveling around the world in eighty days.  She describes the man who would be her friend for his entire life as “most unusual and memorable...five foot three inches in height...with an almost feminine grace and lightness in his step and movements... abnormally shy.” He had, she says, “an astounding sensitiveness” that “drove him to flight,” and it was this perhaps that took him to Japan.

In a country where he never truly learned its language, Koizumi Yakumo found a kind of safety and came to life. Here he met and married Koizimi Setsu, who became his interpreter, guide, and storyteller. With the birth of their first child, he became a legal subject of Japan to ensure that his wife and children wouldn’t lose their Japanese citizenship. It was no sacrifice. As Yakumo, a member of the Koizumi family, he was given a home from which he had no desire for flight.

Through the voices of Hearn’s mother and his two wives, Monique Truong has stitched together an oblique but vivid portrait of a somewhat vampiric writer, a man who soaked up other people’s stories and made them his own. Truong’s poetic narrative is underpinned by portions of the biography wriiten soon after his death by Elizabeth Bisland, which was largely based upon Hearn’s own version of his life. Through eight years of exacting research and travel, including the discovery of an English translation of Koizumi Setsu’s memoir of her husband (Reminiscences of Lafcadio Hearn), Truong has created a work of beauty and brilliance, one that transcends Hearn’s life and enriches it at the same time.~Janet Brown

Kensuke's Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo (Egmont)

Michael was lost at sea ten years ago. He was only eleven. It would be ten years after his rescue that he would share his story. Such is the premise of Kensuke's Kingdom, winner of the Children’s Book Award and written by Michael Morpurgo. 

Michael’s family consists of him, his mother and father, and his pet sheepdog, Stella Artois, Michael had a paper route on Saturdays. On Sundays, the family would go dinghy sailing at the city’s reservoir. His father worked at the brickworks and his mother worked part-time at the brickworks office until their family received “the letter” which would change their lives. 

“The letter” was a notice to inform them that the brickworks was closing down. Michael’s parents looked for other jobs but there was nothing. The family was falling apart. His parents were not speaking to each other and when they did they would be arguing about little things. 

Then, one Saturday, Michael’s world changes. He finds his mother at home crying because his Father sold the family car and said they would be moving south. Michael had never seen his mother in this state. She said it was because of him that their father had this crazy idea. 

She tells him what his father said to her. “There’s only one lousy wage coming into this house - Michael’s paper money.” Father tells his wife, “How do you think that makes me feel, eh? My son’s eleven years old. He’s got a job and I haven’t!”. 

Father’s big plan was to make his dream into reality. He had enough money to buy a yacht named Peggy Sue. He prepared for everything, even Michael’s education. At first, the sailing goes well as the family visits Brazil, Africa and Australia. It isn’t until they hit a storm in the Coral Sea where Michael and his dog fall overboard. 

Michael and Stella wash up on a deserted island and must use his wits to survive on his own. He has no food and water and believes that his time is up and accepts the fact that he will die. However, when he wakes, he finds a plate of fish and fruit and some drinking water provided. Now he knows he is not alone. 

It doesn’t take long for Michael to discover the only other inhabitant on the island. A man whose language he doesn’t understand and who uses words he’s never heard of - Dameda! Yamero! Abunai! At their first encounter, the only thing Michael learns is that the man’s name is Kensuke. 

One day Michael goes swimming in the ocean only and is stung by a large and poisonous jellyfish. It’s Kensuke that nurses Michael back to health and they begin to form a fragile friendship as Kensuke asks Michael to teach him English. 

Once the two can communicate, Michael learns that Kensuke is Japanese man from Nagasaki.  He learns about Kensuke’s family history. How Kensuke joined the Imperial Navy and believes his wife and only son died in the bombing of Nagasaki and how he’s been stranded on the island since the end of the war but has nothing to go back to in Japan. 

Kensuku’s Kingdom is a story of survival and friendship. It’s about creating new bonds and keeping promises and protecting what one deems important. The story may remind you of Gary Pausen’s Hatchet in which a young boy must survive the wilderness on his own. Michael may not be alone on the island but he learns what is most important in life. It is something we should not take for granted. ~Ernie Hoyt

Xi’an Famous Foods by Jason Wang with Jessica K. Chou, photographs by Jenny Huang (Abrams Books)

“There’s a tall, old white dude with a film crew. Do you know who he is?” David Shi, the owner of Xi’an Famous Foods in Queens, is probably one of the few people in New York City in 2011 who would have to ask that question. His son Jason Wang gives him the answer. The old white dude is Anthony Bourdain and the film crew with him is going to propel this small restaurant in a Flushing shopping mall into a culinary destination with worldwide fame.

Shi brought his family to the U.S. from China when his son was only seven but the little boy was already claimed by the strong flavors of black vinegar and cumin-dusted lamb skewers. He had come from a city that was once a major stop on the Silk Road and had developed its own cuisine with the addition of Middle Eastern ingredients: lamb and “earthy spices like cardamom and star anise.” Jason Wang left a “city of fiery desert food” for a country where soy sauce was an exotic item on supermarket shelves. His father discovered that Chinese restaurants in the U.S. served food that would never be found in China. He supported his family by cooking sweet, bland dishes in cities across the East Coast, working at a circuit of different restaurants for years.

Wang soon became homesick for the street food he’d known since birth. As soon as he was tall enough to see over the top of a barbecue grill, he began to recreate the lamb skewers that haunted his taste buds. Adding cumin and salt, he successfully replicated the flavor that he longed for. Obviously, his future in food was already set in place, although it took him time to realize that.

