Spirit of the Phoenix : Beirut and the Story of Lebanon by Tim Llewellyn (I.B. Taurus)

Tim Llewellyn is a British writer who was the British Broadcasting Company’s (BBC) Middle East correspondent based in Beirut for about ten years. He has covered the Lebanese Civil War, the Palestinian question, and was the first reporter to break the news of the massacre at Sabra and Chantila in 1982. 

Spirit of the Phoenix is Llewellyn’s treatise on Beirut and the country of Lebanon. Before you even begin to read, he provides a chronology of important dates and events in Lebanon’s history, followed by a list of leading figures in the country. We are introduced to the people who settled the country: the Maronites, the Druze, the Shia, and the Sunni. 

Lebanon is part of the Levant, an area of the Middle East which includes areas of Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, and Syria. It sometimes also includes current-day Cyprus, Egypt, and parts of Turkey. 

“For all the beauty of its landscapes and the attractions of its people and culture, Lebanon has coursing through its enfeebled veins all the poisonous currents of international rivalries and regional aggression, and the religious and nationalistic fanaticisms these have engendered,” making this one of the most volatile regions in the world. 

Llewellyn hopes to explain how Lebanon and the Lebanese continue to survive, given all the animosity and strife that continues even to this day. He has seen the changes in the country from the time when Beirut was considered a modern and chic city and was still in the country when the Lebanese Civil War began. 

Llewellyn’s book is part travelogue, part history, and is full of his personal anecdotes of what he has experienced living and working in the war-torn country. He revisits many of the places he has reported on and is able to talk to the people who still live there. He may not have the answer to the problems still facing the country, but he does help the reader have a better understanding of the region and its many problems. 

The most upsetting fact you will learn about the Levant is how the League of Nations divided up the Levant after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. There was a Mandate for Great Lebanon and Syria managed by France, and the Mandate for Palestine managed by the United Kingdom. It appears as if the two powerful countries were splitting the land as spoils of war. The creation of Israel on Palestinian soil in 1948 continues to be a sore point for the Palestians leading to creation of HAMAS and Hezbollah. 

Before I finished reading this book, I was shocked to discover how ignorant I was of Lebanon and the Middle East in general. The only thing I knew for certain was its location and that its capital, Beirut, was once referred to as “Paris of the Middle East.” I was surprised to find that Lebanon had a large Christian population, the Maronites. As is true of a large number of people, my knowledge of the Middle East was divided into the Jewish state of Israel and the Arab countries surrounding it being Islamic. How wrong I was!

The only other thing I knew about Lebanon was that they made great food. I knew this because I used to live near a Lebanese restaurant during my university days. Whenever I’m asked, “What would be my ‘Last Supper’ I always answer, dejaj mashwi, a Lebanese dish which is charbroiled chicken marinated in lemon and garlic, topped with a garlic sauce and seasoned with allspice. 

Until the Middle East sorts out its differences without U.S. or other external intervention, I’m afraid World Peace is still years from being achieved. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Glass Kingdom by Lawrence Osborne (Hogarth)

Bangkok is where people come from all over the world to reinvent themselves so it’s no wonder that this is where Sarah Mullins chooses to become Sarah Talbot Jennings. She’s arrived with a suitcase full of cash that she received for letters between famous people--ones that she forged herself. She needs a place to hide until the resulting furor dies down and Bangkok, she decides, is a “chaotic, lawless choice.”

She settles into one of the city’s newly gentrified neighborhoods, one characterized by the “affable stability” of “yoga studios and espresso bars.” Presiding over this veneer of hipster chic is The Kingdom, a somewhat down-at-the-heel residential complex consisting of four towers, each twenty-one stories high. It’s the perfect place for Sarah to park her money for a while while she figures out her next move. What she hadn’t counted on was that she’s landed in a community of drifters and grifters who have come from all over the world, looking for their next target, be it another city or another sucker. 

Sarah, with her aura of wealth and her claims of being a “trust fund baby,” is the perfect victim. The women who befriend her are ones who are experts in decodng the nuances of social class and this American newcomer lacks the manners and style of the upper echelons. It’s an easy matter to figure out where her money comes from. All her neighbors have to do is persuade Sarah to hire the same maid whom they recommend and all use. There are no secrets that a Bangkok maid can’t uncover and this one quickly finds the suitcase laden with bundles of cash.

Suddenly things begin to unravel with alarming speed. Political demonstrations spring up all over Bangkok, threatening to unsettle the capitol and launch a revolution. A curfew goes into effect and power outages throw much of the city into darkness. During a black-out, one of Sarah’s neighbors shows up, covered in blood. She has just killed her physically abusive boyfriend. Sarah, steeped in the female solidarity that infects every American woman, becomes an accomplice, and as she does, reality begins to dissolve.

Many foreigners in Bangkok lead liquid lives. They have no rights and they have no roots. Without much language or cultural understanding, they float in a strange netherworld where paranoia coexists with cluelessness. Sarah, unanchored by any previous form of reality, finds herself in a place where nothing seems real and ghosts are a common feature. Spirit houses, shrines, trees that are protected by presiding spirits, a young girl who appears and disappears in odd places and at odd intervals, the woman whom Sarah assists in the aftermath of the murder who vanishes as thoroughly as if she too had been killed, the spectral flowers that gleam pale in the darkness of the nocturnal power failures--all of these things conspire to evoke an atmosphere of dread. 

Atmosphere is what Lawrence Osborne is known for and he’s become a master of it. In The Glass Kingdom, he anchors this with a skimpy plot, undeveloped characters, a shaky command of dialogue and presents it as all surrealism. However atmosphere is almost enough to carry the book--don’t read it at night, alone. Without ever creating a tangible threat, the gothic darkness of a lonely existence and a cloud of invisible menace is almost overwhelming. 

The problem with inventing a new life is it’s as easy to erase as it is to change. Disappeared, has she? Who cares? Osborne, perhaps without knowing it, has written a cautionary fairy tale with a concluding moral that’s as plausible as it is horrifying.~Janet Brown

Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin (Henry Holt and Company)

“There are the goodbyes and then the fishing out of the bodies—everything in between is speculation.” But “in between” lie three long months and within that space, Anh loses her childhood. 

She and her two brothers are sent away from Vietnam on an eight-day voyage to Hong Kong, aboard a “rotting and cracked boat.” Her parents and her other siblings follow them later, an act that divides the family in two: the survivors and the dead. Three months after she last saw them, Anh is taken to a morgue to identify bodies that were once the other half of her family.

She becomes the only security her brothers will ever have and her spur-of-the-moment decision to lie to an official at the Kai Tak refugee camp determines what their lives will become. Angered that an uncle who had successfully journeyed to America had given her father encouragement to follow him and die, when asked if she has any family abroad, Anh says “No.”

This one syllable puts her and her brothers on a plane to another refugee camp, Sopley, in England. Caught in the exclusionist policies of Margaret Thatcher, it will be two years before the children have a home of their own. At last they have a bed they can all lie upon at the same time with their arms outstretched, a luxurious feeling after sleeping in the narrow bunks of Kai Tak and Sopley.

They aren’t unaccompanied, although they will never know it. Their little brother watches them as they slowly acculturate to their London slum neighborhood. “When they laugh, it’s like a dagger in my heart,” he says, “It’s lonely and tiring to be a ghost…invisible and voiceless.”

But his voice permeates the narrative, along with the future voice of Anh’s daughter who searches for her family’s history, “trying to carve out a story between the macabre and the fairy tale.” A weird counterpoint is given in the words of an aging American soldier who has been given a key role in Operation Wandering Soul, eleven years before Anh and her brothers left Vietnam. He and a comrade are sent out into the battle zone with a cassette player and a portable PA system “to scare the living shit out of those gooks, their lieutenant tells them. When they reach their destination and press “play,” wails, screams and sobs echo into the jungle. Years later they’re told those were meant to be the voices of those Vietnamese who died far from home, wandering souls who yearned to be buried in the places where they belong.

The story of how Anh’s wandering soul finds a home for herself, her brothers, and the part of her family who lie buried under Hong Kong soil, is wrapped in a collage of history: the terrible story of over 1000 Vietnamese who are taken by Thai pirates to Koh Kra, where 160 are killed and 37 women are raped by 500 men over a period of 22 days; a letter written by Margaret Thatcher to a Vietnamese family, a string of empty words belied by minutes from an informal meeting where the Prime Minister clearly states her reluctance to take in refugees who are not white; a study of Prolonged Grief Disorder, grief that lasts beyond a few months and “signals a state of mental illness.”

Anh’s daughter is told by a therapist that her family heritage “is one of death.” Saying she doesn’t want to write about death, she’s forced to confront it as she searches for her family’s history. At last she decides to keep the deaths, keep the suffering, add some joy, and ends her book with her mother in a garden of blooming roses, thinking it is “quite a wonderful thing to be alive.~Janet Brown

Fragrant Heart : A Tale of Love, Life and Food in Asia by Miranda Emmerson (Summersdale)

Miranda Emmerson is a British writer. In 2008, she and her partner decide to have one last fling before settling down and having kids. They decide to spend one year living and working abroad in China. 

Although she and her partner Chris choose to live in China for a year, they also travel to Vietnam and the Mekong Delta, then go west to Cambodia, enjoying the cuisines of Phnom Phen and Tonle Sap Lake. They continue their travels to central Thailand and to the island of Penang and the city of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. 

Emmerson’s love for Chinese food started when she was still a youngster living in Isleworth, a small suburb of London, England. She describes Fragrant Heart as “a book about travel but it’s also about food. The experience of food, the discovery of it, the sensuality of eating strange things in strange lands and falling in love with the taste of other people’s countries”. 

When she was growing up, Emmerson’s family celebrated family occasions at a Chinese restaurant called Mann’s Beijing. When the family had a bit of extra money, birthdays would be celebrated at the Four Regions Restaurant in the neighboring town of Richmond. Emmerson thought, “If Italian food tasted of home and family, Chinese food tasted of exoticism and success”. 

Her love of Chinese food would grow after meeting her friend Anne whose parents were from Hong Kong. They work at a Chinese takeaway and she is mesmerized by the speed and efficiency of how the staff worked. However, it’s living in China that really “turned her on to the possibilities and varieties of Chinese food. To start to understand the different regions and thousand different dishes that could emerge from a single wok”. 

Emmerson does remind readers that Fragrant Heart is not only a culinary travelogue but is also a memoir of facing the unknown, of escaping big decisions she and her partner have yet to make, and of dealing with life in general. 

Emmerson is also a vegetarian. She asks the reader, “Are you vegetarian?” and follows up with, “Want some advice? Don’t go to China!”.  She says, “the irony for the vegetarian traveler in Asia is that as a relatively wealthy visitor to restaurants and towns in the cities, everything comes cooked in and garnished with meat”. 

Their first stop in their travels of food and life starts at a hostel in Beijing. China. It is the year the city hosted the Olympics. The owners of the Red Lantern House hostel are hosting a party for their guests. They are teaching the guests how to make New Year’s dumplings that are shaped like crescent moons. And that is only the beginning. 

Emmerson and her partner move from the hostel and find an apartment in Beijing. They’re introduced to hot-pot meals, eat noodles and rice at an outdoor stall, and her partner takes a Mandarin cooking class (Chris is proficient in four languages and has a degree in Russian from Oxford). 

They eat pho and nem cuon in Vietnam. Pho is a dish made with rice noodles in a broth with either chicken or beef and herbs while nem cuon is Vietnamese spring roll. They ate some grilled chicken and tofu kebabs in Cambodia which were topped with tirk salouk swai, a mango salsa. They introduce the readers to Peranakan cuisine (also known as Baba Nyonya) while in Malaysia before making their way back to China. 

Emmerson’s prose is easy to read and her adventures in Asia with her partner Chris are filled with excitement and fear. Their love of food and culture might inspire you to travel abroad and try things you’ve never eaten before. If international travel is out of your budget, there are always the ethnic restaurants you check out in your own neighborhood. 

Happy eating and happy travels!! What more can you ask for? ~Ernie Hoyt

Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon (HarperCollins)

If it hadn’t been for America’s love of Broadway musicals after World War II, Anna Leonowens would have sunk into well-deserved obscurity long ago. The author of two memoirs of her five-year stay in what was then called Siam, back in the middle of the nineteenth century, Mrs. Leonowens had a brief flurry of fame with her stories of teaching English to the many children of King Rama IV. She faded from public attention until Margaret Landon, the wife of an American missionary who had lived in the south of Thailand for ten years, was handed a copy of An English Governess at the Siamese Court. Both this and its successor, The Romance of the Harem, had been out of print for more than fifty years but they captured Landon’s imagination. 

After an impressive amount of research, she came out with a fictionalized version of Anna’s time in Siam, Anna and the King of Siam. It became a bestseller and drew the attention of theatrical impresarios and Hollywood moguls, ensuring that Anna’s fame spread worldwide. The Broadway show tunes became enduring classics and Deborah Kerr, sumptuously dressed in Victorian gowns made from Thai silk, made Anna an unforgettable historical figure. As she swooped across the throne room floor with her royal partner, Yul Brynner, singing Shall We Dance, who could fail to be enchanted? Thailand, aka Siam, that’s who.

Mrs. Leonowen’s books, Margaret Landon’s novel, and all three of the movies that stemmed from the Broadway musical are banned in Thailand because the portrayal of King Rama IV in these works insults the memory of the monarch and the institution of the monarchy. Even in this century, when few people in other countries know or care about the “English Governess,” her name is still reviled in the Kingdom of Thailand and books refuting her claims are still popular. 

Margaret Landon had tracked down copies of Anna’s two books, met Anna’s granddaughter who gave her copies “of letters and other pertinent material,” and unearthed a volume in the Library of Congress that was a collection of letters written by Rama IV.  Even so, the book she wrote, she confessed,  was “seventy-five per cent fact, and twenty-five per cent fiction based on fact.” (Since she accepted Anna’s invented facts with touching faith and a certain amount of naivete, her figures of fact and fiction are a bit skewed.)

Eighty years later, her novel is almost unreadable. The best parts of it are the portions that draw upon facts. Unfortunately they’re sunk by the remaining portion of the book that’s fictional, and by Landon’s stilted writing, which was probably modeled on Anna’s Victorian literary style. 

Within the supposed facts, there are strange glitches. Anna’s son is often referred to as Boy, with no explanation. Since he’s originally introduced as Louis, this is a weird and puzzling insertion. A Thai prince who appears at the novel’s beginning as an absurd and frightening figure later shows up as an honored physician.  His fluency in English and  the fact that he was the first Thai doctor to use quinine as a treatment for malaria is never mentioned to counteract that first buffoonish portrayal. Another bizarre episode implies that a diamond ring given to Anna by the King was an indication that he wished to add her to his collection of wives, Credulity is completely strained by the story of a royal wife who becomes so proficient in English under Anna’s tutelage that she’s able to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and then translates it into Thai. Most shocking is a graphic description of flesh being cut from the body of a revered monk and fed to the temple dogs before the corpse is cremated, a disgusting bit of pure invention that Landon must have known was false. 

The most engaging portions of the novel are the letters written by Rama IV. The King’s English is idiosyncratic but his sentences are much more readable than the overwrought effusions that are excerpted from Anna’s own letters. 

Dramatic episodes of cruelty toward women of “the harem” are interspersed with lengthy and dull accounts of colonial incursions upon the sovereignty of Siam. Slavery weighs heavily upon Anna’s heart and mind and much later, when King Rama V, her former student, emancipates the slaves of Thailand, she gleefully takes credit for this. 