Anyone who has eaten the food of Xi’an will never forget its taste and textures. Xi capitalized on that distnctive cuisine after he moved his family to the Chinese city of Flushing, a district of Queens that has become the borough’s culinary capital. Growing from a streetside stall near a shopping plaza to “a mini empire of stores all across New York City,” Xi’an Famous Foods has turned cumin-lamb noodles into a New York dish that’s become as popular as pizza or bagels.

Wang pays homage to his birthplace with photographs (taken by Jenny Huang) and stories that are as enticing as the recipes that have come from the city of Xi’an. He reveals the bounty of the  Xi Cang street market as he remembers it, long before it became a tourist attraction that sells deep fried scorpions to crowds of out-of-towners. He teasingly exults over a childhood favorite spot that’s still in business, selling lamb dumplings in vinegar, while refusing to divulge its location, and is thrilled when he finds shops that only make the “daily bread of Xi’an,” fried in a skillet and served warm. He pays homage to the kitchens of his grandparents and offers The No-Frills Guide to Xi’an as a Tourist: a launching pad to this city whose history has been shaped by thirteen dynasties.

Xi’an Famous Foods is more than a cookbook, despite its extraordinary collection of recipes and its detailed instructions on how to follow them.  Wang has written a family history and a tribute to a rapidly changing center of Chinese culture, as well as to the Chinese outpost in New York that launched his family’s success.  On so many different levels, his book is an inspiration--to eat different kinds of food, to make it at home, to visit the banquet of Xi’an food hat exists in New York, and to explore the place where it all came from—”the swirling of cultures in Xi’an.”~Janet Brown

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha (Ballantine Books)

The quest for beauty and the hunger for family dominate the lives of five young women who live within the same building in Seoul’s famous Gangnam neighborhood. 

Ajuri, who lost her voice in a childhood fight with schoolmates, earns her living  in a hair salon, making other women beautiful. Her roommate and childhood friend, Sujin, calls her “the little mermaid,” who communicates solely with pen, paper, and the gift of touch. Without speech, Ajuri has sharpened her other senses beyond what they had been before she became mute;  “the wind,” she says, “I don’t remember it having so many shades of sound.” 

Sujin and Miho grew up together in the same orphanage. Their lives diverged when Miho’s artistic talent took her to live for years in Manhattan. When she returns to Seoul, Sujin urges her to live in the “office-tel” building,” with its desirable zip code and proximity to the subway. Miho, seeing this as a place “for the unfettered”, becomes roommates with a stranger, Kyuri.

Kyuri works in one of Seoul’s most prestigious “room salons,” one that is known as a “10 percent,” employing only the prettiest 10 percent of the girls who make conversation and pour drinks for men who “pay to act as bloated kings.” “Electrically beautiful,” Ajuri describes her neighbor, while Miho sees her as “painfully plastic.” Kyuri has paid a borrowed fortune for her skin that “gleams like pure glass” and her features that have been sculpted into a replica of a popular Korean singer. Trapped in debt, she is haunted by her “expiration date” and thinks of moving to Hong Kong or New York, where beauty is measured by a less demanding standard.

Sujin yearns for Kyuri’s face and the chance it will give her to become a room salon girl, even though she knows it will take at least six months for her to recover from the surgery. The reshaping is a brutal process that makes Sujin mask her lower face to hide the swelling and the numbness that makes her drool as though she was shot up with novocain. But when her beauty begins to bloom, she claims the happiness that eludes Kyuri.

These girls are the reason why a young wife decides to move into the office-tel. She’s magnetized by the glimpses she sees of their closeness and their freedom, an intimacy and mobility that she’s never had. Wonna, after a long series of miscarriages, guards her most recent pregnancy with fierce possessiveness, yearning for the daughter who will give her a family of her own.

Within the framework of these lives, Frances Cha gives a view of modern Korean life with the perspective of an American outsider and the trained eye of a professional journalist. She shows the extraordinary wealth and power of Korea’s upper class in a single sentence, when an heiress approached by a stranger on the street, says to her companion, “Maybe I can have him killed.” “Korea is the size of a fishbowl,” Miho observes, “Someone is always looking down on someone else.” Economic class is difficult to transcend, which makes beauty a necessity. 

But beauty gives a fleeting advantage, accompanied by a crippling loan that’s taken on with little thought. “It is easy to leap when you have no choice,” Kyuri remarks. 

Many women face the prospect of old age without children who will provide emotional and financial support. Korean firms offer maternity leaves that can last at least for three months and as long as a year, something they do their best to avoid providing. The cost of bringing up a child can be astronomical.  Parents who don’t qualify for free government daycare can end up paying huge amounts for child care. Peer pressure makes them buy budget-draining robots who read aloud to children from books that come in sets of 30-50, air purifiers for gigantic baby-strollers, and “pastel bumper beds with tents.” “All these ob-gyns and birthing centers and post-partum centers are going out of business because nobody is having children.” Kyuri says. Meanwhile hospitals devoted to cosmetic surgery attract patients from all over the world and a never-ending supply of room salon girls.

Artifice, for Cha’s characters, is an established fact of life. Elaborate weddings with hundreds of guests confer a fragile status upon wives who wait for husbands to come home from the girls in room salons. Cha strips away myths that proclaim the strength of family and the privileges of beauty,  revealing a glittering, lonely world where women learn to support each other.~Janet Brown