It’s difficult to understand how such a priggish woman could have given birth to so many versions of her invented life. Strangely, the life of her son Louis has been ignored, although it’s far more worthy of a book. Years after his mother took him back to England, he returned to Thailand as an adult, became a captain in the King’s Royal Cavalry, and founded a company that still exists in Thailand under the name of Louis T. Leonowens Co, Ltd. While Anna’s name is excoriated, it’s delightful to think that Thailand has kept “Boy”  as a part of his chosen country’s history.~Janet Brown

The Beast Player by Nahoko Uehashi, translated by Cathy Hirano (Pushkin)

Naoko Uehashi is a well-known fantasy and children’s book author in her native Japan. She has won many awards including the international Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2014. The chairman of the International Board on Books for Young People, Maria Jesus Gil, has said of Uehashi, “Uehashi tells stories that are replete with imagination, culture and the beauty of a sophisticated process and form. Her literary subjects are based on ancient Japanese mythology and science-fiction fantasy that are deeply rooted in human reality”. 

The Beast Player is the English translation of the first two books in her series 獣の奏者: 闘蛇編と王獣編 (Kemono no Soja : Toda hen and Oju hen). Originally published in the Japanese language in 2006 by Kodansha Bunko, it is translated by Cathy Hirano, translator of a number of Marie Kondo books that have gone on to become international bestsellers.

In the world of The Beast Player, the kingdom of Lyoza is ruled by Yojeh, the divine ruler of the kingdom. Protecting the land of Lyoza is the Aluhan (Grand Duke) who is responsible for protecting Lyoza. There are also the Se Zan who guard the Yojeh. 

Elin is the ten-year-old daughter of Sohyon who comes from a nomadic tribe called the Ahlyo. Sohyon  became an outcast when she married outside her people. She and her daughter live with the Toda stewards, the toda being dragon-like water serpents. Sohyon is the head Toda doctor. It is her duty to take care of the kiba, the fiercest of all the toda. Everyone knows that toda cannot be tamed, but they can be controlled by a silent whistle, a whistle that Sohyon doesn’t really like to use. 

One night, all of the kiba mysteriously die. Sohyon is blamed for their death and is sentenced to be eaten alive by wild toda. On the day of her execution, Elin tries to save her. The Aluhan and their warriors were willing to let the child die as well as they considered her to be Akun Meh Chai, the “devil-bitten child”. 

As Elin tries to help her mother, they can see the wild toda coming for them. Sohyon tells her daughter, “Elin, you must never do what I am going to do now. To do so is to commit a mortal sin”. The last thing she says to her daughter is, “I want you to survive. And to find happiness”. She then uses her fingers to whistle and the piercing sound made all the toda stop immediately. 

As Sohyon continues to whistle, the toda came near. Sohyon sets Elin on one of the toda’s backs and said, “Grip hard with both legs and don’t let go of the horns”. She then yelled, “Go! Don’t look back. Go!”. Elin manages to escape but witnesses her mother being devoured by the wild toda.

Elin ends up stranded on the shore of a land far from her own home. She is found by Joeun, a solitary beekeeper. He takes her in and raises her as his own child. He senses that she is different. He also notices the color of her eyes. They are green. Only the Ahlyo have such green eyes and they are rarely seen by others. 

One summer as Joeun takes Elin to the mountains, they see Royal Beasts in the wild. Elin is captivated by them. They appear to be large dragons that are the symbol of the Yojeh. The toda are the natural enemy of the Royal Beasts. However, the Royal Beasts can render the toda immobile by the whistling sound they make. 

As Elin grows older, Joeun sends her to Kazalumu Royal Beast Sanctuary and learns to become a beast doctor. Unknown to Elin, she becomes a pawn in a political struggle between the Aluhan and the Yojeh. There’s also a plot to assassinate the Yojeh as well. 

Uehashi’s epic saga can be enjoyed by children and adults alike. You will meet a whole host of characters which you will become to love (or hate) as the case may be. The story teaches one compassion and cooperation. It also focuses on ambition, greed, corruption, and the pursuit of power. The saga continues in the sequel The Beast Warrior. ~Ernie Hoyt

Nisei Daughter by Monica Sone (University of Washington Press)

Monica Sone is six when her parents tell her she is Japanese. She’s been told stories about her parents’ early lives in Japan, but she and her siblings are Yankees, born in America. Only when she and her brother learn that soon they’ll spend their after-school playtime in a Japanese school every day, does she realize she’s part of a culture that until now hadn’t intruded on her life.

A scrappy little hoyden who lives in her father’s Skid Row hotel, Monica’s playground is on the streets and alleyways of a rundown Seattle neighborhood. Taverns, a burlesque house, and businesses owned by the Japanese parents of her friends make up her landscape. Suddenly she’s in Nihon Gakko where she receives rigorous lessons in the Japanese language and etiquette. It’s a place, Monica decides, where “the model child is one with deep rigor mortis…no noise, no trouble, no backtalk.”

This is in preparation for a family trip to Japan where Monica’s youngest brother has a shrieking tantrum when he’s told to remove his shoes before entering a hotel dining room and Monica slaps one of her cousins during an argument, shocked when the girl doesn’t fight back. At the Nikko Shrine, she rebels when told that no one but the  Emperor is allowed to set foot on the sacred Shinkyo Bridge. Lagging behind her father, she slips under the rope barrier, tries to run up the curving arch of the bridge, and fails, seen only by horrified strangers. When a group of village boys gang up on her brother, Monica dives into the fray, scratching, biting, and pulling hair in “a marvelous free-for-all.” She returns to America knowing that in Japan she is “an alien.” The country where she was born, with its “people of different racial extractions,” is her home.

As she grows older, fissures threaten her sense of security. When her youngest sister grows ill and her parents want to find a house near the beach for the summer, they discover that even places with vacancy signs are no longer available. Finally they’re told “I’m sorry but we don’t want Japs around here,” and Monica feels “raw angry fire flash through my veins.” When she enters adolescence, she and her friends are barred from a swimming pool and leave, protesting “But we’re American citizens” as they drive away.

She is Nisei, an American-born Japanese, with a strong belief in equality and justice. While her Issei parents, born in Japan, had grown up steeped in acceptance and resignation, Monica refuses to submit to prejudice. Then an evening’s choir practice is interrupted when a boy bursts in announcing that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and America is at war. Within two months, Executive Order Number 9066 turns Monica’s American birthright into a cruel hoax. She and her family are packed off to an army barracks where they wait for the orders that will send them to a relocation camp. Anger and rebellion are useless now, and Monica faces the truth that “my citizenship wasn’t real after all.”Perhaps neither were “the ideas and ideals of democracy.”

Memoirs are the heart and soul of history and Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter illuminates the lives of Japanese Americans in the first half of the 20th Century with a bright and stabbing light. Her journey from a peaceful childhood into the betrayal of promises in a country at war is beautifully told and presents a scalding indictment. Her conclusion holds words from an Issei neighbor that sums up the difference between the two generations: “You young ones feel everything so keenly. It’s good, but sometimes you must suffer more for it.” More than any class Monica took when she reluctantly attended Nihon Gakka, it’s the time she spends with her parents and other Issei in the relocation camp that makes her know she’s both American and Japanese, integrated into “a whole person.”~Janet Brown

Activities of Daily Living by Lisa Hsiao Chen (W.W. Norton & Company)

Activities of daily living are how acuity and independence are measured in aging people. Can they manage their money, shop for groceries, do laundry? The list becomes more basic as time goes on. Can they bathe without help, get dressed in the morning, feed themselves three times a day? Are they able to go to the toilet alone? Do they know where they are? Can they recognize familiar faces?

It’s a heartbreaking litany of questions that Alice and her sister Amy ask themselves as the man they call The Father, whom  their mother married after her first husband abandoned his family,  loses his ability to do these things, gradually but with an alarming speed. Six months earlier he lived alone in the way he wanted, with “his standard meals of Fritos and pork rinds confettied with peanuts,” a bottle of Jim Beam, and two packs of cigarettes a day, sitting in front of his television watching Netflix.  In spite of this sustained physical abuse, “his lungs remained pink, his blood pressure and cholesterol levels normal. Just like they were now.” It’s The Father’s mind that’s shutting down. Eventually he’ll forget to breathe, just as he no longer remembers how to perform any other activity of daily living.

When Alice goes to The Father’s house, she’s surprised to discover he had been a man with projects. Old cameras and stacks of photographs, pieces of classical Chinese furniture that he has taught himself to build, a library of cookbooks: all bear testimony to an active mind which is lapsing into torpor. “Come on, brain,” Alice overhears The Father saying as he struggles to put on a pair of pants. 

Alice believes in projects. She lives in a community of artists and when they ask her what she's been up to, she tells them she’s working on a project, although it doesn’t yet exist outside of her head. Within her head she’s obsessed with a performance artist, a man who came to America from Taiwan as Alice, her mother, and sister did. 

Tehching Hsieh is bored with the activities of daily living, although his own are complicated by his status as an illegal alien. For Hsieh time is plastic, a substance to be molded in surreal ways. He selects the expanse of a year to spend or to waste in a matter of his own choosing, in enigmatic versions of his own daily activities. 

One year he builds a cage in his studio and lives in it for 365 days,  never leaving it, without speaking, reading,  writing or being amused by a radio or a television. A friend comes every day bringing food and removing his body waste. During this time he allows four showings, one for each season of the year. He follows this by putting a time clock in his studio and punching it every hour, on the hour, from  one April to the next, for a total of 8,627 punches. Twelve alarm clocks woke him every hour for a year, during which he missed only 133 punches of the clock. A few months after this piece, he lives outdoors with only a sleeping bag as shelter for a year that includes one of the coldest winters ever recorded in New York. The hardest part, Hsieh said, was staying clean; his hands became encrusted with dirt. His next piece involves another person, the artist Linda Montano to whom he is tethered by an 8-foot rope for a year, without ever touching each other. Only in sleep do the couple find privacy. Montano later admitted this piece was “dangerous emotionally.” As Hsieh said, they became each other’s cage.

Alice steeps herself in records of these pieces. She manages to find where Hsieh lives, not far from her own Brooklyn apartment. She spots him in a local supermarket and follows him to Italy where he represents Taiwan in the Venice Bienniale. She never speaks to him but his work becomes her life. 

“What is important for me is passing time, not how to pass time,” Hsieh has told interviewers. By making him her project, Alice passes time without needing to wonder how or why this is happening. But then The Father becomes the project and passing time takes on an unfamiliar urgency. 

Lisa Hsiao Chen uses the form known as autofiction and makes it a work of performance art. There is no plot and no resolution. Although The Father’s decline is the pivot point of the novel, it doesn’t provide a narrative arc. Neither does Tehching Hsieh, a living artist who exists outside of fiction, whose final performance was thirteen years of making no art at all. https://www.tehchinghsieh.net/ Nor does Alice, who ends the book with a single question: “Will there be another project?”

Although this novel floats like a dream drifting through a heavy mist, it’s weighted with the unspoken questions that lie below its surface. Chen is a writer who catches ordinary life and places it in sentences of amazing beauty--”It was late spring; the days molted with gold.” She explores ideas of time and mortality through glimpses of Simone de Beauvoir and Henri Bergson. She investigates the amorphous nature of friendship in modern kinetic lives. She offers up hundreds of thoughts that are like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, leaving it to her readers to assemble them into a whole that will make personal sense for each one of them. She's written a book that might never have been written before. Read it.~Janet Brown

Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura, translated by Phlip Gabriel (Penguin)

Mizuki Tsujimura is well known in Japan as a mystery writer. However, her novel Lonely Castle in the Mirror has elements of fantasy and science-fiction in it. It centers on seven junior high school students who wake up one morning to find the mirrors in their rooms are casting a shiny light. As they touch the surface, they are pulled into the mirror and find themselves in a beautiful castle. There they meet each other for the first time, and are greeted by a little girl wearing a wolf’s mask who calls herself the Wolf Queen. Although none of the students are aware of it yet, they all have one thing in common. 

Originally published in the Japanese language as かがみの孤城 (Kagami no Kojo) in 2017 by Poplar Publishing, it was adapted into a manga by Tomo Taketomi and serialized in Shueisha’s Seinen Magazine from June 2019 to February 2022. The manga has also been published as a five-volume series. The book was adapted into an animation film and released in December of 2022. 

The English version is translated by Phlip Gabriel, an American translator and Japanologist, who is also known for translating a number of works by Haruki Murakami. Although Gabriel is an American, the first English publication of this book was published by Penguin Random House UK and therefore the book is written in British English. 

Kokoro is a student in her first year of Yukishina No.5 Junior High School. However, after her first month there, she has stopped going to school. A couple of days ago, she and her mother went to check out a private alternative-learning school. Kokoro thought she may be able to make a fresh start there but on the day she is to go, she has a severe stomachache and knows she isn’t going to make it in this new place.

As you delve deeper into the story, it becomes clear why Kokoro stopped going to school. She would not admit it to herself but she was being bullied, or to put it lightly, she was shunned and ignored which is still a form of bullying. After a particular incident, she made a drastic decision—she stopped going to school. 

It is when she’s alone in her room that the mirror shines. The first time she stepped through and met the Wolf Queen, she just ran away. The following day when the mirror is shining again, she takes the initiative to go back in. There she meets six other people who seem to be around her age, named Aki, Rion, Subaru, Fuka, Masamune, and Ureshino.

What they find that they have in common is they all stopped going to school. Later, they even find out they all went to the same junior high school and they all have their own issues. 

The Wolf Queen who gathered them together tells them they’re all in a castle which can grant them a wish. She tells them, “Deep inside this castle is a room none of you is permitted to enter. It is a Wishing Room. Only one person will actually have access. Only one of you will have your wish come true. One Little Red Riding Hood.”

The students don’t understand what the Wolf Queen means by calling them ‘Little Red Hood”. She says, “You are the lost Little Red Hoods”, and continues to tell them, “from now until next March, you will need to search for the key that unlocks the Wishing Room. The person who finds it will have the right to enter and their wish will be granted.”

Mizuki Tsujimura’s novel is a fantastical tale of overcoming your fears, working together, becoming self-confident, and having empathy for others. Not only does she hit upon the subject of bullying, but she also deals with abuse, neglect, social withdrawal, and other issues facing teens today, not only in Japan, but throughout the world in general. 

At times heartbreaking but very inspirational, this book will make you think back to the times when perhaps you were considered “different” at school and shared the same trauma as these seven students, but you will also feel compassion for how they were able to overcome their fears. You will care for the characters, you will be pulled into their world, and you will be thinking about his book long after you have finished it. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Scent of Sake by Joyce Lebra (Avon)

“She was taught to submit, to obey… but she dreamed of an empire.” 

Rie is a nineteen-year-old woman who’s the heir to the House of Omura, a sake brewing family in Kobe. As a young girl, Rie loved the yeasty smell of brewing sake. However, sake brewing is a man’s job. Women aren’t allowed in the kura where the sake was made. 

“Let a woman enter the brewery and the sake will sour”, the old ones always said. It was a warning her mother often repeated since Rie was a child. It’s the women’s duty to scrub out the sake barrels though and Rie always tries to clean them as near to the kura as she could get. Not once has the sake gone sour. 

The Scent of Sake is a family epic that spans generations and focuses on a woman who has been told she could never be the head of the House of Omura, simply because of her gender. Now that she is of marriageable age, her mother has found a husband for her. She knew her parents are expecting her to continue the line of Kinzaemon, the patriarch of the family. Her father is Kinzaemon IX. 

In feudal Japan, everyone knowsthat brewing sake is exclusively a man’s world. Rie continues to feel the guilt for having taken her eyes off her younger brother Toichi when she was eight years old. She thought if she had been more careful, he would not have fallen into the well. Now, Rie is the oldest and sole heir to the empire. 

Rie’s father could have brought in the son of a geisha but as with all the merchants of the Kansai area, he prefers a mukoyoshi which means to adopt a husband for his daughter. Rie’s mother, Hana, has found a good match with Jihei, the son of another brewing family. 

Unfortunately, Jihei has no head for business. He spends most of his time either drinking or hanging out with geishas. Although Rie is repulsed by the man, she knows it’s in her family’s interest to get pregnant and bear an heir. 

Rie does get pregnant but has a miscarriage. She also learns that her husband, Jihei, has had a son with a geisha. Her parents tell her that she has no choice but to bring the child into the Omura house so he will become the heir to the dynasty. So now Rie has to raise a child that isn’t her own. 

For Rie, it’s one tragedy after another but she has a plan of her own. She secretly meets with a man she fancies, who also fancies her and they have a tryst. She times everything so that Jihei will think it is his child she is carrying when she gets pregnant again, but she has a girl. 

Everything Rie does, she does for the House. She takes her mother’s advice to heart and has to “kill the self” in order to survive. She refuses to relinquish the power to her husband or to his son. The family stamp remains in her possession. Even after her parents die, it is Rie who holds the real power in the House of Omura. 

Joyce Lebra weaves a story that could be adapted into a taiga drama on NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Company. Taiga dramas are a series that focuses on a historical figure and based on historical facts. She thoroughly researched the history of sake making, speaking with different brewers from Akita and Niigata in the north to Kyushu in the south. The story is enough to make you want to imbibe. ~Ernie Hoyt

Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea by Rita Chang-Eppig (Bloomsbury Publishing)

Shek Yeung is a girl who has been drawn to the sea from her earliest years and her determination to sail with her father and brother leads to an unforeseen destiny. When their boat is captured by pirates, Shek Yeung is sold into prostitution. Her brains, as much as her beauty, attracts a man who has united the pirates of the South China Sea into a fleet that defies the Emperor’s navy. She becomes Cheng Yat’s wife, his partner in battle, and his chief advisor. With his death, she pragmatically assesses the situation and allies herself with her husband’s adopted son, whom she soon marries. Together Shek Yeung and Cheung Po outwit the ships of the English, Portuguese, and the Dutch, as well as warships sent by the Emperor. 

A bodice-ripping romance novel? Not at all. Any torn bodices have been ripped in the distant past and are quickly glossed over. Sex, for all that it is instrumental in Shek Yeung’s destiny, is not a major player in her story—nor is romance. She’s not a woman who has time for that. She has a unified fleet of pirate ships to manage. 

Shek Yeung has one entity in her life to whom she pays respect, the deity Ma-Zou, who protects and offers counsel to those who spend their lives on the sea. Ma-Zou takes many different forms and is enshrined in different legends, some of them providing a counterpoint to Shek Yeung’s own story. But while Ma-Zou is a supernatural being who lives in myth and religion, Shek Yeung is rooted in Chinese history, a dominant figure who ruled China’s seas from 1801 to 1810 and who died under unusual circumstances for a pirate—peacefully, of old age.

She and her second husband controlled a naval empire of five different fleets, each bearing a different colored banner. She and Cheung Po sailed on the Red Banner fleet, 300 ships that scourged the sea from Vietnam to Canton. The Black Banner fleet with 200 ships controlled the waters near the Pearl River Delta, while the Green and Red Banner fleets, with 100 and 50 ships respectively, held sway over the Yangtze River Delta. Taiwan’s seacoast was the province of the Blue Banner Fleet with 150 ships.  Aboard these vessels were 40,000-60,000 pirates, all owing allegiance to Shek Yeung and Cheung Po.

Each pirate carried the weapon of their native regions which were all developed for hand-to-hand combat: cutlasses, double-edged swords, axes, crossbows that fired three arrows at a time, maces, and the multi-pointed tiger-head hook swords. Gunpowder got the pirates onto the ships that were their prey, but once they were aboard, courage and skill were the tools of their blood-soaked trade. 

Rita Chang-Eppig’s research is a primary strength of her novel. Although she has given Shek Yeung details that weren’t part of her history, she gives her a firm position as a redoubtable strategist and warrior. Poor Cheung Po turns ashen in contrast--somewhat henpecked and quite unloved. And although Chang-Eppig pays homage to Ma-Zou in her acknowledgments, as well she should, she never mentions that Shek Yeung existed outside of the author’s creative imagination. 

This is perhaps a deficiency of the advance reader’s edition. When Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea comes to bookstores in its finished form, it will garner more readers if it acknowledges that Shek Yeung once lived, breathed, and ruled as a compelling and factual figure in Chinese history.~Janet Brown

Life Ceremony : Stories by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori (Granta)

Sayaka Murata, author of Convenience Store Woman (Asia by the Book, March 2018) and Earthlings is back. Life Ceremony is her latest book to be published in English and is a collection of thirteen short stories. First published in Japan in 2019 with the title 生命式 (Semei Shiki) by Kawade Shobo Shinsha, the English version is translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori who has also translated books by Ryu Murakami, Miyuki Miyabe, and Kyoka Nakajima.

The lead story, A First Rate Material, centers on a woman named Nana who is about to be married. She is meeting with a couple of girlfriends when one of them notices the sweater and asks her if it’s made of human hair. Nana is delighted that her girlfriend noticed. Yes, in today’s society, items made from human materials are the norm, a form of status—wedding rings made from front teeth, furniture made from human bones. But her fiance is adverse to anything made from human materials. How can she convince him that it’s the fashion now?

A Magnificent Spread focuses on the eating habits of different families. Kumi’s older sister and her husband only eat food they buy online from Happy Future Foods. When Kumi was in junior high school, she told her sister that she was a warrior in a previous life in the magical city of Dundilas and only ate the magical food from that magical kingdom. But now her fiance Keiichi wants her to make her own food for him and his parents. Keiichi only wants to prove his point, saying to everyone, “Everyone thinks the food other people eat are disgusting, and they refuse to eat it. And that’s the way it should be, as far as I’m concerned”. 

The story and namesake of the book Life Ceremony is another fascinating look into what the future holds when someone passes away. When Maho was little, it was forbidden to eat human flesh. She was even reprimanded for making a joke about eating a human. But since then, “the human race has changed little by little.” The population sharply shrank and people fear that the human race would become extinct. This had the “effect  of procreation morphing into a form of social justice”. Sex becomes known as insemination with the goal being to create new life. When people die, it’s the custom to have a “life ceremony” instead of a funeral. “Guests at a life ceremony would eat the deceased’s body, and also seek an insemination partner.” It is based on the idea of “birthing life from death”. 

Sayaka Murata is definitely a rising star in Japan’s literary world. Her first novel Jyunyu (Breastfeeding) won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 2003. She has also won the Yukio Mishima Prize in 2013 for her novel Shiro-iro no machi no, sono hone no taion no (Of Bones, Of Body Heat, Of Whitening City) and in 2016,  her tenth novel, Konbini Ningen (Convenience Store Woman) won the prestigious Akutagawa Award. 

She continues to write about subjects considered taboo in Japanese society, such as sexuality, incest, cannibalism, and LGBTQ issues. It is no easy task to sum up the stories in Life Ceremony. Some of the words I would use to describe the stories are quirky and bizarre. You will laugh, you will cry, you may even become a little nauseated at times. However, every story will make you think about it long after you have finished reading this book. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Loyal Character Dancer by Qiu Xiaolong (Soho Crime)

Inspector Chen Cao is a member of the Shanghai Police Bureau who likes to spend his mornings reading Chinese poetry in the Bund Park. However, on this occasion, he is approached by a senior park security officer who leads him to a dead and mutilated body, dressed in his pajamas. 

So begins Qiu Xiaolong’s novel A Loyal Character Dancer. It is a sequel to Xiaolong’s debut novel, Death of a Red Heroine (Asia by the Book, November 2023) and features a rising star in China’s politically complicated government —Chief Inspector Chen Cao. 

Inspector Chen is soon joined by his assistant, Detective Yu Guangming who takes pictures of the victim and tells his boss that it was Triad killing, the Triads being a secret society originating in China that’s usually involved in organized crime. 

Forensics determine the man was killed by eighteen blows from axes. Chen and Yu also determine that the body was left in the park so it would easily be found. The only question is why. Detective Yu suggests that it may be a warning—but to who and why remains a mystery.

Inspector Chen is then summoned to his superior’s office, Party Secretary Li Guohua. Guohua is not only Chen’s superior but his mentor as well. The Party Secretary tells him, “The Party has always thought highly of you, so this is a job for you, Chief Inspector Chen, for you alone.”

Chen is surprised that Party Secretary Li was already informed about the murder victim found in the Bund Park.  But then Party Secretary Li shows Inspector Chen a picture of an American woman and tells him she is Inspector Catherine Rohn, a representative of the U.S. Marshals Service. Inspector Rohn is in China to escort a woman named Wen Liping back to the United States. Inspector Chen’s job is to help her accomplish this mission. 

Inspector Chen has no idea who Wen Liping is or who her husband, Feng Dexiang, is. A major triad leader named Jia Xinzhi, has been arrested in New York. He is allegedly involved in a number of criminal activities, including people smuggling. The only one who can testify against him is Feng Dexiang. However he will only do so if his wife is brought to the U.S. from China. 

Chen believes this assignment is more of a show to the U.S. Government and is not really interested in babysitting a U.S. Marshall, although Catherine Rohn will be a guest of the nation of China. It appears to be a simple job which Inspector Chen hopes to finish before focusing on the murder victim found in the Bund Park. 

Unfortunately for Chen, things go awry even before Inspector Rohn comes to China. Wen Liping has gone missing and nobody knows her whereabouts. The only information the police are given is that she received a phone call from Feng who told her that her life is in danger and she should escape while she still has a chance. 

Qiu Xiaolong weaves an intricate tale of organized crime, political corruption, and international cooperation between Communist China and the democracy of the United States. Inspector Chen is a key figure as he must find a balance to help an American and still remain a loyal Party member. 

Will Inspector Chen find Wen Liping before Inspector Rohn gets to China? Will he enlist her help if he doesn’t? And what is the mystery of the dead man in the park? All these questions will be answered and will make the reader look forward to the next Inspector Chen adventure. ~Ernie Hoyt

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa, translated by Eric Ozawa (Harper Perennial)

Takako is in love, a blissful state that lasts for a year, until the day her boyfriend tells her he’s getting married. Worse yet, he’s been with his fiancee for twice as long as he’s been dating Takako. Making this scenario completely disastrous is the fact that Takako works with the man who’s just dumped her--but not completely. “You know, we can still see each other sometimes,” he tells her magnanimously.

Engulfed in grief, Takako leaves her job and goes into hibernation, “drifting all alone through outer space.” After a month of misery, she gets a phone call from an uncle she hasn’t seen in years, a man who owns a small used bookstore and needs an assistant. The offer comes with a place to live, a room above the shop.

Takako is running out of money. Faced with living in a Tokyo bookshop or returning home where her mother will speedily arrange a marriage for her, she accepts her uncle’s offer. 

Immediately struck by the musty smell of old paper and the staggering number of old books that have even encroached upon the room that’s meant to be hers, Takako is less than charmed with this new living arrangement. She’s never been a reader and the smell of the shop is overwhelming. “Try to imagine it as the dampness after a morning rain,” her uncle suggests but the mustiness even pervades her futon while the looming presence of books disturbs her sleep. One night she picks up a volume, hoping it will bore her into somnolence. Instead she stays up almost until dawn, ensnared by Until the Death of the Girl by Sasei Muro. From that point on, the bookshop becomes a paradise of possibility and Takako turns into an ardent reader.

Quickly Satoshi Yagisawa throws his readers into four different love stories: Takako’s heartbreak, her uncle’s devotion to the wife who has deserted him, the young server at a coffee shop who is desperately besotted with his coworker, and Takako’s gradual attraction to a bookshop customer who chats with her over coffee. The most irresistible love, however, is the one Takako develops for books, the bookshop, and the street where it’s located. Yasukuni Street is an avenue filled with bookshops that have been selling secondhand books since the end of the nineteenth century. Since each shop specializes in a different field of interest, they coexist in a friendly manner in what Takako’s uncle claims is “the largest concentration of secondhand bookshops in the world.”

This, translator Eric Ozawa says in his Translator’s Note, isn’t fiction. Yagisawa has set his Morisaki Bookshop in central Tokyo’s Jimbocho District, a neighborhood that holds anywhere from 150 to 180 bookshops, each with its own specialty. 

No wonder Takako becomes a bibliophile. She lives in an area where books are the reason for its existence, with everyone on its streets browsing, buying, and discussing books, breathing in their odor that her uncle likens to petrichor. “The whole place,” Takako comes to realize, “felt like the setting for an adventure.”

Within this setting, the different love stories are burnished with a sweetness that never becomes cloying. Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is both comforting and restorative, in a world of overstuffed novels and gloomy appraisals of the current condition.  This slender little novella has been translated into fifteen different languages since  its Japanese debut in 2010. Charming without being overly whimsical and firmly rooted in fact, not fantasy, this is a book that book lovers will buy for their friends while being sure to keep one for themselves.~Janet Brown

Agent Storm : My Life Inside Al Qaeda by Mortem Storm (Penguin Viking)

Agent Storm is the fascinating story of the double life that Mortem Storm led until breaking his silence with the news media after one too many broken promises by the various agencies. Mortem Storm writes an eloquent story of how he went from becoming a radical islamist, then becomes disillusioned with their ideology, and finally finds himself working as a double agent for PET (the Danish Secret Service) as Storm is a Danish citizen, MI5, Mi6, and also the CIA. It comes as no surprise that not one of the Western intelligence was willing to go on record to confirm or deny their participation in the events Storm talks about. 

Many people may doubt the truth of his story but Storm includes copies of E-mails he exchanged with Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-Yemini imam who also had ties to Al Qaeda, videos of a Croatian woman who wanted to marry the cleric, a number of encrypted mails from jihadists in Yemen and Somalia, records of money transfers to Somalia, text messages to the Danish secret police, and secret recordings he made with the various government agencies.

Storm takes us back to his beginnings in a town called Korsor in Denmark. His father was an alcoholic who deserted the family when Storm was still a child. He then was abused by his step-father, became friends with his Arab neighbors in his apartment complex, and committed his first robbery when he was only thirteen. 

As he grew older, he became a member of the Bandidos, a notorious biker gang known for committing acts of violence, hardcore partying, drining, using and selling drugs, and other illegal activities. However, after beating a man with a baseball bat, he couldn’t get the moans of the man out of his head. He began to wonder what purpose his life had. It was around this time that he found himself in a library and began to read the story of the life of the Prophet Mohammad. This would change his life.

Storm was still partying even after officially converting to Islam at the age of nineteen, even changing his name from Morten to Murad. After being arrested for the umpteenth time, he met a Danish Islam convert named Sulaiman while they wee both in custody. After his release, he moves to England with Sulaiman, begins to pray five times a day, and grows a beard. He goes to the Regent’s Park Mosque and is offered a scholarship to study Arabic and Islam at a school in Yemen. He marries a Muslim woman and even names his son Osama, after the top leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden. 

He returns to Britain more radicalized than ever. In London, he meets Anwar al-Awlaki, who at one time was considered the number two man in Al Qaeda, after Osama bin Laden. His friendship with al-Awlaki leads him to befriend other like-minded jihadists. Over a ten year period, Storm would become involved in a network with jihadists in Britain, Denmark, Yemen, and Somalia. Storm is so impassioned to fight for the cause of Islam, he’s willing to go to Somalia and help the Somali jihadists to fight the mostly Chrstian Ethiopian army. He bought a one-way ticket to Mogadishu but before leaving, he’s told by one of his comrades not to come. 

The defeatism of some of his Muslim brothers begin to make him question the Koran. The more that doubts creep into his mind, the more he feels he’s wasted ten years of his life. He begins to think that perhaps his belief in Islam was flawed or was being distorted by men like al-Awlaki. After a lot of soul-searching, Storm makes another life-changing decision—he contacts a man who once gave him his business card after he became “a citizen of interest.” The man is a member of the Danish secret police. 

And so begins his life as an informant. The intelligence Storm provides for the various agencies eventually leads to the involvement of the U.S. government-sanctioned assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki which was approved by President Barack Obama. In most news pieces, the U.S. took credit for dispatching one of the world’s most dangerous men from this earth but according to Storm, it is his intelligence and sources that helped the U.S. government. Of course the U.S. continues to remain silent on this particular point. 

If you are intrigued by international espionage, counter-terrorism, and the goal of making this world a safer place, forget James Bond and Modesty Blaise. You will be happy to know there was someone like Agent Storm to keep the world safe from terrorists. ~Ernie Hoyt

Chinese Prodigal by David Shih (Atlantic Monthly Press)

David Shih’s Chinese Prodigal extends an open invitation to rummage through a well-furnished mind, in the same way readers might root through their grandmother’s attic. Moving from one essay to the next is like opening a box, heavy, intriguing and filled with valuable items that seem to have little to do with what was unearthed earlier.

“After years of sharing my ideas with students,” Professor Shih says in a lengthy introduction, “I wanted to try to write them down to see if I could do it.” That he does, presenting many ideas with James Baldwin’s goal in mind; “...to write a sentence as clean as a bone.”  

His sentences are clean bones searching for their skeleton. Shih is a good writer whose words frequently have the clear ring of aphorisms, and his ideas are provocative and mind-expanding. What they lack is a solid frame to bring them into a cohesive whole. 

Shih echoes the quest of Cheuk Kwan in Have You Eaten Yet? (Asia by the Book, March 2023) in separating race from ethnicity. Unlike Kwan however, he has lived almost all of his life in a country where race is poorly delineated and ethnicities shift positions, depending on what the dominant race wants them to represent. “Asian” as the name of a race in America simply means not black and not white, a liquid category that swings between “model minority” and “yellow peril” with scant reason for either stereotype. Within that racial construct, individual ethnicities also rocket between class markers, with Chinese and Japanese vying for top of the list and Southeast Asians working their way up from the bottom. 

Shih’s father has no illusions about the U.S. A man who has worked hard to achieve “an honest lifetime,” he has accepted racism as an established American truth, telling his children : “Chinese people will always be second-class citizens in this country.” He refuses to let his children learn Chinese, wanting them to speak English without any trace of an accent and he chooses the name “Frederick” as his own English name because he’s able to  pronounce it correctly. His offspring’s achievements give them a place in the white world that they gained through the mastery of English that he had insisted upon, although, Shih says, “language, like blood, can make a family.” The gift of fluency has given them a tool that is superior to their father’s  command of the language and this weakens the power of his patriarchy.

Shih’s portrait of his father is the highlight of his book. Through uncovering this man, he lets his own private thoughts escape. When he tells how his father’s favorite grandchild was Shih’s son, a boy who strongly resembles his white mother, this leads him into a discussion of being a Chinese father to a biracial child. He examines the “ethical dimension to the decision to have mixed-race children in the United States,” and then explores the historical truths and the current events that led to this train of thought. How will America view his son? What social world will he inherit?

The term Asian American, he reminds readers, is a recent one that supplanted “Oriental” or Asiatic. It came into being after the death of Vincent Chin in 1982, a man killed by unemployed auto workers in Detroit who attacked him because they assumed he was Japanese. The murderers were acquitted at a trial that brought people of Asian descent together in a united protest. 

“A word better than Oriental wouldn’t have made a difference in my father’s life,” Shih says, while later telling how “a burgeoning sense of myself as a person of color” helped to weaken the idea of hierarchy among America’s races. “People of color” outnumbered the white race and blurred the lines of the social construct that white men had created to protect and preserve their power.

The eight essays in Chinese Prodigal are excoriating, flaying the cruelties of U.S history toward immigrants of color as well as those that exist in the present and have been brought out from the shadows by politicians who condone and elevate racism. Shih’s mingling of the personal with the historical and the political at times becomes a tangle of confusion but his academic expertise wins out. He has things to teach and his country has a lot to learn.~Janet Brown

Have You Eaten Yet? by Cheuk Kwan (Pegasus Books)

Cheuk Kwan has lived in six different countries and speaks at least six different languages, including several Chinese dialects. Born in Hong Kong without ever having seen the Mainland village that was his family’s home for countless generations, he is a perfect example of the 400 million members of the Chinese diaspora.  Haunted by a single question, “Are we defined by our nationality or our ethnicity,” Kwan believes every member of the Chinese diaspora has a common set of values, even if they don’t, as a Chinese Canadian journalist believes they do, “carry that invisible baggage of ancestral China on our backs.” These shared values--”the importance of family ties, a desire for Chinese culture and education, and an underlying love for Chinese food”--can be found living in family-run Chinese restaurants all over the world. To back up his belief, Kwan embarks upon a four-year quest that will take him over 124,000 miles across five continents to make a documentary series, Chinese Restaurants. (Released in 2006, this series can be seen for free on YouTube.)

Have You Eaten Yet? fleshes out what Kwan compressed into fifteen separate episodes and allows him a voiced subjectivity and breadth of experience that would be out of place on television. This book is a combination of travel and cooking literature, with a large helping of history and not a single recipe in sight. 

Kwan and his camera men have Hong Kong cuisine as their benchmark and are surprised to find “dim sum to die for” in Trinidad and Tobago, “a classic Cantonese rendition” of whole tilapia in Israel, “a sublime Chinese meal” in Kenya that emerges from a kitchen staffed only by Kenyan cooks. In Mauritius he finds “authentic Hakka cuisine” and Northern Chinese cooking in South Africa. In Madagascar, Madame Chan serves Cantonese dishes that are “impeccable,” even though she herself has never been to China or Hong Kong and there are no Chinese workers in her kitchen.

In the north is where Chinese cooking submits to local flavors. In Saskatchawan, a seasoned restaurateur admits his cafe serves “American Chinese food, not what Chinese people eat, right?” In the Himalayan city of Darjeeling, Kwan tactfully calls his meal “Indo-Chinese…Hakka food adapted to Indian tastes.”

Kwan finds Chinatowns in almost every place he visits but it’s Barrio Chino in Havana that seems to haunt him. Once the largest and richest Chinatown in Latin America, it’s now a tourist destination with no more than 200 inhabitants, almost all of them elderly men. But when Kwan visits the Hong Kong Association and identifies himself as “a Kwan from Gao Gong,” he is thronged by members of his clan, making him remember his grandfather saying that many men from Gao Gong went off to Cuba in the early 1900s. Suddenly, in a Chinatown that’s almost dead, Kwan feels a strong connection to a place he’s never seen. “My grandfather,” he thinks, “would feel proud of me now.”

The old men in Havana still feel they are completely Chinese. In a Brazilian restaurant that makes perfect egg tarts, the owner says “This is our home, while his son adds that he himself is more Brazilian than Chinese. In Peru a restaurant proprietor talls Kwan, “This has never been my own country,” while celebrity cookbook author Ken Hom, born in Tucson and raised in Chicago, felt instantly at home on his first trip to Hong Kong “where everything talked to me,”  but now divides his time  between the south of France and Thailand. Kwan himself insists “I have six homes: Jiujiang (Gao Gong), Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Berkeley, and Toronto.” Even so his journey has taught him that he is connected most strongly with the Chinese diaspora, people who retain their Chinese heritage and yet usually find their sense of belonging all over the world. 

As for “Chinese food,” Kwan raises his eyebrows more than a trifle. This catchphrase encompasses the “eating habits of more than a billion people,” spread out over “an area four times larger than western Europe.” Can anyone say there is such a thing as “Chinese food” or that “hyphenated Chinese food” is a lesser form of cuisine, he asks. 

Have You Eaten Yet? Is enough to make us believe in the idea of one world. John Lennon would have loved this book, and so will you.~Janet Brown

Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly (Grand Central Publishing)

Harry Bosch is a detective who works for the Los Angeles Police Department. He is separated from his wife and teenage daughter who currently live in Hong Kong. Bosch is familiar with a liquor store in South L.A. called Fortune Liquors. He was given a matchbook by the owner that had a motto written inside it—“Happy is the man who finds refuge in himself”. He has kept this matchbook with him for many years. Now, the store’s owner has been murdered and he vows to catch the criminal who did it.

The victim, John Li, was also the owner of the store. The person who found him was his wife who doesn’t speak English. Bosch is joined by a detective in the AGU, the Asian Gang Unit. In the course of their investigation, the two detectives manage to link the crime with a Hong Kong triad. Apparently, an LA-based triad was collecting protection money from various businesses, including Fortune Liquors. 

The detectives also learned that Li owned another liquor shop in the valley that was run by his son Robert Li. The extended family lived together in a location between both shops. The son had told Detective Bosch that he and his family had tried talking to his father about closing the shop in South L.A. and the area wasn’t safe but his father wouldn’t listen. His father wasn’t going to let anybody drive him out. 

Bosch and Chu believe they found their suspect in the killing of John Li. Bo-Jing Chang is known to be affiliated with one of the Triad groups working in L.A. and his picture was captured on the liquor store’s security camera. Bosch then receives an anonymous call telling him to back off from the investigation. Bosch and Chu believe they are on the right track but then things get personal.

Bosch is sent a video clip of his daughter who has been abducted in Hong Kong. He believes her kidnapping is related to his current investigation. He takes the next plane to Hong Kong to save his daughter as his number one suspect is planning to flee the U.S. and not return. Bosch knows he has only twenty-four hours to find his daughter before the suspect walks free. 

In Hong Kong, he is helped by his ex-wife, a former FBI agent, and her Chinese friend, Sun Yee. Bosch has determined where his daughter is being held from the background on the video he was sent. He is positive that she is in a room in Kowloon.

Kowloon when translated into English means Nine Dragons, a name spawned from a legend. Bosch’s daughter one told him that “during one of the old dynasties the emperor was supposedly just a boy who got chased by the Mongols into the area that is now Hong Kong. He saw the eight mountain peaks that surrounded it and wanted to call the place Eight Dragons. But one of the men who guarded him reminded him that the emperor was a dragon too. So they called it Kowloon— Nine Dragons”. 

Michael Connelly’s Nine Dragons is the fourteenth book in a series that features LAPD detective Harry Bosch. This fast-paced and exciting mystery takes you from the streets of L.A. to the gritty underside of Hong Kong and Kowloon. It’s a page turner that keeps you guessing until the end who actually committed the crime of killing John Li. Was it a member of the Triads? Could it have been John Li’s son? And how did they get to Bosch’s daughter so quickly? The answers to these questions may surprise you and may shock you as well. ~Ernie Hoyt

The Great Escape: A True Story of Forced Labor and Immigrant Dreams in America by Saket Soni (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)

The U.S. Gulf Coast had been devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. A year later, it was “a construction site of postwar proportions.” Over a million houses had been destroyed and crippled oil rigs needed either repairs or outright rebuilding from scratch. To hire skilled American labor meant paying union wages--welders, pipefitters, plumbers, and electricians didn’t come cheap. But there was a pool of experience that waited to be tapped--workers on Middle Eastern oil rigs who came from India, all of them easily lured by the thought of getting a U.S. green card. Not only would they be a source of cheap labor, they were a way to make some fast money. These men would pay anything to bring wealth and security home to their extended families and to give their children the opportunity to live well in America.

Five hundred Indian workers paid $20,000 each in response to an ad that promised “Permanent Lifetime Settlement In USA For Self And Family.” In two years or less, they would be given green cards. Their parents borrowed the money, sold their land, mortgaged their lives to give their sons this chance. Almost ten million dollars went to the men who made this swindle a success. 

When the workers arrive in America, they are shunted into labor camps where they paid $245  a week for a bunk in “a sardine-can trailer. They wait in line for their turn to use the toilets and showers in another trailer and then queue up to get breakfast in the cafeteria. The toilets overflow, the showers leak water that soak the walls and floors, the bread is moldy, and the workers get sick. They complain about the conditions but their main concern is when could they expect to receive their green cards. Nobody has answers for them and their complaints are met with a force of hired goons. They’re threatened with deportation if they don’t submit to the conditions of the camp. Then one of them hears about an Indian in New Orleans whose job is to help workers. He calls a number on a business card and reaches labor organizer Saket Soni.

A man still in his twenties with immigration difficulties of his own, Soni is a man who isn’t afraid to take desperate measures. Slowly and carefully, he arranges a solution that deserves to be in a movie. In the two camps that housed the five hundred workers, one located in Mississippi and the other in Texas, the Indian workers walk out of the gates that bar them from the world outside.

Soni makes the case that human trafficking has been reinvented in 21st century America. The five hundred men had been recruited through fraudulent means, with the recruiter keeping their passports as insurance that none of them would back out of the arrangement. Once they were on the job site, their impressive debt incurred in hopes of obtaining a green card kept them in involuntary servitude. They had to pay off that debt before they could return home.

When appeals to the Department of Labor go unanswered, Soni ventures into deeper drama--a march from New Orleans to Washington DC, a hunger strike to call attention to the workers’ case. But this is America where politics run deep below every surface. When it becomes known that ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) had been blocking their case from the very beginning, the workers and Soni himself are certain their cause was a hopeless one.

This book is a crash course in immigration policy, labor issues, and the intertwining of business interests with government agencies. Both a human tragedy and an example of how justice can prevail in spite of apparently insurmountable obstacles, The Great Escape rivals any fictional thriller for sheer nail-biting scenarios--but in this case they all happened in real life. Although this group of workers ended up with what they’d been promised, who knows how many more are being defrauded without recourse in this country, every day?~Janet Brown

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Books)

Ocean Vuong is a Vietnamese-American poet whose debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous became a New York Times Bestseller. The main character, Little Dog, is writing a letter to his mother. He knows it’s a letter she will never read as his mother is illiterate. It is more about Little Dog coming to terms with his own life by revisiting his past. 

Little Dog first reminisces about his mother—the way she hurt him when he was still a child. The first time she hit him, he was only four years old. Then there was the time with the remote control that left a bruise on his forearm but he told his teachers, “I fell playing tag”.  Another time, he writes about his mother throwing a box of Legos at her head. 

Little Dog writes to his mother and says he was thirteen when he finally told her to stop hurting him. He looked deep into her eyes, the way he learned to do with the bullies that used to hit him. His mother turned away as if nothing happened. He writes to say, “we both knew you’d never hit me again”. 

Little Dog writes this letter when he’s in his late twenties. He is putting down on paper the history of his life. He knows he was born in Vietnam and was given a name that meant Patriotic Leader of the Nation. He not only writes about his mother, but his grandmother, Lan, as well. They were survivors of the war, then they were refugees, and now they live in Hartford, Connecticut. 

He writes how Lan ran away from an arranged marriage and became a prostitute during the Vietnam War and how she married an American serviceman, then gave birth to a child, his mother, Rose. However, Rose was not the child of the soldier Lan married as she was already four months pregnant when she met him. 

Rose doesn’t have much of an education as her schoolhouse collapsed after the Americans dropped napalm over the place she lived. It is because of the war that Rose suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. She marries an abusive man but manages to leave him. 

Halfway through the novel, Little Dog makes his confession to his mother about his first true relationship—a white boy named Trevor, born and bred in America. whom he meets while working on a tobacco farm one summer when he is only seventeen. This relationship continues into adulthood but ends in tragedy as Trevor becomes a heavy drug user. 

What’s fascinating about this story is the fact that it mirrors Vuong’s life. However Vuong makes no attempt to write a chronologically correct timeline of Little Dog’s life. His nonlinear approach makes the story hard to follow at times. The reader is often left wondering what Vuong is actually trying to convey and although the book has received praise and many accolades for a first novel, I may be in the minority as I found it self-indulgent and tedious. If this is the new wave of fiction, I will gladly find my way back to the classics. ~Ernie Hoyt